You have to be able to market it, you have to want it and stay excited about it, and if it doesn't meet all of those tests, don't do it.”
Congrats if you have found your focus! If nothing feels right yet, try doing this Creativity Catalysts Exercise and start over. This is a great exercise to stimulate new ideas or check the decision you just made.
Exercise: Creativity Catalysts Exercise
We know we are creative beings. Yet we are also very aware that sometimes our creativity stalls, plays tricks on us, or appears to have vanished completely. It is at those moments that we need to reconnect with the vitality around our creative process or project and leverage our inspirational powers to stimulate our ability to make new connections.
The following tips are meant to arouse your natural creative gifts so that you can surmount the obstacles in your journey and achieve maximum potential. Have fun with them, and enjoy the wonder of discovery as you expand your imagination and allow yourself to be a conduit for excellent work!
Keep a daily excitement list about why you are passionate and committed to your exploration or creative project or hypothesis.
Visualize your end result and make a collage of images that support that vision and post it where you can see it regularly.
Take a field trip relating to your project to explore a particular facet of it.
Experience your project using the three learning styles of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic experiences.
Draw a picture of it, make a mind-map of it, or take a photo of it and play with it on Photoshop.
Talk about your project on a tape or video recorder or teach a real or pretend class on the topic to an audience or to your friends.
Act it out with props and maybe even other characters.
Record and follow your intuitive clues relating to your project.
Go to a toy store and select a toy that reminds you of your project and let your inner child play with it.
Set up a series of experiments related to your project with hypotheses to test out.
Exercise regularly to clear your head.
Find someone who is an opposite thinker (a devil's advocate) from you, tell them about your project, and let them challenge or stimulate your thinking.
Select inspiring music that resonates with your project and play it at the beginning of your work time.
Create a water experience—sit in a hot tub, go swimming, take a shower, or visit a spa to increase your flow of ideas.
Take your project away with you as a companion and see how it changes in a new setting.
Meditate or pray about your topic.
Find a symbol of your creative process and keep it close by when you are working or contemplating.
Initiate creative rituals, such as lighting a candle or reading before you begin, to invite your muse into the project.
Look at visual representations relating to your project, like paintings, special destinations, or actual products related to your story.
Send your inner critic to a foreign land so you feel free to make mistakes and cast about for new connections.
Change your location—work on your project in bed, outside in nature, in a museum, or simply change rooms.
Take a day or two off so you can take a fresh look at your project when you return.
Keep a file card packet in your office, car, etc. to jot down all related ideas and thoughts, even if their meaning is a mystery.
Read related books and articles and take notes to jog your inspiration.
Look for the metaphors—how is your proposal like an artichoke or a trolley car?
Keep a separate journal or computer file for each project and keep track of new impressions.
At the right time, share your project with trusted others and gather new insights.
Take creative risks using your fascinations as a guide to unique explorations.
GETTING HEART-FOCUSED
The word “passion” is often thought to be an overused word these days, however it does help you to get heart centered on what you want your work and your life to be about. The messages that you get from your heart chakra are a guide, and those messages emanate from your life purpose and your fascinations. Dr. Gayle Madeleine Randall, MD, is a physician, scientist, medical professor, cross-cultural practitioner, and a writer. Madeleine says, “One of the secrets to my success is always following my passion, and listening to what my heart tells me to do. Whether or not it conforms to what other people think I should do or other people think they should do. Early in my cross cultural exploration at UCLA, I helped set up a series of conferences on what we then called ‘alternative medicine.’ It was considered pretty out there. However, surprisingly, it was so well received that it just grew and grew. I think that one of the secrets is to follow your passion, because it's trying to tell you something. Yes, of course, you should use your mind, logic, and knowledge that you can't run after everything. Because then you're just going to be running, from thing to thing, diluting your energy. In my experience almost everything I have done has gone toward the same core purpose, and that is ultimately to help people and myself, and to heal the planet. Don't forget about Mother Earth and that we make up nine-tenths of the planet.”
Multimillionaire mom Sheri McConnell, CEO of the Smart Women's Institute of Entrepreneurial Learning, is an expert on helping women start businesses and build associations or membership sites. When I asked her where she first got the idea for membership sites, Sheri said, “You know, it came from passion. I was at home, I had just had my third little girl, and at that point in my life I totally needed other adults. I was seeking other women to hang out with so I could be a little sane, since it was the first time in my life that I wasn't working toward a degree or working in the corporate world. It was the first time I gave myself permission to relax and look at my passion, and I was about twenty-eight at that point. I had left Verizon Wireless after two or three years and so I had time to think, ‘what do I love?’ At that point, having already gotten my master's in Organizational Management, I knew it was writing, because that's all you do in your master's program is write, write, write. I became the regional representative for the International Women's Writing Guild in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. I was doing all this work for them and then I decided that I ought to do all this work for my own business. So that's how I got started with the association model, but I took the traditional model and put it on the Internet and merged the best of both models.”
As one of the hosts of Conscious Talk radio, along with her husband, Rob Spears, Brenda does weekly interviews that bring forth new ideas that help people live a more conscious life in a down-to-earth, boots on the ground style, while empowering her listeners to live in accordance with their deeper values. Brenda began her career as an aspiring actress and television host, but was removed from that limelight when she was diagnosed with her third bout of cancer.
