heal me. I go because I am a woman, and in them I see parts of me.”
I met Leslie at a Common Boundary conference on creativity. Recently she took another risk and moved her home away from her warehouse dance studio and into a cedar cabin on an acre and a half of land so she could honor her need to connect with the peacefulness of the country: “In my studio in Miami, I created everything I had ever dreamed of having. It's been hard to move from that physical place because it represents many aspects of my driven, emerging artist over the past ten years. But now, as I move into my forties, I want to live in a place where I can feel the ground underneath me, see the stars at night, watch the cycles of the moon, and just be present in that. My inner voice is telling me to seek out those things that nurture me and feed me both spiritually and creatively.” Leslie's courage to experiment, nudged by her strong intuitive sense of what's right for her, has made all the difference in her life.
Impulsive or planned risks can be either positive or negative. Negative risk taking can be reckless, dangerous, harmful to yourself and others, and even fatal.
Solitude, says the moon shell. Every person, especially every woman, should be alone sometime during the year, some part of each week, and each day.
—ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH WRITER
Investing your life savings into a business that doesn't feel intuitively right to you or skipping your pap smear for two years are examples of negative risks. Positive risks involve challenging yourself, following your creative hunches, and testing your strengths. Positive risks include going back to school to pursue a subject you love, going to Paris because you feel called there, or taking voice lessons. Positive risk takers support themselves with a plan of action, even if the plan is to just experiment with an idea or a strategy. Stepping out of the boundaries of security and stretching to induce growth are essential to positive risking. While we may be fortunate to have a strong support system, positive risk taking is a solo trip. It is an individual process of honoring your own belief system, pursuing a trail of clues, and dedicating yourself wholeheartedly to a path. The women in this chapter all took calculated risks based on the confidence that they were choosing the right course of action, even though there were no guarantees. They were curious, compelled, or challenged, but they also chose carefully to take a risk on behalf of their growth. In general, creative women don't worship the god of security; rather they respond to their inner urges to try out new inklings.
Challenge: YOUR RISK-TAKING HISTORY
What is your personal history as a risk taker? Do you take calculated risks—where you planned out the steps, or impulsive risks—with no forethought or preparation? Identify the key elements of your successes and failures with both kinds of risks. Then write down a risk profile for yourself with guidelines for future risk taking based on your past experience and natural abilities.
Intuiting New Pathways
The story of Rosette Gault, the inventor and developer of paper clay, illustrates how important following intuitive hunches is in cultivating creativity. After many years of running a successful ceramic design studio, and having become a specialist in the art of making eggshell-thin porcelain sculpture, Rosette acknowledged that she needed to invigorate her creative process.
Rosette applied for and received a grant from the Banff Center for the Arts in Canada and set out on a self-declared sabbatical. Twenty years earlier, while in graduate school, Rosette had questioned her teachers about the fragility of clay and why once the clay form cracks, you can't repair it. She was told, logically enough, that “clay shrinks,” but she still wondered what material might prevent these stress fractures. Experts told her that some high-tech material would have to be developed to stop the shrinking, and if it ever was invented, it would cost a fortune to use and wouldn't be practical for use in ceramics. But Rosette stayed loyal to her dream of finding an easy answer, explaining, “The puzzle had been bugging me in the back of my mind for all those years.”
While at Banff, she and another artist, a papermaker, fired clay and recycled paper together, and noted its lightness after firing. Intrigued, Rosette experimented further, trying different combinations. One day, she says, “I mixed up a batch of old brochures into pulp and put it into the clay and made a giant piece much larger than I normally would to test my limit. The form proceeded to crack while it dried. I came back to the dried-out work a couple of days later and looked at the crack and said, ‘Oh yuck.’ So I thought, it'll probably crack again but I'll just smear some of my paper clay emulsion mixture right into the crack, so I did.
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
—HELEN KELLER, ACTIVIST
“What did I have to lose since I had already lost the piece? I thought, well, if it behaves like normal, which I expected it to do, I figured it would crack again as it dried. Then I forgot all about it and a few days later I came back, but to my surprise, the crack was gone. The piece was dry and whole.”
Not quite believing what had happened, Rosette kept quietly testing her mixture, and was fortunate enough to extend her stay at Banff to continue her analysis. Her new blend kept on working. After checking professional journals and trying her combination in different climates, she began to realize that she had indeed invented a new form of clay. Her invention (which recently was awarded a United States patent) has transformed ceramics forever. Her early puzzlement about why clay cracks emerged again mid-career to nudge her to transform the laws of ceramic history.
Another innovator, Joline Godfrey, founded Independent Means, Inc., and the nonprofit group An Income of Her Own. Both organizations are doing breakthrough work in teaching girls the values and skills of financial independence as they grow up. Joline's hope is that this next generation of girls will become more economically responsible for themselves than previous generations of women have been. One of their programs is called Camp $tartupTM, a summer program that teaches teenage girls how to run their own businesses.
I asked Joline how she came upon this incredible idea. “I had written my first book, Our Wildest Dreams: Women Entrepreneurs Making Money, Having Fun, Doing Good, she recalls, “and by the time I got to the last chapter, my head said, ‘This is crazy. . . . Here I've spent all this time listening to and writing about women, and if we continue to focus on women, we're doing remedial work.’ The action has got to be with girls so that in ten years I'm not writing another book on issues women face because nobody talked to them when they were fourteen.” Independent Means, Inc., now has ten full-time employees plus camp staff. They have reached over 50,000 girls, so Joline's vision is paying off. Like Rosette, she paid attention to her awareness that there was the potential for things to be better. Both of them created processes designed to prevent problems, whether it be cracking clay or female poverty.
Like me, Joline has a master's degree from the Boston University School of Social Work. All through her career, Joline's choices have reflected the social worker's commitment to social change. She was one of the first corporate social workers in the field, when she worked for Polaroid Corporation, and was continually asked to speak about her experiences in this new frontier. Committed to the potential for change in the workplace, she inspired many to follow her lead. Joline is such a savvy networker and collaborator that when she was ready to move on from Polaroid, she convinced them to fund her training company.
The idea for her first book, Our Wildest Dreams, came about after she wrote a letter to Inc. magazine in April 1989, blasting them for ignoring women entrepreneurs despite their numbers, and ended up being invited to lunch with George Gendron, editor-inchief. There, she proposed the project of compiling a database of successful women entrepreneurs across the country and creating roundtable dinners to make these enterprising women more visible. The conversations among women at these Inc. dinners
