creativity

As the summer vacations draw to a close and the Fall’s back-to-work, back-to-school, mentality gains hold over all of us, I wonder how many people are approaching it refreshed, renewed and full of ideas. Isn’t that what summer vacation is all about? A bit of time off to relax, to re-create and juice up our batteries.

For those that work the daily grind, maybe you couldn’t take a summer break because they laid-off half your team and you’re stuck working the extra load. Maybe your break didn’t really feel restful because you wanted to catch up on all those things in your life you meant to do weeks or months ago, which you now realize were much more work that you thought and it ate up all your free time for fun or enjoyment. You just feel cheated out of Me-time.

Ahhh, enjoyment, pleasures and life fully lived. Are we even aware of what this state of joy feels like? So much of our free time, and the time in between one thing to another, or even, at the same time while we are doing something else; we check emails, texts, tweets, posts, links, videos, news, weather, jokes……..yatta yatta yatta.

What is with the world that they must constantly check in with their networks social or otherwise? Similar to the empty calories of fast food which is starving the population of nutrition and delicious taste, so is our compulsion to avoid a moment of nothingness. It’s starving our creativity and creative flow.



Embed from Getty Images

Go ahead and try it. Try one day, one hour of not touching your phone while you go about your day; waiting at the bus stop, at the ATM machine, for your laté. Like a smoker, you may out of habit feel the need to touch the portal’s smooth surface.

But wait. Resist. And in the absence you will feel something. You will actually feel something emanating from within yourself.

You may look around in your surroundings. You will be observing the people, the place, the weather. You may notice things that you never would have seen. And in this seeing you start to think, take mental notes, cross-reference to other times or feelings. You become aware of yourself and what you want to do.

In this space, this do-nothing space, you start the process of creativity.

Why resist boredom and fill it with texts, facebook and the like? What we equate with boredom is really stillness, that moment where we can hear ourselves.

Interestingly, Public Radio’s WNYC sponsored a “Bored and Brilliant” campaign earlier this year. They created a podcast and series of exercises to help people get off their phones and confront boredom. http://www.wnyc.org/series/bored-and-brilliant/ The challenge was accepted by thousands of people who wanted to go phone-free, disconnect, observe, and embrace boredom. What did they find? Not so surprising stuff — by filling up all the empty moments in our lives, we’ve been keeping ourselves from experiencing downtime.

Does that explain the exhaustion, the stress illnesses, and general lack of joy and happiness in our world?! Does that explain the sheep mentality, trending topics and the illusory belief that we are engaging in meaningful conversations?

Are we so afraid of a moment of stillness? A moment that we so desperately need in order to nurture and grow the creative sparks that flash for a brief moment, not likely to return.

That creativity you seek for your next great project, for your ongoing practice or for climbing that corporate ladder is there within you. It is there in the momentary stillness that you let yourself feel, get stirred-up by it and allow it’s light to shine outward.

Recognize how you may be starving yourself of boredom. And once you roll around in boredom for a time, you will be ready to jump in to the next fun project full of zeal and renewed energy.

By depriving yourself of a bit of boredom, you run the risk of constantly being on the treadmill, in the social sphere, work sphere and every other aspect of your life. It’s O.K to be bored, do nothing for a short time – in fact creativity is born from it.

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August Book Review: Creativity: Flow and The Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

http://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow?language=en http://www.wnyc.org/series/bored-and-brilliant/

By Susanna Oreskovic

Welcome to Creative Collisions MTL and welcome to 2014. In this first post, I wanted to give you a backgrounder on how this blog came about and what you can expect to find here. You can find more about me on the What’s this all about page.

How this blog came to be:

Over time I have come to realize that many people are either creative, or want to be more creative. The ones we call talented are those that can successfully balance their creative expressions and channel it into a means to make some money, that is, make a business of it.

Just as much as I believe that every single person is creative (more on this later) I also believe that pegging ourselves as Right Brain or Left Brain types is a dumbing-down simplification that fills headlines pages on the internet.

Creative Collisions MTL came to me at a time when I was looking to find ways to share my business knowledge and develop my creative expression, primarily through photography. From others I sensed there was some mystique about knowing the sides of a ledger just as much as there was, for me, a sense of mystique about knowing how the creative and art world worked.

A taste of what can you expect to find here:

I love analogies and baked goods, so today I will start with Pie. You are a Pie! You are not a piece of pie but a whole pie, wholly delicious.

With all this talk about Left brain and Right brain we might think we are doomed to always be flawed. Never feeling good enough on the left brain side to think we can handle the analytical, pragmatic and sometimes routine side of business or never feeling good enough on the right brain side to think we can be the expressive artist or creative genius that we feel deep inside.

My mission is to debunk this myth, to prove that we all operate from a whole brain perspective, that you can learn ways to become more creative or imaginative or decisive or logical or any number of things. There is no flaw in you or the type of brain you think you operate by because like a pie, you are wholly delicious, talented, organized….etc.

The way to pie-dom

In showing you the way to being creative and business minded Creative Collisions MTL will bring to you the inside workings of business minded artists in a series of interviews. This takes some footwork so we are actively seeking people who would like to contribute some time and energy. You will reap benefits far greater than what you contribute. Make sure you go to the Contact us page to let us know your interest regardless of where you live.

We will also bring you teachable tidbits that you can use to become more creative, more business minded, more innovative….just more great information that you can use to move you toward your own goals and success. This may look like ways to get unstuck, or how to manage your workflow, or the dreaded interruptions we incessantly face every day. Living life is a challenge but living your best life doesn’t have to be. Stick with us and you may just be having your cake and eating it to!

Here’s to a delicious 2014.