Creativity is much more than a skill. It speaks to our natural magic: being able to make something out of nothing. Creativity is also how we express our individuality and make neat things happen in the world.

While creativity has become a highly sought-after skill, we are still playing it safe and therefore seeing boring outcomes. Unleashed creativity produces off-the-charts, truly amazing results. It is our ticket to transcending the limits of time so we can build wild dreams.

Within each of us lies a powerful, audacious creator with a potential to make big waves on the planet just by being who we are. In order to free our audacious creator, creativity must be taken out of its mental context. We have to stop thinking outside the box and start accessing the intelligence of our bodies.

EMBODY CERTAINTY

It is quite common to have big dreams and imagine great things happening– in our heads. But holding a dream as a concept doesn’t take us very far. Conceptual dreams feel beyond our reach and are much more difficult to concretize.

Obviously, a dream is invisible until it is born. However, our body serves as its first physical landing place before it makes its appearance in the world.

It is critical that we experience the physical knowing that our dream will happen. We tend to skip this transition step, by going straight from idea to action, without ever embodying the certainty of what we want. When our visions feel like distant possibilities, it’s because we haven’t allowed our bodies to experience them, palpably.

When the mind is the only part of us to sense the dream, our bodies don’t know what to do. The steps to success feel elusive. We may work hard at pursuing what we want only to find ourselves exhausted or unsuccessful.

But there is an easier way.

If we view the entirety of our physical body as a brain, then our intelligence and magnetism skyrocket. A special excitement runs through us; even though the dream hasn’t manifested yet, we know in our bones that it is going to happen.

We suddenly feel a superhuman resourcefulness and know exactly how to get the job done. We effortlessly draw in the people and circumstances needed to bring the dream to fruition.

EMBRACE THE UNKNOWN

The mind is a busy, noisy space. It has an insatiable appetite for information, which might make us more knowledgeable– but at what expense?

Not only does excess information bog us down, but it may not hold the answers we are looking for. By spending most of our time swimming in thoughts, we overlook our own genius. Having knowledge isn’t nearly as valuable as owning our deepest knowing.

First, audacious creativity doesn’t derive from logical chains of thought. It’s more like a stream that pours unexpected ideas into our awareness. That’s because creativity isn’t controlled; it’s allowed.

Second, we must realize that the mind can only contain what is already known and can only retrieve prior knowledge.

But that won’t suffice. Our creative potential has to exceed what our history tells us we can do, otherwise we will never evolve. If we wish to create something that hasn’t been seen before, then we have to transcend the familiar past– which means stepping beyond the mental realm—and entering the unknown.

PLAY WITH ART

If the secret ingredient to audacious creativity is to think less and feel more, artistic play is the gateway.

Artistic play uses art to explore the unknown. Games and exercises are designed to awaken all of our senses, either by observing art (e.g., listening to a song) or creating it (e.g., drawing an image). Artistic play reveals what we don’t yet know about our unique potential and allows us to concretize our dream, by grounding it in our physical senses.

Playing with art gives us a glimpse into who we are and why we struggle. By witnessing our own creative process, we gain clarity and perspective about the nature of our challenges as well as how to resolve them.

Our approach to creating art mimics how we go about creating everything else in our lives, including our work and relationships. Artistic play creates mini versions of our broader life situations from which we can pull valuable insight. Surprising as it may seem, the solutions to our art problems are often the solutions to our life’s problems.

Artistic play loosens the grip of our focus on the knowns of the past. It teaches us how to perceive through a nonrepresentational, non-realistic lens. It melts away the assigned meanings, definitions, and identities of what we know and creates a void from which something else can flourish. It invites us to fill in the blanks and become the creator of new realities.

Playing with art lifts the veil of the mundane. It helps us see that the world is made up of symbols that we are already interpreting, albeit unconsciously, and often not in our favor. Once we realize our ability to interpret reality creatively, we begin to choose consciously.

Artistic play redirects mental energy towards the body. It gives us permission to use our senses in novel ways and even increases their receptivity. Through this multisensory rewiring, we find ways to arrive at our deep knowing, or our creative genius, without the usual “hard work”.

Our embodied knowing doesn’t just change how we experience our own reality; it also changes how we appear to others. Our presence takes on a commanding vibe, but without being forceful. We simply find our natural gravitas and operate from there. Our external environment “magically” begins to respond to us differently– which is how the dream actually unfolds in the physical world.

That’s the thing with creativity. If we start by inventing ourselves from the inside out and feeling the physical gravity of who we really are, our work will carry the potency of our unique creative essence.

All we have to realize is that we are smarter than our brains. In other words, audacious creativity is easier than we think.