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Twas the Christmas that Will Be
‘Twas the week before Christmas and all through the house,
projects were half done, oh, I felt like a louse.The messes were piled in each room to the sky.
I’d need a whip and chocolates to get kids to comply -To organize, straighten, move things to their rooms,
to water poinsettias ’ere they lose their blooms.The menus were not thought of…
The gifts not yet bought up…The wrapping would be hasty in a last-minute dash,
and Christmas eve, we’d fall into bed with a crash.When what to my blundering mind should appear?
But the miracle of ignoring, and parking my rear.We’ll have fun and festivity in our home Christmas Day,
whether or not things are perfect and all put away.The roast could be burnt, and a gift left behind
And we’d still feel the magic of a Christmas-y kind.So I’ll put up my feet and relax just a bit,
do what I enjoy and Christmas will be a hit.To all the mom santas whose lives are a mess…
let yourself be jolly and you and your family will be blessed.{ No Comments } -
Finding Your Voice
I’m pursuing my Masters in Science at Buffalo State College, in Creativity Studies. I’m loving every minute of it.
The first thing people ask me is “Is that a thing? Can you get a Masters in Creativity Studies?” You can. And it is awesome.
I’m sure you’re scratching your head… What is Creativity Studies? Well, so far we’ve learned about Creative Problem Solving – a process developed by Alex Osborn – famous adman from BBD&O and inventor of brainstorming – and Sydney Parnes, BuffState psychology professor whose work anchored the process in neuro-science and psychology. Creative Problem Solving is a facilitated process that helps groups bring imaginative thinking to problems that have no algorythmic answer. We’ve learned how to facilitate this process. And we’ve learned about how they measure creativity, and were put through multiple creative assessments ourselves.
I recently finished a course on finding your voice in facilitation, and as part of that course, I co-facilitated two not for profit groups through a Productive Thinking (or Creative Problem Solving) process to help them reorganize and rethink their relationship so they could each grow and be more beneficial to one another. I was mentored by Kristen Peterson and Paul Groncki of Facilitators Without Borders, who were my cofacilitators for the daylong session.
During a facilitation, you have to lead very important people through games and collaging and hope that they’ll go along with it. You have to convince them that it is important to have fun, in order to achieve their highest creative thinking. They have to believe that even though they’re extremely busy and thirteen of them have gathered in a small room for eight hours, to discuss an existential problem, that there is still time to brainstorm on crazy things, like what else a pair of glasses could be? (btw, how many ideas can you come up with in one minute? Our groups got 13 each.) You have to trust that the process will take angry dialogue into creative thinking and into creative solutions.
As thier leader, you have to be credible, and silly… Accessible, and in charge… an expert, and there to help… in process, but engaged in their content. You have to find and use your voice. You can’t hem or haw. You can’t denigrate yourself or go for the easy, lazy joke. You need to meet the group where they are, and yet still be yourself. There is such integrity in a facilitator’s voice. It is innately, unavoidably you, and yet it is your best self, your shiniest self. It is you, spit and polished. Alert and relaxed. Happy, yet wary.
How you use your voice in a facilitation, is the same as how you present your brand and fit into your industry. Choosing a brand for your services, reflects your values, your voice, your presence and services. It is not just a clever choice of words… it is existential. It represents your very existence. So if you’re considering your brand and/or url to represent yourself, consider using an exercise we used in our facilitation, taken from Tim Hurson’s book “Think Better” :
DRIVE = Do, Restrictions, Investment, Values, Essential Outcomes
- what must your brand do for you?
- What are the restrictions – what must it not do?
- What are you willing to invest?
- What values must it preserve?
- What are the metrics that you’d consider essential to a successful outcome?
Answer these questions before you start listing possible names and choosing your best options. What you’ll see on the page is your voice, your uniqueness, your brand taking shape. Then just let your voice drive the branding and marketing.
Keep an eye out for my upcoming new website: brain-date.com. From that platform,I will begin with new voice to ring you creativity studies so that we can ALL be more creative in everything we endeavor – fromwriting to painting, to business and more.
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John Cleese on Creative Process
If you haven’t seen this 10-minute video, where Monty Python’s John Cleese talks about creative process, it is worth watching.
John Cleese on Creative Process
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Am I Fickle? Are You?
During World War II, the government approached top psychologists and asked them to determine a way to assess someone’s creativity. They deemed creativity essential to being a good spy, and so they needed it as a recruitment tool. At the University of California, Berkely, they began to figure out what personality traits were correlated with high levels of creativity.
To study highly creative people, they assembled experts within domains – like architecture, math, science and writing – to nominate the most creative people in those fields. Then they tested and studied those luminaries for 3 days, in a 1:1 ratio, 10 staff to 10 participants. They assessed these people based on a list of adjectives that they developed with the help of Freud, Jung, and others. The test is called the Adjective Checklist. It is 300 adjectives long, it is self-select (you choose which adjectives apply to you) and it can assess your personality on 29 scales – change, creativity, heterosexuality (remember it was commissioned by the soon-to-be-formed CIA) etc.
So what were the adjectives that indicated creativity?
capable, clever, confident, egotistical, humorous, individualistic, informal, insightful, intelligent, interests wide, inventive, original, reflective, resourceful, self-confident, sexy, snobbish, and unconventional
And of course, what were the traits that were contra-indicated for Creativity?
affected, cautious, commonplace, conservative, conventional, dissatisfied, honest, interests narrow, mannerly, sincere, submissive, and suspicious
I find this fascinating, because scientifically speaking this test is valid – it measures what it purports to measure, well. And it is reliable – it has consistent results across gender, cultures and age groups.
Several of my coaching cohorts suggested words like “present” and “mindful” and I think those concepts were not in existence in 1949. This does not imply that highly creative people of that time were not likely mindful, just that psychologists hadn’t recognized that trait, or given it language yet. Are there other concepts that you consider innate to creativity that aren’t represented here?
BTW, fickle is an adjective that is indicated for the change scale. I would never choose that adjective. I can hear teachers calling me fickle from third grade forward. It was never a good thing. Why would I self-select that adjective, even if it describes me?
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A Post about Nothing
We come in this world with nothing. We go out with nothing. And in between, we learn that nothing is all we need.
In fact, we need a lot more of nothing to get all the somethings we desire.
Time to do nothing, think nothing. Permission to believe nothing. and the wisdom to say nothing.
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Happy Birthday to Me
It is my birthday, and I want for nothing in the world! I’ve decided to blog regularly during this year, to share with all of you the great tools I’ve been learning through life coach training with Martha Beck, Creativity Coach training with Eric Maisel, and Creative Problem Solving and Creativity Studies that I’m taking a masters in at Buffalo State College. This will be a great wealth of tools and how to apply them, and I hope to have fun along the way.
So stick with me this year and you can transform your creativity, maybe your relationship with food, (and hopefully your relationship with me
.) I look forward to helping you through my blog, through products I’ll be bringing out over the year, and in one on one coaching. I’d like to help you get it done, and get it out there. I know writers and creators are reluctant entrepreneurs. I can help you understand why, and how to do it in a way that feels best for you.
I’m doing this for me, as well as for you. I hope for a really great year! (Blow out the candles.) happy birthday to me.
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How to Eat
So many experts out there on how to eat… and hundreds more on how to help you be your own expert on how to eat – the mind-body connection coaches.
As of today, I’m connecting with my body in a new-fangled but not precisely woo-woo way. I may meditate. I will keep a food and satiety journal. I will likely free-write when I want to eat but I’m not hungry. (thanks to Julia Cameron and The Write Diet.)
But the biggest mind-body connection I’m going to have is a blood sugar monitor. Don’t worry, I’m not diabetic. But my apple shape attests to the fact that I don’t metabolize carbs well. (Which is why they call it a beer belly. Sadly, I don’t even drink beer.) I’m going to eat feel and test and see what is the exact right way to eat.
For me.
People like me need a different kind of expert – how not to eat. Or so I thought. As long as I’ve felt like my emotional eating was a problem that I couldn’t overcome, it has been a problem that I can’t overcome. (For readers who don’t know me personally, I’m fat.) We create what we fear. At some point in my experiment, I will explore what thoughts drive me to the pantry.
Now, I’m thinking about it all differently. I need to feel safe, like there’s always abundance for me – of all types. I need to shew away fear about my body, eating, even my creative work. (Definitely linked to eating to cope/procrastinate/soothe! Are you with me on that one?) I need thoughts of abundance…
There will be more chocolate cake. I have love and laughter. I can make my life work. It is utterly possible to eat and feel good about it. I can lose weight. I’m young and everything is ahead of me. I love my house, my work, my bike, and … rice cakes.
The world has been showing me great abundance lately. I’m internalizing it all and heading into a transformative year. Slim and rich… why not?
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Overwhelmed? Trying to Prioritize?
OMG, everyone of my clients is echoing what I’m feeling right now. Is it the heat? We feel overwhelmed and we find it’s difficult to decide which thing on our to-do list is worth doing today – will definitley be worthwhile… do youhave a hard time prioritizing?
If you work alone, then you can find you waste a lot of time on things that don’t work out, or you can fail to do a job, then get caught flat-footed when you’re not prepared for an opportunity. Afterall, there’s only so many hours in a day, right?
So, What’s A Gal to Do?
I’m leaving in a few days, and it would be easy to sort of fritter those days away. I have to pack, and make dinner. And it’s hot out. So I was trying to decide what might I do to finish something useful and big in those days. Because, I know that once I get engaged in a big project, I’me very productive. (Look at me, I’m blogging! Productive, right?) I used techniques from my recent training in CPS (Creative Problem Solving) to figure it out.
Step One: WMBAT
What Might Be All The… ways that I could use three days work to my advantage? I asked myself. The “might be” language is crucial. It triggers your brain to seek solutions. So I made a list – not of things that need doing before I leave (I’ve made that list 100 times) but of projects I could start that might take three days.
Step Two: Highlight
Looking at my short list of urgent tasks, I decided I wanted a converging task, not a diverging task. Let me explain – I didn’t want a research task that would open a whole new can of worms. I wanted a can of worms I’d already opened to be sorted, used in a recipe, or taken on a fishing trip. I wanted to do something that created a finished product so that my subsequent weeklong absence wouldn’t dissipate the value of the work/time I’d spent. I picked or “hit” with a marker the tasks that fit the criteria I had in mind.
Step Three: POINt Analysis (A version of POINt was developed in the early 1980’s by Foucar-Szock, Shephard & Firestien)
I took two options through POINt analysis. POINt stands for (Pluses, Opportunities, Issues, and New thinking)
So for each of two options, I listed:
P/+ Why doing that taks would be good?
O/? What might doing this cause to happen? It might….
I/- What are the issues? Like I’m not ready… or I don’t feel like doing it… or I’m not sure I need this work yet.
Nt/new What new ideas can you bring to each of your issues to make the idea stronger? work better? make it viable?
It made my choice easy. I went from vaguely guilty and a little fuzzy about how I might work for the next three days to energized to undertake a project that’s been on the boards for a long time. Three days… can I get it done? See how fun that’s become?
Try it. You’ll like it.
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A New Platform – Kickstarter
I recently learned about Kickstarter from my friend Phil Simon. If you don’t know about it, it’s a crowd-sourcing site. You can fundraise for artistic projects, and as a funder, you can see what projects people are up to, and see what kinds of personal perks you might get for making even a small donation. If you plan on buying the resulting book, you can find many donation options that include a free book.
Phil Simon’s fourth book is called: A New Platform, and he’s a tech specialist. Here’s Phil’s link: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/705402671/the-age-of-the-platform-my-fourth-book. He’s used this method successfully before, and you can see he’s halfway there again this time. Pay attention to what perks he offers and how he represents his project. Kickstarter can be a powerful tool for many authors who want to defray the costs of self-publishing, marketing and design.
Check out Kickstarter and Phil’s project.
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You’re In Luck gets a Kickstart?
I’ve submitted a project to Kickstarter.com. Has anyone else used this crowdsourcing tool? I’m hoping Kickstarter can help us raise $5,000 to bring our book, You’re In Luck, to market. So far, the book itsef is written in first draft; the characters are all knitted. (No that isn’t a typo! We knitted all the characters and they’re adorable!) And the minature scenes are photographed for Hannah’s side of the world. (stateside story and photography still tk). We need the book designed, published and marketed to get it out to kids with military family members. It will support those kids and their own contributions – missing their family members in harm’s way – and support the military who are over there to protect us all.
I envision taking this book and Lucky postcards to schools (4th through 6th graders) to help them reach out to people still in service in Afghanistan and around the world.
The Story Behind You’re In Luck: A few years ago, my niece Hannah graduated and was commissioned into the Navy on the same day that we all met Barack Obama. (He handed out the diplomas.) It was exciting to say the least, less so a few months later when she was deployed off the coast of Somalia and trained with the Navy Seals to board pirate ships.
We worried, of course. What else can you do? You’re powerless, or so it seems. At Christmas that year, I gathered up luck tokens and tokens of things that are supposed to protect people and sent them all to her in a tin box. People from our family, the neighborhood, and my husband’s family all contributed, so she had a real four-leaf clover that my mother inlaw found in her teen years; she had a real horseshoe that my neighbor a ferrier made for her. And many other symbols of luck: the number 7, a ladybug, stars, acorns, pigs and more.
Well now I’ve written a book called You’re In Luck for middle readers, which is a fictionalized story about my niece Hannah and her niece/nephews, Jack and Lily, in Columbus, Ohio. In the story they have a mother’s helper, Birdy who considers herself a Luckologist. Jack is a worrier, and Birdy just wants to help, so the three kids come up with a way to help the kids’ aunt Hannah who is away at war. They send her everything that they can find that’ll give her luck and protection.
In an underworld fantasy world of the lucky dolphin.
Birdy takes the tin box in to her classroom and everyone wants to do it, so they make postcards and send luck to every military family member or friend of the kids in their classroom. Meanwhile, on board her Navy ship Hannah goes overboard and is rescued by a dolphin who teaches her a bit about luck and gratitude.
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