3 Secrets to Communicating Creatively

(or, How to Survive Living with a Highly Creative Person)

Photo by:Michael Johnson

Dear Highly Creative People:

This article is not for you. This article is for your wives, husbands, girlfriends, boyfriends, roommates, friends, close family, distant relatives, and pets. This article is for anyone in your life who “doesn’t ‘get’ you,” “thinks you’re crazy,” or “can’t understand why you won’t get a ‘real’ job.” Go and get them now. Post this link to their facebook pages. Tweet it. Email it to their smartphones. Print it out and hand it them. Done? Are all of the right people reading this now? Excellent. Let’s begin.

Dear People Given This Article by the Highly Creative Person Who (Probably) Drives You Crazy:

This article is for you. In people as in magnets, opposites attract, which means that you are probably a Highly Administrative Person. In fact, you were probably an extremely happy Administrative – driven, successful, keeping track of every important detail of daily life – until your copacetic existence suffered the barrel roll of creativity, insanity, and frenzied inspiration that is the Highly Creative Person.

Your initial wonder and awe at the Creative’s “fresh perspective,” “enthusiasm,” and “fearlessness” quickly gave way to frustration at their “inability to plan sensibly,” “endless work hours,” and “foolish risk-taking.” But don’t forget – there’s a reason you wanted to hang around this person in the first place. They probably add skills and ideas that you’re missing in your life. And you add skills and ideas that they’re missing in theirs!

With that positive perspective in mind, here are a few communication tips to help you and your favorite Creative learn from each other without killing each other:

1. Dial down the details.

You are a Highly Administrative Person. You thrive on managing the details of every day life. You probably manage the banking, the bills, the appointments, and the schedule for car repairs. You live in a constant cacophony of highly PRESENT concerns.

But listen: If you tell the Highly Creative Person all of your immediate, very pressing, very important PRESENT concerns, do you know what will happen? You will stress them out. A Creative is FUTURE focused. They already live in a world of their own pressing concerns – future business plans, dreams, life goals, etc. – and they structure their present lives as if they lived in their future world.

Is this delusional? Yes. Does it also contain a seed of genius? Certainly. Your job then becomes, rather than forcing the Creative abruptly into the present, to patiently scatter the seed of present concerns. Think about timing and spacing. Remind them on Monday of the Tuesday car repair appointment, but wait until Tuesday night to layer on the details about the kids’ Thursday soccer practice. Just because you see the entire week mapped out ahead of you one detail at a time doesn’t mean that the Creative brain needs to see it that way. Give them just enough lead time to react to the present in the moment so that they can keep their mind on their ten-year goals.

2. Listen; don’t analyze.

The Creative’s brain is full of “big ideas.” You know this, because you hear 5-6 of them a day. The problem is, that when an Administrative hears a “big idea,” what we really hear is the sound of the cash register ringing up exactly how much the idea is going to cost. Some of us may also see the piles of older “big ideas” abandoned in the pursuit of the new, and never cleaned up. But here’s what we don’t see:

The Creative needs to share ideas with us. The Creative breathes and lives ideas, and to shut down that flow of creativity because it “stresses us out” to hear it is to miss out on the best part of living with a Creative. So, next time your favorite Creative shares a “big idea” with you, try this: Don’t think about the pricing, the timing, the scheduling, or the logistics. The Creative isn’t asking you for a five-year business plan – they’re sharing a dream. And unlike Administratives, Creatives don’t need to immediately think about how to achieve their dream.

Let’s say that an Administrative and a Creative both realize at the same time that they each have a dream of climbing Mount Everest. The Administrative will first research the height of the mountain, the weather conditions, the best season in which to climb, the team, gear and rations that will be needed, and the cost of putting everything together for the trip. The Creative will first sit back and think about what it will feel like to be at the top of that mountain, the mindset and mental stamina the climb will require, the camaraderie that will develop between team members, the possible global influence of a successful climb, and whether or not they would like to gear the climb to bring in money for a specific charity.

To an Administrative, that’s counting your chickens before they’re hatched. To a Creative, it is the vital process of laying down the vision clearly enough that it will motivate them to slog through the details it will take to make that vision a reality. If you cut short the Creative’s vision-casting process by talking about the practical details too soon, you will actually short-circuit their ability to reach their goal.

3. Fear not.

This is the most important lesson that Administratives can learn from their Creative friends. Many Administratives live with too high a consciousness of probability and not enough awareness of possibility. When we think of our dreams for the future, we think of what we can reasonably accomplish in one lifetime, given the resources available to us. In contrast, a Creative’s dreams are frequently too wide in scope to be reasonably accomplished in ten lifetimes, and require hundreds or thousands of times the resources currently available. To an Administrative, it looks as if the Creative will run themselves into the ground, and into bankruptcy, trying to accomplish even one of their “big ideas.” And some of them do. In fact, a Creative who can not learn to partner with the Administratives in their life is frequently set up for this kind of lifestyle. But that’s a subject for another article. Because an Administrative who can not learn to partner with the Creatives in their life is set up for another kind of failure: the failure to build bigger than themselves, to dream beyond their own ability or lifetime.

I heard an anecdote once about Walt Disney. In 1971, five years after Walt’s death, Disney World was first opened to the public. During the opening ceremony, one of Walt’s friends turned to Walt’s brother, Roy O. Disney, and whispered, “Boy, I wish Walt could have seen this.” Roy leaned over and replied, “He did, or you never would have.” Thirty-nine years later, in 2010, Disney is still making the list of top companies in the world for quality and consistency, because everything that Disney does is done with Walt Disney’s original vision in mind.

Did Walt Disney have great Administratives who helped him accomplish his vision? Of course. Would Disney as a company ever have become a reality if Walt had allowed those Administratives to limit his dream to what he could reasonably accomplish in his own lifetime, with his own resources? Certainly, no. Administratives – this is our greatest failing, and the greatest thing we could learn from the Creatives in our lives. We have the ability to build big dreams, and the organization to tackle “big ideas.” We all want the Creatives in our lives to “start listening to reason.” But first, we must stop listening to fear.

A final word: The combination of a talented Highly Administrative Person and a gifted Highly Creative Person can lead to one of two scenarios: a Highly Successful Life or a Highly Explosive Life. Hopefully, as you follow the suggestions outlined above, you will find yourselves living the former, with the only fireworks being those above the “big idea” that you just built.

Jenni Patterson is a Highly Administrative Person married to a Highly Creative Person. She loves writing, horseback riding, and is learning the value of partnering her Administrative talents with a Creative perspective on life.

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