Category: Creativity

I just want to reiterate something I’ve realized a while back because I think it’s critical to the experience of growth and development.

Creativity is a process of discovering something that’s already there but you just weren’t aware of it until you actually discovered it.

The keyword in that statement above is aware.

This is why you didn’t know this thing already existed because you just weren’t aware of it.

This has become a reoccurring pattern in my own growth and development.

For example, in 2001 when I experienced my first major challenge as an adult in my life, I was completely oblivious and unaware that I had already gone through previous stages of psychological development in my life and had levelled up my level of consciousness already. If I had, it may have altered my perspective and perception of the challenge I was facing at that moment and may have helped me to progress through it quicker rather than fight against the experience.

Another example applies to organizational development. Perhaps if leaders in organizations could become aware of and see the collective leadership already within their company, they wouldn’t try to control people to change but let people change in ways they already are. In effect, often people are taking collective leadership within organizations to work around the bureaucracy of existing “leaders.” So if you just get out of their way and let them freely explore this collective leadership, the transformation of the organization will occur much more effortlessly.

And finally, if I had been aware I was transitioning to the next stage of my psychological development back in 2015, I perhaps wouldn’t have wasted so many years beating myself up at “failing” when I was actually “growing.” In effect I wasn’t aware that the challenge I was facing, which feels like hitting a wall and feeling stuck, was the actual indicator that I was beginning to transition to a new stage of development.

Of course, someone might say, “Well hindsight is 20/20.” In other words, it’s easy to see what should have been done after an event has already happened, but it’s harder to see that clearly beforehand.

But this goes beyond this. Why? Because even after the event had occurred, I wasn’t aware of the transition because I was still immersed within it. In effect, events are events. Transitions, however, are multiple ongoing events and experiences.

In other words, it harder to become aware of things you’re still immersed within. In effect, something you’re still dealing with and trying to move forward with.

Yet the paradox here is that you often can’t become aware of what you’re immersed within, until you can creatively step out of it and gain an objective perspective of it to actually become aware of it.

This is what I believe reflection allows someone to creatively do but I obviously don’t do it enough.

I need to make a daily practice of reflection.

Everything Is Always Getting Worse (Until It Isn’t)

A few months ago, I found myself doomscrolling through X (first mistake) when I found a thread about how “everything is getting worse.” The author had assembled an impressive collection of graphs showing declining trust in institutions, rising polarization, increasing mental health issues among teens, and various other metrics of

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/everything-is-always-getting-worse-until-it-isnt/

This is an absolutely brilliant piece by Joan Westenberg because it relates to something I’ve touched upon before.

Each generation’s overwhelming hardships are often reflected back upon by future generations and seen as glorified achievements.

For example, members of my family often glorify nostalgically what previous generations overcame during previous times of war or economic depression. Yet when they speak today’s about their current struggles, it’s often angrily about putting blame on someone out there for the hardships they’re going through.

The same occurred with me back in 2001, when the dot-com bubble burst. At the time, I was angry and frustrated at how companies were treating people and blamed them for all the hardships I was going through at the time as well.

But now today, I realize that that moment in my life was the best thing that could have ever happened to me because it woke me up to a larger world of possibilities that I had been blind to before. In effect, it began a quest that lead me to discovering the future of work, creativity, and vertical development, as well metaphorically seeing life as an MMORPG, so as to help me make sense and meaning of it all.

So if we can begin to understand and see these larger cycles in life, we can begin to shift our perspective in turn.

We can realize that the present moment we’re experiencing isn’t an ending, so much as it is a new beginning, a newer chapter in our lives.

BTW if you’re not familiar with it, I’d highly recommend checking out the Two Loops Model, as it perfectly articulates this cyclic process.

To me, this also embodies Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey as a cyclic process of psychological transformation that can repeat throughout your life…but only if you embrace it and allow it to happen versus fighting it.

Another more common name for this is post-traumatic growth.

The great dancer and choreographer Martha Graham described the creative process as a mixture of terror and joy. The terror is the fear of not being able to render the thing imagined in the world of time and space. Living with the discrepancy between the vision or ideal and the manifest reality is an integral part of the creative life. The manifested thing or event is never is perfect as the vision that inspired it.

People who tend to be perfectionists are often terrified to the point of procrastination and paralysis by the prospect of failing to achieve the ideal. They are too impatient and self-critical, becoming frustrated and discouraged if they don’t get it right on the first try. People in touch with their creativity accept imperfection, keep their fear in check, and forge ahead—striving always for their best work, yet realizing they will never quite hit the target. So much for the terror!

The joy is in the creative process itself—in the self-abandonment in creative engagement, where the soul takes flight and soars beyond the realm of time and space.

Laurence G. Boldt, How To Find The Work You Love

I hate this.

I hate that.

These people are bad.

What’s wrong with the world.

Game over. It’s all rigged.

While the awareness for change usually begins with grief, pain, and suffering, real change can only come from the acceptance of letting go and stepping forward into a larger, meaningful world of our own making.

While doing some research on Joseph Campbell today, I stumbled across a paper I had previously saved that talks about The Hermeneutic Loop as the foundation for The Hero’s Journey. The reason I’m bringing it up is because there’s a diagram within the paper (shown below) that reminded me of something I’ve been wanting to talk about for sometime and how it relates to the paradox of visualizing our inner selves.

For most people, this is how they visualize vertical psychological growth. It’s a spiralling upwards at an ever greater breadth. For the longest time though, this has always intuitively felt wrong to me because the inner journey within ourselves has a paradox to it. The space that is created within us emerges from our very deepest core which is our edge.

Pemba Chödrön describes this similar to climbing a mountain to the center of the earth.

In the process of discovering bodhichitta, the journey goes down, not up. It’s as if the mountain pointed toward the center of the earth instead of reaching into the sky.

Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart

I believe Joseph Campbell touches upon this as well when he talks about mandalas and how they’re used to figure out your own cosmic order within yourself.

In working out a mandala for yourself, you draw a circle and then think if the different impulse systems and value systems in your life. Then you compose them and try to find out where your center is. Making a mandala is a discipline for pulling all of those scattered aspects of your life together, for finding a center and ordering yourself to it. You try to coordinate your circle with the universal circle.

Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

For myself, this is similar to how I’ve spoken about understanding yourself like a constellation or solar system, with a core sun and planets orbiting it. In other ways, it’s similar to how I’ve described it like being within a tornado, whereby at times you’re spinning around chaotically, not making sense of things. But then you have moments where you’re in the center eye of the tornado and everything around you that encompasses your life is calm and makes perfect sense…in that moment.

So unlike ancient maps where the outer edges would say “Here be dragons” to warn travellers of the unknowns dangers there because it’s unexplored, maps of our inner selves have “Here be dragons” at their very center core because that’s where the unexplored and unknown lies within us. In effect, our fears are our dragons standing in the way of exploring and discovering the depth and breadth of our very selves as a whole.

The pain, their loss… it’s all I have left of them. You think the grief will make you smaller inside, like your heart will collapse in on itself, but it doesn’t. I feel spaces opening up inside of me like a building with rooms I’ve never explored.

Dolores Abernathy, Westworld

What’s interesting about this all is that as you journey through your life, your center will change and shift. Early on your life, you will think you’ve found the center of your life that stabilizes and grounds you. But then something comes along, shakes your world, and you’ll realize that center was just an aspect of your life, not the center of it. Then you’ll find another center, thinking the same thing, and then it will shift again.

After repeating this heroic process of rediscovering the center of your Self at least a few times by “shedding the skin” of your old self, you will eventually come to your true center, the essence of who you truly are. For myself, what I’m finding interesting is that the center of my life at the start has become the same center again as I progress into the latter stages of my life but in a completely different and larger context than I could have possibly ever imagined.

It reminds me of Paulo Coelho’s book The Alchemist, whereby the heroic journey ends where one began but the journey itself has given us the recognition and awareness to see the treasure that has been lying dormant within us the entire time.

At the end of another great period of collective effort called The Crusades, the social institutions and cultural forces that had coordinated and contained individual energies collapsed. Whole armies disintegrated into their component individuals and sub-groupings. Knights who had ridden forth under the banner of this leader or that rode back on their own. They were the “free lances” who made the late medieval world such a dangerous yet dynamic place.

It’s no accident that today we’re surrounded once again by free lances. The old rules are gone, and the old rules aren’t clear. Security—so far as there is any—is largely something that we must build for ourselves. Identities are confused and changing. We know that ultimately we are on our own, and so we are ready to learn a new way of doing and being. We know that our organizations were designed to serve the needs of another world, so we busy redesigning them.

But we also need a social order that provides for our new needs and doesn’t try to impose archaic obligations on us. We need new laws. We need new leaders. We need a new social principle, an alternative to both selfishness and selflessness. We need a new sense of the common good to justify the sacrifices we’ll need to make to help those who find the new world the most difficult. To create these things, we must begin by remembering that we are all in this together.

William Bridges, JobShift

Our society, as a whole, is largely unable to cope with change, let alone embrace it. Because of this, we are undergoing a crisis of epic proportions, that is only just beginning to effect us but will only get worse.

Change is causing massive mental health issues within our population who do not have the mental resilience training or experience to deal with change on this level of magnitude.

Change is causing massive shifts in the way we work as well and most people do not have the necessary skills to be able to effectively understand this new world of work, let alone function within it, because it again requires one to not just survive in a rapidly changing environment but thrive within it.

Change is causing massive problems within our world (often referred to as “wicked problems”) because they are seemly impossible problems to solve since they can’t be solved by just learning new knowledge but actually require us to transform our relationship with our existing knowledge, changing the way we actually perceive our selves and our world as a whole.

While people are rushing around trying to tackle each of these problems arising from change separately, it’s evidently apparent to me that the most effective way to tackle all of these problems at once is by helping people to psychologically develop themselves so that they can level up not only their thinking but also transform the way they see themselves and their world as well.

This is essentially necessary as apathy is becoming more widespread due to people’s inability to see their own potential capacity to help with these problems because they see them as overwhelming impossible to overcome from their relative perspective. But that’s only because their current perception of their world and their very self is limiting their ability to see their own potential. Yet when one is able to level themselves up, suddenly their relationship to change, and the ambiguity that arises from it, changes as well, empowering them in the process.

She found that, unlike people at conventional action-logics who tend to try to avoid ambiguity, all of her postconventional sample saw creative potential in ambiguity. But within this broad similarity, she found four distinctive responses to ambiguity: the Individualist endured it; the Strategists tolerated it; the Alchemists surrendered to it; and the Ironist generated it. More generally, Nicolaides found that the Individualist and the Strategists worked with ambiguity on particular occasions for particular ends; whereas, in a figure/ground shift, the Alchemists and the Ironist experienced ambiguity as the creative, ongoing element of all experience.

William R. Torbert, Developmental Action Inquiry