The Long Game Podcast with Sandra Scaiano Creative Confidence with Cara Steinmann EP 178
Unleash your creative potential and defy societal expectations as guest Cara Steinmann challenges the norms, embraces messiness, and empowers business owners to think boldly and authentically, igniting a battle between conformity and innovation.
Cara is a highly accomplished business development strategist, community builder, and certified meditation and mindfulness coach. She has dedicated her career to creating online spaces that empower women entrepreneurs to build successful businesses while prioritizing their mental health.
Through her renowned community, the Literation Lab, Cara provides a platform for women to cultivate their creative confidence and express themselves through writing. With her extensive expertise in creativity and confidence-building, Cara has become a trusted resource for business owners seeking to break free from conventional thinking and implement innovative ideas.
What is Creative Confidence?
The definition that Cara shares is believing in your ability to change the world around you. If you think about it, that's your future. That's the business you're building, the offers you're creating. You have to have the creativity and the confidence to put them out there.
Business as flow.
Creative confidence gets squeezed out of us. Cara shares the NASA study of 1600 kids who were considered creative geniuses at age 5. You’ll be blown away when you hear what happened to their creativity at age 20. When we allow our creativity to flow, we unlock new ideas and new ways to look at our work, and our entire world.
4 Fears that impact our creative confidence:
Fear of the messy unknown.
Fear of being judged.
Fear of the first step.
Fear of losing control.
Cara explains how we’ve forgotten how to find our own answers. Finding answers via google or following the formula that someone else created is a shortcut but we might be missing an even better solution if we noodled on it and really gave some thought to how we might create our own answer.
Creativity and confidence are both muscles. The more you use them, especially without getting criticized, the more they grow. It’s one of the reasons why community can help. Being with people who are interested in supporting one another makes it easier to take a chance on yourself.
The creative spark.
I asked Cara how the Literation Lab helps grow creativity. She shares daily prompts for her audience and herself and they write them for the group to read if they feel comfortable, it’s not required. The prompts are in 7 research-backed pillars to help unlock and grow your confidence while you are being creative.
Mistakes and messiness and letting perfection go.
Life is messy and what if we just allowed the mess and kept moving? What if we learn what we need from having tried instead of worrying about what was wrong. There’s a freedom that comes from being confident, knowing it’s not about perfection, it’s about trying new things and seeing what happens.
Being creative is a practice, like writing or designing. Confidence comes when we give ourselves permission to jump into action and tap into the genius we have inside.
Connect with Cara
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