Creative confidence is the notion that you have big ideas and that you are able to act on them, according to David Kelley (Founder of IDEO). Many successful innovation companies have cross-functional teams that create great ideas, but what really creates great innovation are teams with creative confidence.

It does not mean you need to be the next Picasso, it’s simply the belief that everyone is creative. It’s a way of seeing the world in a unique way. According to Csikszentmuhalyi, creative individuals tend to be smart, yet also naïve at the same time. It’s the ability to be playful and have discipline, like being responsible and irresponsible at the same time. This juxtaposition is a critical skill set for innovation and design thinking teams. This quality is what is relied on when it comes to making leaps, trusting their intuition, and chasing solutions that they haven’t totally figured out yet, says the IDEO founder.

Creative confidence will ultimately be the element driving the team to success and tinkering with ideas and solutions to make things and test them out, to get them wrong, yet keep going so that they can gain that knowledge and know where they need to get so that they can evolve.

Learning to be creative again is not an easy task for many of us and is not something that is learnt overnight. A big part of the learning is trusting the design thinking process. It also shows you how to bring in the creative aspects from this methodology into any problem you are trying to solve.

This is all good and well, but there lurks a darker side. Fear of judgement that accompanies the creative process, it is especially true for the so-called “non-creatives”. The truth is everyone is creative. Think back to kindergarten when your imagination would run wild and there was no holding back when drawing your family or a dinosaur. The good news is that there are ways to rediscover your creativeness in adulthood and to help build your creative confidence.

Here are places for you to start with if you want to rediscover your creativeness:

  • IDEO has created a guide to design thinking techniques on their Toolkit website.
  • To learn more about creative confidence watch Ted Kelley’s TEDTalk.
  • The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron has helped many people with creative recovery.