This past weekend, my daughter decided to take a box of crayons to the very first page of an old coloring book. She spent hours carefully choosing colors and informing me every few minutes in excited squeals that she was “staying inside the lines!”

As you can see from the photo on the left (which I scanned just a few minutes ago) she did a stand up job for a child who won’t be four years old for another five months.

It doesn’t bother me that the elephant is green, I mean…she’s a little child and that’s what’s fun about coloring – there aren’t any rules. But as I was putting away some toys and other art work this afternoon, I wondered how it would have affected this little child had I told her you can’t color an elephant green.

I think this coloring is so important. Not because my child is a brilliant artist but because it represents what we all have inside of us, or what we all had inside of us at the age of three.

I’m reading a book called “If You Want to Write – A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit“. It’s not only about writing, but you can take the subject matter and apply it to whatever it is you’re passionate about doing.

One of the first pages spoke very loudly to me. Author, Brenda Ueland, talked about how so many of us have our creativity stifled when we’re children. I’m paraphrasing here, but she spoke about children in school who put their hearts into a piece of writing in school only to have the teacher mark it up with red pencil telling them why it isn’t good.

Of course teachers have to teach us, but to a certain child, this could tear them up inside and make them not want to put thoughts in words ever again.

Adults have so much power over children that it’s staggering and many of us (not me, I was very encouraged as a child to be creative) had our imaginations locked up when we got too old to be “childish”.

If I told my daughter that her coloring was done wrong because the elephant was green, who knows what that could do to her delicate creative spirit.

I think we should all take a good look at this green elephant and think about what we’re doing because we think it’s the way it has to be done.

We should look at our marketing materials, our websites, our processes, our systems. What are we doing because we’ve been boxed in to think they must be done a particular way?

What would happen if we all took a few minutes a day to look at the world through a three year old’s eyes? What would happen if we used that time to do something in our life or in our business just because – Heaven Forbid – it was fun and made us happy?

What’s your green elephant?

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