New Perspective on Creativity

If you're like me, you think being creative is for hobbies and extra-curricular activities, while being proactive is for business. Really think about what it means to be creative at work.

Last night I was reading an e-book, Happy Pocket Full of Money by David Cameron. In one part he was describing the act of being creative using similar language to that usually denoting what it means to be "pro-active."

I first ran into, or absorbed the concept of being proactive when I worked with the Stephen Covey Group in Caracas in the early 1990s. Stephen Covey's first habit of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is simply: Be Proactive. What he means is that we don't wait to live a life of reactions to events, but we design our lives and work to merge our vision with reality.

Being pro-active is really more of an attitude, or way of being, rather than an activity.

David Cameron explained the same wisdom in terms of an attitude of creativity, in contrast to reactivity.

I think this is a valuable insight to broaden our understanding of what it means to be creative. This is on my mind because I'm developing an e-course entitled, "Creative Communication @ Work." My use of the word "creative" really does mean being proactive, not being creative in the sense of sending purple emails or wearing black nail polish to work, although I have no problem with either of these options.

You will not be surprised to know that I like the word, "creativity" much more than "being proactive." The former is much more humane sounding and the latter sounds more like business jargon to my ears. If you tell me to be creative, I'm excited; if you tell me to be pro-active, I feel pressure to perform. Ahhh, the power of words.

Solve Problems through Wider Perspective

One thing I learned from reading many books by Kenneth Burke in my doctorate program is that to widen our perspective on life, we first need to realize that we do see and interpret events through our own particular paradigm. Stephen Covey says that the way we interpret situations forms our reality, so this subject is important enough to take some time to reflect upon it.

Think about the training of a surgeon. This person spends years learning how to operate on people. So it is no surprise that this "cut out the problem" paradigm spreads throughout the surgeon's personal life. That's the way he sees relationships, projects, challenges - looking for the part that needs surgical removal.

Similarly, someone who grows up in a fishing community sees life in terms of baits, traps, fishing spots, the "one that got away". The fisherman may see a situation as involving the wrong kind of bait, or wrong quantity, while the surgeon sees the same problem as one needing the scapel to resolve. A teacher would see it as something that needs to be taught, or reinforced conceptually.

Going back to the WAQ post, the life of a queen is definitely different from (and better than) the life of a commoner. And while most countries have no royalty apart from the celebrity-set, a woman who knows in her heart she is "as good as" any queen, feels more powerful than the woman who perceives in her heart she isn't good enough, that her life depends upon the whims of the fates.

Making the transition to the Queen paradigm begins in your imagination. What if you were a queen, how would you behave? Think about how this lady would dress, what would she think about, how would she spend her week-ends. Because the Queen has numerous infomers, her perspective on life is indeed wider than that of her subjects. And this wider perspective makes her wise. It's time to promote yourself to Queen of your domain.

Don't forget the post contest. Win $50. Contest ends April 30.

The Challenge: Clutter vs. Time Off

If you've been following the line of thought through the last several posts, you may have been struck by the irony of writing about the need to take time off, indeed to schedule time for being a vegetable, followed by posts about the imperative of dealing with clutter. Obviously, there is only so much time and energy, do you schedule time to vegetate, or do you deal with the unfinished tasks, the "drains"?

The answer goes back to Stephen Covey's teaching of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. While I benefited from his teaching many years ago, at that time I certainly did not realize the full wisdom he was imparting. Not that these ideas were new; his contribution was to organize these ideas in a manageable fashion. His first habit is: Be proactive, not reactive. Yeah, we all know that, but it's a concept worth re-visiting.

We are proactive, perhaps most of the time, but because of the multitude of distractions and activities, it is so easy to get stuck in a pattern, and dealing with all urgent matters, and leaving out some very important things. And what is important to you can change with time. It's a good idea to re-assess your situation in order to be proactive in a fresh way, a way that reflects the way you are today.

Being proactive means both scheduling time to do nothing and setting aside time to work on clutter. I'm using "clutter" in a very wide sense, all the stuff that needs to be done, even if it doesn't look like physical clutter in the home. The normal tendency is to ignore clutter, until it takes on crisis proportions and becomes an urgent task, which then tends to take over your life. You may be familiar with the Crash and Burn process. The more intelligent approach is to schedule a manageable time to work on it, without expecting to actually finish everything, but to reduce the scope of the clutter by dealing with it for half an hour every day, or two hours every Saturday, or something like that.

Same goes for time off. That means no TV, no radio, no I-pod, no cell phone, nada for a while. Time to allow your mind to create, without necessarily telling you what it's up to.

Be proactive, once again. Work on your clutter, then relax and do nothing. It's part of creative life in 2008.