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3 • Emotional Blocks - Part 5

Timidity can also kill off creativity. The timid person lacks the self-confidence to venture into new and daring directions. Fre­quently, the cause of such timidity is merely lack of opportunity or failure to recognize opportunity. Self-confidence comes from repeated successes and the gradual realization of ability which the truly confident person has. A confident person feels more daring and thinks more daringly because he has the backing of previous successes. This may be the basis of that old half-truth that "nothing succeeds like success." On the other hand, the timid person might want to consider for a moment that the person best able to take a chance on a new or different venture is the person with the least to lose.

Two other fairly common blocks to creativity are those of self-satisfaction and superperfectionism. Self-satisfaction may, of course, be the quality of self-confidence that has gone to a person's head. But when we become so convinced of our innate abilities that we become smug about them, we lose sight of op­portunities for improvement. Everything that has been done remains to be done over—even if we ourselves did it.

Super perfectionism has killed off many worthwhile ideas and kept them from coming into being simply because the per­fectionist kept searching for the ultimate—a point which is never reached. If you have an idea, and your idea is better than anything in existence at the time, then you should put it to work. You can get rid of the "bugs" or drawbacks later on. But first, get your idea going for the good of everyone concerned.

We cannot drop the subject of emotional blocks without some attention to another phenomenon that seems peculiarly American: the "happiness" seekers. People have begun to run from crises that are only normal problems of living normally. It is not true that a complete freedom from either fear or anxiety is a "healthy" state of mind. Both fear and anxiety are normal attributes that serve helpful purposes by keeping us at our best. Fear makes us uncomfortable, certainly. But the reason we feel fear at all is that it is basic to self-preservation. Anxiety tenses us and may cause all sorts of minor physical side effects. But the fact that it can tense you up makes it helpful. It keeps you doing your best and it helps you anticipate problems well in advance. If you aren't anxious, you will dull such anticipation. The act of swallowing some pill to make fear and normal anxiety go away is a complete chimera: when the effects of the pill have worn off, the causes of anxiety and fear will still be there. And trouble has a way of get­ting worse if left to its own devices even for the time it takes to digest and assimilate a small pill.

So how do you live with fears, tensions, and anxieties? It may sound oversimplified, but it is the truth: you take advantage of them. Learn to make your tensions work for you.

Realize first that tension is normal. So is fear. So is anxiety. Usually, if you face up to a fear, you can trace it in your own mind to what is causing it. This may actually be the means of sensitizing yourself to a problem. Once you have faced your problem squarely, then you can reduce it to an academic problem: work on ways to solve it. This is far different from worrying about it. Worry, of course, is fruitless. It is much better to imagine all the possible consequences of your trouble, even the worst possible thing that could happen, and then figure out what you will do if that does happen. In this way, you will gradually begin to build your self-confidence to the point where it will take more than a minor tension to upset you. Tension may spell trouble—but trouble can spell opportunity.

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