By JANET EVANS
Creativity is a fragile talent, and one that requires careful nurturing. Yet the TV and film industries in which it is needed are inhospitable settings. Fast-paced and highly commercial, they are more likely to produce burnout than bright ideas. How can coaching help the creative personality make the most of their skills?
OVER THE PAST FEW years I have coached a number of clients working in film and television, ranging from ‘pure’ creatives (writers, directors), and ‘creative’ executives (producers, commissioning editors), to ‘straight’ executives. Common themes have emerged from these sessions that have led me to explore the literature on creativity. This has fed back into my coaching in very beneficial ways.
Nurturing creativity
Some of my most creative clients have come to me with worries about their creativity. They may feel they don’t have the same spark any more or be seriously concerned about burnout.
Studies of the psychology of creativity tell us a lot about both the creative process and the creative personality. There is also a large number of first-hand accounts of the act of creation, from Coleridge and Einstein to John Cleese and Sam Mendes.
In these subjective accounts, the creative person describes a process of steeping themselves in the ‘vocabulary’ of the relevant area (“preparation”), focusing on the problem (“priming the mind”), then disengaging from it, often by sleeping or doing something completely unrelated (“incubating”), and then finding that the creative vision springs into their mind (“inspiration”) fully formed, as an outline that can be developed, or as a new and better iteration of something they had been thinking about.
Cognitive and neuro scientists hypothesise that incubation involves the fast processing of large numbers of links and associations in the brain, many of which may be stored at deep levels in the unconscious. Highly creative people seem to be able to store more ideas and information, see broader patterns, and bring them into consciousness more easily than others.
The highly commercial, fast-moving and deadline-driven film and TV industries are a far from hospitable setting for this process. Their culture emphasises unremitting activity, reinforcing the notion that everyone must be moving at top speed, 24/7, to achieve anything worthwhile. This produces serious tensions for the creative person. How can the coach help creative people nurture their creativity?
Make it work
- Encourage clients to prioritise time, both for feeding their creativity – by reading, thinking, watching other people’s work – and for the process of creation. Creative people are often bad planners.
- Reflect with clients on when they are at their most creative – then ask them to block out that time in their diary and guard it with their lives.
For example, I had a client who was most creative at night, and so she organised her life so she could stay up all night once a week.
- Allow time for the creative process and learn to trust it. There will be an uncomfortable period when everything seems to be banging around in the creative person’s head. Focus on something else so unconscious processing can take place without interference. Sensory activities are ideal: sleeping, going to the gym, having a massage, meditating. This is difficult when there is a deadline to meet, but if clients plan well, their unconscious minds will produce the goods.
Fatal flaws
- Being addicted to electronic media. It’s a serious issue and I try to get my clients to think seriously about whether they really need to be available all the time. I suggest turning off their handheld, and freeing their minds, for a certain number of hours each week.
Understanding the personality
Research has shown there is a typical creative personality. As well as being highly intuitive, creative people are often introverted, driven by emotion and their own internal set of values (rather than rationality and logic), and operate to their own timetable.
Creative people have rich and detailed internal visions of their projects and how they should be realised. If they are to see them made real they must communicate them to others. Often, they fail to do this effectively. Their vision is so clear to them that they think they have explained it already, when all they’ve done is give the barest of outlines. But it is so important to them and so linked to their identity that they are reluctant to communicate it anyway.
Make it work
- Encourage creative people to reflect on their personalities – how these help them create and the difficulties that go with them.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator can be very useful here. The guidance suggests that the creative Type is iNtuitive and Feeling (thinks in patterns and associations and is driven by emotions/values rather than rationality), which I have found to be the case with my clients, the vast majority of whom were also Introverts.
Explicitly understanding what sort of person they are, and that this is intimately bound up with their creativity, can be a great help in reassuring creatives that they are not alone in facing such problems, and that there are strategies they can adopt for dealing with them. Reframing – seeing that communicating the creative vision is a vital part of the job – is particularly helpful.
Fatal flaws
- Failing to notice and to refer on potential mood disorders in clients. Modern studies and analysis of the letters and diaries of highly creative people throughout history have shown that they are up to four times more prone to mood disorders – in particular bipolar and unipolar depression – than non-creatives of a similar background.
I have worked with a number of people whose account of their childhood relationships suggests they may suffer from a shaky sense of self- worth. I have found it useful to talk through where their need to strive and prove themselves may come from, and why they feel so vulnerable to criticism and find it so hard to recover.
But it is important to remember that bipolar syndrome and clinical depression are the province of the psychiatric professional, and to refer people on where necessary.
About the author
Janet Evans is a business psychologist, executive coach and consultant on leadership and strategic planning, with an MSc in Organisational Psychology and a diploma in Coaching and Mentoring. She works mainly in the creative media industries and the public sector, having been a senior leader in Whitehall for many years. She runs her own consultancy, Adsum Consulting Limited, and can be contacted at janet@adsumconsulting.co.uk
Encourage clients to prioritise time, both for feeding their creativity – by reading, thinking, watching other people’s work – and for the process of creation
Coaching at Work, Volume 7, Issue 1