I. Biodiversity in the Creative Container
One of my day jobs is teaching new creativity coaches about building relationships with their clients*. Besides being fun, it challenges me to boil down the essence of what helps folks get on with their creative projects. For many, it’s been useful to use the metaphor of how artists shape their creative containers.

The idea of the container goes beyond the places and times you do your work; it also includes the mental states you click into while working. What I’ve learned is that different artists need different-sized containers depending on how many and how far their ideas range.

My clients have taught me that enlarging the creative container to include wide swaths of ideas can be freeing and lead to unsuspected cross-fertilization of seemingly unrelated elements. Often this approach is in contrast to many guides that suggest focusing on one goal at a time, implying that it’s bad to be interested in too many things, to jump from idea to idea.

As our ecologists are teaching us, however, monocultures do not serve healthy balanced lives for long. I know I’m mixing metaphors here, but when ecologists highlight what occurs at the edges of difference microclimates, they celebrate the diversity that supports each creature through good times and drought. So, also, we can look on the verges of our ideas, where one meets another, to promote a rich diversity and new combinations.

Check the size of your own creative container. Is it large enough to hold all your various ideas, urges, obsessions? Have you been marginalizing ideas that don’t seem ‘serious enough’ even though you return to them again and again? If you’ve implicitly been working with a set of smaller containers, once for each interest or medium, what happens when you do the mental experiment of dumping them all into one big cauldron? By risking an initial mess, can you also invite diverse elements into combinations that thrive and support each other in new ways?
*Creativity Coaching Association. Current session of the class “Building the Coaching Relationship” is underway. Next session is in October 2008.

II. Energy Management: Translations from the Psych Research Lab, the Board Room and the Shrink’s Couch
Sher, Barbara. Refuse to Choose: A Revolutionary Program for Doing Everything that you Love. 2006.
This is a more personal book recommendation than is usual for me. Finally I’ve found a person who has experience with the benefits of having way too many irons in the fire. Sher has identified as ‘scanners’ those (of us) who get lost in the blizzards of post-its that tag our many interests.

In naming this group of folks, she validates how such life-long learners can benefit to their work and integrate their qualities of curiosity and exploration into their identities in a positive way. (Does this sound like an artist to you?)

The different types of scanner she identifies are based on her many years as a workshop leader and life coach. There are simultaneous scanners, from those juggling only 2 competing passions to those with 20 to 30 recurring interests. For ‘serial scanners’, she suggests special approaches, including a career tryout plan based on LTTL (Learn, Try, Teach, Leave). She offers handfuls of tools so scanners can be more effective at their many projects. For example, she shows ways of using a journal to honor yet keep track of mental side trips and she’s created rules of thumb for specific situations (“To lower the panic level, lower the danger level.”)  

If you are a generalist rather than a specialist, you may be a scanner and this guide could be a source of invaluable support.

III. Friends in Print: When you feel like reading
Sher, Barbara and  Gottlieb, Annie. Wishcraft. 2003. (2^nd reissue edition).
Sher, Barbara. It’s Only Too Late If You Don’t Start Now: How to Create Your Second Life at Any Age. 1999
Sher, Barbara.  I Could Do Anything If Only I Knew What It Was. 1995.
|Sher’s titles alone let you know what part of a life makeover she focuses on in her different books.  Each is a similar blend of attitude shift and practical steps that are easily adaptable to how you want your particular life to be. As Richard Bolles, author of What Color is Your Parachute, says in his review of Wishcraft, Sher “makes hope practical”.

IV. Creative Links
www.barbarasher.com  Additional resources and chatrooms are available here as well as guidance for forming your own “success team”, with audio clips and bulletin boards. If you think you are a scanner or a sense of isolation has been limiting you, this online community may suit your style.

V. E-mail changes. To change your e-mail address, subscribe, or unsubscribe please e-mail connect@dianereardon.com. If you use a spam filter, please add this e-mail address to your list of approved senders. This material is included on the breakTHROUGH Creativity Coaching (website www.dianereardon.com) All material is copyrighted ©, 30 April 2008, Diane Reardon. All rights reserved. Visit the website for back issues and details on scheduling a complimentary one-hour coaching session.
(Return to Top)