Building your Creativity Community (all creatives need one!) (BKI 40)

You know the stereotype of the lone artist, toiling away in their atelier. I love researching the bios of great artists, and here’s what I’ve found: none of them, even the most “lone wolf” ones, were without a Community. Yet cultivating Community can seem a confusing task: where to begin? Is it possible to deliberately build Community so that it feels natural and real? In today’s BKI (#40! can you believe it?) I share my tips for growing your creative Community, both in-person and online.

Hi, this is Diana. Bright Knowledge Instants give you one thing that you can do today to move your creativity ahead. And right now, one of my most beloved projects, Bright Knowledge, Harp Circle Membership Program, is open. We only open a couple times a year. And it really has me meditating on the crucial power of community in the creative process. So many great artists, no matter what genre they're in, when you look at their practice, again, no matter what art form, they were in, a community, a supportive community that helped them in so many ways.

Even people that we think of as lone wolves, like Van Gogh, he had a strong community. And so when we think about community, what does it give for us? Well, I have another Bright knowledge instant, number 11, about that. And so I recommend you go back and take a look at that. What I came up with for that one was it gives you emotional support, it gives you a sense of belonging, which is crucial as humans.

It inspires you. So it gives you a lot of ideas and motivation, it gives you feedback, and that means you get to progress a lot quicker and a lot more solidly. Also, avoid things like injury. When it comes to music, for example, it gives you examples, people working through the same things as you. An example is worth so much rather than just, well, here's the instruction, here's what you do.

When we actually see people do it, ah, it's worth its weight in gold. And the other one is it gives you an opportunity to give back, gives you the opportunity to give feedback and to give compliments, pats on the back. This makes us feel good and it gives us a sense of confidence in the world. So in that other Bright Knowledge instant, I talked about reaching out to one person and creating community that way.

Today I'd like to talk about reaching out to wider communities. And I see those happening in a couple ways. One is in real life, in the flesh. How can you create communities? Well, I think regular gatherings are an incredible way to create community. It could be a salon, it could be a writer's circle, could be a knitting circle, could be gardening together, whatever is your art form, doing it on a regular basis with other people, setting up actual appointments, jumpstarts so many things besides creativity and inspiration.

It actually keeps your motivation going because you know that you're going to have this meeting and so you're much more likely to engage in your art form, in your creativity. So there are various ways to do in person meeting. As I said, the regular meetings, it could be also playing in public, playing at a park, for example. A community may gather around you that way. It could be volunteering, surrounding your art form, perhaps volunteering to tutor, writing, or volunteering at a community garden.

Great ways to engage in your creativity and also foster community at the same time. And I'd love to hear other ideas that you have for fostering community on sort of a larger scale. Then we think about going the other way, which is online. And that can also be hugely effective, especially given that we're all so busy. There can be real time meetings on video conferencing, such as on the Zoom platform or Skype.

There could be message boards where it doesn't have to be exactly real time, but you can respond on your own time. There can be sharing within groups of videos and recordings and pictures. It's tremendously fruitful. What can happen online within Facebook? There are Facebook groups, including secret groups such as the Bright Knowledge Harp Circle, that can't be found under any searches. So it really does create a very confidential space.

So there can be these types of connections as well that are hugely meaningful. So what I'd like you to think about today, the one thing that you can do is to cultivate community on a little bit of a larger scale now. And it could be in sort of flesh and blood, bricks and mortar, in person meetings, and it can also be online. I've seen the tremendous power of that as well.

So start building your community today and let me know how it goes for you. What are your platforms that you like to engage in? How do you like to connect with community? What's worked for you and what hasn't? Let's find out and build community together. Bye.