Up until 2014 my obsession with perfection was crippling. I was pretty great at being perfect and was managing to combine it with a lot of success, but I was constantly in a state of underlying anxiety, worrying at any moment that if I wasn’t 100% good and right, everything would come crashing down. In 2014, a series of unfortunate events led to that beginning to happen, and so I decided to take a month off work and I asked different people to set me different creative challenges every day. Every day I had to try something new, something I often wasn’t good at and it was a revelation. Opening up to creativity made me happier, freer and ultimately more able to enjoy life.
Fast forward more than half a decade and I am now a mum to a toddler, with another baby on the way. And while I don’t manage to practice what I preach every single day, it has definitely changed my life significantly. Those of you that have been new parents will know that the barrage of advice and information that comes your way is fairly intolerable. It can be an incredibly anxious time and you definitely have no idea what you’re doing. But for me, although I won’t say it wasn’t tough at times, I felt confident in myself, I trusted myself in doing what was best for my baby, and I was happy to be relaxed with him trying new things.
Practicing creativity has enhanced my gut instinct. It makes me more flexible and I allow him to take risks and play in a way that pushes boundaries but I think because I trust both me and him, he trusts himself and has never had any major injuries! He is a super confident, imaginative child and all of this is down to him, really, rather than me, but I am pretty confident in the fact that I didn’t stop him being like that. Practicing my own creativity helped me make space and patience and love for his.
We are all born inherently creative. We all come out with little or no boundaries on our self-expression. But as we get older we learn them, and sometimes we learn them really early. We learn what makes us ‘good,’ what behaviour is ‘right,’ what we need to do in order to please people. Don’t get me wrong, these are all things that are important to learn in some measure, but when too much emphasis is placed on them, and we don’t also spend time with our kids being wild, and free, and silly and creative, it starts to kill those really early instincts which are all too easy to unlearn.
We are all born inherently creative. We all come out with little or no boundaries on our self-expression.
Most of what I’ve learned is not about how I focus on his development, but about how I focus on mine, in order to have the least impact on his sense of self, confidence and creative expression. It’s really hard when he tries to do a puzzle or craft or task ‘wrong’ to not fix it for him (sometimes I do, it’s too annoying) and it sounds silly but that takes a lot from me. I spent so long trying to be perfect it’s hard not to want him to be. For most of my life, I equated perfection with happiness, and who doesn’t want their kid to be happy? But now I realise that striving for perfection ultimately made me miserable, and I don’t want him to pick up the same habits as me. When I relax into enjoying his messy, unruly ways of doing things, it opens up something in me too. We’re learning from each other.
There is absolutely no right or wrong way of doing parenting. But doing it in a way that allows you to be who you are in a way that makes you feel free and happy, and them to be who they are and feel free and happy is a good start. That requires the constant trying and failing that is at the heart of creativity. I am really glad I had the chance to learn about that before he came along. Otherwise I’d still be searching for the ‘right’ answers in books. And I am pretty sure they are not anywhere to be found.
Jo Hunter is the co-Founder and CEO of 64 Million Artists - they are currently running their January Challenge. You can sign up for their challenge, designed to spark daily creativity, here.
A link to Jo speaking on the 64 Million Artists podcast is here