Rise & Grind - Creativity

Rise & Grind - Creativity - Liam And Co.

 

Elizabeth Gilbert's (Eat, Pray, Love) Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear is the inspiration behind this weeks topic. Gilbert reminds us to not allow inspiration to be muted by our fears. This book is broken up into six sections: Courage, Enchantment, Permission, Persistence, Trust and Divinity. It doesn't matter your career or ambitions, there is creativity to be found in all of us - whether you are looking for inspiration, making artwork, writing a book, looking for a new way to look at your work, or infuse joy and passion into your everyday, Gilbert leads you there. Read on for some of our favorite takeaways from this book.

 

 

Cultivate Creativity

3 Steps To Cultivate Creativity in Everything You Do
1. Have a daily starting ritual to get your creative process going. 
  • It's almost impossible to be creative on demand. Not even the most genius writers, musicians, and painters can produce perfection with the snap of a finger. So how do they churn out brilliance one after the other, on a regular basis? They develop a ritual and hold themselves to it every day. This can be as simple as priming yourself to "get in the zone." From organizing your desk, to kick-starting your mind with a song that gets your juices flowing, it does not matter what your starting ritual looks like as long as it signals to your mind that "It's go time!"
2. Use a project box to organize, prepare and recalibrate yourself at work. 
  • Every time you start a new creative project, use a simple cardboard box (old Amazon boxes work great) and write the name of the project on it. Put all of the resources and materials in the box. Anything you might need to complete the project goes in.
Why is this helpful? A few reasons:
    1. It represents your commitment to the project. As long as you have items in the box, you still have work to do. 
    2. It helps you understand your progress. Even if it gets delayed, you can always come back and pick up right where you left off. 
    3. Ideally, if you have something in this box that you might need for other things, it could be motivating for you finish the project to eliminate the back and forth. 
    • It doesn't have to be a box, but the idea is the same. Create a space (drawer, folder, desk, desktop folder) as a place to organize your ideas, keep them in order and show your progress. 
    3. Make it easy to pick up work again by leaving right in the middle of something.
    • This step is recommended by a lot of high-performance individuals, and for good reason, it works. The original source of the idea is attributed to Ernest Hemingway. This step, combined with the starting ritual will do wonders to keep your project momentum rolling. Hemingway would always finish his writing sessions in the middle of a sentence. By doing this, he would return the next day and be forced to put his brain right back where he left off the day before. Hitting the ground running, so to speak. 

       

       

      Creative Thinking
      Instead of a typical list of ideas around helping to cultivate creativity, here is a list of 9 Common Thinking Biases. Often when thinking about improving something about ourselves, we focus on what we need to DO. However, some sometimes we can find a lot of clarity in NOT DOING things. Some of the best dieting results come from not what we eat, but rather in what we don't eat. This list of 9 Common Thinking Biases helps to see where you might be getting hung up in your thinking.  Recognizing where you are limiting yourself may help to set your mind free for more creativity and peace.

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