Two hours of solid group brainstorming. A lot of bad ideas will be thrown in the air, but it’s your right and your privilege to throw as many ideas out there. Good ideas and “meh” ideas.
A friend of mine used to work at a PR agency that, during brainstorming sessions, would not let anyone leave the room until there were 70 ideas on the board. On top of that, even if their first idea was the perfect one and they knew it was, they still went to 70.
You’re a magnet. We all are when we pitch ideas. We attract the criticism and hold it with us while we shout out more ideas. The more ideas, the more criticism we hear, the heavier we feel. Finally, every magnet has its threshold and we can’t hold any more criticism. At that point, we shut up. At that point, we fail. Exhausted from holding so much criticism.
The problem isn’t that you can’t hold any more criticism. The problem is you’ve let it stop you from sharing more ideas. All the sudden you make the brainstorming session about you and not about brainstorming.
It’s two-fold. First, criticism gains weight when you take it personally. Then, second, as you take more criticism personally, you become subjective and blame yourself for poor ideas, for not moving the group forward in the right direction; you believe you’re holding the group back.
Actually, what holds the group back is your lack of more “meh” ideas.
The reason brainstorming groups work is when you share a bad idea, it saves everyone else from thinking of that same bad idea. It’s a game of trial-and-error. More specifically, it’s a game of removing all bad ideas until what you have left are the good ones. When you stop participating with your bad ideas, you’re not doing the group justice, you’re holding them back.
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