feeling safe in creative work & business — kening zhu

Creativity flourishes when we have a sense of safety and self-acceptance. Your artist, like a small child, is happiest when feeling a sense of security. As our artist’s protective parent, we must learn to place our artist with safe companions.

Even if you know what it feels like to be completely open to where your curiosity wants you to go, like Grothendieck, it is a fragile state. It often takes considerable work to keep the creative state from collapsing, especially as your work becomes successful and the social expectations mount. When I listen to interviews with creative people or re

the more you want to explore creatively, the more you need to know that you are safe economically.

You want your people to feel that working with you is a place of reward, not risk. And you also realize that you want to feel like you’re safe so that you can stay at your smartest, rather than in fight-or-flight mode.

This circle of creativity of sorts is a space in which children can take risks and try things out, fall down and stand up again, fail and succeed—because they feel secure and safe in the proximity of a person who loves them unconditionally.