“You’re very creative,” she blurted out. I was startled by such a remark. No way, I thought. What does she see in me that I’m missing? “The problem is,” she began to explain, “you’ve become a very linear thinker, plus you have devoted almost thirty years of your life to a highly regulated business, following rules. What I am trying to do,” she went on, “is awaken your creativity, for you are a very creative person.”
That conversation between my coach and me is as vivid today as it was over seven years ago when it occurred. Eighteen months earlier I had retired from my previous career and had hired her to help me explore what my next one would be. And it was during that conversation that I received one of the greatest epiphanies I have ever experienced, not so much in discovering my creativity, but for the first time in my life I felt I had been given permission and encouragement to pursue it and use it.
Yes, I am creative as my coach revealed to me, but I am not unique in that. So are you. Does it surprise you to learn that as it did me? The truth is creativity is part of the human DNA. We all have it, it just manifests itself in different ways in each of us. We all have different talents. And it is through our unique talents that we are given the ability to transform chaos as we find it into some kind of meaningful order, which is what creativity is all about.
Consider this: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him,” we are told in Genesis 1:27. If that is true that God the Creator of all created mankind in his own likeness, does that not imply that we too are creators? Was that not his intention? If not, why did he give us naming rights and grant us dominion over all he had created?
My great epiphany that day was the realization that the answer is “yes” to all the above, that creativity is a gift from God. And when we use it as He intended – and use it we should – that is our gift back to Him.