WISHING FOR CREATIVITY?

Take this lesson from farmers:

Stop wishing and start cultivating!

• If you truly seek or expect creativity (or crops)  to flourish—plan your objectives, strategies, and tactics… dig the soil, get rid of the rocks, add nutrients, plant seeds, provide water, allow for sunshine, and get rid of energy-draining weeds.

  

• If of course you prefer fantasyland, go right ahead. But for your own wellbeing and those who live and work with you, don’t waste time looking for shortcuts, and don’t waste energy under some false pretense that you dwell in reality.

• So, okay, you ARE serious about wanting to be more creative, and/or wanting to find more creative souls to support your quest, here are some tips I guarantee will kickstart your creative juices, or the talents of those to whom you delegate. And age is not a factor.

• Study and practice stress management so your emotions, body and mind are better prepared to free up and stimulate creative deeds and thoughts that already exist. You may think you or someone else has no real creative skills, but the truth is that the talent IS there; it just may not have been productively stimulated. Learn how to use deep breathing to untangle your creative spirit.

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  Dismiss trivial, unimportant problems. Farmers don’t bother with stray pebbles. Stop torturing your mind. Simply learn to say to yourself: “Oh, well…” and then move on, when small things don’t go your way. Expectations, remember, breed disappointment.

• Do things differently. If you wash your left side first when you shower, switch over to wash your right side first. Take a different road to work than you normally do, even if it means getting up a few minutes earlier. Notice what you see along the way. Force yourself out of bed one morning and watch the sun rise. Serious!

• Take creativity trips and make creativity visits… fair grounds, animated movies, art and sculpture museums, a symphony instead of “Top 40,” a crafts show, daycare center or kindergarten, experimental theatre, an animal shelter, flower gardens, zoo, waterfalls, caverns, rivers, lakes, the ocean, a walk in the woods… ANY AND ALL with your eyes and ears and nose and tongue and fingertips alert to what’s new and different.

• OBSERVE people. Sit with a notebook in Grand Central or Union Station, or a sidewalk café, a high school or college sporting event you wouldn’t normally visit, a graveyard or cemetery, ask for a tour of your local fire department, or—if you’re really brave and have a strong stomach—a local jail. Visit a manufacturing plant… and observe and listen and absorb new images and thoughts and ideas.

• Keep a journal for 3 weeks. Date each entry. Heading for left-hand page: “WHAT HAPPENED” and for facing right-hand page: “HOW I FELT.” Among other things, this helps improve your ability to separate fact from opinion. Can’t think of what to write? Then draw something. Spit on the page. Do SOMEthing each day!

• All this is for openers. And completely up to you. But if you want more, let me know.

If you stumble and fall, get up.

Brush yourself off.

Think about what happened.

Adjust the process or steps you took.

Then do it again!

After all, your new found channels of

creativity could be birthing the next

“Nationwide is on your side” or “Got Milk?”

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hal@businessworks.US

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