Owning Your Creative Power
What you believe about your creative self determines everything you do.
If that’s the case, then we need to start paying attention to what we believe.
Today, we’re talking about one of the most fundamental beliefs we hold as creators and writers: How much control do I have over my success as a writer and creator?
If you believe you have no control over whether you’ll succeed at something, you’ll be far less likely to actually succeed. You might throw your hat in the ring or give it a whirl, but you likely won’t put in as much effort, since you believe your effort doesn’t matter anyway.
What makes a difference is when you believe that your efforts do influence your success - and that your efforts can be improved.
I see this all the time with authors who want to traditionally publish a book and find themselves up against the challenge of platform. Often their line of thinking falls into one of these traps:
- “Editors only want to publish authors with a huge platform.”
- “Getting published is impossible if you don’t have a big enough platform.”
- “I’ll never have a big enough platform to get published.”
The reason we fall into these traps is because these lines of thinking are true or very close to the truth. Yes, editors do want to publish authors with large platforms. Yes, getting published is difficult if you don’t have a large platform, and yes, building a large platform is itself a very difficult task.
But watch how the perspective changes if a writer thinks, “I need to build my platform in order to get published.”
Which mindset makes getting published more likely and actually helps the writer tackle the challenge of building a platform?
Once you make that shift in your beliefs about writing, you can start to own your creative power.
Owning Your Creative Power
Owning your creative power is possible when you change the locus of control from external to internal, and from fixed to alterable. In other words, owning your creative power comes when you believe that your efforts influence your success, and that your ability isn’t predetermined or capped at a ceiling; it’s able to be improved based on effort.
To own your creative power, you have to believe…
- That your ability to accomplish creative tasks is based on internal (vs. external) factors
- That you can improve your ability to accomplish creative tasks (alterable vs. fixed)
The research behind this is called “attribution theory” and has been around for decades. But we have Bernard Weiner, Beate Schuster, and Friedrich Forsterlung specifically to thank for a study that drilled down deeper into how much control we believe we have over what we accomplish.
Weiner and his partners found that when faced with challenges, people tend to attribute their chances of success to four factors:
- Luck (external, alterable)
- Task difficulty (external, fixed)
- Effort (internal, alterable)
- Ability (internal, fixed)
Moreover, these beliefs are dependent on what we’re doing. We might believe that our success at completing a project for work is dependent on our effort, but that whether we succeed at cooking a specific recipe depends on how hard the recipe is (task), or whether we already have experience using those cooking methods (ability). We’ll likely not even try that recipe because we’ve already decided that we won’t be able to succeed. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In order to stop that from happening, we have to shift our thinking to these more effort-focused mindsets:
- “I need to learn that particular cooking method.”
- “That recipe will stretch my skills.”
When we move our estimations of success from external to internal factors and realize that our internal factors can be improved, we immediately start to own our power and raise our chances of success. Success isn’t guaranteed, but it’s far more likely.
Having a Growth Mindset
Researcher Carol Dweck, author of Mindset, has a very similar theory based on her work with children.
Dweck wanted to see what would happen when children faced challenges in the tasks they were trying to perform. What she found was that the children tended to fall into two categories:
- Those who gave up when the challenge exceeded what they already knew they could do (she called this having a “fixed” mindset)
- Those who felt that if they puzzled at it long enough and kept trying, they could figure it out (what she called a “growth” mindset)
Just as with attribution theory, whether we have a fixed or growth mindset depends on what we’re trying to accomplish. We might have a fixed mindset about our ability to sustain a positive intimate relationship, but a growth mindset about our ability to perform a complicated yoga pose.
We make the same judgments about writing and creating.
Let’s take the example of writing a book. A lot of people never even start because they attribute their chances of success to luck, their current abilities, or how difficult writing a book is.
Again, they’re not wrong! Writing a book is hard and you might not have all the knowledge and skills you need now - but by leaving it at that, your writing dreams will never find life beyond a brainstorm on the back of a napkin. Your power comes when you realize that you can overcome those challenges and grow in your abilities and confidence.
Let’s take a look at the different mindsets possible about writing a book:
Obviously, we want to be in that effort quadrant! It doesn’t mean that we will for sure be able to write a book, or that our book will be successful - but it does mean that we’ve made success possible. We are owning our creative power.
