The Occupational Adventure (tm)

Writing with your eyes closed

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Over at Out of the Blog and Into the Light, Catherine Franz has a great blog post about writing with your computer screen turned off (or, if you have a laptop, with your eyes closed). The idea is that you can just let the writing flow, without getting caught up in the editing and polishing process.

It never really occurred to me, but seeing the written version of what I’m writing is probably my writing’s biggest enemy. When I can see it in front of me, I get caught up in the product, and that makes it harder to write.

I'm trying that idea with this post. As I write this, I'm staring out the window and letting the words flow. I’m definitely going to have to do more writing this way.

That whole idea gets me thinking about how this idea applies to life in general. We get so caught up in the product of what we're doing that we don’t let it actually unfold.

In her post Catherine suggests typing “xxx” if there's something you need to rewrite. So if you start a sentence and want to say it differently, rather than deleting it and starting over, just write xxx and keep going. It's a sign to come back and polish when you look at what you've written.

How cool would it be if we did this in our lives as well? It's like approaching everything in a two-stage approach. 1) Create and 2) polish.

Creating lets you step out of your comfort zone and try new things. It uncorks the bottle and lets the juices flow. Polishing then goes back and tidy up what you've created.

What are the possibilities for “writing with your eyes closed” in your life? What do you want to do /create/achieve that an urge to have it "perfect" is getting in the way of?

What could your life look like if you took a two-step approach to it and really let it flow?

Pretty amazing, I'm guessin'.

(OK, now it's time to go back and polish what I've written so you can make sense of all of this.)

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Brought to you by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst ^TM

 

Mind mapping video

mapmaker.curtrosengren.com

I discovered mind mapping a few years back and have been a big fan of it ever since. Combined with my whiteboards, it has become a big part of my thinking, planning, and exploration process.

If youre new to it, here's a great new mind mapping video from Tony Buzan, the man who developed the concept to begin with, to give you a picture of what it's all about.

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Brought to you by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst ^TM

 

Building on imperfection - a life lesson from Metallica

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I'm sitting on the couch right now listening to a Metallica CD that is taking me back to the time in college when we crashed a dance at a Young Communists convention in Minsk in what was then the Soviet Union (really, true story). At the dance, we slipped a Metallica tape into the sound system and three of us hooked up with an East German kid for a head-banging airband performance that left me unable to move my head the next day without wincing with neck pain. Ahhhhh...memories.

What does that story have to do with the topic of this blog? Well, honestly, absolutely nothing. It's just a fun piece of Curt-trivia. But the CD is also reminding me of a scene in the Metallica documentary called Some Kind of Monster that I've been meaning to blog about since I first saw it.

In the scene, the members of the band are collaboratively working on a song. After the lead singer does some improvisation, one of the others said he thought the whole thing was kind of weak except for this one bit he really liked.

They discarded most of what the singer had come up with, but started expanding on just that one snippet. The resulting song turned out to be one of the main songs on their next album.

Besides being a fascinating look into the creative process, it reminded me of how things can work in our careers (and our lives) if we'll let it. Imperfection tends to be something we avoid like the plague, which is unfortunate, because often it's in precisely that imperfection that we'll find the spark of our best insights and ideas.

We don't need to be perfect right out of the starting gate. In fact, quite often (usually?) we won't be. But if we don't try something new because we don't want to risk imperfection, odds are good we'll completely miss the seeds of a whole new song.

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Brought to you by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst ^TM

 

Brain Dancing

mapmaker.curtrosengren.com

This site is worth visiting for the title alone, but it has some good ideas to boot. It's an online nutshell version of the book Brain Dancing, by Patrick Magee.

What is Brain Dancing? In the Magee's words...

The term "Brain Dancing" originated out of my efforts to describe the mental synergy that results from mobilizing right-brain thought processes, especially in those individuals who habitually favor the left side. Right-brain creativity gives the left side more and better ideas to analyze. The disciplined structure of the left provides a framework for organizing these ideas and coming up with questions that stimulate additional creativity. The result is a dynamic loop between the two hemispheres – a "brain dance."

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Brought to you by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst ^TM

 

Spiritual Doodles & Mental Leapfrogs

mapmaker.curtrosengren.com

So many of us are constrained in our journeys by a prison of the linear and logical. We think ourselves into a rigid little box and then get frustrated when we can't think our way out.

There's nothing inherently wrong with linear and logical - it's just not the whole story. It's like having a box of 64 crayons and only being able to use the black and white.

I recently bought a fabulous book aimed at helping us tap into our intuitive, creative side called Spiritual Doodles & Mental Leapfrogs. Here's part of the description from Amazon.com:

With a whimsical sense of fun and fancy that masks a much more serious quest to integrate your conscious and subconscious selves, Katherine Revoir has created a playbook full of exercises and games to ignite your best self — both your rational, analytical, and logical (left brain) self and your intuitive, expressive, and creative (right brain) self. By using both halves of the brain, you can achieve more complete introspection and expand your spiritual consciousness.

One thing I love about the book is the focus on doodling, as opposed to "art." I've seen "explore yourself through art" books that illustrate the ideas with creations that leave me feeling artistically inferior. It kicks up feelings of, "I can't create that, so what's the point?"

The illustrations in this book are doodles that the least artistically inclined among us could easily have come up with in a boring meeting. It makes the ideas in the book much more accessible.

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Brought to you by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst ^TM

 

Don't fight confusion

mapmaker.curtrosengren.com

A couple days ago I wrote a post about the value of uncertainty. Here's a great article on the  Idea Champions site (found via Innovation Weblog) that echoes that idea. I love the way they describe confusion.

There is no need to fight confusion. Let it be. It's a stage you must pass through on your road to creation. Fighting confusion only makes it worse - like trying to clean a dirty pond by poking at it with a stick. And, besides, even while your conscious mind is telling you you're confused, your subconscious mind is processing a mile a minute to come up with some pretty amazing solutions. In the shower. While your exercising. Driving home from work. Even in your dreams.

I love the imagery of trying to clean a dirty pond by poking at it with a stick.

I see that all the time in my work with clients helping them find passion in their careers. The people who are able to get the most out of the process are the ones who are able to embrace the uncertainty, do the work, and let it unfold. By not trying to force clarity, they are better equipped to find it.

When people start fixating on finding "the answer" as quickly as possible, they often get in their own way. The fact that they don't have the answer yet becomes a source of stress, and that becomes an irritant that prevents them from being as open to where the journey might go. They end up stirring up the pond with that stick.

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Brought to you by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst ^TM

 

Counting on "reality"

mapmaker.curtrosengren.com

Two of my favorite words in the English language are, "Question reality." So much of what gets in people's way in life relates to unquestioned assumptions that things "are the way they are." Assumptions about what career is supposed to look like, or about what success means. Assumptions about what is and isn't possible, or about who can and can't do what. The list is practically endless.

So much of how we see the world isn't a static reality, it's a perception based on our conditioning, and the beliefs we've absorbed along the way.

For those of you of the math geek persuasion, EM Sky over at Win-Win Web has a great analogy comparing our assumed reality with counting in base 10 (she does a great job of explaining the concept if you're not already familiar with it, so I won't try to re-explain it here).

In a nutshell, it centers around the notion that our counting system is in "base 10," which simply means it's based on ten digits (0, 1,2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9). When we run out of single digits at number 9, we go back to zero and slap a 1 in front of it (10). Same when we reach 19, and 29...

While we tend to see base 10 as counting "reality," it's really just the way of counting we've been conditioned to believe in. Our counting system could be in "base 3" (0, 1, 2), in which case we would run out of single digits after two and counting would look like this: 0, 1, 2, 10, 11, 12, 20, 21, etc...

So if you had two apples and I gave you one more, using base 3 counting you would have 10 apples.

What's the point of all this? As EM says...

...There are many, many things we do every day that we never think about. We don't have to do them the way we do. It just feels like the only way to do them. It feels like the "real" way because that's how we've always done these things - because that's how everyone does them. But the way we do things isn't necessarily the best way to do them. It's just what's familiar.

...Most of the "thinking" that we do every day isn't really active thinking. It's just popular (and familiar) programming that goes streaming through our minds unquestioned.

We all make assumptions as we go through life. It's how we function without overloading. But sometimes those assumptions are flawed, and there are other ways of looking at "reality" that are more conducive to creating the life we want.

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Brought to you by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst ^TM

 

 

How to exercise an open mind

mapmaker.curtrosengren.com

Want to be smarter, more energetic, more creative, and more sociable? Exercise your brain!

Jen at Circadian Shift (still one of my favorite blogs) points to a great article with some brain exercises to help your mind stay open, flexible, and creative. Here are some of my favorites...

10. Learn how to write backwards. Leonardo DaVinci, the quintessential Renaissance man and a jack-of-all-trades, wrote all of his notes backwards so that they could only be read with a mirror.

15. Walk backwards through your whole house.

30. Play with magnets. It may seem like a child’s activity, but give it a try. For around $20 (thinkgeek.com has some fun magnet toys) you'll find yourself strangely entertained while learning about magnetic properties and physics! Remember, you're never too old to play with toys. :)

31. Try blocking out one of your senses. Do everyday things, like cleaning up your room or using your cell phone, with a blindfold. It puts things in perspective when you are forced to "create" new ways of doing things you've already figured how to do.

34. Try to see another person's perspective. What is important to that person? What is he or she self-conscious about? Is that person as open minded as you?

Which ones do you like? Any other ideas?

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Brought to you by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst ^TM

 

Thinking like a genius

So much of creating the life you want is about moving beyond the tired assumptions and breaking out of the rut. This article, Thinking Like a Genius, offers some ideas for doing just that.

In a nutshell, the ideas are:

1. Look at problems in many different ways, and find new perspectives that no one else has taken (or no one else has publicized!)

2. Visualize!

3. Produce! A distinguishing characteristic of genius is productivity.

4. Make novel combinations. Combine, and recombine, ideas, images, and thoughts into different combinations no matter how incongruent or unusual.

5. Form relationships; make connections between dissimilar subjects.

6. Think in opposites.

7. Think metaphorically.

8. Prepare yourself for chance.

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Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst (sm)

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Train your brain to keep looking for answers

Over the last few weeks I've had the nagging feeling that I've been getting too comfortable with how I do things. That I've started to rest on the laurels of what I know works (the model I developed, etc.), rather than looking for ways to make a proven approach exponentially better. What's missing? What could be changed? What could be improved?

I just ran across an article that sums it up nicely. The article focuses on videography, but the words apply to just about anything you do in life.

I think most of us are caught in that same trap. Our brains find solutions that work, and we stop looking for alternatives that might work better. Rather than being innovative, we rely on what has worked in the past. And the more expertise you feel like you have, the more likely you are to trust your past experiences rather than search out new answers. These new answers, however, are often essential to the continued success of your business and often contain solutions that are more effective than the tried-and-true methods. It is important that we re-train our brains to keep looking, even when we think we have found an answer.

As you move forward in your career journey, ask yourself, "Where have I stopped looking for new answers?" Challenge your assumptions about what you think you know. You just might be surprised with the result.

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Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst (sm)

Time for a career change? Launch it with...
The Occupational Adventure Guide:
A Travel Guide to the Career of Your Dreams