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Creativity Maps: Getting the Most from Your Creative Life

By Dan Goodwin

Many of us who are creative have a great number of different talents, or different areas of interest where we explore and focus our creativity.

Taken in the widest sense, this can mean we use our natural creative abilities every day and in all parts of our lives, whether using new approaches to solving problems in our work, conjuring up a delicious meal for our partner or friends, designing the interior of our home, or writing a few pages a day for a new book.

There’s a vital distinction to be made between those of us who strive to live in the creative way just described, and those who simply occasionally do something creative. It’s the difference between “being” and “doing”.

Also, though many of us may have a major discipline or medium in which we create most of our work — such as painting, design, dance or writing — we may also enjoy many other forms of creative work and creative projects.

By having an overall picture or appraisal of our creative talents at any point in our lives, we can begin to see what we enjoy most, what we feel we’re best at and how else we can apply this, and where we’d like to explore more.

A great way of doing this is to form your own Creativity Map. Anyone familiar with Mind Map techniques will see how easily that technique can be modified for this purpose.

Here’s a simple step-by-step approach to try when mapping out your own creativity:

1. Take a large sheet of blank paper, as big as you can find. Draw a circle in the centre to represent yourself — write something like “My Creativity Map” and the date. This will be the core of your map from which everything else will branch out.
   
   
2. Start with one of the creative areas you feel most comfortable with or that you feel you use the most. Draw a branch outwards from the centre circle and write the name of the area along it. You can use activities like “composing pop songs” or “designing websites” or be more general, like “visual art” or “sound”. Make it true and relevant for your creative life.
   
   
3. Now draw a number of branches coming from that first main branch, one each for the following headings:
   
   
   • Strengths: Your strongest abilities in this area
     
     
   • Enjoyment: What you enjoy about this area
     
     
   • Achievements: The things YOU’RE most proud of in this area
     
     
   • Actual Time: No. of hours per week you currently spend on this area
     
     
   • Desired Time: No. of hours per week you’d LIKE to spend on this area
     
     
   • Transferable: The strengths in this area you can transfer across to other parts of your life.
   
   Fill in the details for that first creative area you’ve chosen under each heading.
   
   
4. Do the same for the each other area of your creative life, use a different colour for each one.
   
   
5. Finally, add branches for any new creative activities or areas that you’d like to do in the near future. Again add and fill in the sub-branch headings as before.

Once you’ve finished your first draft, look at your Creativity Map as whole. What first strikes you about it? What surprises you? What, if anything, is missing?

Look closely too at the branches headed “Transferable”, the skills and strengths you can take across to help you in other areas of your life. Which of these can you apply immediately?

Doing your Creativity Map just once is a valuable exercise in itself. And by doing a new map on a regular basis, once a month for example, you can really begin to see the patterns in your creative life and use it as a basis for powerful and lasting change. •

© Copyright 2006 Dan Goodwin

About the Author | More by Dan Goodwin
Creativity Coach Dan Goodwin is the author of “Create Create!”, a FREE twice monthly ezine for people who want simple and powerful articles, tips and exercises to help them unleash their creative talents. Sign up right now and get your FREE “Explode Your Creativity!” Action Workbook, at www.CoachCreative.com.

11/29/06