Having Creative Confidence
Why trusting your ideas matters more than waiting for perfection.
The biggest risk to creativity isn’t failure, it’s waiting too long to share an idea. When you hold onto an idea until it feels perfect, you don’t just delay progress. You miss the chance for it to grow through collaboration. By the time you finally show it, the moment for others to contribute has often passed. Ideas thrive when shared early, but they die quietly when kept hidden for too long.
This matters not just for the individual creative but for the people around them. If someone on a team keeps their thoughts to themselves until the very end, others are denied the opportunity to shape and strengthen the work. Collaboration gets reduced to helping polish something that’s already locked in, rather than co-creating something new. I didn’t always see this dynamic clearly until I recognised it in myself.
As someone who grew up with a passion for creating art, especially drawing, I believed my value lay in producing polished, visually impressive work. The cleaner, sharper, and more “finished” it looked, the more praise it earned. At school, this approach paid off. Teachers and friends admired my executions, often commenting on how neat and precise my work was. It was all about how it looked when it was finished. But looking back, I realise this mindset made me overly cautious. I became protective of my ideas and hesitant to share anything that wasn’t fully fleshed out from beginning to end. I didn’t trust that others would see the value in the idea itself but only in how well I could execute it.
That belief began to shift when I found myself in environments where silence wasn’t an option. If I wanted to contribute, I had to speak before my ideas felt ready. At first this felt like a huge risk. It felt like I was exposing weakness, but I started to see that my caution was costing not just me, but everyone I was working with. What I thought was protecting my ideas was actually holding them back.
Perfectionism can feel like protection. If you only show the polished version, you avoid the risk of embarrassment. But perfectionism at the wrong stage is one of creativity’s biggest killers. David and Tom Kelley capture this perfectly in Creative Confidence: “When our self-worth isn’t on the line, we are far more willing to be courageous and risk sharing our raw talents and gifts.” Waiting until an idea feels safe might protect your ego but it robs your collaborators of the chance to contribute at the stage when their input is most valuable. If you’ve ever been on the other side of that dynamic (working with someone who never shares early) you know how frustrating it feels to sense potential but never get the chance to add to it.
I recognised this pattern in myself. My perfectionism wasn’t just about high standards, it was rooted in fear. The fear of looking stupid, of being dismissed, of nobody seeing value in an unpolished thought. But creativity doesn’t work that way. Raw, unfinished ideas are often where the most courageous creativity happens, precisely because they invite others in.
The biggest practical change for me was deciding to share sooner. Sketches, loose thoughts and messy drafts. At first it felt very exposing. But the more I did it, the more I realised sharing these initial thoughts actually created momentum. Jerry Saltz puts it bluntly in How to Be an Artist: “It doesn’t matter how scared you are, everyone is scared. Work, you big baby!” His words cut to the truth, waiting for fear to disappear means you’ll never move. Confidence is not about the absence of fear. It’s choosing to share despite feeling it.
Working ideas out in the open has taught me three clear lessons:
Collaboration starts earlier. Other people help shape the idea and see potential in even just a single thought, which only makes everything stronger. They often see things I might have brushed over.
The stakes are lower. If the idea fails, it was just a sketch or a thought, not a polished masterpiece. It’s easier to let it go and move on.
Confidence builds. Each time I share something unpolished and survive, I grow less afraid. It gets easier every time and I never regret it.
Not every idea is gold, many of them actually fail. But failure no longer feels like weakness. It becomes part of the process and sometimes even sparks for a better direction. I’ve started to think of confidence as a muscle. The more I use it, the stronger it gets. Each time I put an idea into the open I am building resilience and learning how to grow through feedback.
This clicked most clearly for me when I was the creative lead for my team during the Showcase. Showcase was a four week project I did as part of my MSc in Advertising and Creativity. Our class was split into two teams and tasked with answering a brief from start to finish. If I had waited until my ideas were perfectly formed before sharing, the whole project would have stalled and my whole team would have suffered because of that. Instead, I put half formed concepts and thoughts on the table and my teammates built on them. Sometimes they took my sketches in directions I never could have predicted. By the end what we had created was stronger because it wasn’t just mine, it was truly collaborative from beginning to end. That experience showed me how dangerous it is to wait until something feels perfect. By then, it’s too late for others to contribute.
Execution will always have its time. Great ideas and excellent execution both matter, it’s not a competition. The difference is timing. Ideas need space to grow through collaboration first. Then execution comes in to bring them to life. Creativity is rarely neat and tidy, it’s loose, fragile and uncertain at the start. But that’s also where it holds the most potential.
To conclude, what I’ve learned is that confidence in creative ideas isn’t about certainty. It’s about giving them a chance to exist especially when they’re unpolished and even when you’re scared. Polishing them in private might feel safe, but it’s how ideas quietly die. Without sharing them, they can’t grow. My own practice, especially leading my team through the Showcase has shown me that creativity truly thrives when we trust our ideas enough to bring them forward early.
Execution can be exciting, but it only matters if the idea survives long enough to reach that stage. The earlier we place confidence in our ideas, the more likely they are to grow into something meaningful and lasting. Ideas don’t need to be perfect to be powerful. They just need to be heard.
By Hannah Murphy.