by Flemming Funch
Carl Rogers, in an essay from "On becoming a person", titled "To Be That Self Which One Truly Is". Via The Obvious and Older and Growing.Watching my clients, I have come to a much better understanding of creative people. El Greco, for example, must have realised as he looked at some of his early work, that "good artists do not paint like that." But somehow he trusted his own experiencing of life, the process of himself, sufficiently that he could go on expressing his own unique perceptions. It was as though he could say, "Good artists do not paint like this, but I paint like this." Or to move to another field, Ernest Hemingway was surely aware that "good writers do not write like this." But fortunately he move toward being Hemingway, being himself, rather than toward some one else’s conception of a good writer. Einstein seems to have been unusually oblivious to the fact that good physicists did not think his kind of thoughts. Rather than drawing back because of his inadequate academic preparation in physics, he simply moved toward being Einstein, toward thinking his own thoughts, toward being as truly and deeply himself as he could. This is not a phenomenon which occurs only in the artist or the genius. Time and again in my clients, I have seen simple people become significant and creative in their own spheres, as they have developed more trust of the processes going on within themselves, and have dared to feel their own feelings, live by values which they discover within, and express themselves in their own unique ways. Great angle on things. If you only try to do what a good artist or a good writer or a good *something* does, you might well become good, but you probably won't become great, and you won't end up doing what you particularly are here to do. Rather it is about trusting your own process and finding what particularly it is that YOU do, and do that the very best you can.
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