Facilitating Creative Process: What's Underneath How Your Show Up

Creative facilitation means tending to our creative self.  
How we show up plays a big part in facilitating the creativity of others. It starts with our own presence,
flexibility, and creativity before we get into the room. Facilitating creative process, especially in groups with strongly divergent views, or who are focused on deeper healing or transformation, can require a lot. The process can weave in and out of being light and fun, and challenging and demanding. It’s easier if we have built up our own resilience with awareness that there are different elements informing ourselves, and each person in the room.

Factors that inform how we create and facilitate include: our character and personality, upbringing, education, life experiences, background, culture, ethnicity, innate gifts, skills, talents, belief systems, values, habits, attitudes, stories we have about our creativity or facilitation, our health, energy, vitality, well being, challenges, hopes, dreams, aspirations, inspirations, direct experiences, insights, discoveries,our connection to purpose or our calling, our knowledge, wisdom,understanding, awareness, adaptability, resiliency, archetypal energies and drives, learning and creating styles, confidence in our own thinking and intuition, our sense of play and aliveness, our relationship to constraints, our frameworks, mental models, and worldview.

The ways these factors show up and integrate within us, and how they interact with different situations is unique to each person - part of our irreducible "creative signature." Facilitating creativity is a creative process in itself that is also uniquely our own, which emerges from the variety of these elements on different levels within us (while also having common universal patterns that emerge), and each person in the room has their own integration of these elements as well. So there is always a lot happening under the surface in any creative workshop - and that's what can make it exciting and surprising, if we anticipate, allow for, and value creative differences.

This is from Chapter 3 on Pre-workshop Preparation in my book, Pattern Breaks: A Facilitator’s Guide to Cultivating Creativity, where I break each of the elements down a bit more than I have space to do here.

#facilitatingcreativity #coachingcreativity #patternbreaksbook