Steps to Reinvention
Client can use a notebook to preserve their new ideas as they occur. Coach to do so without judging them. A Perfect example or practice is what Julia Camron Author of The Artists Way calls morning papers. There are many ways to capture new ideas. The client might have an idea in their sleep and wake up and write it down. Or they might have a thought during the day. This is important to do in the moment. Recommend not listening to the self-talk, criticism, or “someone else’s voice” while still generating that can shut someone right down. Routinely capturing is done upon awakening, but use it as a tool anytime.
Don’t believe that there is just no time to be creative, encourage the client to do some simple thing like paying attention to thoughts and capturing them, through journaling or just writing them down. How about leaving a message for yourself on your voicemail? Don’t let perfectionism keep your client from being their creative selves that they may fear. Just know it’s important to capture new ides without evaluating them.
STEP ONE: Capturing
Capturing is based on the capacity to use creativity intelligently, being on a mission to promote brainstorming, and ideation on paper. Seeing words and ideas on paper, makes for refining thoughts and allows for greater creativity and better solutions. Client can use their journal or a notebook for this process.
Look into the weekly schedule and help your client find wasted hours: hours spent watching TV, gossiping on the phone, reading tabloid, browsing the internet… whatever it is they do. Help them to find just two hours a week and devote them to a creative project. Finding that extra time can sometimes be an obstacle. Recommend waking up half an hour earlier or going to bed a half hour later and by doing this four days a week, magic! You have two hours. The mind can resist, and protest, that,
I don’t get it, I don’t have two hours
Don’t argue about that, that’s not what we do. If the client tells us they can’t find two hours, it could mean there is fear or an underlying belief. Everyone is afraid of something, but keep moving. Only the client can do it. If they’re not ready that’s okay… the world still goes on.
STEP TWO: Broadening
The more diverse your knowledge, the more interesting the interconnections- creativity can be boosted simply by learning interesting new things.
New ideas emerge when old ones become interconnected; that’s where all creativity comes from. Ah ha! That means that one way to prime the creativity pumps to produce interesting and novel ideas is to broaden one’s knowledge—the broader the better. Don’t take yet another course on French cooking; take a course on cartooning, or on 12th century architecture, or on nuclear physics! The more diverse the knowledge, the more creative the ideas will be.
Be curious the more research, the more ones expertise is developed. The exploration allows the client to create a project and find ideas about what they found. Begin to manage physical and social environments. The more interesting and diverse the things and people around you, the more interesting the ideas become.
STEP THREE: Challenging
Having a problems to solve, in tough situations, multiple behaviors compete with one another, and their interconnections create new behaviors and ideas. Be productive and disciplined. The client may have lots of ideas that don’t work but the point is they have lots of ideas. The word “challenge “ could be read in two ways in two ways; the need to challenge oneself, and second, that it is important to realize that society, the audience, for your new self or work will need time to get used to the change. Family, friends, and even coworkers, may initially not want to reward the client or recognize the change., and that could prove challenging. It’s important not to become discouraged, just keep at it! Challenges and “interruptions” can be to refocus. Creative individuals think of failure as a new opportunity; what went wrong? Let me try something else, and move forward with it.
Epstein –http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Epstein
In the laboratory, failure also produces a phenomenon called resurgence- the emergence of behaviors that used to be effective in that situation- that leads to a competition among behaviors and new interconnections. In other words, failure actually stimulates creativity directly, it really is valuable.