Page 226 - THE DO-IT-YOURSELF LOBOTOMY Open Your Mind to Greater Creative Thinking

CHAPTER 20

The Five Greatest

Barriers to Creativity

A very big part of achieving your creative potential is increasing the
things that lead to creative realization. Broadly speaking, those things
include better understanding of this magical stuff and greater com-
mand of the actual thinking skills that lead to fresh ideas. For the most
part, those two areas of concentration have been the focus of this book
to this point.
If you have filled out your Creative ForceField in the Appendix,
you’ve discovered that increasing your creative effectiveness also
means diminishing the forces that work against your creative effort. (If
you have not yet filled out the Creative ForceField on page 255, I sug-
gest you do it now.)
In analyzing hundreds of these Creative ForceField forms, I’ve dis-
covered some common barriers that exist for the vast majority of peo-
ple in business. Here I speak to the larger blocks to help you better
understand this aspect of creativity, because you can’t fix what you
don’t understand.

BARRIER #1: FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN

Fear comes out in a lot of different ways relative to creativity. Just
exploring new ideas brings on fear because new ideas are part of the great
unknown. New ideas aren’t proven. Maybe it’s just human nature to fear
the unknown, but it’s certainly a pattern that’s been with us for centuries.
In the early days of maps, what was shown on the outer fringe of
the known world? Sea dragons and monsters, right? Because no one
knew what was out there, they feared it.