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"I'll take a Friday with tomatoes, avo, lettuce, and a side of the extraordinary.
Hold the mundalities, the ruthless criticism, and the noise in my head."
And for my friend, the blog-viewer, the same, please.
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Know your power to order up ingenuity and joy.
If we take a moment to step out of the thoughts we default to almost everyday,
- the doubts, worries, judgments -
the plans and ruthless comparisons to others,
family patterns of thought that have become unconscious habits of
pressure -
guilt -
undeserving attitudes,
judgment
If we check the menu of possibilities,
the adventure du jour,
the daily special, (there's always a daily special),
if we consciously ask for these things from our Muse,
we will be served a banana cream pie of creative thought.
When you change the way you look at things,
the things you look at change.
―Wayne W. Dyer
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Download Book Review
By Marcy Nelson-Garrison, MA, LP, CPCC
You know you and your clients are creative but do you really know how to invite creativity to the
party?
To engage it as an ally? To really build that valuable muscle?
Jill Badonsky does! And she does it in a way that will make you want to
recommit to your own creativity and feel giddy as you do so! That’s the impact of her book on me,
and why I chose it for my Art of the Heart Award. First of all the book, The Muse Is In, is visually
stunning. It is chock full of color, quirky illustrations, inspiration and exercises that will delight
your senses and have your own muse jumping for joy. Grab one of the warm-ups, gizmos or
thinking tools to power up your creativity. Try on a percolator question, write a haiku, break some
rules or put on your idea radar (imagine a submarine with periscope up). Learn what fuels the
creative process and what gets in the way. Jill offers abundant wisdom throughout including how
to shift obstacles like resistance and rebellion, overwhelm, perfectionism and self sabotage.
Badonsky also knows that growing anything requires practice and lots of it. The last part of the
book offers a creativity prompt for every day of the year. I plan to buy a new journal just for those
exercises! This book is the perfect tool to expand your own creativity, mine it for ideas to use with
clients or gift it as part of your discovery or completion process.
This is definitely a new favorite!
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How to Go on A Voyage of the Imagination
Where shall we go? How about to the world of creative possibilities? The imagination takes us there by allowing us to envision, percolate and experience the possibilities in store for our creativity. But how do you START the process of imagination? Try this:
1. Remove the headphones that have been feeding you the same thoughts you think probably 85% of the time, everyday.
2. No, really. Go ahead -- Actually make the gesture of taking headphones off—when you do this you will give a kinesthetic boost to your intention and you may have a moment of feeling uniquely free from the blathering and “uniquely free” is related to being imaginative. It won’t stop all of the thoughts you usually think from rambling on like because they’ve been blabbering for years, but it will activate the centers of “Something different.”
3. Move into receptiveness. Put ON headphones that are connected to the vast reservoir of creative possibilities inside of yourself, the endless well of illustrious mischief and radical joy, the place dreams start and ideas coalesce in deliberate devotion waiting your consideration and willingness. Include the voices that HAVE served you before, of which I wager to believe there are many.
4. Relax. You don’t even have to consider what it is you are going to receive, just trust that receiving ideas and inspiration will happen. If “trusting” is difficult for you, just trust 5% more. This is “Kaizen,” which involves little tiny calibrations will lead to gigantic changes over time. These changes WOULDN'T have occurred if you expected, pushed, or pressured yourself to do something bigger. It’s a lovely, kind, and enticing way to make a change.
5. Ask a question? Yes. The creative-imaginative mind LOVES questions. Questions are the kindling for great fires of ideas and momentum. A-HA moments that seem to come out of nowhere are often from the seeds planted by questions. Questions are the conductor for orchestras of innovation.
6. Don't Limit Yourself At the Beginning. Number 5 had way too many metaphors for one paragraph but imagination likes unrestricted clout at the beginning of a journey, so don’t limit, judge, or edit your initial output. Let it fly, mixed metaphors, similes, onomatopoeias, whatever.
7. Watch What You Ask. Be aware that the subconscious will also answer questions like: How come others are more imaginative than me? Why don’t I ever get anything done? How come I intend on doing something and then find myself someplace else? Why am I such a doopus? And the answers to questions like this won’t serve you as much as answers to these questions:
8. Let it Percolate Gently but with ruthless vigilance let the question percolate over time. Firmly assigning immediate answer may plunk you back into the obvious and prevent the question from unearthing deeper findings of brilliance.
9. BUT PAY ATTENTION… because answers WILL present themselves and if the OTHER headphones have snuck back on your head -- which they tend to do insidiously unless you're watching --you may miss a passageway to brilliance, a portal to creative blasts of rewarding insight. Inspiration, imagination, and creative instigations of colossal proportion are everywhere … if you are willing to wear the applicable headphones.
(C) 2013 The Muse is IN
voyage here: www.kaizenmuse.com
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