This semester, “failing forward” and having a “child’s eye” were habits that I found playing big roles in my semester. In this course, I mostly saw myself failing forward when I received constructive criticism on assignments. In my efforts of failing forward, I learned that I am not great at handling being criticized. For example, when I received feedback on mindmaps I would only listen to some of the advice I was given because I thought certain points were not right and that I was being misunderstood. However, as I started to listen to criticism/advice more, even advice that made me uncomfortable, I saw my mindmaps starting to improve. After learning about looking at the world with a child’s eye, I found myself actively using this practice. I learned that this is a habit that is easy for me to use, and I used it in a number of areas for this course. For example, when writing inspiration posts, I found that having a child’s eye was useful in observing my surroundings in order to come up with ideas of ways to find inspiration. Also, when visiting my client’s storefront for the group project, it was definitely useful to use a child’s eye when taking in the environment in order to benefit their website.
“Creative confidence” is a habit that I feel has always come pretty naturally to me. I enjoy being creative and using expressive methods for creativity, so I am usually comfortable being challenged to be creative. I consider myself to be a very visual learner and find myself expressing my own ideas in visual ways. However, although I feel that this habit comes easiest to me, there are still areas of it that I struggle with. For example, I am a lot more confident with artistic related creativity than non-visual creativity.
“Embracing ambiguity” is something that I have always found to be very challenging. But due to the circumstances of this semester, it was a habit that was especially important for me to practice. This semester has definitely been one of the most ambiguous periods of time I have ever experienced. The ambiguity of suddenly moving to a remote education model and being home was something that was very overwhelming and scary to me. However, over the past month, the continuous ambiguity has become less scary and more of something that I must learn to embrace. I have realized that although the situation we are in is not ideal, embracing the ambiguity of it is vital in order to find the good in the situation and benefit ourselves. Although I have started to work on my relationship with ambiguity, it is still not close to where I would like to be with embracing it. I truly believe that this habit will be valuable even outside of situations like this pandemic.
The habits that I have started to explore and develop in this course have greatly contributed to transforming myself into a more innovative character. Although practicing these habits is not always easy outside of the course, I would like to try harder to put them to use in all areas of my life as I believe this will help me build a good relationship with them and use them in unique ways.