A Releasing Your Unlimited Creativity discussion topic

Copyright 2009 by K. Ferlic,   All Rights Reserved

From the creativity perspective, performance anxiety is about being or acting in a way that meets some particular performance criteria that is not natural to our being. As such there is a tension between what our mind ask us to do and what our heart asks us to do. Performance anxiety fragments our creative life energy in that we send an enormous about of energy into needing to meet the criteria and often expends additional energy worrying about how effectively we met the criteria and how we will be judged.

In performing any task, there are concerns that need to be addressed. One must practice their skills and do what is possible to improve their performance. However, frequently we are given unrealistic performance expectations by ourselves or society. Or, we adopt standards that are not well founded and then worry about achieving them.

The selection of performance objectives is an interesting issue in that ultimately we can find a way to create whatever we desire and it is very appropriate to hold oneself to a seemingly impossible standard to achieve what appears to be un-achievable. Individuals do it every day and it is those seemingly un-achievable standards that allows us to bring new creation into existence. However, if the performance standards do not come from our heart and our creative passion, they are imposed on our being by our own mind and will cause us some anxiety. These standards become a control issue between our mind and the direction of the natural flow of our creative life energy creating a struggle that we feel as anxiety or in some cases, pain. The struggle is a needless expenditure of creative energy and is felt within our being as worry, anxiety, discomfort, uneasiness, pain and any other description of stress you might like to use. In living this way, we develop an illusion of perfection or what is preferred. Both of which are only beliefs of the mind. We then struggle with our illusion of control between our mind and our heart to meet that idea of perfectionism in whatever for it may be.

This idea of perfectionism is what ourselves or others think we should be. It can be what our parent, our church, our society, our friends, our children, our spouses, ourselves or some other external sources thinks we should be. Whatever it is, it is the wrong "size," picture or image for who and what we are. We can’t fit into it or for some reason or another. Rather than being allowed to grow and unfold into who and what we are, we try and control and direct ourselves into this misfit standard. The only standard that will works for us is one that comes from within ourselves and is in alignment with our heart.

Related topics
Anxiety of creation

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