Mysteries of Creative Process: Explorations at Work and in Daily Life

Abstract

Why a mystery? The sudden surprises of creative novelty can change lives and alter whole areas of existence. The authors combine expertise in business, coaching, and expressive arts with educational psychology, clinical psychiatry, and everyday creativity, plus arts-based and qualitative research methods to explore the mysteries of creative process. We look at the early stages of generating new material and across fields of endeavour. We explore deeper ways of knowing self, other, and the world through rich subjective methods including qualitative interviewing and arts-based inquiry. Applications to work-based creativity and relationships, expressive arts processes for healing, and potential for the growing field of creativity coaching are presented. A goal is to reveal and enhance a fuller range and depth of our sensitive, subtle, conscious, and unconscious creative potentialities. We begin with everyday creativity, using the two product criteria of originality and meaningfulness, then turn to process. We posit that human creativity is, first of all, universal but can often be developed much more, and across multiple modalities and other ways of knowing. Further framing draws from chaos and complexity theory—viewing creative phenomena as part of our broader nonlinear functioning as open systems, linked interdependently with a world in flux. Hence awareness, assessment, and development of creative process—through arts and everyday living—contribute in multiple ways to meaningful work, deeper relationships, life satisfaction, and even our worldview.