Over the last weeks, I have got myself into a lot of research work for my major project. The more I poked around in various books, videos and websites, the more I started to feel an unpleasant sense that I already knew from nearly all of my creative projects before. It was insecurity. The worry of not doing enough work, doing it wrong, miss the topic or come up with ideas that nobody would care about. But as I found out, this is an all-time problem in creative work that everybody who makes a living with their intellectual property experiences sooner or later.

David Kelley describes this feeling as a “fear of judgement, […] the fear of not saying the right creative thing, you’re going to be judged.” (Kelley, 2012). In his TedTalk, he points out his anger about peoples creativity being suppressed by negative feedback. And oftentimes people would get more an more insecure about their inventiveness simply due to this fear of judgement. They would be unhappy about their own work and come into a creative dead-end. Thankfully, Kelley delivers a solution. He quotes the psychologist Dr.Albert Bandura in his term “self-efficacy”. The process of going through a series of small steps in order to gain more an more experience of success and “turn fear into familiarity” (Kelley, 2012).

For many people, this problem oftentimes has its roots in childhood. In his Book “Creative Confidence: Unlocking Your Hidden Potential”, Kevin Noble describes that “everybody is born with a creative gene” (Noble, 2014), but the fear of a negative response holds most individuals back, which harms their confidence. Judgements that we experience in primary school can shape the way we rate our creative abilities lifelong.

“The fear of being judged can turn adults whether student or CEOs into creatives types who keep their ideas to themselves.” (Noble, 2014)

This verifies my experience with creative work. From the fear I experienced while working on various projects in the last years, I realized that the more feedback you get for your creative work (may that be positive or negative), the more confident you get. So you’re self-doubt disappears and you dare to come up with crazier ideas, which pretty much is a recipe for creative work.

How to build your creative confidence | David Kelley, 2012 Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16p9YRF0l-g

NOBLE, K., 2014. Creative Confidence: Unlocking Your Hidden Potential. Speedy Publishing LLC