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My intention with each of these posts is that you’re challenged to interrupt the noise and routine in your life, just for a moment, to think more deeply about what really matters in life… your relationship with yourself and with others in your professional and personal life.
Action Summary
- Pursue activities that put you in ‘Flow’
- Reflect on how you individually and collaboratively go about solving problems
The WHY:
You are probably more creative than you think you are. The reality is you have an enormous capacity to create. You create with your thoughts, your words, your actions and your results. You create through your collaborative work with the various relationships you have in your professional and personal life.
While being ‘creative’ is often aligned with being artistic in some form or other, your capacity to create is practiced through your individual approach to solving everyday problems.
A key question to consider is what feeds your own creativity? Another way to consider this question is to ask what activities cause you to be ‘in flow’?
Flow is a term used by positive psychology research Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi1 and means to be engaged in something that requires you to apply your competency at a maximum level and at the same time, whatever it is you’re engaged in doing, that the activity itself feeds your soul to the point that time seems to stand still, and you get lost in the moment of the activity.
What activities feed your creativity? Is it playing music, your work, meditating, exercising, yoga, learning something new, a hobby?
Building Creativity Helps Builds Trust
Feeding your creative self helps to re-create you and as you pursue activities that feed your creative self you are also feeding your sense of self-trust. And as you work on increasing your confidence for self-trust, that helps to build your courage to trust others and your combined character and competency required to earn others’ trust.
I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Edward de Bono on a number of occasions and admire his thirst for learning and desire to help us improve the way we think about our lives. de Bono has been quoted as saying:
“Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.”
My best to you for now, and remember when you intentionally improve the life of others in your professional and personal relationships, you set up the power of reciprocity … what you give out, you get back.
