Building Creative Confidence

Building Creative Confidence - On the courage to create and what narcissism has to do with it

This year I launched Milano Club as a members-only club for professional creative people who want to find a way to build a professional creative life they will love. The first webinar was about the compulsion to repeat unproductive actions without knowing why we do them.

The second webinar that took place in the beginning of March explored the concept of Creative Confidence. 

Every person should have the possibility of building a professional creative life they will love

No matter the state of the world, or the situation in our personal lives, we should all have the possibility of creating professional creative lives we love. I believe that is not only important for every individual but also for our communities. Having this focus is not to remain oblivious to conflicts around us but a way of keeping a reflective culture alive no matter what happens in the world and in our relationships.

But what does it take to stay focused on this ambition even when it is challenged by the personal and collective events that interrupt our daily lives? Collectively, we have in recent years experienced first covid and now the war in Ukraine and soon we may face major climate changes. Individually, we will all have to suffer the loss of loved ones, conflicts with people and personal dilemmas that challenge us.

How can we understand Creative Confidence and the Courage to create in this context? I have been going through my books and art catalogues documenting the human consequences of war and as we know from the existentialist philosopher Victor Frankl, who wrote about how to find personal meaning even in situations as dire as being a prisoner in a concentration camp, which he himself endured. Frankl sees our ability to respond to life and to be responsible to life as a major factor in finding meaning and therefore, fulfilment in life.

Creative Confidence

The concept of Creative Confidence comes from the Kelley brothers who are behind the American design company IDEO. They have been working with both creative people and other kinds of professionals for many years and have experienced how creative confidence can be built through a series of small successes.

They have been inspired by the American psychologist Albert Bandura and his concept of self-efficacy. Bandura has worked with curing phobias and with empowering people in relation to issues they have been struggling with. He has developed the method of guided mastery that scientifically builds on the same experience as the Kelley brothers. The guided mastery method is a way of staging small successes for yourself and through this slowly developing creative confidence.

The concept of self-efficacy addresses the feeling of being able to master your own life. To build self-efficacy you must trust your ability to change yourself through small deliberate actions that helps you feel your own ability to change and create the life you want for yourself through them.

What do you chose to do with your professional life?

But to build a professional creative life that you will love you must know what you love.

The existentialist psychologist Rollo May, who trained as a psychoanalyst, writes in his book “The Courage to Create” from 1974: “We express our being by creating.”

May elaborates on this by pointing out: “The greatness of a poem or a painting is not that it portrays the thing observed or experienced, but that it portrays the artist’s or the poet’s vision cued off by his encounter with the reality.”

And this leads us to the challenge about why the courage to create is also a struggle with death – a struggle with not being here. May writes: “Creativity is a yearning for immortality. We human beings know that we must die. We know each of us must develop the courage to confront death. Yet we also must rebel and struggle against it. Creativity comes from this struggle.”

The narcissism in fear of failure

The reason why we are all from time to time struggling with taking the steps and showing creative confidence is because we run up against the fear of failure. Because creativity is also a way of staying alive – of insisting of our right to be here and have a voice – it is a struggle that involves a conscious or unconscious dealing with at least the symbolic death. In this way the fear of failure is not only about not succeeding but it is about not succeeding and thus not existing. 

Here we meet the narcissistic layers of ourselves. The primary narcissistic layer is the one that we develop through the love that mirrors our existence when we are babies. This love is the cradle of our happiness and this love plays a part when we try to build a professional creative life we will love. The secondary narcissism is the forced feeling of being who we are where we create ourselves in the images of things valued by our culture.

In building creative confidence, we have to be sure that what we build through guided mastery creates space for the feeling of pleasure and happiness that stems from the primary narcissism and not a way of strengthening the self simply as a mirror of the collective desire in our time.

By doing this we will face dilemmas that have to do with choosing between what the culture expects us to do and what we find to be pleasing and valuable. 

So the question you must ask yourself if you want to build a professional creative life you will love is: How can I build creative confidence with small successes that relate to what I cherish most and what makes me happy?

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At the monthly Milano Club webinars you will as a member be guided through a process of self-reflection that will help you realize why you repeat situations that hold you back and what desires in your life you must integrate for you to get past your dilemmas and love your professional life.

Next webinar:

Surviving rejections - The happiness of selfcare
7th of April

Milano Club is a members-only club for professional creative people with more than 5 years of experience who want to work with themselves in relationship to their work, who want to change the professional roles they are in or who want to develop the relationships they establish with stakeholders. You can find more info at our website: milanoclub.org.