Fear, Rejection, and the Creative Process at Work

Fear, Rejection, and the Creative Process at Work

At the start of every in-person session of my Communication Superpower workshop, I run a short exercise.

I ask people to draw the person sitting to the left of them. They have thirty seconds.

Before anyone puts pen to paper, the same things happen every time. Laughter. Nervous smiles. A low hum of anxiety. Then the disclaimers arrive.

"I can't draw." "This will be terrible." "There's not enough time."

When the drawings are finished, I ask people to share them. And almost without fail, the apologies follow.

"I'm so sorry." "I told you it would be bad." "This really isn't my strong suit."

The exercise is playful. But the behaviour it reveals is not.

What the exercise is actually showing

When it comes to creativity, many of us start making excuses before we have even begun. We doubt our ability. We anticipate rejection. And when we do create something, we rush to minimise it — to soften the moment with self-deprecation before anyone else can pass judgement.

That response is deeply human. To create is to put something of yourself into the world. And in doing so, you make yourself visible — and therefore vulnerable.

This is why creativity is hard. Not technically hard, in most cases. Emotionally hard. The act of making something new and sharing it requires a kind of courage that most of us underestimate — and most organisations systematically discourage without ever meaning to.

What creativity actually requires

Seen through this lens, it is not surprising that creativity struggles to thrive in most workplaces.

When I wrote this essay, I described creativity as requiring four things: imagination, energy, safety, and repetition. That framing still holds as a starting point. But the thinking has developed since then into something more specific and more useful.

The fuller picture lives in Creativity Is a Climate Problem — an essay that explores what the conditions for creativity actually look like inside organisations, and why creating them is a leadership responsibility rather than a cultural accident. If this piece resonates, that one is the natural next step.

What remains true from this earlier framing: creativity requires conditions. It does not emerge from pressure, instruction, or wishful thinking. It requires space, intention, and care — and the absence of the things that most reliably suppress it.

Chief among those suppressors is fear.

Creating more often is the answer

One route through the fear is frequency.

The more often you create, the less power fear holds over each individual act of creation. You build the creative muscle. You learn to ship imperfect work. You develop the capacity to separate your self-worth from the reception of any single piece.

David Bayles captures this well in Art & Fear:

"You make good work by making lots of work that isn't very good, and gradually weeding out the parts that aren't good, the parts that aren't yours. It's called feedback, and it's the most direct route to learning about your own vision."

Creativity is not a single act of brilliance. It is a practice — built through repetition, reflection, and the gradual accumulation of both skill and confidence.

The father Christmas moment

We are often told that children create freely, without fear. And for a short time, that is true.

My son once made a wooden Father Christmas decoration at school — a genuine act of imagination and effort, bringing something from nothing. Before he had even shown it to us, he said: "It looks like it's been through a fire."

I thought it was wonderful. It took pride of place on our tree. But the apology came before the sharing.

At some point — through school, through peers, through comparison, through self-awareness — fear enters the creative process. It seems to arrive quietly, and it stays. The question is not how to eliminate it. Fear does not disappear through reassurance. It softens through exposure, through practice, through environments that treat honest creative effort as something worth protecting.

When not creating hurts more

There came a point for me when the pain of not creating became greater than the fear of what creating might produce.

"Artists don't get down to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working." — Art & Fear

I see organisations reaching this point too. There is a growing recognition that without new ideas, new approaches, and new ways of working, something essential is missing — and that the absence has a cost. The challenge is not identifying the need for creativity. The challenge is building the conditions — the climate — that allow it to re-emerge.

This is among the work I find most interesting: finding the people inside an organisation who are already trying to solve real problems, supporting them, creating enough safe passage for them to experiment, and helping the environment around them become a little less hostile to the act of making something new.

A question worth sitting with

At work today, do you feel able to create?

Do you have the space and energy to imagine and build something that does not yet exist?

Do you feel safe enough to share unfinished ideas — to put something half-formed in front of others without knowing how they will receive it?

Have you practised enough, and been given enough chances to practise, that the fear has softened even slightly?

Every meaningful product, service, system, or idea began as something someone dared to bring into the world. The finished outcome often looks inevitable in hindsight. The fear, the false starts, and the learning that preceded it rarely do.

Creating is hard. But not creating, over time, tends to be harder still.