I wish you a very Happy Christmas and trust that 2012 will be a year for you that is filled with abundance and joy!

In the last post I was speaking about people being ‘full cups’, an affliction which unfortunately often affects people in authority positions – CEO’s, small business owners, long serving employees.

Now what do they all have in common? It could be called ‘the familiarity breeds blindness syndrome’. We are living in a rapidly changing world – something many people do not really fully comprehend as yet.  Old ways of doing things no longer work, business models are changing.  Methods that sold widgets 20, 10  or even 5 years ago  will not work well today. We have moved from the information age into the age of creativity.  There are a few major business on the world stage, some of the bigger corporations that have cottoned on to this and consequently, now employ  creativity experts on their staff.

What does this have to do with familiarity and blindness?  People or businesses that are in a rut tend to just repeat the same old same old.  Because it worked once it should still work. This approach however ignores one of the fundamental laws of the universe, which is that change is the only certainty. The advantage  creativity experts have is that they are trained to think differently, they don’t see the world through the same paradigm as everyone else and they are not attached to a particular outcome.  Therefore they can be open to all possibilities. They also have high pattern recognition skills, which allow them to follow paths, others cannot perceive.

The faster the world moves, the more need we have for creative thinkers, just to help the rest of us keep up.

Today’s Question: How are you managing to see around the blind spots in your own life?

Or The Things That Books Can’t Teach Us

By and large we tend to think of criticism as a negative thing. Why ? Mostly because it is LOL!  However intertwined with that is the struggle our ego puts up when we are criticized, even kindly.  This happens even when we put our selves into  a situation where we might expect criticism to be part of that, such as in a class situation where we are learning a new skill.

Is your cup full or empty?

Are You A Full Cup?

If we want to master a skill, we require constructive criticism.  How else can we know what we need to do to improve? It is impossible to teach a full cup.  There is no room for growth.

As a case in point, I had a self taught person come to me a few years ago and ask me to critique their work and point them in the right direction. It was an interesting experience for me because every time I went to point out what might have been improved in the work, and how it could have been achieved, I was immediately informed of how much this person or that person had admired the work, or thought it the best thing they had ever done.

I realized fairly early on that there was little point in us working together as they were unable to take any kind of guidance without going into defense mode, which effectively prevented then from actually ‘hearing’ what I was saying.

What is important here is that we all do this somewhere in our lives.  Another subtle form of this type of thinking is that as soon as we think we have got something nailed, we stop the flow of expansion because we allow no further possibilities to enter.

Today’s Question: Where are you being a full cup in your life?

It might seem that this topic only relates to people doing artistic or creative types of things, however I do think it is a principle that can be applied to many things that we do. Let’s look at some of the advantages of working in a series.

• It creates continuity
• You get the opportunity to explore a subject in depth
• You often end up pushing yourself to far better work than you ever thought that you could do
• It establishes a cohesive body of work
• Working in series allows you to explore a variety of techniques and approaches to the work, which leads to new discoveries and keeps you creatively expanding

If you look at artists, writers, potters, poets, film makers, fashion designers, so many different creative arenas, you will see that many of them utilize this practice in their work.

Every time a business produces a new product there are a whole raft of set up costs associated with it.  By utilizing the working in series principle, they can make this process more cost effective.  I was in a chain store the other day and noticed they had a range of specially compressed cloths you could use as sports towels.  They had packaged them in a whole range of different containers, everything from baseballs and golf balls to fairy and pirate chests.

Essentially the same product packaged for different  targets.

Today’s Question: How can I use this concept in my career/business?