“The worst enemy of creativity is self-doubt,” wrote Sylvia Plath in her journal. And she couldn’t have been more accurate.
Self-doubt can persuade us to stop creating or keep us from sending our work out into the world. It can be so influential that it colors how we see ourselves, ensuring we don’t pick up a pen, paintbrush, camera or other tool for decades.
“Self-doubt paralyzed me for 25 years,” said Meghan Davidson, Ph.D, a psychologist, professor and researcher at the University of Nebraska. When Davidson was eight years old, her art teacher wrote in her report card that she had “no artistic ability whatsoever.”
“I’m not really a creative person”, always struck me as an odd sentence. Could it really be that some of us are born to be more creatively gifted than others?If so, I thought at first, that’s definitely a downer. In school, what was considered “being creative”, like writing or drawing nice pictures was never my strength.It bugged me for a while I have to say. For today, I finally decided to research and read up on the latest studies of creativity and the science behind it. The truth, which I was very happy to discover, is that any and everybody is creative. In fact, we are all extremely creative.