Are You Only Paying Attention to Your Child's "Talent"? These Tricks Will Help You Change Your Perspective

Paulina Socha-Jakubowska, "Wprost": We often treat "creativity" and "creativity" as synonyms. Rightly so?

Dr Joanna Kwaśniewska: In psychological terms, these are different issues. Creativity refers more to intellectual potential, to our cognitive resources. On the other hand, creativity is creativity in action, realized potential.

I often use the example of my friend who usually talks about what wonderful things she would do in her life, what great ideas she has. Unfortunately, she fails to implement these ideas and ends up always working in a job that she is not happy with and complains about.

And this best illustrates the difference between creativity and creation. Because you can have brilliant ideas, great concepts, but also a deficit of "that something" that makes us able to implement them.

So what might be missing?

Sometimes competence, sometimes courage. Sometimes, one lacks self-confidence and inner strength to persistently implement one's idea.

But is it possible to somehow develop this perseverance, this creativity in ourselves to achieve our goals, our dreams, and make our desires real ?

Just as we train our memory, as we train various other cognitive skills, we can train creativity. I have been involved in creativity training for many, many years. I am very happy to conduct it for young people, for adults, for silvers.

You can train your creativity by doing various funny, often completely silly, but also developing exercises. It's about building distant associations, the ability to think through analogy.

However, it is much more difficult to train creativity in adult life.

Why?

Because the question arises, how to train courage in yourself, when you are, for example, 40 years old? How to train authenticity, staying true to yourself in the face of criticism or when there is a risk that we will be different, we will behave cringe ? The older you are, the harder it is to work on it.

This is work that needs to be done in adult life with the help of a psychotherapist or coach.

Is that why you focus on children in the book?

In childhood one can receive an upbringing that gives one personal strength, self-confidence and that perseverance that has already been mentioned.

But since we are on the subject of children, one cannot help but ask whether creativity is written in the genes?

The answer is not clear-cut, because we do inherit some traits. For example, openness to experience is a temperament trait that is very strongly related to creativity.

Creativity, however, is such a broad and multi-threaded phenomenon that it is difficult to speak of a single creativity gene.

Research shows that we can achieve a lot in terms of developing creativity and creativity.

It seems that more important than the percentage of creativity we inherit is the very belief whether it is "innate" or not. The feeling that creativity is innate inhibits the development of this skill, while the belief that it is acquired opens up the building of this competence.