Laziness and creativity. Sigh.

I'm not even completely sure what laziness is, but I've got it.  Blame the winter.  Blame the 50,000 words I wrote in November as part of NaNoWrimo. Blame my old and aching back.  Whatever... it's laziness.

Every night, I meditate on a day spent re-reading familiar books and avoiding the laundry problem.  I find myself responding, rather than initiating contacts.  I assure you I am not depressed; I'm just lazy!

What's the cause?  Well, probably the winter is part of it; I'm not getting much exercise now that jogging season is over, and that means I'm low-energy.  But really, I think I've hit a fear point in my bigger projects.  The holidays came at just the right time for me to form a thousand excuses not to confront my fear of taking the next step.  Between entertaining the family and consuming upwards of a million Christmas cookies, I've been distracted enough to avoid my creativity anxiety.

The answer, my friends, is simple: laugh at my own foolishness and dive right back in. What is there to be afraid of?  Failure?  You only fail if you don't finish!  Set a schedule and let my family know about it, so that they can help give me that oh-so-gentle push. 

I only have one life, and within that life, all I have is each new day.  The sun is up, and it's time to get back to my life!

6 ways to stimulate your curiosity

Curiosity, not necessity, is the mother of invention! Your creative brain reaches out into the world, sees something that surprises it, and that kick-starts the creative process. 

As we get older, we learn to screen out surprises and focus on the patterns that help us to succeed at basic tasks.  That's very practical--and awful for our creativity.  So here are a few ways you can get your curiosity up and running again.

1. Find three things to ask "why" about, every day.  Remember how you drove the grownups crazy with this question, way back when?  Drive yourself crazy with it, and you'll regain some of that childhood wonder.

2. Use more of your senses to observe the world.  If you're a primarily visual person, use your ears.  If you're a primarily auditory person, use your nose.  You get the idea.  By bringing new information to your brain, you will automatically stimulate its curiosity.

3. Take your head out of the google-verse and start learning from your own experience.  Doing it yourself means no more fast answers; instead, you'll have to live with ambiguity.  Since ambiguity can be frustrating, that puts your curiosity in the driver's seat.

4. Ask other people what they think about the world.  You may be surprised at the diversity of opinion around you.  If so, you will become more curious about your options and the way different people think.

5. Change a habit.  If you always take the same way to work, choose a different route.  Be curious about it.  If you always eat the same kind of food, try a different kind.  Be curious about that!  The point is to change something and let that stimulate your curiosity.

6. Learn something new.  This is just plain good for your brain and your personality.  Take up the guitar, and then get curious about the history of guitars and guitar music.  Study a language, and then get curious about the history of its native speakers.  Learning is fun, it makes you smarter, and it kick-starts your creative brain.

The problem of boredom

Have you ever spent a couple of hours (watching TV, say) being passively entertained, yet when it was over, you feel more bored than ever?  That's because passivity and boredom are closely linked.  The entertainment may have been fun while it lasted, but it doesn't satisfy your need for a vital, engaged, expressive life.

Boredom occurs when people are not challenged by their activities. A person has many facets, from talents to personality traits, and when too  many of those are underused, boredom is the result.  People are bored when they can't or don't intentionally change their activities to make them more challenging. 

In some ways, boredom is actually a good sign; it means that you care how your time is being used.  Unfortunately, it's also an uncomfortable, frustrating, and (sadly) sometimes necessary experience.

My solution to boredom is observation.  Even if I can't actively engage in the activities I find most fulfilling, at any point in time I have a mind and the ability to observe the world around me.  Standing in line, doing a repetitive task, politely listening to someone repeat a story I've heard a hundred times--all of these are times when I can devote a piece of my mind to observation.  Even a fly on the wall is interesting if you are curious about it!

The bonus is that those observations, from time to time, lead to ideas that I can use in my creative projects.  So while I haven't eliminated boring activities from my life,  at least I've made boredom very rare. 

The creative energy of the universe

Do you know why you are creative?  Because the universe is!  Every being, and even substance, around us is part of a vast process of creation.  All of that variety, the sheer extent of the universe is proof of that. 

Led by the natural processes of the universe, our brains evolved a Creativity Department because that helps us to make ourselves more successful at... being ourselves.  Each of us, by becoming stronger and smarter, helps the human race to survive and thrive. In the particular case of human beings, that doesn't just mean our bodies, it means our minds and ideas. People will fight and even die for an idea; we know that our legacy isn't just locked up in our bodies.

The book The Evolving Self by Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi describes this in some detail; here, all I want to say is that your creativity is the part of you that helps you to be part of the universal process of change, experimentation, and invention. Even stars do it, so why shouldn't you? 

If you need to find energy for a creative process, open your eyes, look around you, and see how extraordinarily creative your world is.  From the tiniest mite to the huge stars in the sky, creation is everywhere.  All you need to do is unleash your personal spark.

Competing creatively

Both co-operation and competition are natural social impulses--just watch any group of animals; each behavior has its place.  In fact, because the need to surpass a rival can be very motivating, competitive impulses are often at the root of creative behaviors.

Despite its bad reputation, competition can generate positive ideas and behaviors. For one thing, people "compete" not just with one another, but also with tired assumptions, scary forces of nature, oppressive governments, or biased beliefs. 

Competition becomes destructive when it degenerates into reactions: merely repeating what the "other side" does but doing it more aggressively.  Instead, use your creativity to find more effective ways to compete. 

Start by going beyond "I want to win!" by defining your goal creatively.  For example:

• Instead of just trying to beat the fastest runner on the team, set a goal of developing a smarter, more effective training regimen that both helps you win, and also sets you up to keep increasing your personal best over time
• If you wish you could "shout out" the old ideas that are keeping your company or community from being effective, use your creativity to find ways to engage and persuade others to discuss new ideas with you

And don't forget about co-operation: the ability to get others on your side by co-operating with them can help you to compete much more effectively.

Hearing the still, small voice of creativity

Sometimes the creative flow is high-energy, even a little manic.  Other times, creativity requires a very calm, quiet mood.  In that latter case, it's very important to be able to clear your mind and "listen" to quieter inner thoughts.

You will have your own ebb and flow of energy.  Personally, I find that my body helps to tell me which mode I am in.  If I feel energetic, I end up typing fast and furious, having lots of ideas.  At other times, ideas come more slowly.  Yet these slower times can produce deeper, more sustained creative insights.  To take advantage of that quieter energy, I like to clear my mind and let it move at its own pace.

My favorite exercise for clearing my mind is actually an ancient one from India (there are many and you should choose one that suits you):

I sit at my desk and choose any object on it, and then really observe its physical qualities.  For example, now I am looking at a glass jar. I notice everything about it, from how big or small it is, to how it reflects the light, to any dust on its surface.  Then, when the picture is really clear in my mind, I say to myself:  "I am not that [thing]."  The moment that I do that, my mind sort of snaps back into itself and I become aware of my mind in a very sharp way.

Whatever exercise you use, clear away the cobwebs of your mind when you need to capture a deeper, quieter creative flow.  Still waters really do run deep.

Creating a fresh start

When I complained about one of my siblings, my mom used to tell me "it takes two to tango," meaning that I should also take a look at my own behavior.  I didn't like hearing it then, but as I went out in the world, I realized she was right.

The reality is, we have very little control over other people; our scope of influence is about 99% limited to ourselves.  Achieving a fresh start in a bad situation requires us to re-think how we respond, from a negative job relationship to a conflict with a loved one.

I am not advocating that you endlessly adapt, seeking to just change your attitude.  Conforming and "going along" with something that's wrong is neither creative nor effective. 

Instead, use the creative process to ensure that you perceive the problem insightfully, formulate specific goals for changing it, and be willing to test and discard ineffective solutions:

1)  If you're experiencing a repetitive conflict, look at all of the repetitive things you say and do; jot them down, then take a step back and try to understand why you are reacting that way--it may have little or nothing to do with the present situation.

2) When you come up with an insight about your own behavior, formulate an "insightful challenge": because of [this insight about the situation], my goal is to [make a related change].  Example: "because my fights with my teenage son are bringing up my anger at my ex-husband, my goal is to ground myself in the present and make sure I am really listening to my son."

3) Try to achieve your goal, and if it doesn't work right away, remember that the person on the opposite side of the conflict is probably stuck, as well.  Be patient, persistent, and willing to try, try again.  If you are really committed to your goal, you won't give up.

It isn't easy!  But at least when you focus on your part of the problem, you can actually do something to end it.

Healthy exercise for the brain

Brains are amazing!  They grow and change throughout your whole life.  Every single time you are creative, play with ideas, or learn something new, your brain grows. 

Of course, the other side of that is that your brain won't grow unless you keep on learning, creating, and playing.  Unfortunately, brains are also prone to locking you in to repetitive patterns.  Those unquestioned assumptions? those daily patterns you can't break? all of those characteristics you defend by saying "that's just the way I am"? Those are mental habits.  They keep your brain smaller and, let's just say, flabbier than it ought to be.

Looked at that way, our creativity is the engine of brain health.  It's creativity that lets you learn, that encourages you to explore and form new ideas, all of which are excellent brain exercise. There's even evidence that exercising the brain can help prevent loss of brain function later in life.  If you nurture and enjoy your creativity, you could have a happier, healthier life long into your old age.

So get out there and play!  It's good for you.

Choosing creatively = choosing well

Do you ever find it hard to make choices? It can be stressful: choices are super-important to defining your life's path.  How do you figure out what choices to make?

One answer is that how you make choices is important.  If you're the kind of person who dives right in without ever looking back, you're not really choosing, which doesn't always turn out well.  On the other hand, if you're the kind of person who endlessly thinks and re-thinks, you could get stuck in indecision. 

Luckily, our creative brain is designed to help us strike the right balance.  When we fit our choices into a creative process, we have a method that will help us to both think things through, and also move forward without regret. 

Here are the steps I recommend:

1) First, be really clear on what motivates you to make this choice at all.  If you don't know why you are doing something, you will never know what you should do. Imagine and visualize where you want to end up, and be sure that it's important to you. 

2) As you consider your options, first think, then feel.  Brainstorm your options, then get the information you need to build a "choice picture" that tells you what each option might end up looking like.  After you've done that, tap into your feelings--how much do you like each of those choice pictures?

3) Clear out the distractions so you can tune into your deepest self.  Listen for your inner voice. If it's in turmoil, you're just not ready to choose. Don't stop or run away, ask yourself "what's missing?" and solve it.

In the end, you will simply make a choice.  However, if you've gone through this process, it will be a conscious choice that brings you closer to understanding yourself and the world.  And that will keep your life's path pointing forward, not backward.

Creativity makes you special

As my son goes off to his first big city job today, I can't help but remember when I first started interviewing for jobs, after college.  I remember looking up at those huge skyscrapers, and around at the thousands of other people and feeling really, really small.  In such a huge, crowded city, how could I be unique?

Well, we are all unique, special, and (if we keep our creativity) able to make a difference in the world.  Yet when you're going through the rounds of interviews, tests, comparisons with other people, it's easy to lapse into self-doubt.  So here's how to use your creativity to overcome those feelings.

1) Identify your personal goals.  If you have a vision for your life, you will keep a sense of yourself as an individual.

2) Entertain and inform yourself by really perceiving the world around you.  Those unique perceptions will ensure that you don't just follow patterns and make assumptions.

3) When you have an insight, take it seriously. Those moments of extraordinary clarity that characterize an insight could open a unique path for your life, or at least blast you out of a rut. 

So embrace the new, knowing that you have what it takes to live with creativity, purpose, and individual flair.  You are you! And that is wonderful.

Four ways to kick-start your creative brain

Even if you're in a creative profession, or have creative hobbies, you can get bogged down and lose your creative "juice".  As we head into the summertime, I thought I'd share a few ideas for how to re-energize creativity, and take full advantage of those long summer days.

1) Give up a habit or two. Breaking your patterns will kick your brain out of a rut.  For example, if you always turn on the TV when you get home, try leaving it off.  If you always have tuna salad sandwiches for lunch, try something new. Yes, it will probably be uncomfortable, so embrace the discomfort and focus your energies on your creative projects.

2) Put a moratorium on complaining.  Complaining is addictive--and destructive to your mental state.  Repetitive complaints, especially, solve nothing, making you feel powerless.  Face it: the traffic is always going to be bad on Friday afternoon; your little sister will continue to be annoying. Instead of complaining about things, focus on your project.

3) Clean your workspace. (This idea came from one of my Facebook followers, and it's a great one.)  Clutter distracts you and creates anxiety.  I am a terrible "clutterer" myself so I say that with no judgment--cleaning up your space will help you to focus and re-energize.

4) Listen to some new music.  Music provides deep stimulus to the brain.  Today, we have access to all kinds of music online, so take advantage!  Try something entirely new: if you always listen to techno, try Mozart, or Chopin--and vice versa.  You'll find some interesting synergies, and that might get your creative juices flowing again.

...Or come up with your own ideas!  You know what gets your energy flowing.  So kick off your summer by kick-starting your creative brain.

Creativity and positivity

This morning a Facebook friend posted a story about how Grand Rapids, Michigan, dubbed one of America's "dying" cities, responded energetically, creatively, and positively to declare themselves very much alive.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPjjZCO67WI

Boy, did I love that story.  Last summer, I took a working vacation to a region of New York state declared dead somewhere back in the seventies, when industrial jobs left their area.  What I found was a community of positive people who formed home businesses, grew food, and enjoyed the beauty of their region. Yes, they were comparatively poor; but no-one could say they were living desperate lives.

The people I saw there were part of my inspiration to form Actively Creative.  I don't mean to romanticize poverty or dismiss the serious issues around economic hardship here or anywhere in the world.  But acknowledging all that, people and communities often find extraordinary solutions by focusing on how they can create their futures, rather than mourn the past.

When shared in a community, creativity is exponentially more positive and powerful.  So bravo, Grand Rapids!  You rock.

Creativity balances optimism and criticism

An article by Tali Sharot in Time Magazine describes research on the human bias toward optimism. The study shows that when people are asked about the future, they tend to assume that things will turn out better than they actually do.

That positive attitude is crucial to creativity.  As the author of the study points out, if we were pessimists, we'd still be living in caves. Doing anything for the first time, let alone anything truly new, requires confidence that you can achieve it.  

On the other hand, the optimism bias can lead us to take foolish risks, like running up our credit card balance or accepting a bad deal on a mortgage.  Without critical thinking, life would be a string of disorganized experiments, leading nowhere.

Creativity harnesses the optimism bias, but it also needs to put our expertise to work.  The trick is to do so without shutting your creativity down.  The five-step creative process achieves that balance across two phases: an open phase in which you delay your critical thinking, and a (partially) closed phase, in which you apply your expertise to critique your idea.

As we've said before, being creative uses the whole person.  Love your optimism and your expertise.  Both will lead you to success.

Truth and creativity

Creative flow is a beautifully focused openness that can't be interrupted without being destroyed.  When a creative flow has hold of us, all of our faculties (perception, intuition, analysis, energy, motivation, and so on) are in sync with one another.  In that state, we are tapping into a more unified, complete "self".  Productivity can skyrocket; the power to create is multiplied by the synergy.

Why on earth is that so rare?  Wouldn't it be better if we were always able to apply more of our talents and personal attributes to the various tasks and problems we face every day?

Of course it would.  However, most of the time, people are pretty fragmented, cut off from parts of themselves.  One reason for this is repression--the unconscious or conscious avoidance of our own thoughts, memories, or feelings. That's why today's blog post is about truth. 

It's a fact that consciousness is naturally fluid. Our brains are actually a composite of different and sometimes conflicting processes, and our conciousness and perceptions are spread across those processes.  So complete unity is never going to occur.

However, and it's a big however, you certainly have alot more of your self available at any given time when you are not repressed. For example, if you are trying to avoid feeling angry, you could cut off a whole realm of memory and perception because you're afraid that it might get your blood boiling.  And that is going to stop you from entering a state of flow.

There is a piece of truth inside each of us, made up of the sum of our perceptions, memories, feelings, and dreams.  Being in touch with that, even for a moment, is one of the pure pleasures of creative flow.  Remember that what's inside your mind is not your enemy--it's you!  Open yourself up to your truth, and use your creativity to face it. 

Unchosen paths of creativity

One of the hardest parts of working on creative projects is committing to one choice, and casting aside another.  In the middle of a process, you usually won't be able to prove that your choice was the right one.  It's just... your choice.

I take two approaches to dealing with that uncertainty.  The first is that I don't rush my exploration.  Deadlines or not, it's important to let the intuitive process take place.  Letting ideas slosh around in my brain, exploring and researching are all crucial to my ability to make choices.  Sleeping on an idea (and waking up with an insight) has saved me from mistakes more often than sticking to a perfect project plan.

Second, I have come to understand that no choice will ever be perfect.  All preparation aside, a choice is just a choice.  It's your choice because you chose it.  If you feel inspired, motivated, insightful, and then make a choice about your project, that's as good as it's going to get.  Someone else, or even you on a different day, might have made a different decision.  So be it!

Never be careless. Your project is too important for you to make choices lightly.  But choose you must, and that takes will and character.  Continue on down your path; if obstacles should arise and you need to go back and re-choose, do it with the same purposefulness and commitment.  Your attitude toward making choices will drive your achievements.

Passing on the gift of creativity

Corporations, schools, community groups all try to encourage creativity in different ways.  Mostly, they try to provide stimulation in the arts; that works for those with the right talent and inclination, but not for most people.  Actually, creativity applies to anything that can be encountered, perceived, learned, or done, whether that's art, science, politics, or human relationships. 

Instead, we need to understand that creativity is a set of skills and behaviors that tap into a specific part of the human brain.  Each skill needs to be inspired, encouraged, and sustained for it to become part of the normal behavior of a person. 

Parents can help by enjoying a child's imagination and supporting them in undertaking projects of their own devising; schools can do this too.  Corporations and community groups may need to actually bring in educators to teach the creative process, encouraging the sometimes disruptive process of creativity.

The question I asked myself a few years ago is, "What can you do to pass on what you've learned about creative thinking, problem solving, and living?"  Today, I'm passing that question along to you.  Can you be slower to judgment of another person's idea?  Can you smile more or use humor to get people you work with to relax and explore solutions?  Can you just be an example of enjoying creativity to those around you?

Share your creative skills, and make the world that much better for those around you!

Coping with problems, creatively

Yesterday, just three weeks out of warranty, my computer crashed.  Although I have a backup system, some important documents and downloads hadn't yet been picked up.  Worse, my stream of thought and invention was interrupted!  What had been a beautiful, exciting flow of ideas was sacrificed to the slog of repair.

But don't cry for me, creative people. Hiccups, problems, even disasters are sure to occur on any path, but on a creative path they have meaning.  If we weave our disappointments into the fabric of our creative process, they can actually become creative fodder.  Reframe the problem as a creative challenge, use your intuition to explore a full range of solutions, evaluate them... you know the path.

I don't suggest that you should feel happy about it! Of course, any loss of your work or effort is painful.  But if your creative brain is turned on, you can still use it to find solutions (like going through my e-mail to find a few precious thoughts) or even work into the thread of a story I'm writing.

Life is a challenge, and we should be grateful when the challenges are fixable and meaningful.  It all helps us grow, creatively and as people.

Setting your creative goals

The foundation of a creative project is your sense of purpose.  For that reason, a positive, specific, and realistic goal is in many ways your most important creative asset.

• Your goal is positive if you can go from "X should be different" to "I intend to achieve Y." 

• It's specific if you know what success would look like; if you can envision your endpoint in some detail, and describe it to others.  

• Your goal is realistic if you or your partners are able to take the real-world steps necessary to achieve it.   

Getting to a positive, significant, realistic goal usually takes pre-work, where you explore and consider different types of goals before you settle on one.  In the actively creative process, the first three steps out of five (identification, incubation, insight) are about defining a creative goal.  

For more about how to develop a creative goal, please check out my book:  Actively Creative: A Guided Process.

What's a creative insight?

Most descriptions of the creative process include an insight, which we typically think of as some kind of amazing new fact or observation.  There's no doubt that insights are important to creativity, but insights are not just facts, however amazing.

A recent article pointed out that business people frequently label as "insights" what are really only long lists of observations.  The problem is that just describing something is not the same as understanding it. Could Van Gogh have painted one of his famous orchards based on a 500 page research tome about apple production?  I think not.

Facts by themselves are not insightful; we're surrounded by noisy, distracting, observable facts at all times.  Instead, the insight is an experience which belongs to the perceptive person who picks one out of a million available observations, connects it to a challenge, and sees how important it could be to a creative process.

So how do you know when you've had an insight?  The personal, inner experience of "aha!".  "Aha!" means that you have experienced a revelation; if it's new to you, that's enough.  And of course, it could be wrong, so you'll have to evaluate it.  But when, amidst the thousands of observations you make every waking hour of your life, you experience an "aha", treasure it.  You may be on to something big!

Mothers of invention

Possibly the scariest responsibility anyone can have is that of raising a child. In addition to your conscious choices, things you can't control--the words that just slip out, your facial expressions, your energy level--also shape your child.

So over the years mothers (and fathers too, of course, but it's Mothers Day) have discovered the creative part of their brain and used it to ensure that whatever they do, however they respond, whatever happens in the outside world, their child is shaped primarily by love.

Creativity turns a harsh word into a warm, "I'm sorry" moment. Creativity takes a bad year at school and turns it into a way to see family conflicts through a child's eyes. In a mother's hands, creativity turns milestones into memories, fear into courage, sadness into hope.

You could have replaced the word "creativity" with love in all of those sentences.  Love is the motivation, creativity is the engine, and a strong, hopeful child is the vision.  For Mother's Day, let's all express our gratitude, and also gain inspiration from our unique, persistent, and creatively willfull mothers. 

Thanks, mom; we love you, too!