Creativity is a daily practice

What’s important is not the destination or “stage” upon which our creativity lands; what is important is that we learn to establish frameworks and systems that encourage us to practice our creativity every single day. Ultimately, that practice is what will lead us to creative fulfillment and success on a variety of stages.

In my Foundations class, we practice a framework called “Creative In, Creative Out”. Here, I ask students to commit to one week of daily creative practice where they both take in creative work and put out creative work with 20 minutes dedicated to each creative act. Creative In can include going to an art gallery, researching works by a favorite choreographer, or studying the vocal choices of a singer. Creative Out can be writing the lyrics to the chorus of a song, sketching the stream behind your house, mimicking the vocal choices of the singer that you studied, choreographing a short piece inspired by the movements and style of the choreographer you researched. Creative In forces us to continually refill our inspiration files so that we always have source material to pull from and are continually expanding our creative vocabulary. Creative Out forces us to exercise our creative muscles in ways that might not always be audience ready, to stretch and play to increase our creative bandwidth and apply our learnings without the pressure of producing something worthy of someone else’s consumption.

And so I ask you, what is your practice? How do you show up for your creative self each and every day?