S3 E67: Approaching Creativity Like A Scientist

Podcast

Oct 7

Having an experimental mindset in your creative process can be such a helpful tool for inspiring new ideas, supporting you when you get stuck, and persevering through perfectionism. Bringing curiosity to the process also makes it more fun! I share some reflection questions you can ask yourself and some different types of creative experiments to try.

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Hello and welcome to Episode 67 of Being A Whole Person. Today is all about approaching creativity like a scientist. Before I get into the episode, a couple announcements. Number one: the next episode, which would come out on the 21st of October, is going to be a replay. This month and the previous month, September, have been just crazy nuts busy for me, and in order to make sure I'm doing my best work for you, and also modeling what I teach here, which is to perhaps remove something from your plate when you can, I am going to air one of my favorite reruns on the next episode, and I'll be back with a new one on November 4th.
I went back and forth about it a little bit because I was thinking, “I want to be consistent.” But if this is also a moment where perhaps you are trying to remove something from your plates, and if you see someone else do the same, it feels like, “Oh yes, I'm being given permission to do this.” Not that you need my permission at all, but sometimes it helps to see these behaviors of being kind to yourself and doing less modeled for you, and I'm here to do that for you! So that's the deal with that.
Also, in November, there's going to be another free Creative Show and Tell. I'm not sure what the date is as I'm recording this, but it will be in the show notes to sign up by the time I publish the episode, so the date will be there. It'll definitely be sometime in November. So basically, Creative Show and Tell is exactly what it sounds like. You show up with whatever project you want to show, and we all share our stuff. If you have things that you're getting stuck on, and you want some feedback from me and your fellow artists, you can ask for feedback. If you just want to show up and show your thing, and have people clap for you, cool. You get to decide what kind of feedback you want. But that's been really fun to just kind of get together and chat with other artists, get to see what other people are doing. I found it really fun, and I bet you will, too. So once again, that's free to sign up for, and the date will be in the show notes for some time in November.
And lastly, of course, please rate and review the podcast if you haven't yet. It really does help with getting found in a sea of podcasts, and I very much appreciate everyone who has done so, and everyone who will do so in the future. Thank you so much.
So, approaching creativity like a scientist is an idea that I have really found helpful for a long time. I should give the caveat here, in case you didn't know my background, I'm not actually a scientist. I'm going to be mixing some metaphors here, with fictional scientists, maybe something that is a stereotype from a movie. If you are a scientist, and you have cool perspectives on this, I would love to hear from you!
There are lots of ways that you can interpret this, but what it means to me to approach creativity like a scientist is mainly to have this experimental mindset. Creativity is really a big experiment, right? We don't know what's going to work before we start. And really, if you think about it, life is one big experiment because we don't know our path. We might chart a path, and change course along the way based on what information we get from how we feel about what happens.
For any of you that are recovering perfectionists like me, you might find it really freeing to lean into approaching life as an experiment, and your creative work as an experiment, because it can really relieve some of that perfectionistic pressure of, it has to go right. If it's just an experiment and you're gathering data, you're just collecting information on what's working and what doesn't work, and that really frees you up to be curious about what is actually happening.
Depending on how your brain works, you could be very statistical and data-driven and really track your results if you're doing a creative experiment of some kind. You could say, “I'm going to work on this specific medium for 30 days, or 100 days,” and you could track what kinds of things you like doing more than others, or what results you like. You can choose to run different experiments, like, “I'm going to work in this specific way for a week and see how that affects me.” There are all kinds of ways that you can treat things like an experiment and reflect on what happened, kind of log what happened as you go and maybe that will make you decide to set some new goals.
This idea I use in my weekly check in which is a free worksheet that you can get, along with my monthly check in worksheet, on my resources page. But really, the questions for the weekly check in are super simple: what worked, what didn't work, what did I learn, and what would I like from next week, or the future? If you've been a long time listener, I'm sure you've heard me talk about this. I still do it every week, I just write it right on my calendar page, and it takes like 10 minutes to do.
You can use this check in for literally anything that you're looking to get your own feedback on, and then you can look back to see, did you get out of this project what you were looking for, or what you expected? Maybe making an experiment is just about setting some parameters, too, setting some boundaries like, “I'm only going to work on this for this period of time,” or “I'm only going to work on this certain medium,” or “I'm going to work on drawing with my left hand and see what happens.”
I'm sure you can think of all kinds of elements that you could experiment with. Maybe it's materials. Maybe it's the time of day that you are choosing to work on your art. Maybe it's that you're only going to make small things, when you usually make big things. I'm sure you can think of a million different things that could be experimental elements.
I really love using this experimental mindset, because it can feel so vulnerable to be in the struggle of the creative process, especially when you're in that messy middle section where you're like, “I don't know if this is any good, I don't know if I'm going to finish it. Am I any good? Am I really an artist?” This is where all these huge questions come up that can be kind of scary. Maybe you're like, “I just don't know how to do this.” Sometimes you don't even know what the question is, and it's just a general aversion to working on it - this resistance, and a grind-y feeling in your stomach when you think about it. I'm sure this is familiar, or at least one of these things is familiar to you.
So when that's happening, it's great if you can have curiosity about your feelings, like, “Oh, that's interesting, I am avoiding writing right now. I wonder why I'm doing that.” Or maybe it's a question like, “Why do I feel like crying right now? I'm very frustrated with this.” Then if you add curiosity, it depersonalizes it for you, and you can really try to look more objectively, knowing that if things aren't going well, it doesn't mean you're a failure. It doesn't mean you're never going to finish the project. It's all good information, right?
If you're struggling with the middle of a project, you can say, “I wonder what I could do to make myself feel more comfortable with this. I wonder how I could support myself better through struggling with this step of the process. I wonder if I could skip a step of the process completely to make things easier.” Every scientist knows they have a hypothesis about what might happen, but the amount of times that actually happens may not be that great. Even if things don't go as you think they will, which is how life works, right?
“Failed” experiments, I'm using “failed” in quotes, because it's mainly just that your expectations don't match reality. These “failed” experiments are still really useful. It gives you tons of information about what exactly didn't work, and what conditions were surrounding the situation when that thing didn't work. And bonus, (I guess depending on your medium, maybe there are some more dangerous media out there) your mistakes in making your art are probably much less costly and dangerous than a scientist’s, like blowing up something in the lab. I know that's not true for everybody. You might work with some more dangerous materials, but just that feeling that I can get in here and get messy. I can blow stuff up with my chemistry set. I'm not saying that you should do that, but you know, a mild mess isn't a failure. It's just perhaps something that makes you adjust your course.
Maybe you even try to make something that isn't what you expected, just to see what happens, as long as it's low cost materials. I know some of you who are using more expensive things aren't going to just want to do lots of things, to throw your materials away, but maybe there's a way that you could make that work for you ,even if your materials are more expensive. Also, knowing that not every project is going to work out is very freeing because if you are budgeting for certain materials, you can say, “Alright, maybe half of the things I make are going to be keepers,” and you just have that knowledge that there's going to be some things that you're going to throw away and that's totally fine.
Scientists have to be really patient. Scientists have to stick with the research and stick with the process until it's done. Research takes a long time because they take a lot of care with the process, and we artists are the same way. Not to say that every single project has to be the longest thing ever - some of them will be faster to finish.
If that feels restrictive to you to think about patience and a long process, I'm not saying that you have to make up a bunch of complicated rules for yourself to follow or anything like that, but just reminding yourself that the creative process takes time and we're not in charge of the timeline. Sometimes the timeline stretches on longer because of unexpected things, and that's just part of the deal, right? If you were following along with me earlier this year, you saw that I created this thing called the Compassionate Creativity Club as a way to bring people together, have a chance to have a little bit of community, have these creative show and tell events. The attitude behind that was sort of this lab, where you get to show up and experiment and play and have a lot of fun in the process, and that club itself was an experiment.
I've paused it for the fall because it's not something that fits into my current schedule and I want to make sure that I have enough time for it to actually do it if I'm going to do it. Sometimes we try things and they don't continue. Sometimes we try things, take a break, and they continue in a different form. I don't know what will happen with that yet, but that offering itself was an experiment.
But anyway, in the process of coming up with what that was going to be, I was trying to come up with an idea of who my creative guides were for the process. I knew it wasn't just one person. I knew it was kind of a panel of different people. I saw one of these creative guides as this tall guy in a lab coat, wearing goggles, all that stuff. He wasn't just in a normal white lab coat. This was a lab coat splattered with multi-colored paint, like Jackson Pollock style. That image has really stuck with me through this process so much that I might even try to recreate it for a Halloween costume.
Then I had these other figures on sort of my creative guides panel. There was a welcoming, warm leader. There was this very like, short, small, playful, childlike person who was dressed as a bee for some reason. I don't know where these images came from, but this is what stuck with me. So, you know, the different figures here were like counterpoints of each other. It's not to say that the scientist has to be serious or anything like that, but that's sort of how I conceived of these different characters that were helping me, in the spirit of this project.
Whether or not the Compassionate Creativity Club grows into something, I love this idea of experimentation being a driving force for creativity because oftentimes art and science are posed as opposites, but I think there's a ton of overlap between the two things. I just love that we can set the expectation that we get to experiment instead of needing it to go right the first time. We're allowed to play around, we're allowed to try whatever we want to, especially in the safety of our own homes before we show anybody - we get to do that! We can experiment in public too, if we want to, but you don't have to.
So in case talking about creativity scientifically feels limiting, you can definitely view it in a more expansive, philosophical way as a tool to pull out when it's helpful to you, and I hope that this concept is helpful for you, too. Let me know about any creative experiments that you are doing currently or that you've done in the past. I always love hearing from you about what you're working on. You can email hello@rebeccahass.com or you can find me on Instagram at @rebecca_hass. I'm not posting a ton there, but I am still there. If you message me, I will get it. So let me know what you're working on, that's awesome. I hope that this episode has been helpful to you, and I'll be back in your ears very soon. Have a great week.