The Complexity of Creative People

The Complexity of the Creative PersonalityBy Douglas Eby

Creativity researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi includes descriptions of the multiple characteristics of creative people.

In a post of hers, Juliet Bruce, Ph.D. notes that Csikszentmihalyi wrote, “If there is one word that makes creative people different from others, it is the word complexity. Instead of being an individual, they are a multitude.”

“Like the color white that includes all colors, they tend to bring together the entire range of human possibilities within themselves. Creativity allows for paradox, light, shadow, inconsistency, even chaos –and creative people experience both extremes with equal intensity.”

Here are a few qualities he lists, as Bruce summarizes:

1) A great deal of physical energy alternating with a great need for quiet and rest.
2) Highly sexual, yet often celibate, especially when working.

3) Smart and naïve at the same time. A mix of wisdom and childishness. Emotional immaturity along with the deepest insights.

4) Convergent (rational, left brain, sound judgment) and divergent (intuitive, right brain, visionary) thinking…

5) Both extroverted and introverted, needing people and solitude equally.

6) Humble and proud, both painfully self-doubting and wildly self-confident.

7) May defy gender stereotypes, and are likely to have not only the strengths of their own gender but those of the other as well. A kind of psychic androgyny.

For more, see her post Understanding Creative People – and Csikszentmihalyi’s classic book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention.

Do you relate to any of these qualities?

One of these intriguing areas is androgyny.

Tilda Swinton won an oscar for her role in “Michael Clayton.” Part of her power as an actor and many of her characters is in their androgynous looks and energies. Swinton has said she is fascinated by the question, “How do we identify ourselves, and how do we settle into other people’s expectations for our identity?” She once commented she is “very often referred to as ‘Sir’ in elevators and such” and that it “has to do with being this tall and not wearing much lipstick. I think people just can’t imagine I’d be a woman if I look like this.”

But androgyny is more than appearance. Kathleen Noble, PhD, a professor and psychotherapist who works with many gifted clients, said in our interview, “Gifted women tend to be highly androgynous… they tend to combine qualities that we tend to ascribe to both genders.

“So for instance, you get women who are highly sensitive and highly empathic and compassionate (which are all components of psychic ability), combined with high energy and high drive, high independence and autonomy, which are qualities that the culture rewards in men but not in women.”

Ellen Winner comments in her book Gifted Children: Myths and Realities, “Perhaps because gifted children reject mainstream values, they reject gender-stereotyped traits as well. … Csikszentmihalyi’s talented females scored highly on achievement motivation and dominance, two traits associated with males, and rejected traditional feminine values such as neatness.
“The gifted boys in his study scored highly on measures of sensitivity and aesthetic values, two traits typically associated with females, and rejected the stereotypical male trait of bravado.” [Winner was referring to his book: Talented Teenagers : The Roots of Success and Failure.]

Perhaps consciously expanding boundaries such as gender stereotypes can help people be more creatively expressive.

Douglas Eby, MA/Psychology, is a writer and researcher on the psychology of creative expression and personal growth. He is author of the Talent Development Resources series of sites. Also see his Facebook and Twitter pages.

The Search for the Authentic Voice

“Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live
I want to see raised dripping and brought into the sun.
It is not my own face I see there, but other faces,
even your face at another age.
Whatever’s lost there is needed by both of us—”

-- Adrienne Rich


In the arts the idea of voice and “style” as highly individuated and highly sought after aspects of the creative process, and the product of that process, is paramount. One is expected to seek out and grow into one’s “voice” through a variety of approaches that are numerous and almost as difficult to pin point as the nature and attributes of that voice itself. The emergence of that voice or style as a recognizable attribute of one’s creative work is the evidence of what is real and accessible as it becomes an artistic experience that moves and transforms. It is in the making of one’s voice accessible to others that one’s voice can be transformed into art, a poem, a style of acting and singing or writing. Even this is a difficult and hard-to-pin-down process of self discovery within rules and directions that are almost completely reliant on the artists’ vision and honesty about how that vision is rendered.

In the helping professions, in work that is defined by verbal communication as its major tool, finding the authentic voice involves a similar process. We learn a variety of approaches and theories with which we hope to use to approach certain tasks of eliciting and/or imparting information to our “audience”, our clients and patients. Often the information we deal in, the stuff of our interactions, is of an essential, highly intimate and at best only partially discovered nature. We are given the authority and the responsibility of creating spaces for change and development in partnership with those who come to us for help through how we listen and how we speak about what we hear.

Just as the search for and maintenance of the authentic voice or style of an artist involves constant self-evaluation and observation of a full spectrum of aspects of the creative process, the ability of the helping professional to engage in listening and dialogue toward change and discovery is also charged with the responsibility of coming from some center of the authentic. Regardless of one’s proficiency in any number of communication and therapeutic techniques, the inability to engage genuinely with clients and patients will sabotage progress. The ability to authentically and somewhat fearlessly enter intimate relationship is the thing. Everything else can only become productive after the basis for real caring and trust has been established and can be maintained.

This may appear to be somewhat elementary. Trust-building and rapport are universally accepted, and perhaps taken for granted, as the foundation in most therapeutic and professional helping relationships. But while they are expected to exist, their nature and the skill of the caregiver to imbue them with the ability to tap into an authentic, deep and productive caring, without crossing over and sabotaging the process by crashing through professional and personal boundaries, remains less explored.

It is the nature of the authentic voice of trust and connection we are most interested in… the rather less-that-definable nature of communicating true concern and empathy from the heart of where it lives in oneself. I propose that this is the real work for any helping professional, and that without it active listening, support and guidance through change are at best a sluggish possibility if not impossible.

We’ve all been subjected to office and professional personnel, in any number of professional capacities in which we are the consumer, whose chosen manner of communicating concern and care is parental, patron- or matronizing, sometimes to such an extreme degree that we are automatically offended or alienated. In care scenarios in which our personal, emotional and often intimate physical well-being is being explored, our responses to this “style” might range from weary tolerance to open disdain. In any case, the lack of ability in which the helping professional has been able to convey an authentic concern, coupled with a solid area-specific skill set and aptitude, immediately affects our ability to enter into an honest exchange of information that lubricates and is essential to the dialogue that must take place in order that we get the best care and attention possible.

Missteps in communication by helping professionals are not often as apparent as this example. It is possible that many of the mistakes made are even more damaging but less immediately apparent. Tone of voice, pacing, ability to read the nature and preferences of the client’s own styles of communication in relationship to how they are best served through conversation are all important aspects of how to establish an authentic voice as a professional in a helping role. Measuring and assessing the various balances of need in these areas, while one is in the middle of establishing and taking care of a genuine trusting relationship, are among the most difficult and creative aspects of the process of building a productive therapeutic helping relationship. Skill and getting the information necessary to make good judgments in these areas are often a matter of practice and simply asking for the information one needs from the client or patient in question. But perhaps more essential, and most complicated, is the ability of the professional to access and use his or her real self, the authentic voice, both symbolically and literally.

Simple enough: as long as the professional is familiar with and knows what that true voice sounds like. If we consider that finding one’s authentic voice is much, much more than hearing the music and meaning of what comes out our mouths and what does not, and exists more along the lines of a deeper search and maintenance of a familiarity with oneself, at a very primary level, then we begin to recognize the true complexity of how to convey our connection to those who come to us for assistance in our role as helper.

And this isn’t about self-disclosure, or at least it is not about disclosing the facts and minutiae of our lives to those to whom we are entrusted to assist in any number of ways. While a certain amount of self-disclosure is probably in order depending on individual circumstances and professional roles, too much information disclosed about oneself could be a mistaken attempt to provide authentic connection that can and should be established in some other way. This can damage or short circuit your client or patient’s will to engage productively.

Remember, in many cases, your authenticity will encourage them to see you in the way that they need to in order that you can help them. Too much specific information prevents that from happening and does nothing to further the therapeutic alliance that is so essential. So much of how we establish firmly genuine professional interactional relations has so little to do with what we say and more about how and what we can elicit from our clients and patients out of their conviction that we are worthy of their trust. We can only be successful in this task if we are perceived to be coming from a place of truth and genuine non-judgmental concern for their well-being.

So how do we show our true selves to those who come to us for expertise, guidance and support? What is this process of discovery and maintenance of our authentic voice? Where do we start, and more, what will it look like as we are able to build a certain amount of skill? Are we somewhere along the path already? How do we open that pocket of genuine empathy and dole it out naturally and care-fully, all in the service of those who come to us for our expertise and support and as a catharsis toward their own change?

Here are some questions that might be helpful in that process of self discovery and “authenticity maintenance”. There are no right or wrong answers. These questions are provided as a tool for self evaluation and a way to explore and meditate on the location and creative disclosure of authentic voice.


1) Think of a professional, someone who helped you whom you hold in very high regard. Name five of their non verbal attributes that you were fond of or that helped you decide to trust them.
2) How comfortable are you with non-sexual intimacy in your own life? How does that translate to your professional life?
3) How do you speak about your clients and patients with other professionals in your field? How is it different from how you speak to your clients and patients? How do you rationalize any differences?
4) When talking about presenting your authentic self to your clients and patients what parts of your real self, which emotions and feelings, feel most vulnerable? How do you respond to clients and patients who express those same emotions and feelings?
5) In your life what has been the best response to you when you have been in great pain, grief or confusion?
6) In what situations have you felt you have been able to speak in a way that represented most who you are as a person and what is most important to you? What was the outcome? What created that opportunity?
7) When conversing with others what cues do you notice that say you have a person’s attention and concern? What cues say you have lost their attention and concern?
8) What kind of range of expression, from sadness to laughter, anger to joy, do you employ in your relationships with your clients and patients? What kind of a range do you think represents the authentic voice as we are speaking of it?
9) What practice do you employ to exercise and strengthen your ability to have and maintain authenticity-based relationships with your patients and clients? If you do not have one, where will you begin to look to find one? How will you know it is working?
10) Name five ways you can practice increasing your skills in accessing and maintaining your authentic voice.


Finding, developing and taking care of the authentic voice is a deep and creative process of unending discovery and uncovering, not unlike the one a painter or poet goes through to locate, translate and present central themes of their selves in the world. Our wish, as helping professionals, is to similarly make our selves accessible and in-common to others who have come to us for support and guidance and even a kind of love.

As the poet Adrienne Rich says in one of her Twenty One Love Poems, from her book “Dream of a Common Language”, our authenticity is the one way we have at our disposal to ask our clients and patients the same question they ask us, “…show me what I can do for you, who have made the unnameable nameable for others, even for me.”

On Meetings: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly (but Mostly the Good): Ten Ways to Make Your Meetings Succeed

Any of the following sound vaguely familiar?

• The world has developed into a place populated by those who go to meetings and the others who serve coffee and donuts to those who go to meetings.


• The world has evolved to the point that there are two kinds of working people, those who plan and go to meetings, and the rest of us who have been told by them that we must do our jobs and fit them around meetings they have planned so they can tell us how to do our jobs.


• Meetings are for those who cannot make a decision about how to spend other people’s time and money badly without bringing them all together to talk for too long about how they are going to spend other people’s time and money badly.


• Meetings are like paperwork, the more there is the less actual work gets done.


• The world is divided into two kinds of meetings, ones that tell you what you already know and do it in the longest amount of time imaginable, and ones that teach you what you don’t know in a way that assures that you will have to relearn it after you’ve left the meeting.


• Meetings are designed to give everyone a chance to participate in making decisions that have already been made.


• The prime purpose of meetings is for people from far-flung departments to get together to see who’s hair and waistline is different and who will act as badly as they always do at meetings. That way everyone is sure to have something to contribute at the next meeting.
  

Meetings are alternately disparaged and tolerated, essential and a complete waste of time.

A good meeting may hard to find, but when you are a part of one you know it. You can take something back from a well-facilitated and efficiently thought-out meeting that is helpful and can be implemented with understanding and clarity.

A successful meeting reinforces the common goals and connections that bring people together for the meeting and to the workplace in general. People leave good meetings feeling they have been heard and their expertise has been honored and/or their concerns aptly addressed.

We leave good meetings with new information clearly expressed and clearly actionable.

We leave good meetings knowing who we would contact should we have questions about the information the meeting dealt with.

Bad meetings are the stuff of corporate, agency, or workgroup legend. We all have our war stories, funny, tragic and unbelievable. That is not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about having good meetings.

If meetings are a necessary evil then let us make them tolerable and productive. Let us make them as short as possible without cutting necessary corners or being required to convene another meeting to cover the information or processes that were left out or unconsidered. Let us work to make them a place where people feel value and able; places where our connections to one another in the workplace, even if contentious, are valuable and affirmative.

Here is a list of a few things that make a meeting worth attending. It doesn’t pretend to be completely comprehensive and I invite additions. It is not meant to pertain to the kind of bad news meetings in which people, in large or small numbers, or their departments, are let go. It certainly does not concern meetings in which the purpose is to “hot seat” one or a few employees by ganging up on them to attempt to motivate change, whether the need for action along that vein is necessary or not. I would propose that while some of the items on this list might work for such a meeting, meetings for those purposes are counter-intuitive and fail in almost every aspect of the basis for having a successful meeting.

1) Do your homework. Not only in terms of the information and/or process that is the purpose of the meeting, but in terms of the process of the meeting itself.

2) Do your homework whether you will lead or attend. Is your role as attendee going to be interactive or passive? What information do you need to have with you? Who has the information about this if you do not know?

3) Ask these questions:
a. Is this largely a meeting to disseminate new information or to share information and problem solve a new or faltering process?
b. How much time needs to be dedicated to interaction between attendees?
c. How much teaching time is required?
d. What do you know about the learning and process styles of those in attendance?
e. As an attendee: what do you know about your own way of participating in group process and how can it be used constructively?

4) Do you need to lead or facilitate or both? Where are your strengths? If you are a good leader but fall short as a facilitator can you ask someone else with that strength to co-lead if the meeting requires an ample amount of facilitation?

5) Decide on the format and time line for the meeting and stick to it. Designate an official time-keeper if you will be too busy or are not good at tracking time. Inform and ask all participants to observe these time lines and thank them in advance for agreeing to do so. As a participant, be willing to actively participate in time management.

6) Are there high context people who will attend who require more interaction and background time to process and share? How can you help them participate without allowing the timelines and goals of the meeting to be subverted?

7) What about quick-thinking result-oriented people to whom meetings can be seen as a waste of time, but who have great information and innovative, effective styles? How can you engage them in the process without others feeling rushed, interrupted or minimized?

8) Practice or script how you plan to move the meeting along to its next item of business or away from one that has been finalized or thoroughly discussed. (Stick to the time frame!)

9) Design your time line to incorporate ample question and answer periods during the body of the meeting and one toward the end prior to the final recap (see following). Do not take more time than needed for questions and be ready to sort and defer questions to another time or to a one-to-one interaction at a later date (“Why don’t you and I talk about that another time” “We’d have more time to discuss that in full later, let’s move on.” “Why don’t you talk to me after the meeting and we can schedule a time to talk about that”)

10) Make sure to include ample time for as many recap and summary periods as are necessary during the course of the meeting and for a comprehensive one at the close of the meeting. Make sure people share and know what the meeting has accomplished and what the expectations are after the meeting. Do not shirk or short-change the recap. This is when the meeting’s goals and objectives will be re-stated and its specific actions and processes or changes reviewed. A good recap clarifies confusion, restates resolutions and implementations. Ask participants for feedback on the process of the meeting after the final recap. A brief, sincere and good-humored, “How do you think this meeting went?” can go a long way toward engaging your coworkers, associates and clients in follow up and the success of meetings to come.

And finally, be grateful to the participants. Especially be grateful to those whose work day is full of tasks that a meeting takes them away from. Acknowledge both the necessity and the imposition of the meeting. Participants of a successful meeting might also put some effort into gratitude. And be specific in your positive feedback. People are often problem-oriented. They remember what they did wrong. What they did right is forgotten in spite of it holding the potential solution for what they did wrong. They will remember if you acknowledge it.

So, good luck to you in your efforts to make your meetings a productive and engaging part of how you accomplish what your work requires of you.

Remember: a meeting’s effectiveness is not in the idea of the meeting itself, but how it is organized and run. Meetings are our chance, really, to bring people together to communicate about the goals toward which our work groups, companies or agencies are primarily engaged. Without them we are often ineffective, even if brilliant, Lone Rangers with an incomplete toolbox of ways to communicate with those who are engaged in parts of the same task that we are.

Meetings are a place to share expertise, vision and support. We can assume that, once the issues of money, basic needs and mutual respect are dealt with, everyone wants to do the best job they can. As human beings we look for opportunities to learn how to do that.

While meetings should not be the only way to facilitate this natural human urge to improve and excel, if done well they can be great avenues and opportunities toward that end. They can simultaneously assist us to engage in and get better at interacting with others and that can make our work group learn and excel too.

Good luck and go get ‘em!

RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us

Honoring Our Gifts: Letter to My Talents

The following letter was written during a retreat weekend at The Fen. Not far from Three Rivers Michigan, on a tributary and wetland that is part of the St. Joseph River system, The Fen is a very special artists’ retreat center owned and shared with others by the great Canadian singer, songwriter and poet Ferron and her partner Mary.

Our retreat weekend was structured around keeping silence for a good portion of the day and “talking your walk” with the rest of an intimate number of participants at the end of the day.

One of the suggested assignments was to write a letter to an important some one, something, or some place, and/or to address your fear of expressing your talent: what keeps you from sharing your gifts? I chose to write a letter to my talents.

I found succor and connection in the exercise and in the product of the exercise, which I share here. I heartily recommend similar experiments to others as a way to get to one’s center of worth and worthiness, whether you identify as an artist or not. Besides, it’s fun!


Dear Talents;

First of all I’d like to thank you for a wonderful weekend. You went out of your way to make my place with you comfortable and exciting and included enough risk-taking that I felt somehow I could be new and renew.

Of course the customs in your country are somewhat strange and alien considering the restrictions in the place I find myself living. But, in spite of that, it didn’t take long for me to see that lifting that veil, that veneer of masks and meaningless prohibitions and letting them fall away, was all for the best. Your rules, if one can even call them that, to honor your heart, to speak the best parts of yourself, and to connect with the best parts of others – and then to make something lasting and worthy for the next generations – are strange at first, but soon come naturally; so naturally that I find myself humming those tunes even in the most adverse situations.

This must be how people, even in the most oppressive lands, those dim and dank mine shafts of the collective shadow, survive: they know their music, they remember and honor the songs of their loving predecessors, and they always discover what is new and can be depended upon. And they find ways and people with whom to share what they have discovered. That is what I’ve learned from you my friend.

I know you have been with me since I was a child but your name, or names, were hidden from me even as you were born in my own house like some secret sibling I could turn to in the dark night afraid and we could cling together – and laugh or hum our little new songs back and forth, back and forth, never to forget we belong together, we are in one another, even if the circumstances of kings and queens would have us doubt our worth.

I like your country and hope I will find time in my waking hours and even more often in my dreams to be near you there. Until then, fare thee well. Let us speak often and well as we have been able to and reconfirm the inseparable nature of our bonds.

I am sitting by a river now. It is Fall and the bright tree -- orange, yellow, and amber -- is mirrored in the moving water. Strange. I could be in your country even here. Yes, there are trains and the drone of far away trucks, even gun shots, sometimes fearsomely close, close enough to remember the wars others have to dream through to remember you and the possibilities of where you live. I cannot forget them, can I?

So I hope I can bring you to my living even here – these small places where we make enough quiet to hear you in the intermittent rain of Fall leaves, the owls and kingfishers, the crickets behind me, the little green frog with duckweed on its back.

Look at all the little leaf boats! They are coming around the bending water toward me. And then, even then, I must let them go on!

Thank you for your gifts to me,

Forever yours, inestimably mine, infinitesimally ours –

Sincerely,

Bob

Six Questions for Initial One-to-One Workplace Problem-Solving Sessions

Please answer these questions or be prepared to discuss these questions when I meet with you for our initial one-to-one session. There are no right answers. What we talk about will be held in confidence, unless it has to do with any illegal or unethical behavior.

My approach to workplace conflict or desired change revealed through our talks will be to assist you to take charge of how to work to resolve it yourself, either through coaching you in ways to initiate and carry out direct conversations to that end, or to be present during conflict resolution sessions with those the conflict concerns. We will work on coping strategies when direct problem-solving is not the best choice or premature.

Although the word conflict has negative connotations and often creates anxiety, I believe it can be used as an opportunity for understanding and positive change.

1) What interpersonal or communication skill or attribute do you think is your most valuable asset to your work team?

2) Can you describe some interpersonal or communication skill you think you could be better at in the workplace?

3) What is the major difference between the way you communicate at home with family and friends and the way you communicate in the workplace?

4) Name one to three positive communication patterns already in place in the workplace that you think could be used more. How do you think this might be accomplished and what do you think you could commit to doing to make it more common?

5) Name one to three communication patterns that are absent from or have a negative effect in the workplace. How do you think this might be remedied? What do you think you would commit to doing to help create a remedy?

6) What is the most difficult aspect of workplace communication for you? Name one to three ways you think I could help you manage, cope or change that aspect.

We Are Wrong About Being Wrong

from op/ed columnist Johann Hari:

If we want to face up to our mistakes, then we need to change the way we think about them. Error is an essential step in the process of finding the right answer

Friday, 13 August 2010, The UK’s Independent

Here's a series of questions that should be fairly straight- forward, but are actually excruciating. When were you last wrong? What has been your most recent serious screw-up at work? What has been your biggest mistake in your personal life? We all have a weird and paradoxical relationship with our mistakes. We can see that everyone around us makes errors all the time – yet we are always astonished when it turns out we are getting things wrong too. It's because, deep down, we see being wrong as shameful proof that we've been sloppy, or stupid. This belief pervades our culture: we applaud the public figures who "stay the course", even if it's wrong, and boo the ones who admit a mistake and "U-turn" or "flip-flop". But what if – apologies for the irony landslide here – we are wrong in the whole way we think about being wrong?

A brilliant new manifesto has just been published urging us to reassess our relationship with our own mistakes: Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by the American journalist Kathryn Schulz. Perhaps the best place to start her story is with an experiment first staged in the University of Berlin in 1902 by Professor Frank Von Liszt. In a classroom, two students began to have an angry argument, until one pulled out a gun. As the panicked students around them drew back, a professor tried to intervene – and a shot was fired. The professor collapsed to the ground. The witnesses, unaware that all three were actors following a script, were then taken outside and quizzed about what they had seen and heard. They were encouraged to give as much detail as possible.

Everyone got it wrong. They put long monologues into the mouths of spectators who had said nothing; they "heard" the row as being about a dozen different imagined subjects, from girlfriends to debts to exams; they saw blood everywhere, when there was none. Most people got a majority of their "facts" wrong, and even the very best witness offered a picture that was 25 per cent fiction. The more certain the witness, the more wrong they were. Every time the experiment is run, the results are the same.

The implications are pretty startling. Human beings can't even accurately describe an event of great importance that we have just witnessed with our own eyes. What does that suggest about our ability to be easily right about much more complex questions? In American Pastoral, Philip Roth calls life, "an astonishing farce of misperception". Our abilities to perceive and reason are painfully limited, while the world is unutterably complex. We are peering at an entire universe through a drinking straw.

So the meaningful question about any human being isn't: does he get things wrong? With these limitations, we will all make big mistakes. The real question is: does he take the time to understand his mistakes and learn from them? But you can only do this regularly if you know how to think about mistakes in a healthy way.

There are a few areas of human life where people have found a way to do this. Revealingly, they are the areas that make things work better than any other – the sciences. To pluck one example of millions, when Barry Marshall and Robin Warren proposed that stomach ulcers were caused by bacterial infections in the 1980s, almost all scientists disagreed. Now, after conclusive tests, everyone agrees. It's not that scientists have less ego than the rest of us, or feel less sting when they are proven wrong. It's that they have developed rigorous techniques for constantly checking their claims against the evidence, and ruthlessly hunting out their errors and figuring out what they mean.

This approach can be extended. After two planes collided at Tenerife airport in 1977, killing 600 people, the airline industry introduced radical new protocols. Crew and ground members are now actually rewarded for reporting their own errors and screw-ups. The result? Accidents fell dramatically, from 0.178 per million flight hours to 0.104.

Now compare that to the way we conduct public life. One of the most predictable applause lines for any politician is to boast that he won't back down, look back, or say sorry. Tony Blair wasn't unusual when he bragged: "I can only go one way, I've got no reverse gear." But a car without a reverse gear would be banned from the roads.

Yet we have structured our public life so this seems like a sensible statement, while anyone who ever admits a mistake is talking themselves out of a job. You can hear the carping interviewers now: "How can we ever trust you again, if you were wrong about this?" We make it easier to continue in error than to admit error and put it right.

If we want to face up to our mistakes more regularly, then we need to change the way we think about them. If we see them as proof of our own incompetence, we will continue to puff out our chests and pretend they aren't there. Is there a different way?

Error is an essential step in the process of finding the right answer. Every scientist leaves behind a trail of disproven hypotheses and papers shot to pieces by colleagues. He doesn't see them as shameful, but as part of a process that was bringing him closer to the truth through experimentation. Similarly, James Joyce, thinking about all the drafts he wrote that failed, said, "a man's errors are his portals of discovery".

But error may be even more fundamental than that. From the moment we are born, human beings are creating theories about the world, based on limited evidence. It's how we survived: if our ancestors hadn't generalised that all lions are dangerous, you wouldn't be reading this. Errors are often simply this necessary impulse reaching too far, or misfiring. So the impulse that makes us wrong is also the impulse that makes us human.

Since reading Schultz's book, I have been trying harder to train myself to think systematically about my own mistakes. Every week, I make a list of what I have got wrong, personally or professionally, and try to figure out how to get it right next time. I can't entirely drain the pain from it, but I do think there's a hunger out there for this approach: the most positive reaction I have ever had to a column was when I tried to publicly explore how I had got the Iraq war so horribly wrong. What I learned from that awful mistake – the true factors that drive US and UK foreign policy, rather than propaganda claims – have led me, I think, to positive insights since. If I had instead run from the error and insisted it wasn't there, I would be stuck in a bloody blind alley, devoid of insights.

Tim Harford of Radio 4's More or Less has suggested an annual prize for the politician who makes the most constructive admission of error. It'd be a good start – but we will best seek a healthier approach to error in public life when we achieve it in ourselves.

You will get something wrong today, and tomorrow, and every day of your life. So will I, and everybody you know. You don't have a choice about being wrong sometimes: mistakes will be your life-long companion. But you do have a choice about whether to approach your error in terror so you suppress, ignore and repeat it – or to make it your honest, open ally in trying to get to the truth.