7 Permissions to Unleash Your Imagination

What if your creative process begins with defiance?

In one of the most inspiring talks I’ve seen this year, writer and cultural critic Tressie McMillan Cottom, PhD, shares a pathway to reclaiming our creative imagination in our breaking/awakening world:

“When people try to sell you on the idea that the future is settled, it is because it is deeply unsettled. This promise of an artificially intelligent future is just a collective anxiety that wealthy, powerful people have about how well they are going to be able to control us in the future. If they can get us to accept that the future is already settled, then we will create that for them.
My most daring idea is to refuse...Refusing is actually the more hopeful, expansive vision of the future than the one that is telling us that the future is already settled and decided.”

Here’s what I can’t stop thinking about: refusal is creative alchemy.

We are taught that YES is the magic word in the creative process, and the pathway to activate our imagination. Which is, of course, true — yes is great.

But. And. Also.

What if our no is a creative act?

What if refusal is an on-switch for our creative power – an opening to more imagination and exuberance and possibility?

Bad Bunny’s daring, stunning 2026 SuperBowl performance exemplifies this. Sung entirely in Spanish, his native language, Bad Bunny is uncompromising in his commitment to his inner truth. He refused to tour the US to protect his fans from ICE criminals.

What resulted from his refusals was historic, galvanizing, life-giving creative medicine.

What if the moment someone refuses — even when that refusal is dishonored — a new story is born?

But her new story will disrupt the ‘settled’ future, which is why the dominant culture will do absolutely everything it can to keep us from two critical powers:

1. Our ability to say NO

2. Our ability to imagine something better

The cultural training most of us receive around ‘no’ being unacceptable is so manipulative that sometimes we stop being able to identify it inside of ourselves.

Fascism and all forms of oppressive control are designed to wear down our ability to hear our inner voice, because the systems can’t survive when we listen to ourselves.

Every attempt to suppress our refusal is both an egregious violation of boundaries and a way to keep us from responding to the creative energy within us.

Bad Bunny relentlessly responds to his own imagination and creative impulse. Our creativity will collapse the system, so they are scrambling to cut us off from it.

When we dare to keep imagining, we take our power back.

"The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are, because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary.” — Ursula Hegi

Today’s Invitation: KEEP IMAGINING

One way we could look at the moment we are in is that there has never been a more important time to unfurl our wildest creative selves.

And also: most people I know are broken open by everything that’s going on and trying to figure out how to stay engaged without falling apart. Our heartbreak is an appropriate human response when violent criminals maintain and abuse the highest positions of power.

So we can grieve on the go as we keep tending to our wild dreams and creative power. We can let our creativity be the medicine for our heartbreak and the mechanism for our liberation.

Here are 7 permissions to unlock imagination. My hope is that something here sparks an idea, momentum, or maybe...a creative miracle.

7 Permissions to Unlock Your Creative Imagination

1. REFUSE

What if your creative process begins with defiance?

When you regard the emotions that might come with ‘no’ as your creative power — fury, boldness, ferocity — what shifts?

This can be especially helpful when visioning or imagining feels blocked or inaccessible.

What’s something you want to say no to, but have been holding back on — in your creative work or life — and what happens when you give yourself permission to do it anyway? How is this refusal a way of honoring your deep truth?

2. DREAM AND PLAY IN THE POSSIBILITY SPACE

Here’s what I wish I could do: come to where you are, scoop up all of the overwhelm and responsibility and worry and hold them for you while I watch your kids/pets/elders and do your dishes so you can have s space to dream and play in whatever way you need to. Imagine if we could make this happen for you. Even for 15 minutes.

What dreams won’t let go of you right now? If you had the space, how do you long to play?

3. TRUST YOUR IMAGINATION

How is your relationship to your imagination feeling right now? Fascism and algorithms are designed to get you to betray your inner voice, so for many of us this relationship needs extra nourishment and attention. And if you received messages early that your dreaming was an impractical waste of time, restoring this trust will be a kind of medicine for your true creative spirit.

**4. TRY WILD SH*T**

Take a dream, goal, or intention that matters to you but feels a bit stuck. Put on the timer for 5 minutes and write 20-30 wild ideas for whatever you choose. Challenge yourself to be as expansive and uncensored as possible. Then, chose one idea and turn it into an experiment and put a creative appointment on your calendar before you talk yourself out of it.

If you knew you couldn’t disappoint anyone, and you knew you couldn’t fail, what wild sh*t would you give yourself permission to try?

Now is the time for our wildest ideas and bravest creativity.

**5. REIMAGINE ANYTHING THAT ISN’T A F*CK YES**

When we are reimagining, the tendency can be to orient around what could work based on what we know.

The edge here is to stay faithful only to the f*ck yes, even when you don’t yet know how to bring it forth or make it work.

What needs reimagining? Try this prompt: Wouldn’t it be amazing if...And let yourself explore possibilities for a few minutes.

I made a visualization for my clients for this one — if you’d like it, just hit reply and I’ll send it to you.

6. GET OUT OF THE WAITING ROOM

The culture thrives when we stay in the waiting room — waiting to be ready, perfect, certain, linear — so it can sell us products to solve the problems it invented for us. I only know this because I am very familiar with the waiting room and have also bought a lot of those products.

But when we get out of the waiting room we are choosing creativity, and like anyone we are in a relationship with, she loves to be chosen. Regardless of the outcome, every time we move on something we’ve been imagining for awhile, we nourish our relationship with creativity, which can have lasting effects for years to come.

What dream needs you to move?

7. CREATE THE WORLD

When a creator reclaims her role as a world-builder, she directs her creative power toward something utterly unique, unrepeatable, and nourishing for our future.

I often use this permission when my clients are working on projects and feeling stuck on linear sequencing (outlines, plotlines) OR having a hard time clarifying a goal or focus. Put the attention on world-building instead of linear sense-making and see what happens: What does the world feel like/smell like/sound like? Who is in this world? What’s possible here?

Here’s to the chorus of no’s that are building the new world. Refuse. Imagine. Create. This can be a way forward.

May we keep creating and imagining and defying and dancing and grieving and showing up and resisting and checking in on each other and walking each other home.

We are in this together, and I am sending big love and support,

Liz

I am human.

This letter is a labor of love written by yours truly. I wish robots could do my laundry for me while I write. I hope it is helpful for you. If you have any suggestions or topics you’d like me to write about, send me an email at hello@lizkimball.com.

When No Is a Creative Act: 7 Permissions to Unleash Your Imagination in a Culture That's Afraid of It