CREATIVE PERSONALITY
The attributes that make us the creative people we already are
Talking to Bibby
As with all toddlers, Barry was very good at pushing the boundaries of his imagination, especially when he was caught being naughty! Barry’s mum, Vicky, remembers vividly, just after his second birthday, hearing him chatting in toddler-speak to someone in the garden. She assumed it was a neighbour. However, the conversation went on for quite some time. And given that she was sure that Barry’s conversational skills were not as advanced as to be able to discuss the finer points of producing impressive hollyhocks, she ventured out to take a look. He was sitting in the middle of the garden holding a tea party, without any bears or soft toys for company. She bent down and asked who he was talking to. “Bibby,” came the very definite reply. “Who’s Bibby?” she asked. “He’s my best friend. I see him in my bedroom, and he comes out with us.” The response wasn’t quite that eloquent, but you get the drift!
From that day forward, Bibby made considerably more appearances. When asked how tall he was, Barry always indicated he was a similar height to his newfound chum. They did all kinds of things together, from tea parties to racing, visiting real live friends, shopping, and even going to McDonald’s. This was a touch embarrassing, as Vicky needed to get an extra seat for Bibby, which everyone else knew was empty.
After Barry’s third birthday, Bibby’s role in his life increased. When there was an accident with a milk bottle, it was Bibby who had picked it up and dropped it. When toys got lost, guess who had borrowed them. And of course, whenever Barry decided to redecorate his room, which he did on two occasions – once with a very attractive set of luminous poster paints and the other time with felt tip pen – it was Bibby again. If Vicky reprimanded Barry, she had to admonish Bibby as well. As you might imagine, this always alleviated any anger. Have you ever tried to scold a figment of someone else’s imagination and keep a straight face?
Bibby developed his own friends, Boggy and Bratchett. They made intermittent appearances whenever a wider audience was called for. They were all packed in a small suitcase to go on holiday because, of course, their size miraculously changed whenever required.
Vicky was always very fond of Bibby. He proved to be a great friend to Barry over the years and only started to disappear at the age of four or five when Barry started full-time school, and didn’t play with him so much anymore. Occasionally, Bibby made a guest appearance when Barry saw something that brought him back to mind, but these reincarnations became less frequent as the years passed.
The power of imagination
Welcome! This is the power of imagination at work. I love this story because it demonstrates that you don’t have to be able to make pictures in your head to be imaginative. It means that imagination is open to all, which makes sense because it is, of course, yet another evolutionary adaptation. I like to think we all have a Bibby in our heads. Someone we can have a rational conversation with, even if we don’t feel rational. Someone who can raise our spirits when we feel a bit down. Someone who doesn’t judge or offer unconstructive criticism when we’ve fallen short of our own expectations. Most importantly, someone with whom we can dream our greatest dreams and let our imagination soar.
By the way, when Vicky shared this story with me, more than 20 years ago, she asked me to say that you should feel free to borrow Bibby whenever you need to, or give him a call. He is a very easy-going soul, provides hours of fun, and is always happy to help. (We hear all sorts of stories in our travels. Some come and go. Others stick. This one is timeless. Thank you, Vicky, for this wonderful story.)
So, this is a story about being imaginative, one of the many attributes commonly associated with having a creative personality. It might be a little more accurate to say that imagination is one of the personality attributes we bring to creative expression. There’s more to say about this subtle word twist, but that’s for another day. My focus in this post is on creative personality rather than its component attributes.
Definitions first
The American Psychological Association Online Dictionary defines personality as “the enduring configuration of characteristics and behaviour that comprises an individual’s unique adjustment to life, including major traits, interests, drives, values, self-concept, abilities, and emotional patterns. Personality is generally viewed as a complex, dynamic integration or totality shaped by many forces, including hereditary and constitutional tendencies, physical maturation, early training, identification with significant individuals and groups, culturally conditioned values and roles, and critical experiences and relationships. Various theories explain the structure and development of personality in different ways, but all agree that personality helps determine behaviour.” Phew! So, a respected source and definitive definition. However, you could pretty much replace personality with identity, and you’d have something close to one of the many definitions of identity. Definitions, bah humbug! Another conversation for another day.
For creativity educators Edwin Selby, Emily Shaw, and John Houtz, creative personality is the traits or attributes that represent differences between individuals, which are stable over time, and consistent across varying situations. Put another way, creative personality is the combination of attributes that relate to creative expression. Shorter, sharper, clearer, all good. Well, not really. This perspective makes creative personality sound static. It is not. It suggests that we apply all these creative attributes to each instance of creative expression. We do not. It makes it sound as though it is a discrete entity. It is not. That said, it will serve meantime.
Traits or attributes
Still on definitions, there are four terms that are used somewhat synonymously in this field: traits, attributes, characteristics, and qualities. All are defined in the APA Online Dictionary of Psychology.
A trait is “an enduring personality characteristic that describes or determines an individual’s behaviour across a range of situations.”
An attribute is “a quality or property of a person, sensation, or object.”
A characteristic is a particular feature or quality of a person, animal, or other unit of interest, especially any of the enduring qualities or traits that define an individual’s nature or personality in relation to others.”
Finally, a quality is “a characteristic or feature of something, be it physical or abstract.”
Confusing? I think the main distinction is that a trait is intrinsically human, whereas the other terms can be applied to inanimate objects. Otherwise, they do appear to mean the same thing. I decided to use just two terms, distinguished and organised solely based on scale, where characteristics are components of attributes.
Conclusions
So, what did I decipher from all my reading and subsequent research? Here goes...
First, creative personality is indeed the mix of attributes associated with creative expression. This does not mean they are used exclusively in the creative domain. They may well be used in any manner of other endeavours. I like to think about things in pictures, and a Venn diagram works really well here. All our attributes would sit in one bigger circle, labelled Personality. A subset of these attributes would then be located within a smaller circle contained within the bigger circle, labelled Creative Personality. Equally, there might be a Sporting Personality, which might intersect with but not match the creative subset. The important point here is that a creative personality is not a discrete entity, separate from our wider personality. Like a Russian doll, creative personality nests inside overall personality.
Next, we all have a creative personality, just as we all have an identity and a creative identity. Renowned psychologist Gordon Allport was a pioneer of personality psychology. He developed trait theory and confirmed that we all have a personality. He published the first major textbook on the subject, Personality: A Psychological Interpretation, in 1937, in which he emphasised individual uniqueness. As we all have a personality, by extension, we all have a creative personality. (We might not be utilising it, but it’s there, nonetheless.)
In the same way that we all have a unique identity, we also have a unique combination of those attributes. Our (creative) personality is ours and ours alone. Contemporary creativity psychologist Mark Runco agrees. He goes further by suggesting that we bring different creative personalities to different creative endeavours (or domains). My research into the notion of transient identities, where we bring a unique context-specific version of ourselves to every social interaction or creative expression, supports this contention.
I found it handy to organise the attributes I identified. (My research methodology, reflexive thematic analysis, required this.) I identified three categories (aka themes) of attributes: those associated with Generating New Ideas, those for Defying the Crowd (Robert Sternberg and Todd Lubart’s term for challenging convention), and those for Making Creativity Happen. I isolated 12 attributes and allocated them to the 3 categories. Imaginative, inquisitive, observant, and lateral related to Generating New Ideas. Versatile, entrepreneurial, challenging, and tolerant related to Defying the Crowd. And agentic, ambitious, positive, and self-aware related to making Creativity Happen. Of course, reality is a little more complex. Finally, each attribute had a series of characteristics associated with it. I identified 96 in all! For example, agentic was the most frequently cited attribute in my conversations with my participants (not that they used that word). The term agentic is frequently used in the social sciences and rarely elsewhere. It describes an individual who behaves proactively, intentionally, wilfully, and practically, solely or in collaboration with others, in pursuit of a predetermined goal. It included 12 of the 96 characteristics: evaluative, pragmatic, perfectionist, prepared, troubleshooter, decisive, collaborative, performative, leading, proactive, industrious, and following. I intend to explore each one of these characteristics in future posts to explain how they relate to creative personality and creative identity, as well as to demonstrate that you can already claim each and every one.
Next, I found that the terms creative personality and creative identity were often used synonymously. This is wrong and misleading. Personality, and its creative subset, are components of identity (and creative identity), as I shall demonstrate in the next post.
Creative personality and creative expression share an intimate connection. Since our creative personality is unique, we all bring something different to the party. This is just one of the reasons why collaborative creativity works so well, and possibly also why it sometimes gets into difficulty.
Context determines the mix of attributes, and therefore the particular version of our creative personality, that we bring to any particular creative endeavour. If we anticipate that it’s going to get difficult, we bring our determined, our persistent, our resilient, amongst others. If we think it’s going to be fun, we bring our extroverted, our fanciful, and our spontaneous.
Attributes and characteristics rarely (if ever) operate in isolation. Some may be more evident, but others will play a supporting role. Each version of our creative personality is a complex mixture of elements. It’s like the most elaborate recipe you’ve ever tried to follow, on steroids. And if it turns out that we’re missing an ingredient, we conjure it up from our extensive repertoire. If it’s absent from our repertoire and we really want to succeed, we improvise with something close and make a note to develop the missing element for future use.
Attributes and characteristics often operate outside of conscious awareness. If I need to be imaginative, I don’t need to instruct myself to be so; it just happens (or sometimes doesn’t, and trying to force it is hugely unproductive). How many times has someone (generally with a higher perceived status) told you to “just use your imagination.” Really helpful, not.
There is a myth that we must possess the lateral attribute to be creative. You’ve heard that old cherry, often again from someone with higher perceived authority, “You need to think outside the box.” I’ve spent 25 years suggesting that people might respond with, “I’d love to. Show me how,” knowing full well that the person giving the instruction has no idea in the world how to follow it themselves. As an attribute, lateral accounted for just 3 of the 96 characteristics I isolated. By my maths, that leaves another 93 to go at. I’m not suggesting we ignore lateral. It’s great fun, and often succeeds in yielding perspectives that could never have arisen from reasoned, straight-line thinking. It just doesn’t have a monopoly on creative output.
There’s another myth that suggests that the creative personality comprises only what we might describe as positive attributes, such as focused, passionate, committed, confident, or optimistic. However, renowned psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi suggests that creative people can adapt to any situation. This means they can be both energetic and calm, smart and naïve, wise yet childish, convergent and divergent, responsible and irresponsible. My research confirmed this. In other words, attributes are not unitary things. They exist on a spectrum with what might be considered a highly positive aspect at one end, with its opposite at the other. Individuals can then operate within a band along that spectrum. I can think of times when being unfocused, disinterested, mercurial, diffident, or pessimistic were entirely appropriate creative responses.
Almost there! Creative personality is not a static thing. Just like identity, it is in a state of constant flux as we participate in new adventures and experiences. As we reflect, interpret, and learn, we might realise, for example, the advantages associated with becoming more intuitive. We spend some time going with what feels right, using a little less reason to make decisions. When this yields good outcomes, we persist. What was a conscious behaviour becomes something we do automatically and to a high standard. In other words, it becomes a skill or competence and then a habit, which in turn becomes an attribute. Repetition and refinement.
And finally, it’s important to understand that creative personality signals past achievement but future potential. We have to apply our attributes to creative expression if we are to achieve results. Baptiste Barbot, Maud Besançon and Todd Lubart confirm that creative personality only becomes creative ability when it is employed.
How can we use this information?
We can use these insights about creative personality in many ways to help us build a solid creative identity (or strengthen an existing one). The most powerful use comes from using evidence from past experience to eliminate doubt. For example, we may have a thought running around in our head that goes something like this: “I’m not creative because I’m not spontaneous.” Spontaneity is one of the more positive elements in the creative stereotype we looked at in the last post. It suggests that creative people act impulsively, without premeditation. We might think, “I’m not like that. So, I can’t be creative.” There is a debilitating circularity to this argument. It is an example of the all-or-nothing thinking I highlighted in one of the afterthoughts about changing beliefs. On paper, it’s a simple one to address. We just identify a time (or times) when we know we have been spontaneous, replay the event, embellish it a little, confirm that we know how to do this, and commit to behaving in this manner a little more in future. In no time, we come to accept that we can be spontaneous, and so become spontaneous. Remember from last time around, beliefs depend on evidence and patterns. Expose the evidence and create the patterns and beliefs follow: “I am spontaneous. So, I’m creative!”
More, much more, about this in future posts.
Key takeaways
Creative personality comprises the attributes associated with creative expression that are stable over time, consistent across varying situations, and differentiate us from one another.
We all have a creative personality.
Our own creative personality is unique.
It’s helpful to organise the attributes if we wish to develop our creative personality.
Creative personality is one component of our creative identity.
Creative personality shapes our creative expression in the same way that identity shapes behaviour.
Context determines the version of our creative personality we bring to any creative act.
Attributes act in concert, never in isolation.
Attributes generally operate outside conscious awareness or intention.
We don’t need to be lateral to be creative (although it can help and it’s lots of fun).
Creative personality is more than just those attributes that appear positive.
Creative personality only becomes creative achievement through creative expression (there’s a mouthful!)
We can use this knowledge to develop our creative personality throughout our lives.
Call to action
List, and then reflect upon, the attributes that you might bring to your creative expression. In other words, describe your creative personality. If you consider yourself to be focused, get that into the list. Include attributes that, at first sight, might appear to hinder creative expression. For example, if you feel you accommodate the wishes of others, get that into the list as well. Every seasoned creative knows there are times when it’s best to accept the way things are going and make the best of the situation. Confirm that you already have a creative personality, and then work out how you might make more of it in life, work, and play.
By the way, this list is dynamic. Keep adding to it anytime something else occurs to you.
Next time
Building on the idea that creative personality is a part of our creative identity, we’ll have a look at the components of identity, that’s all of the components. With identity being one of the most researched fields in contemporary psychology, you would think this would be something you could get straight from a textbook or an article. However, I was unable to find a single source that consolidated all the components. So, I had to work it out for myself. You can judge whether or not I succeeded.
Before we finish...
Here’s a story about a different creative personality characteristic: curiosity. It’s from the very beginning of my career in a food factory...
I’ve always had a bit of fascination with how machines work. So, there I was on the first day of my first proper job in the world of work. Along with Liz, I had successfully negotiated the graduate recruitment process for a food manufacturing business. You might recognise Knorr soups and sauces, and Hellmann’s mayonnaise, and if you’re 110 years old, Brown & Polson’s Patent Cornflour. (They were very proud of the patent bit.) Part of the programme for day one was a tour through the entire plant, which employed nearly 2000 people. Liz and I were in the capable and very experienced hands of Senior Supervisor Morag Martin, who had worked in pretty well every part of the factory. What she didn’t know wasn’t worth knowing. So she was full of answers, which was just as well because Liz and I were full of questions.
We got to the department where the cornflour was packaged. The machines that did this were enormous beasts, made more monstrous because they stood in clattering rows as if they were poised to pounce on any unwary intruder. It was easy to see where the cornflour tumbled into the innards of the machine. It was also obvious where the packaged cornflour exited, to be automatically packed into heavy brown cardboard boxes, 24 at a time, taped and sent to the palletising area.
The bit that fascinated me was what happened in between. Somehow, somewhere, a bag was formed to hold the cornflour, the bag was sealed, a light cardboard packet was formed, the sealed bag was inserted into the packet, the packet lid was glued in place, and finally, the filled packets were collated into 24s. For the life of me, I could not work out how it all came together, and with such speed and precision.
Safety mesh guarded the machine from unwelcome interference while the mass of clanking, rattling, reciprocating, vibrating, juddering, grinding, revolving metal parts that would have looked at home in a dungeon from the Spanish Inquisition went about their business.
I hunkered down and watched and watched, so very carefully, following one operation to the next, as claws closed bags and teeth opened cartons. As you would expect, I completely lost track of time. Morag and Liz carried on without me, deep in their own conversation and no doubt secure in the knowledge that I was trailing somewhere close behind. I was not. They had almost reached the Knorr packaging department before they realised their party was one short. They retraced their steps. However, I was still hidden behind the far side of the cornflour beast, and they missed me. I understand it was fully 20 minutes before they found me. I was given a light admonishment for getting ‘lost’ but congratulated on my curiosity. “You need that when a machine goes down,” Morag confirmed.
In my defence, this is how it is when you catch a bout of curiosity. Everything else fades away. There is only one object in the whole wide world: the focus of your curiosity. And that curiosity has stood me in good stead throughout my life.
That’s it for this time round, but remember,
A solid creative identity is all you need to be creative for the rest of your life.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you will recommend and share – you’ll be doing them a favour
Till next time, be bold!
Alisdair.
Notes on creative personality and defying the crowd
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/articles/199607/the-creative-personality
https://doi.org/10.1177/001698620504900404
https://doi.org/10.1080/10400410903579585
https://doi.org/10.1163/9781848883086_012
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316228036.006
https://doi.org/10.1002/jocb.451
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2013.07.129
ISBN 9780743236478