How To Connect To Your Inner Creative

“You can be anything you want to be when you grow up,” echoed your parents. Fast-forward 20 years and voila, here we are: working run of the mill jobs, sometimes tirelessly, believing that fun and creativity are only allowed on the weekends, or even worse, on a 14-day vacation. As adults, we often forget to indulge, if not depend on, creative outlets for inspiration, connection and overall well being. Instead, we clunk around feeling the need to feed an endless gnawing on the inside of ourselves that screams, “I need adventure; is this really my life?” or, “I wish I was a kid again.” Why? Because being a kid had no confines, it was boundless, free, and full of inquiry and exploration.

The answer sits well within us.

News flash! The youngster in you still lives, you just have to awaken its vibration and invite them out from time to time, or more of the time. The dosage is for you to decide.

Remember when you were a kid and you used to take Elmer’s glue and slap it in the palm of your hands to generate a massive ball of fingerprinted rubber? Or when you used to go outside and channel Wonder Woman or Spider-Man while jumping over rocks and puddles, sometimes tumbling through the foliage, just to follow that six legged species resembling a tree leaf with twig-like extremities? After capture, you’d rush home to explain to mom or dad why you needed to save this insect from extinction. That was inquiry; that was exploration and connection.

Recall from the past to inject in the now.

In my early 20s, I realized that maybe I should take this same approach to finding my next job, hobby, or creative expression and voice, instead of relying on thousands of Google searches to tell me who I might be. Google is an awesome and informative resource, but to feel truly creative, we must delve into our primary explorative outlets by recalling what we enjoyed as a kid and injecting those sentiments into our daily dynamics, if not, into our careers and lives as a whole. That is what being creative is all about.

Call on your joy and never hang up.

Some of the explorations I was enamored by as a youngster and now refuse to live without include art exploration, writing, herbalism, astronomy, and storytelling.

While engrossed in these types of activities, I felt free, unattached, and open to possibility—an innocence mirrored from childhood into adulthood. Call on your joy and never hang up the line. Before your next relocation, before you lease that expensive car and upgrade from Blackberry to iOs, take a moment to ask yourself, “Can my youngster self thrive here? Is this a space where I can explore my creativity?”

Everyone is creative, not just a subset group of individuals. Channel that within yourself and believe it. You will be happy you invited the kid along.

Cheers to being a creative.