How disengaging will make you more creative and productive.

Have you ever been up against a deadline at the end of a frantic week at work and found that your brain simply isn’t functioning properly and you can’t seem to get your thoughts together. There is so much adrenalin rushing through you at the thought of the looming deadline that it feels as though your brain is foggy and unable to formulate clear thoughts and ideas.

Time to STOP and disengage! Seriously! I know it sounds crazy and counterintuitive but I can promise you that just 20 minutes of disengaging will change everything. It will improve your focus, clarity, creativity and productivity.

How to do it.

Put everything on pause for 20 minutes and let your phone go to voicemail. Step outside whatever the weather and just let yourself breathe. If you are able to find a green space,

even the smallest amount that is great. Focus on the feel of your feet on the ground. Try and count all the different sounds you can hear. See if you can count up to 20 different sounds. If the weather / space you are in permits, take off your shoes of and place your feet directly on on the earth. Research shows that grounding, connecting our feet to the earth has myriad benefits including; relieving muscle tension and headaches, reducing inflammation by reducing excess positive electrons, increasing energy and mental clarity, lowering stress and promoting calmness.

If you are able to, find a place to sit down and close your eyes. If not, just maintain your place of stillness wherever you are. Feel where that pressure of all the things you need to do is located in your head. Visually imagine it dropping down into your chest space and begin to breathe into your chest and out again from your chest. Imagine your breathe coming into your chest and out from your chest. Breathing into this heart space and then out again. Do this for a minute or so. You will begin to feel very calm, quite quickly. Doing this activates heart coherence, which according to the heart math institute has many demonstrated benefits including, improved short- and long-term memory, providing a greater ability to focus, improved cognitive function, improved blood pressure as well as lowering stress and cortisol. Not bad for a 2 minute exercise! Once you are feeling calmer, think about the issue or deadline demanding your attention and see yourself in your minds eye, having completed it exactly as you wanted to. How does that feel in your body? What can you see, hear and smell as you hand in this work? When you can really feel it, open your eyes. I promise the work will be easier and you will feel as sense of ease as you now go to complete the work. Please let me know how you get on!

How can we build our creativity when we don’t even know we possess it.

Creativity is a hot topic right now. There are thousands of books and studies dedicated to studying the habits of highly creative people and telling us that we can all be creative geniuses if only we will try hard enough. As an artist and creativity coach, I’m known for saying, ‘anyone can be an artist, everyone is creative.’ But what does this actually mean. And is it true?

I’m sure we can all remember a time in childhood when we would happily work creatively and most of us will have drawn avidly at some point, even if only as a very young child. You may have watched your own child pick up a crayon and start drawing. It may not necessarily even be on the paper in front of them, it could be all over your walls and floors! Children are naturally creative problem solvers.

But something happens when we get older that inhibits this natural creativity. We learn to be serious and studious in school and then get a good sensible job that pays the bills. None of this arty farty stuff; that doesn’t apply to us any longer. And the longer we live our lives, not using our creative muscles, the more alien it feels to consider ourselves creative. Is it any wonder that the majority of people do not consider themselves remotely creative.

I’m here to tell you that creative people are not different or special to you. They just have different daily habits that are conducive to creativity. Creative work and structures are embedded into their daily routines. If they have a problem to work through, they might use a mind map (see previous post) to generate new and interesting ideas. They have confidence that their unconscious creative mind will generate new and interesting solutions for them. Through years of accessing their creativity, they trust that there is a wise and knowing part of themselves that knows the answer.

The power of habit: How to do it!

The one and only way to begin to access your own creative genius and to learn to trust this part of yourself is to build a creative habit into your life. It need only be for 5 minutes a day. Have a notebook that you use especially for this purpose and a pen handy: Perhaps it needs to be by your bed so that you do it as soon as you wake up. Or one the counter so that you can do it immediately after breakfast, whatever works for you and your daily routine.

One week of your new creative routine could look like this.

Day 1: Spend 5 minutes simply doodling, just messing around on the paper, letting yourself build up some lines and shapes. Then go about your day as usual.

Day 2. For 4 minutes, allow yourself to just doodle on the page. Nothing to write or do or think about. Just relaxing doodling. Then spend the final minute thinking about what your doodles might mean? How did it feel doing it? Do the shapes remind you of anything?

Day 3. Look at something you use every day, it could be a watch, your phone, a toothbrush, a fork or spoon. Anything. And then spend 5 minutes drawing it. It doesn’t need to be a masterpiece; it doesn’t need to look like a photograph. Just enjoy looking and drawing.

Day 4. Spend 4 minutes drawing an everyday object, as you did the day before. Then spend a minute thinking about how you felt, whilst you were drawing. Were you worrying about the day or were you totally focussed? Could this be a useful energy to cultivate, during your day?

Day 5: Spend 5 minutes drawing your day. Your commute to work, the conversations you had, what you ate, how you felt. Use any sort of lines or symbols to do this. The only rule is not to use text! Remember only you need to see this, it needn’t be a masterpiece. It only needs to make sense to you.

Day 6: Spend 4 minutes drawing your day and then the final minute looking at your drawing to see if anything unexpected has been revealed to you. If so, write this insight down.

Day 7: Spend 4 minutes writing a note to your creativity. Get to know it. Let it know that you want to engage with it again. Make friends with it. See if it has any responses for you. Spend the final minute just seeing what responses you get from it. Then congratulate yourself on your week of creativity! You have begun something very powerful indeed. And you have discovered something that is not outside of you, but was there inside of you the whole time!

Let me know in the comments below what you thought of this? Is it something you are going to try? Is it something you have tried before?

Until next time, keep creative!