Creativity can be as elusive as trying to capture lightning in one of those old-timey, miniscule apothecary bottles. As an author who literally makes stuff up for a living, it has most certainly eluded me a time or two million.

The problem is, most of us feel a drive to create…to leave small traces of ourselves in the world—a bit of proof that we do, in fact, exist. Often you’ll hear that creation is one of life’s sacred needs. Even if this doesn’t ring true for you, it’s not likely you’ll be able to avoid creating altogether. In this world driven by content—even if you’re not in an industry that is typically considered creative—being original and coming up with out of the box ideas is imperative. You’ll find a greater sense of ownership in your projects, and gain the added benefit of impressing your boss or clients.

There are a lot of ways to rattle up those creative juices, and you might find you’ll add a little adventure to your life while you’re at it.  

1. Try Different Things

We live in a fast-paced world—one where it’s way too easy to fall into that trap of just getting stuff done. We have our routines and schedules and don’t often stop to think a whole lot about trying different or new things. Take a moment to think about it… when was the last time you did something truly different? This doesn’t have to be scary or difficult, and you’ll find that if you start small, it just might become an adventurous habit.

What if you:

• Sampled a new food
• Tested out a new sport or activity like paddle boarding, rock climbing, or an aerial yoga class
• Joined a team volleyball, floor hockey, or even lawn bowling (bonus points for meeting new people too!) 
• Mixed things up everyday—try on a new genre of music, or travel a new route to work, or even simply watch a video on a topic you’ve always wanted to know more about

2. Go Where Other Interesting and Creative People Are

Combining ideas in new ways is one of the cornerstones of creativity. Existing art and concepts are perfect places for incubating and sparking something new. You could come up with a new angle or twist or maybe your area of expertise fused with something you’ve never seen could birth something incredible. I’m certainly not talking about copying anyone else, but inspiration breeds innovation.

Try the following:

• Attend the theatre (live or on screen)
• Frequent museums and galleries
• Support a local artist at an opening or book signing
• Drop in at an open mic night to see how others are experimenting

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.” — Steve Jobs

3. Save Your Ideas

I’d bet that you’re more creative than you think. It’s just that interesting ideas sometimes take a stroll through our minds then decide to take an extended leave of absence. But not to worry. Most of us already have a “notebook” with us at all times in the notes app in our smartphones—I have so many notes in mine, I have to create folders to keep them all sorted.

Other tricks to try:

• Keep track of your dreams – start writing the moment you wake up or they’ll float away like a whispery fog
• If you’re anything like me, ideas will often appear like magic while you’re in the shower. Keep your phone—and a towel!—nearby
• Record ideas that pop by when you’re watching TV, movies or reading books—these are potential jumping off points for something new
• Journal! I find that when I make a point to just get started…ideas will start to appear. Or maybe they were there all along and I just didn’t recognize them

4. Give Yourself Room

When our minds are busy with the day to day grind, it tends to be a lot more difficult to come up with creative thoughts and new ideas. If you struggle with a flow of creativity, maybe it’s because stress can often get in the way.

A few things you could try:

• If you have one of those minds that whirrs as you try to fall asleep, try to calm it by jotting down all those things you forgot about today or are afraid to miss tomorrow. Once the task is saved, it should be a lot easier to let it rest. Again, simply add a reminder or task on your phone
• I’m sure you’ve heard it before (hello konmari method), but clearing your work areas and living space can definitely help optimize your time and energy. Organized spaces = organized mind (for most of us). If nothing else, a beautiful space can help form beautiful ideas 
• Ponder (or perhaps meditate), but don’t ruminate. What’s the difference? Positivity vs. negativity. When I “ponder”, it’s a lot more like daydreaming than it is letting negative thoughts whirl around in there. Think about the amazing things this world has to offer – all the beautiful art, nature, food, people, places, and amazing ideas. Keep lists of things that you find exciting, fun, interesting, hopeful, peaceful, and reassuring.

5. Let Go of Fear

My biggest crusher of creativity is the comparison game. We are all on our own journeys—let yourself have the unique, quirky, frustrating, and gorgeous one only you can create. Experiment. Try. Fail. What if it all just didn’t matter so much? When I’m feeling overwhelmed and fearful, I try to take a step back and ask myself just that—what if it didn’t matter so much? And you know what I usually find? It actually doesn’t matter as much as I’m making it out to in my head.

Make failure a priority – without mistakes, there is no learning or progress. Start giving failure the credit it deserves. Challenge yourself—especially when things get hard

Some think creativity is meant for artists and inventors, but it’s surprising how much creativity day-to-day work and living require. Scheduling, problem solving, and even cooking are all creative endeavors. If we’re not creating, we’re stagnant. Creativity is essential for all of us.

Even if you’re not specifically looking to “be more creative”, I can guarantee at the very least, trying out some of these tactics will make you a much more interesting person. And you might be surprised once you start looking, just how much creativity actually flows through you.

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On May 1, 2020, on the Global Launch call of the Restorative Practices Alliance, which I convened, the most meaningful part of the event for me personally was a dialogue that I facilitated between Kuuyux Ilarion Merculieff, an Indigenous Unangan Elder from Alaska who is President of the Global Center for Indigenous Leadership and Lifeways, and Dr. Stephen Porges, PhD, a psychophysiology researcher and likely the world’s leading expert on the relationship between the Autonomic Nervous System and behavior, about the human heart.

Although approaching the topic from seemingly distant orientations – Ilarion approaching from the perspective of Indigenous Wisdom, and Stephen approaching from the lens of neurophysiology, by way of the Polyvagal Theory, which he developed, and using very different words and framings, I found it remarkable that they were saying the same thing.

Upside-down/Inside-out Society

Indigenous people call modern western society the upside-down or inside-out society. They say we have reversed all the laws of living, because the heart and the mind are not in their proper places. They say that in modern Western society the mind tells the heart what to do, whereas in order to live in the right relationship with all that is, the heart needs to be telling the mind what to do. Dr. Porges says the same thing in a different way: only when we feel safe, at an embodied level, can we turn on the social engagement or Connection system, which is the gateway to connection and relationship, and only when this happens can the heart physiologically run the brain.

I want to explain what Dr. Porges is saying a bit more deeply here, so that you can feel what he is saying about our access to the human heart. We are endowed by Life with a remarkable nervous system. Our nervous system has a variety of components and functions, but what I want to focus on here is our Autonomic Nervous System, which you can also think of as our Automatic Nervous System. This embodied nervous system is the architecture of the mind-body connection, monitoring our internal organs and bodily systems, and exchanging this information with the brain.

The Autonomic Nervous System has two primary functions:

1. To maintain dynamic balance in the internal bodily systems, calibrating them moment-to-moment as we move through our lives. This dynamic balancing is called homeostasis, and involves constantly tuning and adjusting our heart rate, breathing, digestion, core temperature, immune function, and a variety of other involuntary systems to keep us adapted to our internal and external environments and using energy efficiently.
2. To tune our bodies and minds to respond appropriately to the environment based on whether or not we have a bodily detection of safety or threat.

Polyvagal Theory

Polyvagal Theory teaches us that depending on whether we feel safe or threatened, our Autonomic Nervous System evokes one of three primary neural platforms, which exist in a hierarchy. If we feel safe enough, our system will surface the Social Engagement, or Connection System, which is the neurophysiological system that unites the face and the voice with the heart and the breath, and brings us into functional calm and attuned relationship. If we feel threatened (and this assessment of threat is made by our body, not our thoughts) our nervous systems will re-tune into a protective response. In the hierarchy of the nervous system, this is often first a fight or flight response (sympathetic nervous system response) that is high energy and active. If the fight or flight response fails to get us safe, our nervous system will shift to a shutdown response that is immobilized and often numb (a dorsal vagal nervous system response).

These neural platforms (Connection, Fight/Flight, and Shutdown) tune our bodies, emotions, thinking, perceiving, and acting. They shape how it feels inside our bodies–our heart rate, breathing, muscle tension. They shape our emotions and our thoughts. They shape the way that we interpret the world around us. And they shape the behaviors through which we respond to it. Of principal significance: when we feel safe, we literally see, hear, and feel different things than when we feel threatened. Neural platform, over time, also shapes how we experience ourselves at a core existential level: we identify with the states we spend the most time in. Someone who becomes baselined in a fight response experiences themselves, and is experienced by others as a combative person. Someone who becomes baselined in a flight response experiences themselves, and is experienced by others as an anxious or fearful person. What this really means is that they feel chronically unsafe.

The key to understanding Polyvagal Theory, and as it happens, the key to understanding the relationship between the heart and the brain, is threat detection. I make this assertion because it is only when we feel safe enough in our bodies to surface the neural platforms of Connection that we have full access to ourselves, Others, and the Living World. Feeling safe in our bodies is the doorway to the Connection System, which in turn is the doorway to connection with all that is. When our connection systems are turned on, the heart is literally, physiologically, telling the mind what to do. This system is not only the root driver of wellbeing, but the doorway to connection.

Feeling Safe In Our Bodies

Only when we feel safe in our bodies are we able to connect deeply into ourselves, others, the world around us. Only then are we able to be with: to move into reciprocal relationship, to create a ‘we’.

Take a moment, if you will, to engage in a brief experiment.  Imagine that you are sitting with a dear friend – someone you feel safe with; someone who you feel understands you deeply, and has your best interests at heart. Imagine that you are having an animated conversation with this person about something that matters to you both. In your mind’s eye, can you see how you are tracking their facial expressions, the rising and falling of their voice, the meaning in its inflections? Can you see how you notice each of their gestures? And can you feel this space of connection that opens up between you, the sense of a shared space, the sense of a ‘we’? This is a simple and beautiful example of the Connection System being online, with archetypic echoes of the earliest communication between an infant and a caregiver, often the mother. Before we can speak, our caregivers are using this system – the doorway of the face, voice, the tuning of the middle ear – to see and listen into our interiors so that they can tune into us and meet our needs.

Imagine now a slight interruption in your dialog with your friend – something that pulls your attention away. An unknown sound, for example. Can you imagine how, in an instant, your attention re-tunes, quickly scanning the environment to detect and identify the sound? Suddenly, your nervous system is re-prioritizing the information coming in. It shifts from connecting to protecting.

We can conceptualize this, in lay language, as the heart opening and closing. It opens when we feel safe, and can trust enough to enter into the vulnerability of connection and reciprocal relationship. It closes when we feel threatened, and sense that we must protect and guard our hearts.

It is very important for our wellbeing to understand the physiological nature of these responses, because we live in a modern world where we are surrounded by cues of threat. The global pandemic has put the world, for nearly a year, into a state of almost constant awareness of threat, while simultaneously depriving us of touch, and being able to see the faces of others, which is generally our source of connection cues. Furthermore, we find ourselves in countries where political division and polarization are so extreme that our politics is locked into a perpetual state of fight, and in the midst of social upheavals arising from systemic oppression, and ecological catastrophe arising from climate disruption. All around us, we see things that make us feel unsafe, and the heart contracts.  Yet only when it opens can we live the highest, fullest versions of ourselves. Only when it opens can the heart take its rightful place, telling the mind what to do.

What I would like you to take away from this article, what I would like you to hold onto, is this awareness that only when we feel safe can we access the full intelligence of our hearts and the resources that reside there. Our human family will require its fullest creative brilliance and ingenuity to re-align our civilization with the Original Instructions for all of Life, and to do this we’ll need to be able to feel safe enough to open our hearts, so that we can receive the full inspiration we need to create a future that works for all.

Feeling safe in the body is the doorway to turning on the Connection System that allows us to live from our hearts. If this project seems meaningful to you, or it if seems difficult – if you find yourself aware of the many ways that trauma – either personal or collective – is blocking you from accessing this awareness, I would like to invite you to read the book I’ve spent the last many years working on with the help of 40 mentors and advisors in 20 disciplines of wellbeing across 18 cultures: Restorative Practices of Wellbeing.

Wishing that Your Heart is able to tell your mind what to do.

Author Bio

Natureza Gabriel is a connection phenomenologist. He likes to be still, and he likes to make things. He has spent a good deal of time making a company, a school, and a global cooperative. These three things are closely connected.

He is Convener of the Restorative Practices Alliance (the global cooperative), a philanthropic ancestral neuro-technology cooperative and culture repair engine. He studied at Yale and Stanford Universities, but has been shaped more by sitting in teepees and circles than in classrooms. He has been blessed with many remarkable mentors in many cultures and lineages and disciplines. He is the Founder and CEO of Applied Mindfulness, Inc. where he directs research, curriculum development, and pedagogy. He is co-founder of the Academy of Applied Social Medicine, where Dr. Stephen Porges, PhD is honorary chair of Neurophysiology.

For 25 years he has been studying connection phenomenology across multiple disciplines, including neuroscience, mindful awareness, creativity, social justice, cultural linguistics, deep nature awareness, leadership, organizational structure, and ancestral economics. His newest book is Restorative Practices of Wellbeing, which is being published July 10, 2021.

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A small or nonexistent social circle will deprive you of opportunities for meaningful relationships.

This lack of human connection can impact your well-being. 

Is it possible that you”re closing yourself off from people?

If so, you’re making it much more challenging to develop friendships based on authenticity and closeness. 

Learning to open yourself will go a long way toward solving this problem, but knowing how to open up to people may not come naturally to you.

All is not lost, though.

Techniques for becoming more open are not complicated.

Why Can’t I Open Up To People?

Opening up to people can make you feel vulnerable and insecure. Most of us tend to avoid these feelings because we don’t want to expose ourselves to judgment and other negative reactions.

However, psychologists at the University of Mannheim in Germany have identified through research studies a difference between how we experience our own vulnerability and vulnerability in others. 

Multiple studies indicated that people see their vulnerability as a very concrete threat, but they view other people’s vulnerability as an abstract issue. 

The abstraction lessens their perception of it as a problem in others. Overall, expression of vulnerability built trust between people, increased forgiveness, and deepened relationships.

Aside from these general human tendencies, you may have individual experiences that drive you to conceal your thoughts and feelings.

Common reasons people can’t open up include:

• Fear of embarrassment
• Anxiety about judgment
• A belief that all people are mean
• Previous betrayals in life
• An upbringing that valued concealment of emotions

How Do You Open Up Emotionally?

Open people don’t overthink what the reactions of people will be when they share about themselves. 

On the other hand, you may avoid revealing your inner world and authentic self because you imagine devastating scenarios of rejection or ridicule. 

Although we all need to filter what we share somewhat, a moderate expression of your honest thoughts and feelings will not ruin your life.

To start the process of opening up:

How to Open Up to People: 9 Ways to Reveal More of Yourself

How do you start opening up to someone? These tips will help you pry open the door to your personality instead of holding it shut like you always do.

1. Really Listen to People

Analyzing what you might say and the response to your words could distract you from opportunities to participate in a conversation. When you listen to people, you could hear something that you can relate to. 

Then you could say, “Oh, I know how that feels,” and describe what happened to you. This exchange could build a connection.

The person feels heard and learned that you shared in the feeling.

2. Focus on the Moment

Closing yourself off is a way to protect yourself from consequences, like acknowledging your own feelings or risking others’ judgment. 

When you stay in the moment, you free yourself from the restraint of predicting every possible outcome. We all need to express ourselves at times, and it’s OK to let it flow out when you’re with someone willing to listen.

3. Commit to Saying Something Specific About Yourself

You’ve sheltered yourself behind the safety of generic answers like “I’m fine” for too long. The next time someone asks how you’re doing, try to say something real. 

You don’t have to bare your soul, but you could say something honest like, “I wish I had gotten a better night’s sleep.” 

The point is not to bury your reality with little white lies. If your dog died last week and you’re feeling sad, answer the question truthfully and say, “I’m still sad about losing my dog.”

4. Latch on to Shared Interests

Teaching yourself to be a more open person doesn’t have to start with revealing your most personal secrets. You transform yourself with small steps, and shared interests allow you to express your authentic views. 

If someone likes motorcycles and you do too, it represents a foundation for having an interesting conversation and building a friendship.

The shared interest could be anything, like authors, television shows, going to auctions, or fishing.

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5. Be Yourself

This is the hard one, isn’t it? You guard yourself so closely because you worry people will reject you.

You might assume that no one cares to know anything about you. Some people do care if you give them a chance. 

Don’t be fake just to fit in. That’s not opening yourself and making a connection. Say what you honestly think, as long as you’re not hurting feelings, so that people have a chance to get to know you.

6. Don’t Be Judgmental

Connecting with people relies on them feeling accepted and safe. You don’t necessarily have to agree with someone, but you should not make a person feel judged. 

Being an open person involves a willingness to be accepting of other people’s views and feelings. It’s supposed to be a reciprocal process. Essentially, don’t give people a reason to shut you out as you try to open up yourself more.

7. Adjust Your Body Language

Are you always looking for the exit? Do you cross your arms or look down when people try to talk to you?

Body language immediately communicates whether you are open or not. Your habit of guarding your inner self will be evident in your body. 

Try to shift your body into a more open posture. Face people. Relax your arms. Lean forward a bit when someone talks. You might be surprised how far the mind can follow when the body leads.

8. Nurture Connections With People You Already Know

When you long for human support with a problem, do you hesitate to reach out because you don’t want to bother a person with your turmoil? 

To avoid this situation, you should stay in touch with people in casual ways that are low stakes. Invite a co-worker to take a lunch break with you. Talk to your siblings every week if you can. 

Regular interactions when everything is fine make it easier to reach out for emotional support when you’re struggling with burdensome feelings.

9. Celebrate Your Successes

Pat yourself on the back when you achieve one of your “opening up” goals. If you shared a genuine feeling with someone, then mark that down as a victory. 

Mentally review how it felt to connect with someone. The feeling was probably positive. Hold on to that feedback to stay motivated to keep seeking out the human connection you need.

Small Changes Lead to Big Rewards

Learning to open yourself up does not mean forsaking your privacy. You can take time to contemplate your feelings and decide how much to share, but don’t stay in the phase of thinking things through by yourself. 

You should not discount the benefits of opening up to someone. That person might have a perspective that helps you feel better or even solves your problem.

If you think that you’re just unable to open up to people at all, then maybe talking to a therapist is a good step.

A therapist can help you uncover the issues holding you back from experiencing a rich life with supportive relationships. The effort will reward you if you keep trying. 

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