Rewilding Creativity
The Journey to Rewilding Creativity
For years, I was fascinated by performance psychology. I started my Master’s degree convinced my mission was to find ways to totally optimise performance at elite levels. I knew how hard elite performers work – my own varied portfolio career as a singer-songwriter, session performer, and teacher showed me the dedication required. I believed my job was to find the perfect strategy to solve the common mindset hurdles: imposter syndrome, lack of motivation, and performance anxiety.
My perspective going in to the Masters journey was to look out for ways to optimise, to find ways for performing artists to reach higher levels of performance and productivity.
Then I soon began researching perfectionism, and a major shift in perspective was needed.
My very quest for performance optimisation had a deeply perfectionist thread running right through the middle of it. My pursuit of a “perfect solution” was fuelled by the same pressure I was trying to solve. It became clear that in a society that prioritises endless growth and demands we always be on – always making more, doing more – perfectionism is almost a requirement. It is an unspoken philosophy most of us subscribe to.
The Perfection Trap
As I began to unpick the writing around perfectionism, I randomly saw a book on a bookshop shelf called The Perfection Trap by Thomas Curran which began to crack my perspective wide open. Curran (a leading perfectionism researcher) takes readers through the science behind it, but goes beyond this to reflect on the many reasons why his studies show a rise in perfectionism. It seems obvious now I think about it, but of course when we live in a capitalist society which prioritises endless growth, it’s no wonder that perfectionism is almost a requirement of living in that system. Capitalism encourages us to always be on, always making more, being more, doing more.
The feeling of needing to always be productive and getting better (while good in moderation) is something I’ve felt throughout my career. I’ve also not always felt like being on a lot of the time. What seems to work for me is to be in my creative hibernation zone to allow myself the time to develop my music in solitude, followed by more public sharing moments of that work, and even have time away from my craft! Just like nature’s seasons, there isn’t always a harvest. Maybe each cycle, creativity included, needs the quiet downtime of winter to recharge, ahead of planting new ‘idea seeds’.
Doing Less and Working with What We Have
In my pilot study on perfectionism, one of the main things that became clear was that people have a very close relationship with their creativity. Often complicated by things like perfectionism, this relationship has moments of elation and moments of deep frustration. As I know for myself, and saw in the words of others, being creative can be an incredibly basic need for some of us to function (sleeping, eating, breathing, creating, etc.), but thoughts of not being ‘good enough’ often spill into many aspects of our lives, robbing us of time spent enjoying being creative.
I was getting frustrated by the lack of solutions. I needed some sort of creative philosophy to live by which prioritised creating for the sake of it, rather than for what I think others will think is good. A philosophy which reminded me to follow seasonal cycles and nature, rather than societal expectations which only built up unnecessary pressure in my mind.
So, when I go back to thinking about how we have a chance to be more environmentally sustainable, I find there are lessons here in how we can be more creatively sustainable too. In sustainability fields there are conversations happening around ‘degrowth’ over endless, uncapped growth. There are conversations about being regenerative and trying to work within the limitations we have, creatively, rather than just starting off afresh. I think back to my starting idea of “how can we optimise performance at elite levels”, and I begin to wonder maybe rather than trying to be more, maybe we actually do less and work with what we have.
This is where the principles of rewilding offer us a powerful, tangible philosophy for creative restoration and freedom.
The Invitation to Rewild
In nature terms, rewilding can mean restoring land back to an uncultivated state, and letting nature do its thing. If we transpose that into our context, that might mean peeling away the layers of perfectionism, imposter syndrome, isolation and general crap that has built up from being human and disrupted our primal creative instincts.
It will look different for everyone, but the gist of it is, ‘what if we saw ourselves, at the core, as good enough, with creativity not being something we are trying to grow into more and more, but rather something we had all along?’Many creatives cite their most fulfilling experiences as moments that felt playful and free, yet how come it becomes harder to play with a childlike mindset the more you know? As Picasso said: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”
So, I invite you to start ‘rewilding creativity’. Start small, focus on what you enjoy creatively, and the process of doing it, for yourself.
