Creative Steps

The Washington Post arranged for Joshua Bell, one of the world’s finest classical musicians, to busk incognito in a metro station.  They wanted to know if the average commuter would spot musical ‘greatness’ if they saw it unannounced. They called it an “experiment in context, perception and priorities.” What do you think happened?

Would you know world class if you saw it?

For 43 minutes, the internationally acclaimed virtuoso performed six classical pieces, “some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made.”

1,097 people passed by, few stopped to appreciate the music and 27 people gave a total of $32.

What does this tell us? On this occasion, in a ‘banal setting at an inconvenient time’ beauty did not transcend. It seems that context is important.

We would perhaps like to think that we would know world class if we saw it, but the truth is that without a context great work can be hard to appreciate.

We see this is other walks of life too: art treasures can be lost in attics; in many fields the greats are only discovered years after their deaths; different stores retail the same product at vastly different prices.

For aspiring creatives this holds a lesson; it can be hard to appreciate the quality of our own work as we tend to see it in a particular ‘personal’ context. Familiarity can allow us to overlook the quality of our work and, conversely, out intentions can cause us to underestimate its flaws.

This story also instructs us not to believe the feedback we receive. Joshua Bell was used to reverential audiences but was ignored in the subway. His work was the same in both situations; it was the context that was different.

Pay Attention

The context on this occasion was the daily commute. People do not expect to see a world class musician performing as a busker and so they tended to overlook it when it actually happened. The other point is that their minds were probably elsewhere; already in work, or perhaps still in bed, or on some other daydream.

If we are able to miss something of this quality then what else do we miss?

Without the ability to pay attention we can miss so much that the world has to offer. And if we are in the business of creating art we might benefit from noticing what is going on around us.

The daily commute can train us to focus inward, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Every time a child walked past he or she tried to stop and watch (and the parent hurried the child along). Is this because the children are more open to having new experiences?

As a general rule we should remember that we need to be present in order to appreciate life and similarly we need to bepresent to create art. We do not know when the next world class performance will be staged right before our eyes.

Pay attention is the third creative steps ebook.

Click here for the Washington Post article.

Tags: creative steps, Creativity Coaching, Feedback, Pay Attention
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Creative Steps and Creativity Coaching Concepts

Creative Steps is a nine-module, multi-media, creativity course for people who want to learn how to coach themselves to increasing creativity. It is for people who want to more consistently and effectively connect with their creative side.

Creative Steps is an online coaching course for seasoned professionals who want to take the quantity and quality of their creative work to the next level.

It is also a creativity guide for passionate amateurs who have always wanted to accomplish a creative dream and in the process become more fully self-expressed.

Each module is one step on the journey to creativity and each module presents the following:

downloadable tools and techniques to enhance creativity;
coaching material to help you overcome whatever is holding you back move towards increasing creativity;
case studies of famous people and enthusiastic amateurs;
exercises and tasks so you can flex your creative muscles and trial different ways of working;
tricks of the trade and lots of bonus material.

The course is practical; this is because we learn best through doing. You will be asked to take on new behaviours, try new ways of thinking and you will also be encouraged to work on a creative project of your own.

The Role of Coaching

Creativity Coaching was originally conceived to help people achieve more of what they want in their creative lives. It draws on many of the best concepts of life coaching, nlp and other fields of performance improvement to help people move towards increasing creativity.

This course helps you learn to be your own creative coach.

We assume you have no experience of coaching or the tools and techniques employed in this field. That is why everything you need is here.

For those new to coaching, the GROW model is a great starting point. It is one of the basic of coaching concepts introduced on creative steps. It is a framework that helps you unpack a problem and select the appropriate next step without getting into overwhelm. Use the structure whenever you feel a little directionless or when there is ‘a dip in the road’.

Goals - What do you want?
Reality - What’s happening now?
Options - What could you do?
What next? - What will you do?

You will learn more about the GROW model in the download area. You will also learn many other creativity coaching concepts.

If you feel you would benefit from creativity coaching then you might be interested to know that for a limited time my Information-Packed, Multi-Media Online Creativity Coaching Course is offered free of charge!

Unlimited Free Creativity Coaching

FIND OUT MORE

Tags: Coach Yourself, coaching concepts, Creativity Coaching, Increasing Creativity
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Life is better when you can fully about express yourself; and that means accepting yourself for who you are, and believing that this has value.

We can spend our whole lives living by other people’s rules or being dominated by someone else’s beliefs of how we should be.

As Oscar Wilde said “be yourself: everyone else is already taken“

Sometimes we look at what others are doing and our fear or envy knocks us off our own path. We spend far too much time worried about what other people are thinking, not realising that they, too, are absorbed in their own worries and not at all interested in us!

Pursuing our own creativity is a great way to become more ourselves. When we are creating we are living in the present, we exist with purpose and assurance. We experience the world more fully as we are fully engaged and able to be fully present, we see things more clearly and we are seen differently by our friends and families. Our head is acting in concert with what we feel in our hearts and in our guts – that is to say, we become congruent.

Tags: Coach Yourself, Creativity Coaching, express yourself, Increasing Creativity
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I have heard lots of opinion discussing the genesis of genius – born or made?

We all want to know if it is nature or nurture that makes us creative. 

Most of these opinions are interesting because of what we learn about the speaker and the times in which they live, rather than what we learn about genius.

Take this apparently anachronistic study by a man named Galton in the 1860s. 

Galton devised a system to grade natural ability in a range from genius to idiocy in ‘14 classes of mental ability each being separated by its neighbours by equal grades’.

He then set out to discover if there was such a thing as ‘Hereditary Genius’ by seeing if the family members of illustrious or eminent men were more or less likely to be illustrious or eminent themselves.

(In Galton’s classification being ‘illustrious’ was better than being ‘eminent’ which in turn was better than being at the next grade; a grade he called ‘judge’)

Galton, who coined the phrase ‘nature versus nurture’, studied men from many walks of life and this is what he discovered from the creative world:

Poets – nature versus nurture?

56 poets were studied and 40% were found to have eminently gifted relations and these relations were largely confined the poet’s immediate families. He concluded “poets are clearly not founders of families.” He believed that the rare combination of qualities required to be an eminent poet was not sustainable in inheritance. He felt that the “inheritance of the strong sensuous tastes of the poet without the controlling faculties may lead to complete failure.”

Musicians – is it in the genes?

26 of the 120 eminent musicians studied had illustrious relatives. As with the poets these eminent kin were found mainly among the closest relatives. There was a notable absence of eminent relations through the female line among the musicians.

Painters – what about them?

42 painters were studied with the following conclusion: “the rareness with which artistic eminence passes through more than two degrees of kinship is almost as noticeable as in the case of musicians and poets.”

What do we learn?

Poets don’t make good fathers?
If you want to be a musician make sure there are no musicians in your mother’s family?
Don’t start to paint if there is an eminent painter in your family?

150 years later…. do we now believe that it is nature or nurture?

I recently spoke with the parents of a keen and talented 8 year old guitar player.  They were angry and frustrated that their child’s teacher had told their son that he would never make it as a musician because “your parents are not musical”. Although angry at these comments, something seemed to tell the young boy’s parents that the teacher might have a point.

We all have beliefs about our own position in life – what could we have done with slightly different genes or slightly better parents? And beliefs guide our choices in life…

What was that music teacher’s belief? Why was he a teacher and not he a musician?

And why was Galton inspired to study Hereditary Genius? Perhaps it was the influence of his illustrious cousin, a certain Charles Darwin.

Tags: Belief, Creative Genius
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The ease of success

Sometimes when things are really working you might feel that there is an element of flow; an ease and effortlessness in which you act naturally and unconsciously. This is the ease of success.

You find this ease when you are acting in your body and not in your head and you will discover a certain lightness and even joy in the moment. This is when we do our best work; as if it is being generated by our ‘other than conscious’ self.

If your creative work has lost that flow, that effortlessness, then don’t throw it all away! You might not necessarily have to change what you are doing, it might be enough to change the how.

‘How’ is always more important than ‘what’. Success is determined by your behaviours, not by your latent ‘talent’ or your best wishes. This is one of the purposes of coaching.

Pay attention to whatever is happening in the present moment; concentrate on the ‘doing’ and surrender the control of what you want to achieve. This is tricky because it means you have to accept the present circumstance you find yourself in – you have to accept what is! You cannot pay attention to the present and resist it at the same time.

It is possible that the flow you are looking for can be found by simply letting go of your concerns about the future. The ease of success comes from the action of doing not from achieving.

Steinbeck was a great writer because the pencil was at times an ‘extension of his arm’, a direct link to his ‘greater creativity’ – he was a writer because he was able to write in the present and avoid turning to the future for salvation. He was a writer before being a successful writer. Neither success or failure could change that. There was no need to be anything other than what he already was.

It is important to know that the ease of success doesn’t come with success. It comes from knowing you are already complete and that you can already behave with playfulness and vitality. You will still have goals, but you don’t need to pursue those goals with fear or resentment or bitter determination. You do not need to become someone else. It is not a future situation or condition that you are relying on to make you happy – you have the ease of success in that moment.

The need for presence in creative work is discussed in module 3 of Creative Steps, the online creativity coaching course. Module 3 is all about presence: the course pdf, the case studies and the coaching materials are all dedicated to helping you pay attention to the present moment and achieve the ease of success. Take a look at the rest of the contents.

Tags: Creativity Coaching, Module 3
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Successful People and Coaching

I have been coaching for over 8 years now and one of the most surprising and notable facts is that the majority of my clients have been successful people, and often already prolific artists, musicians and writers.

Even the people who were just starting their creative journey were successful in other areas of their lives – usually career professionals looking for a new outlet for their energies or an opportunity to express themselves in new ways.

This might seem counter-intuitive, but successful people use coaches.

In fact, I’d go as far as to say that professionals have coaches and amateurs do not.

Think about it. Roger Federer, the world’s greatest tennis player, has a coach. You would expect nothing less, would you?

In other areas of life the same applies – top performers use coaches.

Coaches are not teachers, they do not know more than their clients. A good coach will enable their client to maximise their natural attributes. As Tim Gallwey, a founding father of performance coaching, stated: “performance = potential minus interference“, i.e. the coach assists the client remove interference.

Find out more about the purpose of coaching or get creativity coaching tips

The coaching relationship is an alliance between coach and client. It is always about the client and what they want to achieve but the effectiveness will be determined by the strength of the alliance between coach and client.

I am extending the number of free coaching spaces and I am offering free coaching to another 10 people. If you are serious about your creative success then please contact me.

Tags: Creativity Coaching
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A note on the importance of selfishness in creativity.

It seems that if we are to fulfil our creative potential then we must learn to become selfish. We must accept that a reasonable and responsible level of selfishness is sometimes required if we are to build the future that we desire.

In order to give ourselves permission to be selfish it is worth remembering that we all benefit greatly from the selfishness of others. Think of your favourite artists, musicians or writers and consider how you might have benefited from their selfishness.

Furthermore, when we are able to act selfishly we are more likely to be able to make requests of others and perhaps also be more responsive to their genuine requests in return. In this way we may be able to live grounded lives that are less buffeted by the need for approval. We may be able to be guided by our own North Stars and avoid our almost certain futures (we look at this in Module 8 of the online creativity coaching course. See the contents page here).

As in all things there is a balance to strike. Sometimes we should be selfish and go for our own fulfilment, other times we should perhaps be more mindful of the importance of other influencers in our lives and act in a way that meets their approval.

As creative individuals we are in control of our own output so we need to be aware of how our actions are shaped by our tendency to lean towards approval or fulfilment. How do we make decisions about how to balance these two? Whose approval are we seeking and why? And what are the costs and consequences of our decisions?

Many of us will still have a negative association with the word ‘selfish’; it is generally used to describe unpleasant people, after all. The association might be the reason so much potential is left unfulfilled. If this is you then consider the following questions:

• If you were to put yourself first what would you say or do?
• What is 100% of what you want in this situation?
• How can you get more of what will satisfy you?
• How can you say no?
• What are your boundaries and how can you make this clearer?

This topic is covered in more detail in the information-packed, multi-media online creativity coaching course.

To learn more about creativity coaching read here.

Tags: Creativity Coaching, module 8
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