If you’ve not heard of the Five love languages you have to check out this book (Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman) these love languages explain how we need and prefer to be loved by our spouse.

1. Words of Affirmation
2. Quality Time
3. Receiving Gifts
4. Acts of Service
5. Physical Touch

Understanding your own and your spouses love language can go a long way towards a better marriage.

In the summer I formulated four creativity languages. I am writing about this in my book Unleashing Creativity.  Through feedback from a beta tester and a feeling of incompleteness I realized there is a missing language.  For the past 6 months or so I’ve been pondering that fifth creativity language.  I know it is out there, but what is it.

Well due to my time at the platform conference, a conversation with Stu McLaren and a recent brainstorming session that I led. I realized what that 5th language is.  I am calling this 5th language it the innovating creator.  An innovating creator is a person with constant ideas around many or certain topics.

For example, there is a friend of mine who whenever we get together we talk about our ideas.  We both seem to have constant ideas and half-baked plans and sometimes money-making schemes.  Some of these ideas are great, some not so great, but almost never are either of us good at executing on them.  We have what Stu McLaren called idea diarrhea, I’ve had this for a long time.  What I realized in context of creativity that this is a strength, I know people who never have ideas and poo poo every idea they hear, those same people are excellent executors, excellent developing creators.

I work with some great scientists and engineers who have constant and ever evolving ideas.  Some of them become highly profitable products and processes, idea-diarrhea is valuable as long as there is someone able to execute on them.

The person with constant ideas, the 5th creativity language is the innovating creator.

All creativity can be grouped into one of the following 5 Creativity Languages, we can learn to understand and create more by understanding what our language(s) are:

1. The Researching Creator
2. The Artistic Creator
3. The Developing Creator
4. The Connecting Creator
5. The Innovating Creator

I think that language terminology fits very well with creativity. Most people categorize creativity much too narrowly, most view creativity as only the artistic people around us, I think little is understood and recognized about the different forms of creativity.  Similar to the custom needs and wants for love between spouses everyone is able to and enjoys creating in a different ways.

Our creativity is not our personality, I think it goes deeper than our personality, our personality is one function of our creativity. Our creative language(s) are fundamental to how we create and how we give to the world in which we live.

What do you think your creative language might be?

PS…One more thing, it is official the creative languages test is now live and you can go here to purchase at an introductory price of $29, once you click the buy now button a link with a password will be sent to you to take the online test, the test results will be shared with you on the page, then a custom pdf write up will sent to your email address. Don’t miss out.