Yes, this IS a drill

Go ahead! Pick one to ruin. (Image by kesie91)

When working with a group of inexperienced singers, I use a favorite trick to instantly elicit a rich, powerful tone, no matter how weak and lackluster their voices sounded before.

It’s simple: I ask them all to try to sing as ugly as possible.

With that, the ensemble is transformed. Freed from the constraint of trying to sound pretty, every singer drops their inhibitions and actually sings. The result is immediately, undeniably superior to what they were doing before.

When we stop taking ourselves so darn seriously, we can make magic happen.

I was once stuck in my creative work, preferring the hypothetical perfection of what I could create over something flawed but real.

I set aside a couple of days to dig deeply into writing in particular. At first, nothing was flowing, even though I was dedicating one hundred percent of my focus and attention to doing my best work possible.

Perhaps that was the problem. Seeking to change things up, I installed a very silly application on my computer called Write or Die.

Write or Die rewards not good writing, but typing. If you type continuously, you might receive a reward, like a photo of a kitten.

But beware! If you stop typing, you may be punished with a screeching noise or a creepy photo.

With nothing to lose, I gave it a shot. I was rewarded with more than just a cute photo. In mere hours, I wrote eighty pages, most of it much better than the labored, perfectionistic crap I had been coming up with before.

This was a revelation. The second I gave myself permission to do terrible work, I started doing work that I was actually proud of.

I’ve learned that if I want to make something impressive, I will fail. For me, it’s best to start by allowing myself to make something laughably bad. The pressure thus relieved, I might turn out something that has potential. At the very least, I’ll have a lot more fun in the process.

So many of us carry weird baggage. We might have an identity as an expert, so our work has to be expert level. Or, on the other hand, we might have imposter syndrome, so we struggle with setting out to accomplish something: Who are we to think we can make it happen?

It’s easier sometimes to let ourselves be awful, phony, or useless. We might even, like the group of singers, try to be bad on purpose.

In doing so, we disrupt our habits. We mess with our expectations. We silence the critical voices in our head, because this isn’t real. This is just an experiment. We’re just playing.

And, of course, that’s where the magic happens.

Whether we’re trying to write an essay for school, launch a website, perfect a dance move, paint a landscape, or sew a dress, we might benefit from just pretending to do it — simply doing a trial run.

In the process, we might trick ourselves into doing it for real, but that’s not the goal. Rather, the idea is to spend as much time as possible in that place where we can exercise our creativity and ingenuity without worrying about whether it’s good enough.

The more we experience this mode of being, the easier it will be to let go of our hangups and find that welcoming creative space without having to be sneaky about it. Even if we make only ugly and misshapen objects and projects, we are finally making things. That’s the start of delighting ourselves and others with our work.