Creative Wounds and Asking For Feedback (Haven Digest)

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Many of us drag creative wounds around with us. Scars from painful criticism, missed opportunities, and things not going to plan. They can cause us to lose connection with our creative spirit and give up on things that really matter to us.

Creative wounds are often sights of shame and embarrassment, where we blame ourselves for not being talented, strong, or resilient enough.

But they sometimes stem from misunderstandings, when we don’t fully realise and support our feelings and needs at the time.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve derailed myself by not understanding what I really need in this way.

We might ask someone for “their thoughts” on something we did, only to realise once the feedback arrives, we didn’t want their thoughts at all. We just wanted them to celebrate with us that we’d done a thing.

Creative Wounds and Feedback

Asking for feedback is a bit of an art. It requires us to be clear about what we want, why we want it, who we want it from, how we need it, and when.

We don’t need other people’s opinions in order to validate us and our work. But we can use people’s experience, perspective, and creative spirit to give fresh eyes to something we’d genuinely like to improve and grow.

This week in The Haven, we are diving into this topic. We will be thinking about creative wounds from Cold Bucket Experiences (times when we were riding high and had cold water poured on our creative spirit). And exploring how to make space for more constructive, energising, and fruitful communication. Not just within a “creative practice”, but in all areas of life.

Creative Wounds

My friend Mark Pierce writes:

“A Creative Wound has the power to delay our pursuits—sometimes for years—and it can even derail our lives completely. This may sound melodramatic, but really it’s not. Anything that makes us feel ashamed of ourselves or our work can render us incapable of the self-expression we yearn for.”

– Mark Pierce (The Creative Wound)

Around The Community This Week

Coming Up

Join us on Monday for our next Live Café session.

Focused time can often feel hard to come by. The Live Cafe Hour is an opportunity to spend 80 minutes “alone together” alongside other members and focus on what matters most.

It’s the perfect opportunity to catch up with those important (but non-urgent) activities. Or receive gentle accountability to focus on that thing you’ve been putting off.

Theme Kota | Sunday 1st October 2023 (6pm UK)

As social beings, humans are wired for belonging. But in a judgemental and critical world, it doesn’t always feel safe to be yourself, especially when you don’t seem to see or experience the world in quite the same way as other people.

We will bring our Haven hive mind to these questions: