Psychologist Ted Zeff, among others, notes the personality trait of high sensitivity can be particularly challenging for men, especially in this culture.

But many boys and men find that creative expression is enhanced by the many positive qualities of the trait.

Writer and entrepreneur Peter Messerschmidt [aka 'Denmarkguy'], who – like myself – identifies as being highly sensitive, writes in one of his informative articles on the topic of highly sensitive men (HSM) and how much they “accept” or make use of this aspect of their personality.

He notes, “One group– typically the largest– display all the characteristics of high sensitivity, but forcefully deny and reject the possibility that they are ‘sensitive.’

Author Susan Cain declares: “Without introverts, the world would be devoid of: the theory of gravity; the theory of relativity; W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming”; Chopin’s nocturnes; Proust’s In Search of Lost Time; Peter Pan…”

She quotes science journalist Winifred Gallagher: “The glory of the disposition that stops to consider stimuli rather than rushing to engage with them is its long association with intellectual and artistic achievement.

“Neither E = mc2 nor Paradise Lost was dashed off by a party animal.”

Ang Lee recently won his second Academy Award as best director for “Life of Pi” (his first was for “Brokeback Mountain”).

In an article on leadership, Susan Cain gives a number of examples of “effective Asian-American leaders” including Lee, and others: “novelist Chang Rae-Lee; fashion designer Vera Wang; New York Times literary critic Michiko Kakutani…the list goes on and on.”

From Are Asian-Americans Too Quiet to Lead U.S. Businesses?

One of the stars of “Life of Pi,” Adil Hussain, described how the Taiwanese filmmaker works.

He commented that Ang Lee is “so sensitive and the way he directs you is so silent. He’d whisper into your ear what he has to say.

“I’m very sensitive in real life. I cannot not cry if someone around me is crying…even if it’s not appropriate. I have that thing in me, a weakness or sensitivity.” Jessica Chastain

She is such a powerful, dynamic and emotionally expressive actor, in films including “The Tree of Life”; “The Debt”; “Lawless,” and “The Help,” for which she was nominated for an Oscar.

Jessica Chastain has made other comments about herself that relate to high sensitivity, as well as being introverted and shy:

“I’m inspired by people who are so sensitive and vulnerable that they try to cover it up.”

[on rehearsals] “They’ll say, Save it, save it. I tell them: Don’t worry. I have a bottomless well of tears.”

“I’m not the girl at the club on the table. I’m going to be the one in the corner, quiet and so I don’t call attention to myself.”

“I was the girl who cut school to go to the park, and the other kids would be smoking and drinking and I’d be reading Shakespeare.”

“I walk the dogs, I play the ukulele, I cook. I’m not a girl who goes to big parties–I’m shy.”

If we are willing to put our creative work out there – into the world in some way – it will be judged and ranked.

What if our book doesn’t make it to a bestseller list, our painting is not accepted by a gallery, our blog doesn’t show up on a Google page one, or our movie doesn’t get invited to a film festival?

One consequence is we may feel deflated, and question our worth as a creator.

Elaine Aron declares that “low self-esteem is about power and influence, the result of rank. Like other social animals, we constantly rank ourselves among others–competing and comparing.”

From her post Ranking and Linking, For Better and For Worse.

That sort of ranking may be true for anyone who is creating, but the emotional impact can be particularly intense for highly sensitive people.

“People often avoid the uncomfortable uncertainty of novel solutions regardless of potential benefit.”

That quote comes from the Forbes magazine article Managing The Psychological Bias Against Creativity by Todd Essig, who notes the situation where “You come up with a great new idea at work, or at home.

“Or a political leader actually tries something ‘new and different’ when faced with a previously intractable problem. But then, rather than grateful acceptance, or even a fair hearing, the idea is squashed, ridiculed, or otherwise ignored.”

New research, he says, “empirically documents how our resistance to uncertainty makes the ‘old ways’ far stickier than they should be given the practical benefits of creative, new solutions.

“Once again, the biases built into our minds leave us simultaneously moving in opposite directions; we like creativity but avoid creative ideas because creative ideas are too, in a word, creative.”

Creativity researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi declared creative people, based on his extensive studies, are “Both extroverted and introverted, needing people and solitude equally.”

[From my earlier post The Complexity of the Creative Personality.]

I’m not so sure how widely that applies.

As an introvert myself, I don’t experience much urge to be extroverted.

And, I have been drawn to read and quote from the interviews of actors and other artists who say they are introverted, but they don’t generally indicate they are also extroverted.

But many actors, for example, say they are introverted or shy or sensitive – or these qualities are ascribed to them by reporters – and it isn’t clear how much of a distinction they are making between these traits.

Do you use music for creative work? Do you get distracted by noise?

In one of my interviews with psychologist and author Susan Perry, PhD, she commented that a writer she knew chose a fresh CD for each novel she wrote.

“A few people told me things like that,” Perry remarked.

“They’ll choose particular music for a particular project, and by putting that music on, they put themselves into — it’s not hypnotic exactly, but into where their brain gets used to moving from hearing that music, to working on that particular project.

“That’s the purpose of many of the rituals that creative people use. They’re not just superstitious fetishes: ‘I have to this particular pen.’ They serve a very real purpose in both loosening and focusing.”

“What would be truly surprising would be to find that sound could not suggest colour, that colours could not evoke the idea of a melody, and that sound and colour were unsuitable for the translation of ideas, seeing that things have always found their expression through a system of reciprocal analogy.” Charles Baudelaire

A simple definition of synesthesia is that it is a “crosstalking” or overlapping of sensory experiences that for most people remain separate.

Researchers find a higher proportion of creative people are synesthetes.

The image is from the book “The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia in Art and Science.”

The publisher explains that synesthesia occurs “when two or more senses cooperate in perception. Once dismissed as imagination or delusion, metaphor or drug-induced hallucination, the experience of synesthesia has now been documented by scans of synesthetes’ brains…”

“Creativity is always collaborative, even when you’re alone.” Keith Sawyer

“Artists work best alone.” Steve Wozniak

Different kinds of creative expression have different needs in terms of solitude versus collaboration.

In my post Creative collaboration, for example, actor Keith Powell of the TV series ”30 Rock” comments about the atmosphere of the writers room for the show – a common example of collaboration in the creative development of many art and entertainment projects. Movies and TV shows involve dozens, even hundreds of people at a time.

In the same article, I note that Professor Keith Sawyer writes in his book Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration that “creativity is always collaborative, even when you’re alone.”