As I explained in Chapter 1, creativity does not belong solely to the realms of the arts. Everyone needs to be creative to get through life. Creativity is just as important for figuring out how to organize a dorm room as it for finding ways to build your business and increase your income.
This activity will give you the opportunity to reflect on how well you are using your creativity to enhance your life. If improving your life is one of your reasons for seeking academic success (and I hope it is), then you will want to be sure you can see the connection between your goals and your creativity.
To complete this activity, you will once again be using your journal or notebook and a pen or pencil for writing.
Task: Assessing your access to your creativity is much easier than it sounds. To conduct this test, make two columns on a blank sheet of paper. Label the first column Goals and the second column Accomplishments. Then list all of the goals you have today and the goals you have had in the past in the first column, and in the second column, note which of these goals you have managed to achieve.
Assessment: If you have a long list of goals and a good rate of success at achieving your goals, then chances are you are well connected to your creativity. This should serve you well in your life pursuits.
If you find yourself setting goals which you quickly abandon, then your access to your creativity may be blocked. If you do not even allow yourself to set goals, then the blocks to your creativity are serious!
Challenge: If you have not experienced success in accomplishing your goals or you cannot imagine setting goals for yourself, you very likely have some negative associations with using your creativity. Your challenge now is to spend some time writing about your feelings about setting goals or using your creativity. Explore your past experiences and try to articulate as many self-limiting beliefs as you can identify.
As you engage in this activity, remember that as a child, you had no control over the events that happened to you. Your responses to those events, and the beliefs you formed as a result of them, were all done in an effort to preserve your life. Children are born with a very strong survival instinct. As children, the beliefs we form about ourselves and the world in which we live arise from our instinct to survive. This is the true gift of our creativity: It allows us to find ways to preserve our lives in situations that we perceive as threatening.
Because young children are entirely egocentric, they believe that the world revolves around them and that they are the cause of everything they experience. That is because young children lack the reasoning abilities that would help them to make sense of the world in a way that does not place them at the very center of every event they experience. Brain scans of very young children reveal the reasons for this egocentricity. These scans show no evidence of the brainwaves that are associated with reasoning. These brainwaves do not even begin to appear in the brain scans of children until they are six years old!
As a result, children draw conclusions about the world that can sound very funny to adults. But when those children become adults, they may discover that the beliefs they formed about themselves in childhood are not only illogical (remember, these beliefs were formed by a helpless being who lacked the ability to reason), but that they no longer serve their best interests.
As adults, we possess brains that are well equipped to understand, and survive in, the complex world we inhabit. But as children, we relied on others for our survival, so it was important for us to keep those we relied on happy. This was how we insured our survival.
Identifying beliefs about yourself that are no longer of service to you does not mean that anything was wrong with you when you were a child. Nor do they suggest that something is wrong with you now. Rather, these beliefs can give you powerful insights to your past. They can serve as potent reminders of just how remarkably creative you truly are. The only problem you need to be concerned with is whether the beliefs you formed early in life now stand in the way of your success.
EFT is a powerful tool for clearing self-limiting beliefs. You can even use EFT to reinforce positive beliefs about yourself. As you will learn in Chapter Three of this book, having a belief system in place that is completely congruent with your dreams, goals and desires will help you to manifest those desires.