People ask me all the time, “so…are you an artist?” And these days I say, “I am, because I live a creative life.” I used to stutter my way through it. It almost sounds awkward as I write it. But I’ve become more confident, and it’s this creative life that’s grown my confidence. Confidence as personal power. Not power over anyone but the power to transform conflict into opportunity or to disarm and stay curious in the face of a judgment or to relinquish my own agenda on behalf of a collective one.
Re-reading some of my speeches and blogs, I see this extended dance between creativity and power with a consistent focus on the latter. Like in:
the power we give away through our over-reliance on others and the seductions of the outside world and
the power we can find in trusting a much larger current to take us into experiences that grow us, and releasing strong attachments to how we think life should go and
the power imbalance that continues between men and women and realize it’s just a reflection of the imbalance of the masculine and feminine energies inside us.
So what’s the link between creativity and personal power, you ask? How are they related? From a certain perspective, this all sounds like the language of spirituality or self-help books.
Yet I’ve found the only way to grow my personal power is through my capacity to make creative choices. And to understand where this capacity comes from, we gotta know more about our brains. So bear with me while I distill some brain science down to a few essentials.
Bruce Lipton, cellular biologist and author of The Biology of Belief, distills brain science down more efficiently than most.