Avoid Self-Censorship to Bring Your Ideas to Life
The biggest enemy of your ideas is you. If you’ve ever bragged about an idea just to get rejected, you can easily get used to self-censorship. Avoid this trap if you want your ideas to flourish.
As the 99u creative productivity site explains, we naturally have very strong self-preservation instincts that keep us from going back to something that has hurt us. When your ideas are rejected or criticized, it hurts. So, when we don’t like the reaction, we shut off or suppress the part of our mind that wants to share these ideas. This kills the creative process:
Usually, one touch to the hot stove is enough to avoid such discomfort in the future. The same is true if we experience an emotional sense of stress from our first experiences of social rejection or ridicule. We quickly learn to be afraid and thus automatically avoid potentially stressful situations of any kind, including the most common one: making mistakes …
The problem is that our responses to error become so ingrained and so reflexive, so thoughtless, that our avoidance tactics automatically prevent new experiences that could potentially be rewarding. We don’t even give this experience a chance!
Of course, there is nothing wrong with using a little common sense before sharing an idea. Vomiting whatever comes into your head can get you in trouble. However, if you go too far in the other direction and reject all the ideas you have, simply because you came up with them, you can hurt you even more in the long run.
Ideacide: The Dangers of Self-Censorship (And How To Stop It) | 99u