Get on the scoreboard of creative survival

If you want to become more prolific, reduce the effort of completing the first version of your work.

Few things will give you more momentum in the creative process than this.

You can call it a draft, a prototype, a minimum viable product, or whatever, but the ethos is still the same.

The goal is to create just enough so that you have something to react to and iterate on.

My term for this is called oxygenation, which is stolen from the yoga world. My instructors have told us countless times that when you’re practicing in a hundred degree room with forty percent humidity for ninety minutes straight, breathing is your lifeline.

Think about it. When a you experience a health emergency, the first thing paramedics provide patients is oxygen. Humans need air. Breath is life. It’s the source of all things. The rest is a close second on the scoreboard of human survival.

The same goes with personal creativity management. If we don’t oxygenate the process, both internally and externally, we’ll never complete the first version of our work.

Oxygenation, as it’s defined, is the process of giving new ideas a fighting chance to breathe and grow.

We can do this inside our heads, aka, inner oxygenation; we can do it with our coworkers, aka, team oxygenation; and we can do it over the course of a project, aka, process oxygenation.

But however we do it, the key is using our thoughts and words and actions, with ourselves and others, to nurture our ideas with encouragement and freedom and affirmation.

Because make no mistake, cynicism will rear its ugly head. Especially early on in our creative projects. And the only way to prevent that attitude from gridlocking execution is with oxygen. Optimistic energy.

Harvard scientists named this feeling psychological safety, the belief that you’re safe for interpersonal risk taking. A sense of confidence and trust that you will not be embarrassed, rejected, or punished for speaking up.

Google’s leadership team has actually collected surveys, conducted interviews and analyzed statistics of their fifty thousand employees for almost three years around psychological safety. It’s now become the organizing principle for the way they build project teams.

Clearly, oxygenation is stoking the fires of innovation in a big way. If you want your team to get on the scoreboard of human survival, learn to breathe into the creative process.

Get that first version of your work complete, and let the momentum carry you.

How does cynicism kill your team’s innovative flames?