Creativity is one of the central aspects of SELF. At a time when technology threatens to dehumanize and homogenize us, creativity remains a fortress of soul. You can optimize your creative potential by owning, refining it and deploying it. That path, which sometimes is a bit painful, is always one that leads to more personal power.

People are often afraid of their creativity. Why? Because we aren’t the originators of the energy behind that creativity. The universe or God is. And being the conduit for inexplicable, immeasurable creative energy can be anxiety-provoking. We can fear being obliterated by the sheer force of it.

This is the same reason that adults often advise truly gifted children that their creative interests might make for fun hobbies, but aren’t necessarily a proper way to spend a whole lot of their time. I think the adults feel their kids could be lost to those interests—absorbed by them.

I have helped hundreds of men and women who listened to adults when they were children and all-but-forgot very deep interests they had in painting, music, writing and many other forms of self-expression.

Coaxed to share with me any beloved hobby they had as kids, it’s not at all unusual for them to mention an art form and then recall someone who advised them that they needed to be less obsessed with it—that being well-rounded was the key to a happy life.

How about you? Did you have a passion as a child, adolescent or young adult that you shelved because someone told you it was taking up too much of your time, or that it was an unlikely way to make a living, or that you could use a part of it in service to a “real” career?

One of my clients was a very successful and very unhappy lawyer who recalled drawing houses and buildings as a junior high school student and loving it. She was actually disciplined by more than one teacher for drawing during math and science classes. And she forgot all about it, until we discussed interests she had left behind early in life.

Once she remembered it, though, she couldn’t quite get it out of her mind. She took an architecture course at a local college and then decided to take the huge and life-affirming leap to get a degree in it. Today, she no longer practices law, instead designing and building magnificent homes.

Another client of mine—a car dealer—loved music as a boy. He played more than one musical instrument. But something about his love for music seemed to threaten his parents. Maybe, he wondered in adulthood, his parents were worried he loved the music more than he loved them. They set rigid standards for his grades and, when he couldn’t meet those standards, they punished him by taking away his time to play music—his “hobby.”

My client didn’t stop working as a car dealer. But he did rekindle his love for music by buying a guitar, taking guitar lessons and starting a band.

Summoning the memory of a deep interest of his from long ago that was resisted by others turned out to be a key to his creativity as an adult.

How about you? Did someone talk you out of a creative passion when you were young? If so, that may be a good hint that it’s worth revisiting. Because it may well have been a genuine love of yours—and, therefore, a little scary (or more than a little scary) to those around you.

Too many of us are locked in self-consciousness. We worry about how we will be perceived by friends and family, or colleagues, or that great nameless, faceless mass of folks known as “the public.” Anxiety of that kind is the enemy of creativity because creativity requires the courage to be judged. Whether writing or painting or sculpting or inventing a new product or starting a new business, there will be no shortage of critiques and critics. And the more raw or original or iconoclastic the idea, the louder the criticism will be. Get it just right as an artist/inventor/entrepreneur of any kind, and you can plan for lots of pushback—at least, initially.

Since this is the case, one way to tap into your creative spirit is to start brainstorming with this unfinished sentence, “If no one would ever know, I would try to create __________.”

Or, you could use this unfinished sentence: “If no one would ever know, I would write about ___________.”

Or how about this one: “If I knew no one would laugh at me, I’d design a __________.”

It’s worth using an activity like this to get to your creative core because the fear of self-disclosure is actually a paper tiger. You won’t lose anything worth keeping when you uncover and share the deepest level of your creative soul; you’ll gain the power to connect with others at that level. And that’s what a creative life is all about.

The interplay between anxiety and creativity isn’t a one-way street. Sure, anxiety can limit your creative output. But if you keep your creativity bottled up, it won’t just remain peacefully contained. It will start to churn uncomfortably, underground, and actually cause anxiety.

Even when a person is engaged in a creative process, it can take a conscious decision to burrow more deeply, in order to get to even richer sources of creative energy. Not infrequently, when writing the series of essays included in my book, To Wrestle with Demons, I had to challenge myself to reveal more of my thoughts than I initially felt uncomfortable with.

In fact, the reflections that initially begged to remain private ended up being the ones readers said they connected most with. That’s no surprise; we are more alike than different in what we fear and much more alone with our anxieties than we need to be.

Self-revelation crushes anxiety and fuels real creativity because it accesses core truths. Just take it from one of my favorite authors, the late Harry Crews. Crews had written without any success for years. Then, he finally decided to stop pretending and start sharing who he really was. That’s when his work started to sell. One novel after another. Here’s how he described it:

I was sitting in a tiny room at the typewriter trying not to wake up my eight-year old son. Beside me in boxes were manuscripts. All rejected. Rejected because they were no good. I’d written five novels and hundreds and hundreds of short stories. I’d written ten years, and not a word had seen print . . . I was a writer. A fiction writer. And a goddamn good one. It was in me somewhere, but something had gone horribly wrong . . .

I turned and looked at all that worthless work stacked against the wall. Why was it all so goddamn bad? Because by then I knew the work I had done, and was doing, was no good. I had worked just hard enough and had learned just enough to know that I wasn't neglected or overlooked by several thousand dumb publishers of one kind or another. No, I was a twenty-four-karat fake; that was the trouble.

For many and complicated reasons, circumstances had collaborated to make me ashamed that I was a tenant farmer’s son. As weak and warped as it is, and as difficult as it is even now to admit it, I was so humiliated by the fact that I was from the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp in the worst hookworm and rickets part of Georgia I could not bear to think of it, and worse to believe it.

Everything I had written had been out of a fear and loathing for what I was and who I was. It was all out of an effort to pretend otherwise.

I believe to this day, and will always believe, that in that moment I literally saved my life, because the next thought—and it was more than a thought, it was dead-solid conviction—was that all I had going for me in the world or would ever have was that swamp, all those goddamn mules, all the other beautiful and dreadful and sorry circumstances that had made me the Grit I am and will always be. Once I realized that the way I saw the world and man’s condition in it would always be exactly and inevitably shaped by everything which up to that moment had only shamed me, once I realized that, I was home free.

Yes, indeed. He was home free. He went on to publish many acclaimed novels and collections of short stories. His biography Blood, Bone and Marrow, written by Ted Geltner, was published in 2016.

I want you to dare to do it. Free yourself from anxiety by diving into the creative work you worry might reveal too much about you. Challenge yourself to peel away layers of defenses keeping you from sharing the core of you. You will never be weakened in the effort, only made more powerful.

None of us has time or words to spare, when you really think about it. Our lives on the planet are brief, and our opportunities to impact others are not infinite. Given this, I want to share three ways I believe you can truly connect with other creative people when you interact with them, in your personal life, professional life or creative work.

SHARE WHAT YOU INITIALLY FEAR IS TOO MUCH TO SHARE

Whether in discussions with friends, with romantic partners or in your public speaking, writing or any other art, you will arrive at moments when revealing painful pages of your life story seems like too much of a risk. Those are the very pages to share. They are gold. I’m talking about living through losses or trauma or living with self-doubt or guilt. Sharing these pages requires courage—the courage of self-revelation. But only through self-revelation (and more of it, frankly, than you think is wise) can true connections with others be forged.

People are not moved by your successes or your C.V. They are moved by your challenges, especially the ones that initially make the seductive case that they ought be hidden away—buried. Unearth them. Share them.

ASK THE NEXT QUESTION, AND THE NEXT ONE, TOO

In discussing life or love or art (which may be all the same thing, by the way) with others, many of us have the tendency to stop a conversation when we are at the threshold of intimacy—but still shy of it. Someone may offer that she “didn’t much like” her parents when she was growing up, and we’re tempted to say, “That’s sad. I’m sure they did better later on.” Or, we might say, “I think a lot of people feel that way about their parents while they’re growing up.” Both replies are ways of shutting the other person down. There are lots of questions that will open up the other person, including, “Why did you dislike them?” Or, “How did they disappoint you?” Or, “What do you remember as the time they let you down the most?”

When reading someone’s poetry or looking at his paintings or watching her film or, for that matter, wondering what moved someone to start a particular business, listen for the deepest of emotions, then ask more about the topics that seem connected to them.

Don’t run from the pain of another person. Move toward it. The reward will be genuine human connection, at a core, spiritual level. And, in this life, there is no greater reward.

SAY IT OUT LOUD WHEN YOU FEEL THE CONNECTION HAPPEN

When we connect at this core, spiritual level with another creative person, the power of the connection can itself lead us to turn away from its power. To counteract this tendency, I find it valuable to state was has happened. “It’s amazing we could sit down and go back decades in one another’s life,” you might say. Or, “I feel like I know what really happened in your life to fuel your music.” Celebrate and honor the connection; don’t fear it.

You were born to create. I hope you embrace that fact. It is never an accident when you have the impulse to "start" something or "contribute" something or "achieve" something. It is part of your purpose and it is your power.