In times of upheaval, creativity is not a luxury.
How many times have you fantasized that someone who KNOW will step in and just tell you what to do with your business? (I have!)
Making a business succeed can feel complex, and sometimes mysterious - like at any given moment, you can see important parts, but it's hard to see the WHOLE, and know how to take all factors into account with every decision.
That's because your business isn't entirely yours. It's as much a product of the culture and time you are in, and that context is always changing. Your business wouldn't be what it is without that. Your goals and your dreams for the world, and your solutions to problems, come from the outside of you as much as from the inside.
And you can't possibly see that whole, and you don't need to make yourself wrong or bad or incomplete for not seeing it. You can only see the water that touches YOUR boat - not the water over the horizon or around the island.
Sometimes we use coaches and masterminds and friendships to help us feel like we are seeing the whole, because they've got a different view from their boats. That's really useful.
But it's also helpful to embrace the fact that we can't see the whole, and we never will. And that embrace, right there, is the choice that primes us for our best creative work. It an active, co-creative conversation between mystery and our conscious awareness, that makes something truly fresh, present and meaningful possible.
This takes creative confidence. This is, I'm realizing, the definition of creative confidence.
Creativity is not a luxury when it comes to business. You wouldn't even have a business if its weren't for the creative moment of decision to bring something into being that didn't exist before. The decision to combine: to combine the particularities of your circumstances, with aspects of your dream for the world, with the best of some of the skills and experiences you bring, with your financial and logistical needs, and more.
Some would say our instinct is to respond to times of stress, of pandemic, of authoritarianism, of very real dangers, by shutting down our creative powers. To go on autopilot. To freeze, flee, fight, hide. We tell ourselves it's too hard to create when the feelings are so big .
When I look at the history of art and music and dance and other forms of culture, I can see the opposite is true. Creativity and discovery and courage come directly from periods of struggle; in fact periods of struggle create the limits and challenges in which humans rise and create new ways of being, communicating, and relating that heal and nourish, and create maps for a different future.
Creativity is not a luxury: it is at the heart of what you do as a business owner. It is innate, AND it has been under siege by a culture that wants you to be a passive consumer; which tells us that "creative" stuff isn't important or productive, but merely "entertainment."
It's amazing how much, and how continually, we create, in a culture that undermines it and trivializes it constantly.
I propose that you see your creativity as the method and the ethos and the answer to any new challenge and/or opportunity that the COVID-19 pandemic has placed before your business.
The NIMBLE workshop shares very concrete methods and prompts that will help you free up more creative brain space in a time when our mental and emotional capacities can feel decreased.
They will help you step back from survival mode and think bigger again about your work in a changing world, and open space for fresh ideas and approaches to emerge.
Whether you need to make major pivots, or small adjustments to your work right now to be relevant, sensitive, and imaginative to the present moment, these methods and prompts will help you.
Come take care of yourself and your biz.
Because your creativity is fun, but its not a luxury - its a necessity.
I hope to see you there.