• It forces me to concentrate. Watching the clock tick down, I get things done quickly and efficiently before 9pm.
• I send more e-mails: I don’t stress over making detailed and comprehensive responses, and am learning to effectively communicating my message with less.
• The time after 9pm is a great stress relief. Being able to let go in the evening creates space that I don’t fill with the pressure to get things done.
• On the down side – my posting has disappeared in the last week.

Strangely though, I feel out-of-balance. My previous 21-day stretches incorporating exercise, meditation and the creativity project have vanished.

Prof. Srikumar Rao, in his course, Creativity & Personal Mastery, states that anytime you are trying to change your behavior through an act of will, you are doing harm to yourself – instead you should focus on who you are being, and let the change happen naturally through you. In a way, these 21-day commitments are an attempt to force myself to change – and perhaps not the most effective way to bring about change.

At the begining of each day, the project team (say 20 people) get together, and in the space of 15 minutes, everyone gives a brief update of what they’re working on and any problems they are encountering – while standing – no sitting allowed. People speak up if they are able to help, but no solutions are offered in the meeting.

Results: Everyone is informed about what others are worked upon, and connections form automatically to bring people together without wasting everyone’s time.

Just as simple as it sounds, the freewrite exercise is about writing without inhibitions.

Freewrite Exercise

1. Write for a pre-determined limit, such as 15 minutes or 2 pages.
2. You may use a computer, as it will allow you to write quicker and will cause less strain, but I have found more profound results writing by hand.
3. Try to write concretely, sensorial, in images. Do not worry about “making sense”, do not think, pay no attention to grammar, forget spelling, and don’t use any punctuation. Write freely.
4. Write as quick as you can.

When the predetermined point on the page is reached or the allotted time is up, stop writing. Put your free-write away. Do not read it. This is important so that you’re not distracted with the expectation of creating contact while you are writing.

Remember: once you begin writing do not stop – no pausing to reflect. The point is to write without thinking about what you will write.

Why to do it

The purpose of the exercise is to tap into unconscious material, calm your mind from swirling thoughts and help you to tap into the creative potential within. It is a great way to reach a calm, creative state before journaling or starting a project.

In addition, you can gather together multiple free-writes, and review them for inspirational material at a later date.

I asked myself this morning, how many times in the last week was I truly creative?

Monitoring my thoughts this week, it is a shock to realize just how persistent the thoughts are racing around my head… I leave no room to be creative… the space is squeezed out with a constant urge to be doing.

While I’m on the go, I do create blog posts, photographs in the park, drawings during art class, saucepans of stuff for supper… but they don’t have that novel aftertaste of true creativity.

The most creative moments come when I am not doing but just being. During these times, the problems which have been stewing in my unconscious bubble up into the present moment.

Work environments push for creativity, but they don’t tend to encourage space for reflection. How can you create a quick space for creative thoughts to flow? Bring yourself back to the present:

Tool for returning to the present moment:

1. Find a quiet space where you can sit uninterrupted
2. Sit with your back straight, and your feet planted on the floor.
3. Inhale. Take a deep breath, and watch what it feels like to breathe in.
4. Exhale. Let your breath out slowly, and watch what it feels like to breathe out.
5. Smell. As you breathe in, what do you smell?
6. Taste. Move your tongue around your mouth. What do you taste? Any bits of lunch left over?
7. Listen. Ask your self what you hear. And then probe deeper. What background noise is there?
8. Look. What do you see around you?
9. Look again. This time, look at the negative space – the shapes of emptiness between objects.
10. Look again. This time look at the a color, and how the tone varies with the light and shade.
11. Examine your thoughts. Ask yourself, “what is the next thought that enters my mind?” Sit patiently until the thought enters.

This week, I am taking note throughout the day of the thoughts that race through my head. My thoughts are heavily pre-occupied with not having enough time to get things done. I am quite aware of this (and am actively trying to get a handle on it), but I wasn’t aware of the negative messages I keep repeating to myself, such as:

• I can’t get anything done.
• I don’t have any time.
• Angry messages to myself of, “why haven’t I done that yet?!?”

Anxiety is an inhibitor to tapping into creative flow of ideas and possibility. I have been trying to solve the problem by getting the thoughts out of my head and assigning clear next steps to each of them. However, before I do this, I need to eliminate the negative messages which are reinforcing my anxiety.

How do you eliminate negative thoughts? You don’t. You can’t force thoughts out of your head. Instead, observe them and accept they are there. When you observe you thoughts without getting attached to them, change happens naturally.

One of the biggest inhibitions to creativity and creating mindful work environments is the stress that accumulates from the looming cloud of vague commitments. In an age addicted to the hyper-speed of technology, e-mails, meetings, tasks and “stuff” flying around – the stress from trying to hang on to what we need to get done is often overwhelming.

Recently, I have ben exploring David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity – aka, GTD – a method for getting all the thoughts out of your head, into an organized system, where a concrete next-action can be supplied for each task. I discovered a free open-source package called Thinking Rock to process all the thoughts that have been eating away at my attention and energy.

For the next 21 days, I am going to use this software, to see if it really increases my productivity and lowers my stress. If I lower my stress, how will I manage to stay awake at my desk?!?

People tend to life seriously and make situations overly complicated. Or is that just me? Does drama ever do anything remotely useful?

One approach I find to be effective in combating this is Rule #6, from Ros and Benjamin’s Zander’s Art of Possibility. The story of Rule #6 is:

An executive is in meeting at another company with one of their managers. They are sitting in the manager’s office, when suddenly the door burst open and a man comes in upset and shouting about an urgent problem. The manager says, “Peter, Peter, please remember Rule #6.” Immediately Peter calms down, says thank you and departs.

Soon after, a young woman enters, hysterical, hair flying all over the place, carrying on in frenzy about her situation. He responds, “Mary, please — remember Rule #6!” She says, “Oh, I’m so sorry”, apologizes and leaves the room quietly.

Then it happens a third time. (It always happens a third time.) At this point the visiting executive can’t keep quiet any longer and says, “Sir, I have seen three people come into this room in a state of uncontrollable fury, and then walk out completely calmly. Would you be willing to share this, Rule #6, what it is?”

The manager says, “Oh yes, Rule #6, very simply put is, don’t take yourself so damn seriously.” And so the executive says, “Oh, that’s a wonderful rule. What, may I ask, are the other rules?” And he replies, “There aren’t any.”

So… whatever it is, get over it, and don’t take yourself so god-damn seriously.

De Bono created these 6 thinking hats as a means to shift from your standard argumentative style to parallel thinking – taking all sides of an argument one at a time, and looking at them together in the same direction.

With the six thinking hats, there is a hat for each direction. And everyone is expected to contribute for each direction. It’s not about wining an argument, but designed to increase the power of decision making, save time, remove the ego, and to achieve clarity by focusing on one thing at a time.

The six thinking hats are:

• White Hat: neutral & objective – facts & figures
• Red Hat: rage & emotions – the emotional view
• Black Hat: cautious & careful – the weakness in an idea
• Yellow Hat: optimistic & hopeful – positive thinking
• Green Hat: creativity & new ideas
• Blue Hat: control & organization of other hats

I stumbled upon an improv workshop this evening, run by Just Add Water. The company’s focus is to use theater, improve and role-play to improve understanding of human dynamics and solve organizational issues in the workplace.

The 4 C’s of Improvisation:

• Consistency: Accepting the reality your partner creates.
• Context: Building on the reality in the context of the scene.
• Cooperation: Act as if you’re part of the scene.
• Character: Become the character, be active in defining and using imaginary objects in the world.

• Pick an area of your life that is not working.
• Create a new reality that improves upon this “reality”. (Make it up. Be creative.)
• This new reality must be plausible at some level.
• Start living with this reality, and gathering evidence that supports that it is true.
• Disregard all evidence that disproves this reality.

And then see what happens over the course of a week. I find it almost scary how easy it is to find the evidence I need to prove something radically different.