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How to Focus Your Creative Energy to Build that Dream

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Managing Time Creatively

Paradoxical Creativity

When it comes to raising barns and building bridges can be a major drain. We have to fit our dream inside, beside, and often outside of the work we do to pay our bills. Just when we find the time to put forward on our sweetest idea, we also find that our minds and our creativity have been overspent.

In Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi outlined The 10 Dimensions of Creative Complexity, which I call the Ten Paradoxes of Creativity. Each paradox describes the ability to use a repertoire of thought and actions between two extremes — where most people show a distinct preference highly creative people prefer “both and.”

The first paradox that Dr. C reported is that:

Creative individuals have a great deal of physical energy, but they also are often quiet and at rest. p.58

What he offered three facts and observations about energy that seem most worth exploring.

  • Their high energy due more to their focused minds than their genes.
  • They often take rests and sleep a lot.
  • Their energy is under their personal control.

Creative individuals learn to manage their energy by trial and error. This highly productive, focus / rest process is something they develop as a strategy to reach their goals.

How to Focus Your Creative Energy to Build that Dream

Managing focus and rest is a high performance skill. Our genes don’t have to align in a certain for us to master it. We start by raising our awareness, seeing the times when our creative energy naturally runs high and when we’re drawn to “a little down time.” Imagine how much more productive we’d be if we got in sync with our personal creative energy?

Here’s some things we might do . . .

  • Pay attention to the ebb and the flow.
    Granted we don’t have perfect control over our schedules. Still, we often fit ourselves to the work rather than find our most productive times for the kind of work we’re doing.

    Are you more creative at night or in the early hours? It’s worth it to get up early to take advantage of what you’ll accomplish if you do.

    Watch what you do every day and especially on the weekends. When do you naturally rest and when do you naturally play?

    Are you checking email when your best ideas could be coming? Save the boring stuff for when your creative energy is lower.

    Do you do better if you put your meetings and phone calls in the morning or the afternoon?

    Play with the order of what you do until you find you’re breezing through the tasks that wear you out the most.

  • When energy gets low, stop for fuel.
    When you feel your energy draining, take a break, power nap, or walk around. Plodding on only moves forward more slowly with less efficiency.
    How often do you stop for refueling? A few minutes refueling makes the time that follows more productive.

    What sorts of activities recharge your brain? A well chosen activity can supercharge our brains, our creativity, and our resolve. We recover the time away in higher performance when we return.

    If you’ve working on the computer with words or spreadsheets, you might do something colorful that requires not words or numbers.

    If you’ve been doing design work, you might stop to do a crossword or read a magazine article. Using the other side of our brain can be the best way to refuel.

  • Leave your work at an inviting unfinished place. At the end of a work session, we often hurry or push through to finish up something. Try this instead. Choose a point in the work where a part of the project will be “almost finished, but not quite.” When you return, you’ll finish it quickly and move forward with the extra charge of that accomplishment.
  • Plan to be creative.
    When a project inspires you, plan large blocks of uninterrupted time to devote as much energy as you want. Keep your creativity climbing faster by making sure you don’t have to stop just when the going is good.

    Eat well and sleep well before you start.

    Set up the atmosphere with minimal distractions.

    Make creative work an occasion worth planning.

  • Hang with high energy folks..
    Spend time with people who energize you. Schedule your “catch up” phone conversations with upbeat friends during hours when you’re mind is lagging.
    Ask them about their creative projects. Creativity is contagious. Take advantage of that.

Highly productive creative people focus like a laser beam when they’re working and they take energy from being fully engaged. (See Flow, also by Dr. C.) As soon as they’re not, they rest. That’s how they harness their creativity to produce their dreams.

We can do it too.

When does your energy rise and fall? What strategies can you offer to help us channel our creative energy?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Work with Liz!!

Credibility: How to Connect with New Arrivals to the SocialSphere

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What We Do Well

Susan Reid’s thoughts on women entrepreneurs got me thinking about the SocialSphere and what makes us all successful when we are. It’s no surprise that those entrepreneurial traits that she outlines are found in familiar places online.

Susan points out that successful entrepreneurs have several traits in common. I found those traits alive and well online.

She added business leadership characteristics that seem to be found more often in women — an affinity for balanced, life-style businesses; a bias toward service-focused, customer care; values-led business leadership; faith in intuition, trust, and holistic decision-making; and a success definition that includes relationships. Great social media practitioners — men and women — work toward those same people-centered values. . . . This framework for measuring social media from Peter Kim points to the core of that likemindedness. The very word social in social media and social networking seems to make that people-centeredness an obvious trait.

When I read the last section, Top Five Mistakes Made by Women in Business, I began looking at our online conversation and and how we might handle it best for new people arriving in the SocialSphere. .

How to Connect with New Arrivals to the SocialSphere

Credibility comes from the “context and content.” People meet us and try to place us among what they already know. They use their experience and our first impression — how we look, what we say, what we do — to recognize signs that might validate our consistency, integrity, competence, and trustworthiness.

Every person measures those qualities based on measures of content and context they have used in the past. Note this example and the differences in context.

When did you start using social media tools beyond blogs?

Three years of experience with social media tools can be a lot.

Three years ago, social media wasn’t discussed.
Three years ago Twitter didn’t exist.

Three years experience is still entry level in offline contexts.

It’s a contextual gap.

To establish an authentic relationships, we need to communicate within their context. If, for example, we want to do business, a first impression needs to convey credibly that three years of social media experience is more than entry level. Credible first impressions are crucial to authentic relationships. Authentic relationships are crucial to strong reputations.

Here are six ways to credible first impressions and authentic, lasting relationships.

  • Never let ’em see you sweat.
    When we’re at our best we’re authentic without the gory details. After they’ve been processed, we debrief on learning situations with appropriate distance. When we greet new situations with confidence and direction, it’s natural to invite colleagues into partnerships and collaborations. Our ability to deliver with speed and accuracy increases. That’s visible and professional authenticity. When a job is being well executed, the amount of sweat is irrelevant.
  • Positive beats negative.
    When we’re positive, we naturally gravitate toward supporting common goals and positive outcomes. Positive situations and positive emotions are attractive. Social media tools are made for building connections. Connections happen when we take positive action, offer solutions, and raise others and their work above us.
  • Show up and take ownership — even when it’s not easy.
    When we make every promise, even those to ourselves, unbreakable, we build integrity and credibility. Things as simple as returning phone calls and emails elevates a relationship when everyone else is too busy. Showing people that you value them and their time is respectful — respect is a core component to thriving relationships.
  • BE a product of the level playing field.
    When we’re level — outside of a hierarchy — it’s easier to be calm, assertive, and personally invested without taking things personally. On a level field, every point of view is worthy. It’s a matter of making space to step back to listen actively and responding with integrity.
  • Think and answer for the long-term.
    When we give our best response, not our “first response,” it takes longer, but we show confidence, courage of conviction, and reflective wisdom. Slowing down to allow our best ideas to catch up identifies us as a professional.
  • Make everything about them.
    We do our best when we make a space and make it easy for folks to be themselves, be successful, and connect with other folks. People remember most how we make them feel and how we offer a chance to find purpose or meaning in their lives.

  • Value their experience.
    When we invite people in and find ways to align their goals with our own, we ignite the power of community. Communities accomplish what individuals cannot do alone. The opportunity to share ideas and learn from new arrivals is thrilling. If we listen to learn as well as teach, the potential is only limited by our ability to dream. When we invest in other people, they invest back.

We’ve built a highly collaborative social media culture — one that thrives on learning from each other openly, honestly, and with minimal hierarchy. We know how to meet, interact, and build communities with our customers / readers. That culture is what we value. It’s also what we have to offer.

New folks coming are potential. They will change a culture, just as we did when we got here. If we reach out in the best ways possible, they’ll be our new readers and our new clients. They’ll be the new members of our communities, and we’ll be theirs.

How can we help each other make credible connections with new arrivals? If you’re new to the SocialSphere, what advice do you have?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

A Barn Raisers Guide: 7 Ways to Leave the Field of Dreams to Build a Thriving Reality

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Field of Dreamers and Barn Raisers

For quite a while, I’ve been working with businesses who have or are preparing to build or expand a web presence or social community. They ask me to help focus their strategy and to help bring people to their communities. They want to attract, impress, and ultimately engage fiercely loyal participants.

If you’ve been online for a while, you’ve probably noticed that a percentage of new arrivals get a key strategic point of community sites out of order. Field of Dreamers are sure if they build their idea their way the people will come. Except the people don’t necessarily see the same thing.

More strategic folks Barn Raisers avoid the risk by building the community as they build the site. They believe that people will help build a powerful idea. Barn Raisers invite collaboration from the people they’ll be serving and so what they build is often a gathering place for people even before it’s fully finished.

A Barn Raisers Guide

Here are 7 ways to leave a field of dreams and get people to help you build a thriving reality.

  • Look for similar dreams and listen to everyone who knows about them.
    Ask, search, and explore to find every reality that has the slightest things in common with your dream. Spend some time at each site you find. Meet the people there and see how they use each site. Hear every other guy’s dreams, wishes, needs, and point of view. Get curious. Ask questions constantly. Wonder about what people think of what’s old, what’s new, what’s in every space in the market. Have some ready questions such as this one: If you were going to build a space for people who like to imitate frogs, what features would consider important to include?
  • Turn your dream into promise to do one thing better than anyone else.
    Be able to articulate exactly what that is, why it’s important, and how fits in to a person’s life. Check back with those you spoke to and tweak your promised offer until the folks you’ll serve say it’s relevant to them and fits their lives.
  • Plan from conception to launch.
    Invite people from your outside usual circle to check in on what you’re doing along the way. Weigh their comments for value, sort them, and remember to put the good one to use. Thank everyone of them.
  • Turn your promise into a space for conversation, interaction, creation, and sharing.
    Build a connection conduit. If your promise becomes a blog, keep it sleek and without barriers. Make it easy to see and interact with you. Offer variety in resources and multimedia. Find ways to interact through events. If you’re building a community site, go easy on bells and whistles, execute your promise clearly, and better than anyone has before. Then use extra resources to find more ways for people to converse, interact, create, and share while on your site.
  • Be obsessed with easy.
    If you think something is easy, make it easier. When you’ve done that all you can, ask your grandmother or someone who’s never seen it to try using it without directions. If they don’t breeze through it, go back to the drawing board to make it easier.yet
  • Ask visitors for feedback and ideas on new ways to use the site.
    Let the rule be that everyone gets to pick their best way to do things. That develops into the kind of space that has the climate for relationships.
  • Build ways into your site to link out to and to celebrate your participants.
    Showcase your heroes. Begin with the folks who help you build the site. Give away five great referrals every morning and five more in the afternoon or evening. People notice folks who appreciate others.

If you invite folks to be part of a powerful idea, you’ll find that you suddenly have a knack for making spaces where people collect, connect, and start conversations. It might have something to do letting people help form the environments that they’re going to inhabit. It’s like painting a house that we’re going to live in — pride of ownership.

Barn raising has always been a brilliant strategy — building the relationships while you’re building a site.

It takes a little practice. And it takes leadership to let go enough to get the good stuff without getting the chaos. The best results always calls for the best from each of us.

I’m hoping as we build barns we might bring some Field of Dreamers to work with Barn Raisers on a community site. I thought maybe they might like the process. Do you think the two together would have a chance of success?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

It’s Time to Reach Our Best Hand Out to the Folks Coming In

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Did You See the Discussion?

Yesterday’s discussion about playing for keeps was a peek at a the idea it’s important to our best selves to what we do. The best people connections in life and business happen when our inside values are visible on the outside. Or as John Haydon said in the comments:

… whenever I am being honest with myself and authentic with others, I don’t even have to ask if I’m walking the walk.

Why Here? Why Now?

Each wave of new bloggers and social media practioners finds a different socialsphere. They arrive a little further from where it all began. The information, tools, and practices change and move from hands to hands. People find new uses for the tools. People use the tools and application in unintended ways.

The socialsphere changes a little with the integration of each new group.

It’s getting harder to tell the authentic practioners from the frauds. One cause could be that not enough of us are clear about the expertise we offer or how competent we are.

Soon the waves will be larger — more in the form of companies. The companies will come with goals / plans, money, and their own traditions and histories. Some wlll learn the tools, join communities, and understand the cultural shift the tools were made to facilitate. Some will learn the tools, but succeed by applying them in old culture ways. It’s likely some will try the tools and fail miserably.

And a new generation is arriving who’ve been using and testing the tools while they get their degrees. What changes will they bring?

We want mainstream arrivals to succeed and to grow what we started rather than accidently knock it down. Yet, it’s almost as if we’re the company and they’re the customers now. Like customers responding to a product, they’ll decide whether social media works for them.

Mainstream definition of social media and its success or failure will define the culture of the Internet.

In an apprentice environment such as this, new arrivals are only as good as the one who teaches them. It’s natural for people to study the folks they connect with most quickly and trust the most. That would be the first people who look competent, who talk with intelligence and confidence, and if at all possible, who already know their friends.

Right here. Right now.
It’s time to reach our best hand out to the folks coming in.

4 Steps to Raise a Barn and Build a Bridge

The plan that is unfolding begins with this model project. It’s planned to be the first of many projects for many people on the Internet. If you have a dream project on the shelf, you might start yours and track it alongside this one of mine.

This project that I’ve named “Don’t Tell ’em, Show ’em” involves bringing out the best of this blog, of myself, of the SOB list, and in a second part, help for others to do the same. It’s a barnraising and a bridge building endeavor that has these four traits.

  • The project is a business and community idea.
  • It’s a barnraising in that the community is invited to participate in building the space made for them.
  • It’s a bridge building in that businesses and individuals offline and outside the community are invited to participate. It’s a natural way for new arrivals to learn culture of the social web.
  • The project will have a date upon which it will be complete so that everyone gets the payoff of feeling and seeing success.

Then the folks who can will raise more barns and build more bridges on the next projects.

The process will be open. I’ll keep you in the plan as it unfolds. I’ll tell you what’s happening. I’ll ask for help when I get stuck. I plan to get attention, raise the bar, and show the value of what we’re about. If you have ideas how to do that better, faster, louder, or more efficiently — where to go what to start — if you have skills to volunteer, or if you want to track a project of your own, I’ve a comment box below. C’mon let’s talk.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Related:
Why Play the Game, If We Aren’t Playing for Keeps?

Why Play the Game, If We Aren’t Playing for Keeps?

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A Story of More than That

I’ve bought five homes. From the time the real estate agent was engaged until the offer was made not one took longer than a week. Two offers were completed in a single day. The real estate agent in Austin told me that in 25 years we were his only clients who actually purchased the house we said we were looking to buy.

I chose my university the same way.

I married my husband 42 days after we met — 24 years and 11 months ago.

My point is I know how to make a decision. I have a good sense of who I am. . . .

Yet I’ve been thinking about redesigning my blog for almost a year. Obviously it wasn’t a case of finding a new template. It’s a story of more than that.

Unwieldy Blog Unwieldy Me

Sometime around last October I realized that my blog had grown unwieldy. People can’t see the content or how it reflects me. The writing blog, the business blog, the branding blog all sit buried beneath pages. That same October, I realized that my personal presentation was in the same unwieldy state of outward presentation.

I took time to map out how to solve the blog problems. I took even longer to work out the same things about me. That done, I started looking for how to get the work done and get my life in order.

I Was in the Game . . . Not Really

Every day, I kept bumping into things that reinforced what I’d learned or suspected. Some incidents were small. Some events were larger.

At SOBCon08, I came face to face with a fact.

I was in the game, but I wasn’t playing with all that was in me.

I looked around and saw I wasn’t the only one that was holding back.

And the question stood in front of me.

Why play the game, if we aren’t playing for keeps?

And it stayed with me.
They have their act together better than I do.
Oh God, another “bad hair day” video.

Why should anyone believe the shoemaker makes fabulous shoes if his own shoes are ratty? The shoemaker ought to be wearing the best shoes in town.

It’s a rationalization, a total disconnect to think otherwise.

Why do we let ourselves off the hook on that?
No famous shoemaker ever wore ratty shoes.

If we’re not the best examples of our own talents, if we’re not walking our values, might as well hang up our uniforms — why would anyone waste good time and money on someone who’s heart isn’t in the game?

This isn’t just about shoes. It’s about people seeing what we can do.

Can people see you?

I’m Getting in the Game for Keeps . . . How About You?

People have relationships with people they can “see” — real people — people they trust. Social networking, social media, social anything is about connecting people with people. It’s relating, showing up, revealing something about the who we are inside.

We trust people whose inside values are visible on the outside.

That means giving a sign that we see them too and understand their values.
Time to quit talking about blogging in our jammies. It doesn’t make sense to people who don’t know our culture.

I’m getting in the game for keeps.
I’m showing up for the people in my life and my business. Gonna let them and you see me learn as well as let ’em see what I already know.

I used to think “Don’t tell ’em, show ’em,” was just a writer’s line.

It’s more. It’s a way of living.

Talk is cheap.
Showing up, showing who we are is relational gold.
If you value people in your life — business, social, friendship, family . . .

It’s okay to let people see you trying.
Trying happens right before succeeding.

How much
can they hear
if what they see
isn’t all that we could show them?

What would be easier if we got the offline world to take the blogosphere seriously?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Is That Noisy Guy On Twitter Creative or Just a Pain in the . . . ?

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It’s Complex

Paradoxical Creativity

When Csikszentmihalyi wrote Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, he found that it wasn’t easy to pin down what determines a creative life, it seemed to hinge upon the determination to follow a creative instinct.

What Dr. C. did was describe how creativity works. He laid out how culture evolves as curious and determined individuals transform domains. He explained how we might learn from the lives of those men and women to add creativity to our own. He found the commonalities in their struggles and strategies. This is what he said about them.

Are there no traits that distinguish creative people? . . . If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it would be “complexity.” By this I mean that they show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes — instead of being an “individual” each of them is a “multitude.” Like the color white that includes all the hues in the spectrum, they tend to bring together the entire range of human possibilities within themselves.

The qualities are present in all of us, but usually we are trained to develop only one pole of the dialectic. We might grow cultivating the aggressive, competitive side of our nature, and disdain or repress the nurturant, cooperative side. A creative individual is more likely to be both aggressive and cooperative either at the same time or at different times, depending on the situation. Having a complex personality means being able to express the full range of traits that are potentially present in the human repertoire but usually atrophy because we think that one or the other pole is “good,” whereas the other extreme is “bad.” . . .

Perhaps a central position, a golden mean, is the place of choice, what software writers call the default condition. But creative persons definitely know both extremes and experience both with equal intensity and without inner conflict. —Csikszentmihalyi, p. 57

He named ten antithetical traits both present integrated in dialectical tension and called them the Ten Dimensions of Complexity. I call them the Ten of Paradoxes of Creativity.

Either way, they make us crazy.

The 10 Dimensions of Creative Complexity

Each trait that Dr. Mihaly uncovered is a contradiction, a complexity, a paradox. Each contributes to making it hard to predict creative responses. If you consider the list as a whole, you’ll see how such a “complex individual” might find “fodder” that fuels curiosity, innovation, and original ideas. It’s also easy to see how less “exhuberant” people might find these contradictions confusing, difficult, and frustrating. What do you see?

  1. Creative individuals have great physical energy, but they become extremely quiet when they are at rest. This restful period can lead others to think that they are not feeling well or that they are unhappy, when the truth is they are fine.

  2. Creative folks tend to be both highly intelligent and naive at the same time.

  3. Creative people are disciplined and playful simultaneously. In some creative people, this can mean that they are responsible and irresponsible at the same time as well.

  4. Creative minds move between a spectrum of fantasy and imagination and a firm grounding in reality. They understand the present and need to keep in touch with the past.

  5. Creative individuals seem to be both introverted and extroverted, expressing both traits at once. An image to explain this might be that they are shy showoffs, if you can picture that.

  6. Creative people are sincerely humble and extremely proud in a childlike way. It requires ego to have a risky, fresh idea. It takes self-doubt to hammer it out to a workable form.

  7. Creative folks don’t feel as tied to gender roles. They feel distinctly individual. They don’t feel the barriers of authority or the rules of what they are “supposed to do.”

  8. Creative individuals are thought to be rebellious. Yet, in order to be creative one has to understand and have internalized the traditional culture. Therefore creativity comes from deep roots in tradition. Creative people are traditional and cutting edge.

  9. Creative people are deeply passionate about their work, yet can be extremely detached and objective when discussing it.

  10. Creative people are highly open and sensitive, which exposes them to pain and suffering, but also allows them to feel higher values of joy and happiness.

I plan to pair Dr. C.’s research with my educational background to offer some actionable ideas for stretching our creativity as we go about our business and our lives.

Creativity in Action

So is that noisy guy on Twitter nuts or creative? So if I’ve made you curious, even just a little bit, that’s start. Curiosity is the cure for boredom. Curiosity fuels ideas. Ideas keep blogging alive.

Move it forward by asking everyone you meet today one question. Make today “one question interview day.” What will your question be?

Mine is this . . . Do you have paradoxes in your personality?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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