While working with a client the other day, I encountered an issue that seems to perennially trouble creative people (and their mentors). The client, a writer for a media agency, said that she was worried about knowing “too much” about herself and her creative process. 

She felt that the more she analyzed herself and her creative processes, the more stilted her work would become. 

Her concerns seem to fit an image people have of the creative person as someone who performs "naturally," unable to articulate how they do what they do.

I told her about Erroll Garner, the famous jazz pianist. According to Whitney Balliet (Being A Genius) Garner, at the age of three, would listen to a song in the evening and then play it exactly the next day. And at a recording session, as an adult, he once played eighty songs, all of them flawless, in a time normally allotted for ten or twelve minutes of music.

Yet Garner never learned to read music. When asked about this, he said, "Hell, man, nobody can hear you read." 

When I asked my client if she felt she was like Erroll Garner, she replied, with a smile, “Well no, not quite.” 

In fact, she recalled an incident where her school friend John noted how she seemed to circle around her work before actually starting to write. She then began to recognize this as part of her process, giving herself time to circle around her writing as a kind of necessary gestation period. 

Her need to know herself as a creative performer, then, was clear. But just as clear was her  concern that too much analysis might, as she said, “kill the creativity.”

This left me with the question: As her facilitator, was I someone who could foster or kill her creativity? 

To answer her concern, I related the theory of “automaticity,” which states that we generally do not stop to think about what we do. Instead we act in an automatic mode that enables us to act quickly and efficiently. Which makes sense if, well, if you stop to think about it. 

Take for example the simple act of riding a bike. Simple now that we have learned how to ride a bike. But remember how difficult the original learning process was? How we had to think about balance and speed and turning. Which is one reason why we didn't get to far – we had to think about what we were doing.

Stopping to think is part of the learning process. But my helping her to stop and look at her thinking put her in a temporary state of analysis, much like the kid learning how to ride the bike. Of course, this did help her learn more about herself as a creative performer.

But at that moment she could not perform any better (if at all). Like the child on the bicycle, she needed to reach a point where she could take action almost without thinking. Only then could she act in a smooth, seamless way – what Csikszentmihalyi calls acting in a “flow.”

That is why I would later help her integrate her new thinking into her behavior. This is sometimes called “knowledge conversion,” where a person  internalizes new information in such a way that actions again become automatic (for more on this, see Nonaka and Takeuchi’s book The Knowledge Creating Company). 

Once my client understood this position, she became more comfortable with the discovery process. She knew that she needed time to stop and analyze her processes, and she also needed time to integrate her observations into her thinking. Only then could she re-enter her creative flow, although at a higher level than before.