While there are no specific traits that all creative people possess, there are some dimensions found in many highly creative people. These dimensions are like spectrums or paradoxes and creative people often manage to move along these dimensions with ease. Listen and see which of these dimensions you exhibit in your life and work.
What You’ll Learn
* The 10 dimensions found in highly creative people
* The many paradoxes that creative people are able to manage
* The difference between big “C” and little “c” creativity
Resources
* Csikszentmihalyi’s book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention
The Weekly Challenge
Share in the comments which of these dimension you feel you possess. How do they show up in your life? Feel free to also use the comments section to ask Amy questions.
Transcript
Feel like reading instead of listening? Download the free PDF Transcript or read it below. Enjoy!
Transcript for Episode #010: The 10 Dimensions of Creative People
Amy Climer: Welcome to the Deliberate Creative Podcast episode #010. I’m so excited. We’re at episode #010. This is awesome. When you start a project like this, you just hope you can keep going and I feel like 10 is a big number. Thanks for listening.
Today, we’re talking about 10 dimensions of the creative personality. Specifically, I’m going to share some research by one of my favorite researchers. His name is Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He is most well known for his book, Flow, and the research that he did on that concept of flow. Flow is that idea where you just get into the zone, we get into this flow. Time slips away and we’re so focused and so engrossed in what we’re doing that we just get really energized and excited. He discovered this concept of flow because he was researching creativity.
He is really a creativity researcher and then more recently, maybe 15 years ago, co-founded the field of Positive Psychology with Dr. Martin Seligman. That field has just exploded now and it’s really cool to see his impact on that. I had the opportunity to interview him in 2011 and he’s such a nice guy. It’s always great when your heroes turned out to be nice people – so really excited that I had the opportunity to interview him.
Today, I’m going to share with you some research that he did and published in a book called Creativity. It was published in 1996 and it was based on research that he did from 1990-1995. I’ll explain that research in more depth in a moment. I want to talk first about this idea of a creative personality and what does that mean.
In 1950, there was a significant event that year that really kicked off creativity research. The president of the American Psychological Association, Dr. Guilford, gave a keynote speech at their annual meeting and he really pushed the psychologists to start studying creativity. People listened and after that speech, there was this huge surge in creativity research – huge compared to what there had been before.
That first 20 to 30 years of creativity research was really trying to figure out what are the traits that creative people possess. And really what we figured out is there aren’t any. There aren’t very many specific traits that all creative people possess. The reality is we’re much more diverse than that. But Dr. Csikszentmihalyi had done this study where he interviewed 97 people who were highly creative and what he did find was there were some dimensions that they all possessed.
