note of your insights from these inquiries that illuminating your personal approach, and begin to redesign your life in a way that will maximize your creative potential.
SECRET 3
Following Your Fascinations
It takes courage to follow your fascinations, wherever they may lead. Yet, creativity demands that you trust and stay on the path despite obstacles. The good news is that it's possible.
Taking Courageous Risks
Intuiting New Pathways
Developing Staying Power
Heeding Your Heart
If you can put fear aside, you're unstoppable.
—JANET HAGBERG, WRITER AND ACTIVIST
It's one thing to have an idea, but it's quite another to trust your idea and follow where it leads. Following your fascinations means taking risks and venturing out from the safe harbor to the open seas. In fact, according to Betsy Morscher and Barbara Schindler Jones, authors of Risk-Taking for Women, the original meaning of risk from the Greek is “to sail around a cliff.” All of the women profiled in this book dared to pursue their inspirations into uncharted waters and have useful advice on the topic.
Taking Courageous Risks
There are two kinds of risks: impulsive risks and calculated risks. Impulsive risks unfold in the spur of the moment, unplanned. Often our intuition urges us to try something new and different. A few years ago I impulsively bought a handpainted table, which I enjoy every day. This table has also inspired me to try painting tables myself. No harm done. Often we get creative impulses to throw sand in a painting, print out a story on purple paper, or design a dress out of scarves. These spontaneous risks are part of the innovation process. Yet, sometimes impulsive risks, like being too candid with a client, teaming up with a business partner you hardly know, or taking on an acting role that doesn't suit you, can backfire. The old expression “Look before you leap” has some intelligence to it. Each of us has to learn our own balance between being carefree and careless. As women, many of us have been taught to be too cautious, too nice, and to play it too safe. That overly conservative style may inhibit the emergence of your creative self. To be truly creative, you must be willing to try and fail, and then get over it. You do, however, need to be able to determine which impulsive risks could be dangerous to your wellbeing, so you can make wise choices.
On the other hand, calculated risks are planned out and strategic, selected with forethought and preparation. A calculated risk might be taking a trip to Santa Barbara to see if you really want to live there. Part of the process would include a plan to check out employment/business opportunities in your line of work, meetings with a few realtors to learn about housing prices, and driving around and talking with people to learn more about the pros and cons of the city. Calculated risks propel us forward in a positive manner.
A calculated risk unlocked the potential of stress management consultant and humorist Loretta LaRoche. Divorced in her late thirties, Loretta followed her inner attraction for exercise and dance in her personal post-divorce quest to “go from dumpy to divine.”
And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.
—ERICA JONG, WRITER
A single mother with three children, her first job was at a fitness center that hired her to teach people how to put exercise to music, which they thought was extremely cutting-edge. She hung on for a year but couldn't handle the meetings, sexism, and politicking of it all. So she took a risk: “I decided to send some invitations to people I knew to join me in an exercise/dance class at a local Elks Hall. And the only way I could afford to do it was to use a monthly support check from my ex-husband to rent the hall and just pray on bended knee that someone would pay and show up. Seventy-five women came. That was the beginning of my entrepreneurial career.”
Loretta's story is a good example of a planned risk—she didn't hawk everything she owned, she used a specific amount of money. As her business grew, Loretta went on to score investors, open her own fitness center, and add stress and wellness classes to the mix. A nurse colleague of hers encouraged her to risk further and do a daylong stress program using humor. Loretta said to her, “You've got to be crazy—a whole day? What the heck am I going to do? Yeah—I'm funny, but this is a whole other thing.” Loretta always had the gift of humor, but her friend encouraged her to blend humor and its healing properties. So Loretta created what she called “a day in a kindergarten class,” complete with coloring, musical chairs, and research on humor. People kept calling and asking for more.
As she worked with the combination, Loretta realized that stressed people often distort reality, and her humor highlights these distortions. By valuing her observations, Loretta developed a unique approach of teaching her audiences cognitive restructuring—how to change our negative thinking habits. Laughter is a great teacher in Loretta's hands, and her down-home views reflect back to us our overreactions to day-to-day inconveniences or irritations. Her mission now is to “abolish global whining.” She works with the faculty of the esteemed Mind-Body Clinic at Deaconess/Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, speaks to packed audiences, has award-winning videos on PBS, and just published a new book.
I have to thank my husband for discovering her. A PBS devotee who usually watches science programs that are too technical for me, he came upon Loretta while channel-surfing and insisted that I watch her show, The Joy of Stress, since I've also spent years training people in stress management. I found Loretta captivating and refreshing and knew she was destined to be a blockbuster. My husband and I have listened to her routines repeatedly, and each time we discover a new nuance. Daring to take risk led Loretta to the creation of a new methodology for reducing stress.
Sometimes new enticements take us by surprise. Dancer Leslie Neal happened to hear about another choreographer who was working with women in prisons in Seattle. Shortly after hearing the story, Leslie woke up one morning with a jolt and a commitment to try it herself: “It's been like a calling. Whenever I begin to struggle, more opportunities come. I've found what I believe I am truly supposed to be doing, and I'm very grateful.” Within six months of this revelation, Leslie initiated “Inside Out—Expressive Arts Workshops for Incarcerated Women” at the Broward Correctional Institution in Florida, which is now the longest ongoing prison arts program in the state and has received national attention for its success. Since 1994, it has been implemented in two other facilities in Florida, and Leslie has taught workshops at women's prisons in Michigan and California.
The purpose of “Inside Out” is to utilize art-making and creative expression as tools to enhance women's self-esteem and confidence, to expand communication skills and self-expression, and to encourage personal change.
As for me, prizes mean nothing. My prize is my work.
—KATHARINE HEPBURN, ACTRESS
With research support, Leslie is now working to develop a curriculum guide for other prison arts programs. As she writes about her work in her article, “Miles from Nowhere, Teaching Dance in Prison” in High Performance, Leslie says, “Why do I go to prison once a week? I go because I feel safer there, with them, than I do outside. I go because now they expect me to come. I go because I believe in the change that we have all experienced with each other.
