Think about this: Your children will live well into the very last decades of this century, many beyond that mark.
Yes, please think about that, the full significance of it. What do you imagine their lives will be like in a future of:
- The unknowable unknowns of constant change, some radical, and occasional disruptions, some fierce.
- Opportunities we can’t begin to imagine.
Some economists estimate that 50% of the jobs that will make up the economy by the end of the next decade don’t exist yet. I’ve seen other estimates even higher.
That’s why after nearly 30 years of study and teaching I believe the best way to prepare our children for their future is helping them be and become their most creative and entrepreneurial selves.
We want them to be able to make their own way so they are able to create advantage from whatever the future challenges may be.
The good news — you know this well if you have been reading these columns or listening to my radio show — is that your children, every one of them, were born with remarkable creative qualities that, being core to our human condition, don’t go away.
It’s our job to make sure they flourish, that they retain and develop their creative genius the George Land NASA research project found 98% of us at age 5 possess.
Along with the best preparation for the 2050’s and 2080’s — there is no one who has any idea what life will be like then as professional futurists acknowledge their ‘most likely future scenarios aren’t very likely’ — there are other benefits our children will enjoy by being their most creative selves.
Business’ currently value the qualities associated with creativity. IBM’s survey of 1,500 CEO’s in over 30 industries found they valued Creativity #1 over all other employee traits. LinkedIn annually surveys their members about the skills and abilities associated with success in business and for the past 3 years Creativity has been #1.
Recent research has associated living a creative life as the best way to live a long life and experience the greatest joy during that long life.
Here’s tips for building an understanding of your family as a creative one, starting with your behavior:
- Include in your conversations with your children the theme line of how important it is for your family to embrace your creative qualities. Over time try to develop the understanding that your family values creativity in all of its wonderful expressions.
- Talk about the failures that have occurred in your life and how you handled them so that you learned from them. Two important lessons. That you have failed and it didn’t end your world, and that you turned that failure into a good thing in your life. We need to take smart ‘look before you leap’ risks, but we need to have the courage to take them and your modeling of that behavior is crucial.
- Be spontaneous. Where do you find joy in the inches and minutes of life? Share that wonder with your children, and help them find it as well. And let them lead the family in some spontaneous adventures, something like “Hey Susan, why don’t you plan the family’s Friday night fun?”
- Tell stories. If you’ve been a parent for any length of time you know children love stories—our brains understand the world through stories. So tell stories about your grandparents and about your childhood. Make up stories that are fantastical. Urge them to join in with you as you build a funny story. Ask them to tell stories about events in their day.
- Invite them to share in meal preparation. They get to experience creating something that has immediate value. Plus it’s a great time to be sharing your days with each other.
- Leave them alone without digital devices to figure out that they can entertain themselves. Perhaps the family can declare one day a week as a Digital Sabbath, when none of you will rely on digital technologies.
- After a couple of first efforts, as the family is warming up to your new understanding of itself, introduce a couple of creative family activities. Two that are proven to spark fresh creative approaches to life are the 30 Day Creative Action Program and The 6 Creative Types taxonomy.
- The 30 Day CAP is fun and easy to do. Each family member, once a day, does something you’ve never done before or do something you do habitually but in a whole new fashion.
An example of the first might be that when you leave the house in the morning you make up a new name for the first thing you see. Another example: If one of your children is old enough but hasn’t yet prepared a meal for the family, they could do that.
Two examples of doing a habitual behavior in a new way: If you brush your teeth right handed, today brush them left handed. Tonight sleep with your head on the opposite side of the bed.
At dinner your family can talk about what behaviors you are doing as part of this activity and the fun you are having doing them — this activity is certainly a time for whimsy — and what you might be learning.
Affirm that the creative impact of this activity has been researched and it’s found that when you maintain this for 30 days your ability to overcome status quo thinking and generate fresh new ideas or solutions to problems improves by nearly 80%.
An additional creative family activity can be built around The 6 Creative Types taxonomy that IBM developed to help their employees become more creative. I wrote an article that explains the six types—Explorer, Artist, Cultivator, Warrior, Saint, Orchestrator — that you’ll find here. You’ll also find more description about the exercise I offer here.
My students have learned a lot about who they are creatively, and where they need to grow next, by finding their creative profile in these 6 types — I’ve yet to work with anyone who claims to be just one of the types — and the exercise of then visually representing your combination of types is lots of fun.
So add this to your creative family gathering, where you each create an image of your creative type combo, where you talk with others about their sense of your combo, and where you might do a family combo, one image that captures all of your creative types.
Watch for it and call to it when you see it because it may be so natural they may not even notice it, name it a creatively productive thing, help them see themselves as creative.
Learning to read, navigating a day at school, organizing their rooms, learning a new skill, playing sports, learning to drive, being a part of a family. All can be seen as creative activities and your child benefits from seeing them that way.
“Exploring Your Creative Genius” takes an expansive view on what it means to be creative and entrepreneurial in an ongoing conversation led by Carl Nordgren — entrepreneur, novelist, and lifelong student with decades of experience growing his own creative capacity and assisting others to do the same in exciting new ways!
You can also find more ways to explore your creative genius in this column’s companion radio program, broadcasting on 97.9 The Hill WCHL and posted here on Chapelboro!
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