creative maverick

“Know thine enemy as completely as you know yourself and you will always be victorious.” Sun Tzu

The number one enemy of your creativity and happiness is your Top Dog. Every creativity exercise ever invented was designed to get past it.

Life Coach Pete Cohen says:

“The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your internal dialogue”

and the most important part of that dialogue is with your Top Dog.

Origins of the Top Dog

Babies know what they want and express it freely. Hungry? Just scream. They don’t have creative blocks. Of course, this isn’t a great way for adults to behave so we raise our children to act in a more sociable way.

But sometimes teaching good behaviour isn’t done cleanly. It strays into criticism, shame and humiliation. Snapping at the boy that cries, laughing at the girl that gets angry, the silent flick of the eyebrows that disapproves of a child “showing off”.

I believe it’s these incidences that create your Top Dog.

Fear

In reality these messages were fueled by the fear and anxiety of the person giving them. And that fear and anxiety was learned in their childhood.

So your Top Dog is driven by fear - fear of failing, of “making a fool of yourself”, of getting hurt, of being humiliated.

There’s not a lot of logic to it either. It often gives conflicting messages - “you should stand up for yourself” / “don’t make yourself unpopular”. After all, this is a very young part of you. Have you ever seen two young children walking down the street and the elder sibling is admonishing the younger using words that are clearly from its parents; “oh I don’t know what we are going to do with you!”. That’s all your Top Dog is doing - aping the messages from your parents.

In a strange way, your Top Dog is actually trying to protect you. Like the overweight guy at lunch who gets the joke in about diet before anyone else can. But the message only serves to make you feel worse.

Top Dog messages are culturally influenced. Classic British ones are “Don’t get your hopes up”, “Don’t get ideas above your station”, “Don’t show off” and even the shockingly unhealthy “‘I want’ never gets”.

Your first step

The greatest mistake we all make is to take the Top Dog as the Voice Of Reason. It is not.

So your first step to managing your top dog for greater creativity and happiness is to identify it. I’ll be coming back to this topic but for the time being just start to notice your internal dialogue and if you spot something that might be your Top Dog, simply label it; “Ah, that sounds like Top Dog”.

Leave a comment to let me know how you get on.