The Fertile Unknown

9 Practices for Cultivating Creative Aliveness

A day of one's, 1-11-11 seemed like an appropriate time to talk about new beginnings! In the spirit of new beginnings and creating what's next, I thought I would share a few (of many) ways to engage creative aliveness as we shift into 2011.  

9 Practices for Cultivating Creative Aliveness

The following practices are not necessarily in a linear order, and you might go back and forth between them. It's not as much about a sequence as it is about engaging and responding in the moment: sometimes listening receptively; others times creating it out actively. By intentionally and consciously setting the "container" with the first three practices, you can be more present to adapting to the rest. Our right brain, by its non-linear nature, isn't one to follow our pre-set linear path...that's the domain of left brain. Any whole-brain creative process includes both linear and non-linear engagement. The right brain also loves to imagine and create new practices as we follow any existing method or approach. If you have an impulse along those lines, go for it. I experience all the time with my clients - as we get deeper into an emergence process, not only do new ideas and directions emerge, but new approaches for cultivating and discovering them emerge in the moment. There is an improvisational quality to each creative emergence - what keeps it so juicy and alive! 

1. Clearing. Give yourself space, time and attention. Consciously set aside some non-distracted time and attention. Like any healthy relationship you have, or creative project you engage, your Creative Self needs quality time to thrive. Make your creative self your most important client - even if that means setting official "creative self  time" on your calendar. Just like (hopefully) you wouldn't answer an email or tweet when with a client, give your creative self the same focused attention - it needs that to be seen, heard and known to be more active and reveal its riches.

2. Centering. Get centered. During your designated emergence time, getting centered allows you to be more present to what is calling to emerge within you. It is about having an intentionality, a clarity of focus and a presence, to be able to begin to hear and connect with deeper aspects of your creative self. Do this is whatever way feels comfortable...whether you do this via visualization, meditation, affirmation, embodiment, or however else you get centered. It can be any small ritual that serves as a pattern break out of your normal everyday consciousness and centers you. I do this with my clients at the onset every coaching session, and the rituals we use vary based on who they are. Find what works for you. This is your "sacred" time.
 
3. Asking. Ask yourself what is most alive for you NOW. It's not about the entirety of your vision and all that you can imagine - just what feels most alive within you now. Listening to what's alive now is like picking the lowest-hanging, ripest fruit from your tree of potential - it does have to be the complete vision. I often ask, "What's calling to emerge for me now?" which helps take it out of future potential (all that can be) and into the realm of the immediately actionable (what is now and next).

"Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." ~ Howard Thurman


4. Holding. Release the need for an immediate answer...or a familiar one. Hold the question before rushing to an answer or "the" answer. Instead of writing down a list with the same thoughts that you always carry in your left-brain, try engaging your whole brain first. The right brain processes much more quickly than the left brain - and is not inhibited by habitual thinking. Let your left-brain take a mini-vacay. Emergence needs so breathing room before being analyzed, evlauted and figured out. It is not about rushing into sense making. Indulge non-sense-making for a while.

5. Listening. Listen with your whole self, and whole brain. not just the left brain language. Pay attention to images, feelings, thoughts, ideas, surprises, seeming disconnects that come out of nowhere, impulses that emerge. Pay attention to how it feels in your body. What feels most alive? What energizes you? Do not wait for it to make complete sense before you validate it (more passions are not realized because they are judged as ridiculous before they have a chance to evolve. A new emergence, like any new birth, can be messy when being born. Listen for incomplete and partial directions, not entirely clear and sensible answers. In a creative process they usually unfold through cultivation.

 6. Cultivating. Use whole-brain creative processes - draw it, paint it, move with it, embody it, act it out, etc - to break habitual thinking patterns, open up the creative aliveness wellspring, and draw forth its insights and wisdom. It's not about the entirety of your vision and all that you can imagine - it is about what is calling to emerge from within you now. By creatively cultivating it out, you access far deeper levels of information and insights about it than just by thinking about it alone. Use both left-brain linear practices with right-brain practices and whole-brain storytelling. Every emergence is a multi-dimensional story that fits into the context of who you are and expresses what's unfolding.

"Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time." ~ Thomas Merton

7. Tending. Also pay attention to images, feelings, thoughts, ideas, impulses that emerge as you go about your days, outside of your "sacred" time. Record them. Ask the question to your creative source a lot, not just once. Let it marinate. As Rainer Maria Rilke said, "Live the question." Deepen into it over time. Notice the patterns that emerge, the key themes. As we engage the process of cultivating what's most alive for us now and in the near future, then the next level of the vision will emerge - like a rose which unfolds in layers, revealing one layer at a time. That's how an emergence works. Many dreams remain idle because there's too big of a gap between all that can be in that vision, and what is simply next - and we can feel overwhelmed, or judge ourselves if not "on track" - and then we can shut down. By working with what is next day by day, the bigger vision becomes more and more clear over time...and accessible. Instead of a target to be hit, creative aliveness is more of a garden to be cultivated...and shaped into something tangible.          

8. Creating. Once you have more clarity - you have diverged out and expanded the creative "playing field" of new, emergent gifts - then look at how to structure that aliveness into you work and life. The key, though, is to not skip over the cultivating and go right to the creating-it part as so many strategic plans have us do. With that approach you can get an action plan, strategy, or goal that is attainable...but may not give you the passion-infused life energy to see it through. The conventional way to stay motivated is through will and perseverance. This is still valuable for those times you do not feel like doing it. To YES-AND that...I believe, and have seen this consistantly over the past 14 years of coaching passion-centered entrepreneurs, that once you have connected to your purposeful aliveness, it is the greatest motivator there is. Motivation is then embedded in the goal itself, and not just something we need to use to achieve it. It's there within us to carry us forth even when we do not feel the energy of it.

9. Adapting. Let the vision be mutable and change over time. Balance planning with emergence.  Have goals and hold them focused enough to guide the process AND loosely enough for new information, insights, and awareness' in the moment can shift them into something more alive (and often unexpected) -  something that you would not have known until you are in the midst of your process. Some goals shift. Some are released entirely. And some new ones show up along the way.  By keeping the long term directed and flexible both, and focusing on what's next, you have room to move, respond, adapt within the goals, making them more accessible...and energized. I heard a great term by Holacracy founder Brian Robertson that resonated with me for this concept: dynamic steering.

There is an improv principle: "Be changed by what is said or what happens" that I find also applies to cultivating passion-infused creativity. In engaging your creative self at deeper levels, you tend to grow and change as a person and meet up with the parts of ourselves that held back our creative flow. As we engage our creative aliveness, this often shifts our original goals into something else - often a more expansive version with some unexpected, emergent surprises. The key is not to get stuck when best-laid plans do not look as planned. They are often "evolutionary invitations" in disguise. Creators and pioneers throughout history have made some of their most profound discoveries and contributions via what was not planned en route to what was. Like John Lennon said: "Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans."

Like an improv scene (which is more what life is like than a formulaic, unwavering, static direction), know that that your visions will probably not play out exactly as planned. It can be influenced by a variety of factors and conditions you can't know ahead of time. It is a living, apdaptive story that will morph and change over time with real-time feedback...and being present to your alive-feeling, creative impulses.

Unseen resources that we do not know when we begin our journey show up along the way as we are engaging the journey. In emergence, the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts, and it often leads us to happenings far more alive, fun and meaningful than what our original vision can possibly give us. Life shows up most vividly in the cracks. Aliveness rewards letting go of over-controls. It's important not to need to know the whole HOW before you begin, just a direction and what is most alive...and an entry point. Be kind to yourself in your not-knowings and have fun!

~ 2011 Michelle James  ~ www.creativeemergence.com

Thrivable Interviews Me on Yin/Yang of Creative Emergence

Todd Hoskins of Thrivable.net interviewed me
on the dynamic balance of the yin and yang of creativity and emergence in the workplace. You can see this interview and many others on thrivability on their blog: http://bit.ly/fI2mRF

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Todd Hoskins:  Michelle, you lead conferences, workshops, and do coaching around facilitating creativity in business. How do those in business organizations, beyond the design team, work towards fostering creativity?

Michelle James:  The most effective and meaningful changes I’ve observed have come from both embracing creative practices and also establishing new foundations: generative principles of engagement, expanded mind sets, new frameworks, and entering into a “co-creative partnering” type of relationship with each other, and with the unknown.

For example, weaving improv-based principles as the rules of engagement in meetings can transform both the energy and outcomes. One client transformed their meetings – which were either boring or contained continual battles for whose idea was best – into Discovery Sessions just by setting three of the improv principles as the foundational container for each meeting: yes-and, make everyone look good, and serve the good of the whole. Their once dreaded meetings, where little got done and all felt drained, became lively, co-creative sessions where new and different ideas and applications emerged in the meeting itself by just adhering to new principles of engagement. People began building on each other’s ideas instead of only defending their own.

Another example: an aspiring entrepreneur may have three different passions or business ideas and believes he or she has to choose one. By engaging emergence by conscious pattern breaking, whole-brain and somatic creative techniques, and deep immersion into the question, a new and completely unexpected pattern can emerge that reveals a coherent structure that could not have been predicted before that exploratory deep dive. A new coherent business structure can emerge that contains what is most alive and relevant of the three previous ideas, along with surprising new qualities.

I have seen this so many times with entrepreneurs who are creating a business that doesn’t fit neatly into a current business model, my own business included. One level of thinking’s either/or question becomes the next level of thinking’s both/and solution. It often requires hanging out in “not knowing” for part of the process.

Todd:  How is emergence related to creativity?  What does it look like when it happens?

Michelle:  I’m not sure how to do that question justice in a few sentences without it either being vague or too reductive, and there can be many different answers. After years of working with it, It’s still hard for me to define because I see it as a universal process linked in to how life itself works – and myself as a life-long student of that process. Creativity, for me, is both means to cultivate the emergence – using creativity practices to engage emergence – and the outcome of an emergence. That’s why “creative emergence” resonates with me – the terms are so intimately linked. Creativity generates emergence, and emergence produces creativity – the whole process is an ongoing creative, emergent feedback loop.

A creative, emergent process requires navigating the dynamic balance of listening and choosing; knowledge and discovery; stepping up to create, and letting go to receive – in other words, doing what is yours to do, and letting the self-organization of emergent creativity do its part. Like midwifing any new birth, there is a natural trajectory already happening…and…there are things you can do to help facilitate a healthy birth, and then clean it up and make it accessible to the world.

In groups, you can see this emergence in action in highly functioning improv theater groups, jazz ensembles, sports teams, etc…and in co-creative work teams that have trust at their core. Often the emergence happens after the “efforting” is released. Something takes over that is greater than any individual’s agenda that has an intelligence of its own. The group “field” produces something unexpected that emerges from the interaction of its members – whether it’s comedy line, a piece of music, a new strategy or business, a world changing idea or the next iteration of solution. In a group, emergence has the after-effect of “Look what WE did!” Something new was created that no one could expect, and each person sees how they needed the others in order to become something beyond any single person’s vision or agenda.

Facilitating emergence in an organization is partly about creating the conditions that allow people to contribute more of themselves than just their job description…to bring their unique creativity out in service of the vision, the team and the organization. People buy into what they help create. To bring out the creativity requires leaving the “control” mindset, and trusting in the natural self-organization of the creative process, while also creating boundaries for that creativity to emerge. One paradox of emergence is that flow needs boundaries.

For both individuals and groups, one activity to practice engaging the unknown is to ask the question, hold it without rushing to answer, then get the right brain involved and start drawing it – with NO recognizable pictures or symbols. Just draw the “energy” as you feel it moment by moment – colors, lines and shapes. This can be uncomfortable at first for some people because all the inner voices of judgment and the fear of the unknown can show up – and it is unfamiliar. Allow yourself to not know what it is. Get in the practice of not knowing…and just keep drawing.

With practice, it actually becomes liberating. Research has shown the right brain processes more quickly than the left. And it expresses differently, so working this way can be like learning a new language at first. If you rely only on images you already know, you’re still letting the left-brain dictate the process. After allowing the right brain’s expression, THEN go back and bring in the left brain to try to find meaning through inquiry into the abstract drawing. It’s amazing what patterns and practical, concrete insights emerge just from diverging into the abstract unfamiliar first before converging back into the familiar.

Resistance often show up in the creative process, and it’s temping to turn back to what’s familiar. The act of moving through the discomfort of the contraction of resistance gives more power to the expansion of the new emergence – like the chick’s beak, which gains its strength by having to peck through the resistance of the shell as part of its hatching. The status quo wants to maintain itself; the new birth wants to come forth…and both are essential parts of the dynamic tension within the creative impulse.

Todd:  What other tensions and paradoxes are in the process of emergence? How can an organization move from either/or to yes/and, allowing for these tensions?

Michelle:  Included would be the dynamic tensions/interaction between divergence and convergence, the yin and yang archetypes, planning and improvising, stillness and activity, reflection and action, logic and intuition, using both what is seen and unseen, directing and unfolding, incubating and birthing. There are many more. The creative emergence process itself is paradoxical – what seems opposed or disconnected at one level emerges into something new at another level.  It is learning how to not see these aspects in conflict and to welcome the dynamic tension as a gift of creative process. And, of course, it can still be challenging – and messy – like any new birth while it’s happening. It can feel exciting and energizing at times, and painful and doubt-ridden at others.

Creativity contains both “yes-and,” which is expansion and divergence, as well as “either/or,” which is contraction and convergence. The key is to expand the playing field by diverging (yes-anding) first, before starting to organize and focus on convergence (discerning). I believe organizations need to create space, time, a value system, and set of practices that more explicitly embrace divergence. We need to infuse that into the company culture at every level. The need for exploration without judgment is significant before going into strategizing – it informs new structures. Discernment is necessary in the creative process – we just need to give more time to divergent practices to generate more novelty first before going there.

Todd:   With the yin and yang, what have we been missing within culture and organizations?

Michelle:  Culturally, we have been out of balance. We have focused mainly on the creative yang archetype: outward-focused, production, efficiency, results; forging ahead, focused, driven, goal oriented. When in balance with the creative yin archetype these can be healthy parts of a larger co-creative whole. But we have left out the yin as “too soft” or even “woo woo” so we have experienced a predominant work culture of the yang out of balance. Without the yin for balance, we experience the shadow side of an out-of-balance work culture: cut throat, uncaring, stressful, back stabbing, lack of work/life balance, fear-based, driven to excess or striving to keep up, trying to impress, lack of feeling safe to explore or take creative risks, binary thinking (success/fail, right/wrong), disconnected, etc. I believe many of our challenges in the workplace stem from our over-emphasis on the creative yang and our de-emphasis, or sometimes complete rejection, of the creative yin instead of integrating them.

Creative organizations need both. The yin is relational and includes incubating, being with, integrating, supporting, and yes-anding. More than just left-brain linear thinking, the yin is about engaging embodiment and somatic wisdom, intuition, right brain, non-linear practices. It is experiential and whole-person. It more than just talk, and more than just action – it is a connection to what is most alive in ourselves; a connection to our stories, our inner voice, our senses, our bodies and our hearts. Actions and interactions that emerge from an integrated connection to the yin archetype look different than the actions we’ve seen come form its absence. The yin and yang archetypal energies need each other for generative, whole-systems, meaning-filled creativity.

This integration is something I have been deeply committed to in my work for a long time. Some years ago I created a program on “Creativity and the Yin/Yang Archetypes” about the integration of both for a more engaged, alive, creative workplace. I found – and still do – it’s easier to facilitate and apply it than to talk about it because it needs our whole brain, not just left brain, to engage it. We’re in a time where more whole-brain practices (improvisation, visual communication and thinking, ritual, storytelling, embodiment, movement, etc.) are being brought into the business world all the time.

We are also seeing more focus on meaning, calling, passion, aliveness, empathy, finding your voice, deep listening and internal motivation. Our metaphorical landscape is expanding to include more yin-centered metaphors. By infusing more yin practices, language and foundational ways of interacting into the yang workplace, it becomes holistically generative. The creative yin and creative yang are deep, archetypal patterns which, working together, allow exponential levels of creativity to emerge.

Todd:  You’re producing your second Creativity in Business Conference in October. How does the mode of your conferences, retreats, and workshops reflect the purpose?  How does the form follow function?

Michelle:  I believe the most dynamic, alive, creative organizations and individuals are those most in dynamic balance with yin and yang creativity. The intention of my work is to have my all my workshops, events, and coaching session reflect that balance of rich content and whole-brain/whole-being experience; mind and heart integration. They all use multiple dimensions of creative process and they are based in life-giving principles of engagement.

At our conferences, we use improv principles as our guidelines of interaction for the day. At our creativity network, presenters commit to doing something new to be on their creative edges. I also constantly create new activities, offerings or programs to keep and me on my own creative and evolving edges. My passion, among other things, is to create structures and conditions to support the balance of learning, wisdom, real-time creativity and emergence that supports aliveness, generative connections and serving the greater good. Part of living that mission is to imagine it, try it, get feedback, and modify. They do not all play out as hoped – some better, some worse – but they all contain seeds of learning and new growth.