Category: Creativity

I don’t know what I’m doing.

I’ve been spending time reflecting upon the realizations from my last post and trying to wrap my head around it, so that I can try to start communicating in this new way. However, I keep feeling inadequate and at a loss to do so.

But when this happens now, I notice a pattern that emerges to overcome this feeling. And that pattern is me repeating to myself what creativity means to me.

Creativity is discovering something that has always been there all along but you just weren’t aware of it yet.

So when I think I can’t do something that’s new, I begin to reflect back to see if I have already unknowingly been doing what I want to do.

And strangely enough, I do become aware of ways I’ve already been doing what I want to do.

It’s funny because this mirrors something I’ve said before in terms of how it relates to organizational development.

You don’t need to find leaders outside your organization. There are tons of leaders inside of it already. You just need to become aware of them and see them for what they are.

In other words, often times we blind ourselves to possibilities and opportunities that are right under our very noses because we are looking with blinders of beliefs and assumptions on. Thus we often have a very narrow, limited, pre-defined perspective of what we “expect” we should be looking for and seeing.

Yet if we let go of these filters and broaden our vision, suddenly so much more comes into view.

So just like how a CEO is blind to potential leaders within their organizational body, I have as well been blind to aspects of myself that have already been communicating in this new way until I broaden my gaze and specifically look back for it.

In doing so, I realize instances where I’ve already been communicating in this new way.

One memory I believe is back in the past when I left a note for my wife using MMORPG language as though I was off adventuring and slaying dragons during my work day.

Another memory is how I’ve been trying to articulate my life changing experience back in 2001, when the dot-com bubble burst and I lost my job. I remember continually saying that I began questioning my beliefs and assumptions around work and in doing so, it lead me on a lifelong quest to research a new way of working.

These are both examples of describing everyday events but then interjecting keywords that embody my Life is a Role-Playing Game framework to it (i.e questioning = quest).

Yet in doing so, I’m not explaining from outside the framework, I’m instead expressing the experience from the inside of it, thus embodying it in the way I communicate.

In other words, this method of communication doesn’t feel like a know-it-all who has mastered everything already (because I most definitely haven’t) but rather feels like a not-know-it-all who is going through an experience that they can’t make sense of and it feels unknown and uncertain to them.

In doing so, it makes other people resonate with the feeling of being in an unknown and uncertain space and helps them to realize that this isn’t abnormal but actually a completely normal part of life which is what growth and development feels like.

So all I need to do now is just the same thing that a CEO would do within his organization to let the potential leadership within it emerge.

I need to get out of my own way and let these aspects of myself communicate more fully in this newer, already emerging, way.

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 was reflecting back on Deborah Frieze’s TED Talk about how change occurs like living systems, using her and Margaret Wheatley’s Two Loops Model from Berkana, as a way of describing how this occurs and how different people can fulfill different roles in the change process based upon where they are at and what aligns with them the most.

In thinking about this though and relating it to my last post, what I realized is that there isn’t one inflection point of change occurring but multiple ones because every individual is evolving and growing at different stages of development. So it’s not just understanding what role you fulfill but at what “stage” of change are you at within your life.

Having said that though, there’s a specific quote by Deborah below that really hits home for me because it embodies what I feel has been going on for almost a decade with many change practitioners and consultants who do seem to be at the right stage of change but just can’t seem to make the leap to the next stage.

…if they get connected to one another, sharing information and learning, then their separate efforts can suddenly emerge as a powerful system capable of disrupting the old order and giving birth to something new.

Deborah Frieze

I’ve been saying for the longest time, that I see all of these notable people talking about the same thing but from their own disciplinary perspectives and languages. And while everyone of these people are most definitely sharing information, what I feel is missing is a collective sense of learning because, for that to occur, it requires everyone to start speaking a similar language of meaning which is most definitely not happening yet.

But what if that’s not needed at first? What if all that’s need at first is to just show a map of how all of these different people are working on the same thing from their own disciplinary perspective. Would a bigger picture of such help connect these people and make them realize they are not alone, as there are others out there working on the same thing in different ways?

And would that connection then help them to come together and decide upon a shared language and vision which in turn helps them to become the “powerful system” they’ve always wanted to be to disrupt the “old order.” It would probably require people to let go of their egos, so as to allow for a greater collective identity to emerge and take the center stage, rather than any one person.

We need boredom to live better lives. But social media is destroying it

When boredom creeps in, many of us turn to social media. But that may be preventing us from reaching a transformative level of boredom.

https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/social-media-profound-boredom/

When superficially bored, “We are held in limbo by a situation that restricts us from doing what we want to be doing, while simultaneously being left empty insofar as the situation does not satisfy us.” Think of being stuck in a useless work meeting or trapped inside on a rainy day.

When repeatedly exposed to superficial boredom, we can reach profound boredom, defined as “a deep state of indifference towards oneself and to the world” leading to “an existential discomfort in which people struggle with their sense of self.”

But social media couldn’t hold off subjects’ profound boredom forever. “I felt empty, an emptiness that was difficult to escape from,” one of the interviewees, Richard, told the authors. “The longer I was bored, the worse I felt about myself. Like, who am I and what do I want to do with my life?”

But when Richard and many of the other subjects became profoundly bored, they cited their listlessness as an impetus for reinvention.

As awful as the COVID lockdowns were, they provided “ideal” conditions for profound boredom, the authors said, which ultimately pushed many to discover new passions. The much discussed Great Resignation, in which employees are now leaving their unsatisfying jobs in far greater proportions than has been seen over the past two decades, could very well have been galvanized by profound boredom during the pandemic.

A Buddhist Perspective on Addiction: Nothing is Vital – 3 Quarks Daily

by Marie Snyder

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2023/01/a-buddhist-perspective-on-addiction-nothing-is-vital.html

Addiction comes from the Latin dicere, related to the root of the word dictator. It’s like having an internal dictator usurping our agency.

Furthermore, an addiction is like a useful set of armour that helps us through the world, but eventually it gets too heavy and cumbersome until we’re finally ready to start shedding it. Addictions offer a temporary illusion of protection from suffering that then becomes a cause of suffering. Specifically, addictions offer protection from the present moment. We’re fighting just being. We get a little bored or aggravated or sad, and we reach for a drink to soften the hard edges or start to scroll through social media to distract ourselves – anything to take us away from being right here right now. But if we can sit with the present and tolerate our discomfort with it, then what we might consider negative emotional states can be opportunities: boredom can become creativity, aggravation turns to innovation, and sadness can bring us to the awareness of the precious beauty in the world.

Our conventional growth and development involving learning to wear psychological masks and armour to fit into society. Post-conventional development involves learning to let go of these facades and thus stand out from society but in the process learn to fit into and just be ourselves.

Instead it develops the capacity of awareness of the moments of quiet that already exist between our thoughts. They’re there already; they just need to be noticed. These moments of nothing are vital. It helped me to understand like to a piece of music has rests that provides moments of quiet that are indispensable to the music, or similar to how a painting has areas of restraint, areas with nothing happening that are necessary for us to better see what is happening. Without the moments of nothing, music, art, and our minds are just chaos. We meditate to find that nothing. Once we can find these gaps between our thoughts, we can work to sustain them a little longer each time. It’s not about stopping our thoughts or fighting to get them to settle down, but just noticing those slivers of peace between them.

And then, once we grasp these moments of nothingness, we can begin to appreciate that we aren’t our thoughts. The self isn’t just a collection of ideas that come to us wrapped up in a brain in a stable body. We exist in the moments between our thoughts as well. And when we start to look at who we are, if it’s not our thoughts, then we’re nothing, but in the best possible way. We can be without having to be something. I can never remember this for long, though. I set up reminders because I’ve found nothing more useful to distance myself from ideas or arguments or expectations than mere observation of the inner world as distinct from identity.

To take it just a little further, this craving we all share comes from adhering to the illusion of having a separate self. We meditate to find that we don’t exist as a distinct entity. This is great because then we don’t have to worry about doing all the things!! We’re all part of a bigger ocean.

“Nothing matters.”

Without “emptying our cup” and holding space for ourselves, nothing new came come into being, emerging from that space deep within us.

“The New World is often found within the in-between moments of the Old World.”

We are not the character, the identity, we construct and are playing but are the limitless player behind the character.

We’re not comfortable with emptiness, so we try to fill it, grasping at fixing problems or finding that one solution to solve our issues instead of coming to terms with our true nature. People worry that finding the emptiness within will be like falling through space, but it’s more like floating in warm water or opening the door to an empty house that is rife with possibilities. Our dissatisfaction with ordinary life provokes us to seek a permanent euphoria, but everything is constantly changing anyway, so who really benefits from elevating the importance of particulars?

My intuition is telling me that there is something profoundly important about this statement that relates to a previous post of mine talking about using knowledge (via concept maps) to create a sense of “solid ground to stand on.” It’s almost like it’s telling me that I’m going in the wrong direction by striving to use knowledge to seek certainty.

Wait a minute. Or is it that I’m using knowledge as a crutch in this way? I am addictivein saving every article and paper the I read in PDF form, highlighting and annotating the parts of them that I find important. I think I do this because I believe that they can validate what I’m experiencing, seeing, and perceiving that others seem perceptually blind to. So it’s almost like I don’t trust myself and accept myself, the being that I becoming.

But to fully accept and trust myself, I need to let go and “float in the warm water” of possibilities, without trying to contain and codify myself within a “collection of ideas” that solidly define an identity that I can stand upon (thus defining me as one thing but also limiting me in the process of my becoming something more). I think this is one of my greatest fears and frustrations, my inability to articulate my identity in a conventional way that people will understand, because the scope of what I’m working on seems so massive and encompassing, as if to include all of life itself.

It’s funny. I remember decades back talking about my frustration with categorizing the content on my website because I felt like I couldn’t contain it within one area or discipline but rather it needed to straddled multiple borders. It sounds like I’m experiencing the same thing in terms of categorizing my identity.

What’s poignant about this all though, particularly the quote about “floating in warm water,” is that I already realize what I’m talking about here. It is the continuum of creativity.

In effect, so much of life is initially seen as crossing rivers as obstacles by creating bridges across them. What I’m slowly learning from vertical development though is that the “river” isn’t something to avoid but something to eventually immerse oneself within, as it is the creative source of life itself. Thus life is about learning to master creativity by experiencing it in greater forms.

Yet as been proven time and again, knowing something and truly understanding the wisdom of it on an experiential level is two completely different things. That’s because immersing yourself in a new realm of being can be just as fearful as immersing yourself fully into water for the first time when you were young. Once the initial shock and disorientation wears off though, it becomes quite exhilarating and wondrous in its nature.

Transitional Absurdity: A Developmental Notion That Offers Hope

It is essential that we acknowledge the craziness of much of what we encounter today, and that we have ways of understanding that craziness that can guide us going forward.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/cultural-psychiatry/202212/transitional-absurdity-developmental-notion-offers-hope

But new cultural chapters don’t tend to arrive smoothly. Predictably, there will be a necessary time of transition where the loss of familiar truths causes disruption. The theory describes how we would expect this to be particularly the case with today’s needed changes. Transition between modern-age realties and cultural maturity’s more systemic perspectives requires a letting go of culture’s past role as mythic parent—and with this, the surrender of absolutist, ideological beliefs of all sorts. We should expect the resulting need to more directly confront life’s uncertainties and complexities and to take a new kind of human responsibility to be particularly disruptive.