Word-Of-the-Week #660: Surreal
March 30, 2017 by Susan Clarke · Comments Off on Word-Of-the-Week #660: Surreal
Surreal – dream like, unreal, fantastic.
Can you remember the last time you had a surreal experience? Do any have any past memories that were dream like, unreal or fantastic? Did you know that Surreal was Merriam-Webster’s 2016 word of the year?
When we were planning our trip to India last year, Sunil our travel agent remarked, “You are going to three of the most surreal places I have ever been. The Himalaya’s, Hampi, & Bagan in Myanmar.” And he was right!
A couple of years ago I thought about comparing international sites to those I have seen in North America. And since a picture is worth a thousand words I will keep it short and sweet.
- We stayed in Leh in the Himalaya’s which is a high desert at 11,000 + feet.
The Himalya’s
- In February we were in Palm Springs and when I looked up at the mountains surrounding the valley, some capped with snow, it reminded me of the Himalaya’s minus the monks, monasteries, and altitude sickness! High desert – low desert – looks pretty much the same to me. What do you think?
Palm Springs
- Then last week we headed out in search of the Wildest Desert Bloom in Decades! And since I had never been to the Joshua Tree National Park we went there first and came into Borrego Springs on the back roads.
Hampi
- When we were driving through Joshua Tree it struck me that it looked just like Hampi with all the crazy rock formations (well of course minus the ruins which is why we went.) What do you think?
Joshua Tree
- And for Bagan, there just isn’t any place like it! Sorry about that.
This week’s focus is on surreal. What would you like to see that would qualify as unreal or fantastic? Do you enjoy just being out in nature? Have you had your recommended dosage of Vitamin N this week? Check out the Wildest Desert Bloom in Decades!
FUN-fact – The Joshua tree, the largest of the yuccas, grows only in the Mojave Desert.
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FUN-photos: Wildest Desert Bloom in Decades!
March 30, 2017 by Susan Clarke · Comments Off on FUN-photos: Wildest Desert Bloom in Decades!
- Finding the Wildest Desert Blooms in Decades was our day’s agenda. Since I had never been to the Joshua Tree National Park that was our first destination. Massive boulders and rock formations jutted up from the earth. Some stacked neatly while others looked as if they were tumbled out of a giant bucket. And thousands of Joshua Trees in varying stages of life & death filled the desert in every direction.
- Then as we continued on to Borrego Springs using only the back roads, the “hills were alive with blooms” that ranged from vanilla, to soft pale butter & vibrant sunflower yellow, periwinkle, fuchsia, tangerine, lilac & lavender. Clinging to the side of the rocks and roads were perfectly formed big bouquet-like mounds of miniature daisy bushes.
And the rock formations in Mecca were incredible. Unfortunately Mr. Jaded, AKA Chris, didn’t stop so I could take some pix. Quote “It’s just a pile of rocks.” This is what I live with!
- La Casa del Zorro was our overnight stop and the next morning was spent driving and hiking in search of the fields of flowers dotting the desert landscape. Our “big bonus surprise” was discovering 130 full-sized metal sculptures that are inspired by creatures that roamed this same desert millions of years ago. The artworks, spread out over 10 square miles, range from prehistoric mammals to historical characters, dinosaurs, and a 350-foot-long fanciful serpent.
- Heading home we came out of the desert via Hwy. 78 to Julian and got more incredible displays of bountiful blooms that got bigger the higher up the mountain we went.
FUN-fact – The Joshua tree, the largest of the yuccas, grows only in the Mojave Desert.
Word-Of-the-Week #659: Stamina
March 23, 2017 by Susan Clarke · Comments Off on Word-Of-the-Week #659: Stamina
Stamina – enduring energy, strength, and resilience.
What creative ideas were spurred last week? Are you willing to take the risk and experiment with your creative ideas no matter what? Do you feel compelled to wait until you have a perfect finished product to put your ideas out into the world?
2nd half – from “Tap your well of creativity” by Alene Dawson from The La Times. “For really creative people … your biggest enemy is procrastination,” says Tom Kelley, who with his brother, David Kelley, wrote the book “Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All.” He’s also a partner at the lauded design and innovation firm IDEO (it designed the original mouse for Apple) and speaks on creativity across the globe. The good news? You can fight back that tendency, with practice. “Nurture your own creativity. It’s the combination of the natural creative ability and also the courage to act and stamina to keep going on things.”
- Relax constraints. –“I was working with a spirits company recently,” Kelley said, “and I said, ‘Try to imagine you’re a brand new 22-year-old employee in your company. It’s 10 years from now, which means you can relax technology constraints, and now imagine the most innovative bar in Los Angeles in the summer of, let’s say 2026.’ Wow, with the distance of time and age they came up with amazing ideas. It’s about getting mental distance from the problem, relaxing constraint — it’s not about you anymore, it’s not about the present. When you get people out of their heads, out of their normal thought patterns, it unlocks more creativity.”
- Embrace diverse perspective. –“I wrote a whole book about this, ‘The Ten Faces of Innovation,’ ” Kelley says. “One secret ingredient for innovation in a group setting is actually respecting the other disciplines and teaming up with them well. Not thinking, ‘My discipline is the most important thing.’ … If I say, ‘Look, I’m really good at what I do, but what I do has a greater chance of succeeding if I team up with you,’ then the real collaboration starts happening. There’s a lot of good in that.”
- Improve your tolerance for failure. –“The truth is that we’ve all got ideas,” says Scott Belsky, author of “Making Ideas
Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality.” “We seldom feel welcome to take risk and experiment with the ideas we come up with. You must put something on the line and be willing to stomach incremental setbacks to push your ideas forward.”
- Minimize “reactionary workflow.” –“In the era of email, Facebook, Twitter and a dozen other sources of flowing information — coupled with the devices we carry around with us — we are liable to spend all day, every day reacting to what comes into us rather than being proactive in what matters most to us,” says Belsky. “I call this the era of ‘reactionary workflow’ because we can easily react 100% of the time and never make a dent in our long-term goals. … It’s critical that we force ourselves to unplug more often and focus on the long term, the list of two, three things we’re trying to do for our business and in our lives over time.”
- Stop ‘selfie stalking.’ – “We spend too much time obsessing over what the world is saying about us. Whether it is checking your site’s traffic, your number of followers on social media or your bank account, these small repetitive actions don’t help you make ideas happen. They just help you feel safe,” Belsky says . “‘Insecurity work’ is stuff we do that (1) has no intended outcome, (2) does not move the ball forward in any way and (3) is quick enough that you can do it multiple times a day without realizing. … Try restricting all insecurity work to a specified 30 minutes every day.”
- Get influential. – “Nothing is completely original. All creative work builds on what came before,” says Austin Kleon, author of “Steal Like an Artist.” “So run toward influence instead of away from it: Read tons of books, go to museums, concerts and movies, take long walks, etc. Be always on the lookout for inspiration and carry a notebook with you wherever you go so you never lose an idea.”
- Commit to a daily creativity practice, no matter how small. – “Find a special distraction-free place and go there at the same time every day. Set a timer, let your mind go, and do your thing,” says Kleon. “A page a day doesn’t seem like much, but stick with it for a year, and you have 365 pages, enough for a book. Little bits of effort add up over time.”
- Show your work. – “Don’t wait until you have a perfect finished product to put your ideas out into the world,” says Kleon. “Start a blog, a newsletter or a social media account and start sharing your influences, works-in-progress and things that you’re learning. When you share things you love, you find a community of people who love those things too.”
This week’s focus is stamina. Are you willing to commit to a daily creativity practice? Have you ever teamed up on a project and found that you had more energy? Is procrastination an issue that is keeping you from realizing your creative potential?
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Word-Of-the-Week #658: Nurture
March 16, 2017 by Susan Clarke · Comments Off on Word-Of-the-Week #658: Nurture
Nurture – to encourage and promote development.
Do you have creative dreams that you’d like to turn into reality? How about unfinished projects that have been pushed aside? Do you have one activity that really spurs your creativity?
This week’s focus – excerpts from “Tap your well of creativity” by Alene Dawson from The La Times. She writes, “Here in L.A., many a “creative” crafts vision boards, recites affirmations and generally begs and barters with the gods for inspiration and stick-to-itiveness — as still-undone projects nag at the do-it-tomorrow soul. Rather than letting your genius ideas languish another year, another decade, another lifetime, we asked creativity experts to share tips on how to actually complete your book, script, music composition, art or design project and transform your creative dreams into a reality.
“For really creative people … your biggest enemy is procrastination,” says Tom Kelley, who with his brother, David Kelley, wrote the book “Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All.” He’s also a partner at the lauded design and innovation firm IDEO (it designed the original mouse for Apple) and speaks on creativity across the globe. The good news? You can fight back that tendency, with practice. “Nurture your own creativity. It’s the combination of the natural creative ability and also the courage to act and stamina to keep going on things.”
- Figure out when you’re at your best. – “A really simple, super-tactical thing people can do,” Kelley says, “is just kind of turn up the creative yield on ideas that are already starting to form in their minds, right? When do you have your best ideas? So if you’re a little bit mindful, people find that, ‘Oh yeah, there’s a time when I’m most creative, it’s … when I’m on a long commute and my mind is wandering,’ or if you find, like me, it’s the first five minutes of the morning. Then don’t jump out of bed or go back to sleep when the alarm goes off, stay in that kind of creative mindset for the first five minutes until the snooze alarm rings. So you find your time, and then you protect it, and then capture your ideas that occur during those times.”
He suggests writing down good ideas immediately because you’ll most likely forget them. Kelley keeps two pads of paper at his bed at all times. “My brother, David, has a white board and marker in the shower,” Kelley says, adding people most commonly tell him the shower is their most creative idea space. “There is no email in the shower. There is nothing to engage your mind and so your mind gets to wander.”
It may also be a specific piece of music that helps your creativity flourish. Once you know what gets your creative juices flowing, use that to your advantage. “The great thing about that is it becomes Pavlovian. … It’s like, hey brain, remember what we do when this music plays?”
- Find a “reverse mentor.” –Somebody who may or may not be 5, 10, 15, 20 years younger than you who is exposed to insight, trends or new ideas you might otherwise miss. The easiest way to do this is, for example, take them to lunch every second Thursday for the next six weeks. Explain that you want them to expand the horizon looking for stuff you should know about it. You may be wiser or have more education than this mentor, but you stand to learn even more. You’ll be so much smarter, you’ll have so much more stimulus. … People tell me this really turns up their creativity.
- Change your routine. – Kelley uses taking a “gap year” before college as an example, when young adults get to learn and experiment with new things beyond book learning. Kelley says someone already mid-career usually can’t quite afford or doesn’t want to do a whole gap year, “so you can designate a gap week or a gap month where you change up your routine. You start going to different restaurants, hanging out in different neighborhoods, maybe you meet different people, keep different hours, maybe take an online course during that month. … Try living in a different city for a little while. I actually did this last year and it totally changed my life. … It’s that old thing of a certain form of madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
- Battle procrastination. Epically. –“I found tremendous help from a book called ‘The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles’ by Steven Pressfield. It recharacterizes procrastination. … Procrastination sounds like a personality flaw, but when a person recharacterizes procrastination into capital-R resistance — a force for evil in the world and it is your job to overcome resistance, rather than being weak — resistance is a call for me to be strong, a call to be a fighter,” says Kelley.
- Try walking, especially in nature – Daniel L. Schwartz, dean of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, says gentle physical activity, such as walking, softens the filters that block “crazy, but sometimes creative, ideas from coming to the surface” and may also put people in a “golden spot” of increased intellectual vitality. Other simple, familiar activities may also trigger a creative flow.
And I know from personal experience taking a walk spurs tons of creativity. It’s easy and pretty cheap! Inspiration is all around us. When do you get your best ideas? Do you keep a notepad handy to write down when inspiration hits? Is there any one thing that is causing Resistance? This week’s focus is to encourage and develop your creativity!
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Word-Of-the-Week #657: Persevere
March 9, 2017 by Susan Clarke · Comments Off on Word-Of-the-Week #657: Persevere
Persevere – to continue without halting despite difficulties or setbacks; persistence.
Have you ever accomplished something that you thought would not be possible? Do you recover quickly from defeat and adjust easily to change? Can you think of a time when you doubled down against all odds and transformed adversity into a resounding success?
This week’s focus – The Washington Post article by Career Coach Gary Cohen “Resilience on the job can pay off. Perseverance will vastly improve your odds of success.” He writes, “More than 111 million people watched the biggest comeback in Super Bowl history when the New England Patriots scored 31 unanswered points to beat the Atlanta Falcon in overtime.
It would have been easy for the Patriots to give up, lose focus, and begin thinking about some well-deserved time off after a grueling season. But what we watched was an outstanding example of resilience. Please note, you don’t have to be Tom Brady to be resilient.
Nearly 20 years ago, I was recruited to run the consumer division of a mid-sized company serving the industrial market and the home improvement industry. The industrial division was well-established and had a strong customer base, however the consumer division was quite small, struggling in a crowded and highly competitive market, and losing a significant amount of money. What I learned about this privately held company after I had joined it was that the entire company was truly on the brink of bankruptcy with significant cash-flow problems. We needed something big to happen and it needed to happen quickly.
I persuaded one of the largest retailers to invite us to a product-line review, even though they had never heard of our company, and already had eight other companies coming, including two incumbent suppliers. My reputation was on the line. The problem was that the review was in six weeks and we had no retail packaging or promotional materials, no data or competitive information, and no recommended mix of products to sell in the stores. At first I panicked and actually told my wife that I didn’t know what I had gotten myself into.
But I pulled my very small team together and told them this would take a huge commitment, working days, nights, weekends. I asked them if they could put everything they had into this effort. I asked them if they believed we could out-maneuver and out-muscle our established competitors. This was an opportunity for us to have faith in ourselves, our talents, skills and abilities, and to come back from a deep deficit, based on our ability to be resilient.
Those six weeks of non-stop work and very little sleep paid off for us. The merchants were surprised and our competitors in the retail market who barely knew us were caught completely off-guard. We were immediately awarded a 100-store test and that quickly turned into being awarded this retailer’s business in nearly 1,500 of their stores. That success helped us win business at a couple of other very large retailers. The company made a huge comeback and today, nearly nine years since I departed the company, they have taken their business to all new heights.
Our team was resilient, believing that we could make this happen, that we could out-perform the competition, and we became a significant player in the consumer market.
So what does it take to embrace this trait? It certainly requires an individual to shift their perspectives. Self-help author and motivational speaker Wayne Dyer once said, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” Really think about that.
We tend to look at things from our own default perspective, without thought that the view may be much better through a lens other than our own. When you face a horrible or adverse situation at work, it is so easy to dwell on the negatives. People who are resilient will approach this differently. They may acknowledge that the current situation is difficult at best, but they will bounce back and think about the ways they can turn the situation into an opportunity, a more attractive picture. As a leader, this is a trait you always want to embrace.
Look at every situation, no matter how difficult, as a new opportunity to shine. Believe in yourself, believe in your team, and know that it is truly your positive attitude, strong work ethic and winning competitive spirit that will drive your resilience. The next time you are in a tough situation and it looks like you are unable to win, reframe your perspective, look through that new lens, dig in your heels, and make a commitment to persevere and succeed. Nobody wins all of the time, but your record will vastly improve with a strong dose of resilience.”
Knowing that it will vastly improve your odds of success, how willing are you to persevere? Do you believe in yourself and your team? Do you possess the Tom Brady Factor? A positive attitude? A strong worth ethic? A winning competitive spirit?
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