Susan Cain suspects that another reason for the creativity gap in the leadership ranks is that many creative thinkers are introverts.
She thinks “Today’s leaders need to perform traditional tasks, like making speeches, rallying troops, and setting goals. But they also need to feel in their bones what innovation means.“If the same person can’t do all these things at once – and let’s face it: how many people are both social and solitary, goal-oriented and wildly original? – we should be thinking more about leadership-sharing, where two people divide leadership tasks according to their natural strengths and talents.
“One example of this model is introverted ‘product visionary’ Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, and the extroverted ‘people person’ COO Sheryl Sandberg.”
Deepak Chopra teaches us the eight steps to creativity, from his book Grow Younger, Live Longer. http://vsb.li/rW9kaJ
"There are eight basic steps to the creative response. Become conscious of these steps and use the creative response whenever you are facing an issue or challenge in your life. You have unlimited creative potential that can be used to solve any problem you are facing.
1. Intended outcome: Have a clear vision of what it is that you want to have unfold. Avoid defining your intentions in terms of what you don’t want.
2. Information gathering: Learn everything that is available about the issue you are facing..."
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Read more about developing creativity in the many posts of my Creative Mind column, such as: Creative Inspiration In The Shower and Fixing The Hubble
Creativity coach Lisa Riley notes "Whether you're an artist, writer, designer or performer, it's common to experience dry spells in your creativity. But there are ways to revive your creative juices and start feeling productive again."
Both introversion and high sensitivity may be part of creative people who are deep thinkers, process slowly, are sensitive to stimuli, emotionally reactive.
In her Psychology Today post Are Introverts More Creative than Extraverts?, writer, cartoonist and musician Wagele writes about how this key personality dimension may relate to creative expression.
“Are liking solitude and focusing inward creative gifts?,” she asks.
"These stressful elements of creative work detract from what most people generally see as the positive sides of creative job conditions."...
The demands associated with creative work activities pose key challenges for workers, according to new research out of the University of Toronto that describes the stress associated with some aspects of work and its impact on the boundaries between work and family life.
Author G. Willow Wilson notes a pop culture-bashing trend, with a number of critics disparaging some forms of creative expression they don't appreciate.
Sister Wendy was a pleasure to watch for her passion and wealth of art related stories.
But author G. Willow Wilson notes there is “a pop culture-bashing trend at work among the high echelons of literary America. From Jonathan Franzen’s infamous remarks about Twitter and eBooks to this recent NYT op-ed belittling adults who read YA fiction (and/or play video games), it’s clear that high-culturalists are feeling some hostility toward new media and entertainment.”
'Better known as Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network alongside Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield is the new Spiderman....He said the character saved his life: "It was a symbol of what got me through tough times in terms of being a skinny kid." He was bullied "because I was very confused when I first went to school, and there was a kid who was just mean and I just didn't understand it, and right into my teenage years, where I would be mugged on the street, or when I was 17 or 18 and I was in drama school..."
The interviewer writes, "Garfield confesses that he has always been an over-sensitive soul... He found validation in acting, but the oversensitivity was still there."
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My related post: Ted Zeff on highly sensitive boys and men
Like other talented and creative people, many actors use and abuse drugs, often as self-medication. Sometimes they risk addiction.
Edie Falco portrays the compassionate and competent – and painkiller-addicted – Jackie Peyton on the comedic drama series “Nurse Jackie.”
Falco has said her own experiences with addiction have been part of her dynamic acting. “Addiction has had such an impact on my life and the people I love, and there really is not a lot about it that is funny.”
Two recent podcasts offer excellent descriptions of daemonic creativity's central insight: that the best work comes when we deliberately step aside and let the daemon speak.
The central point or insight of daemonic creativity can be stated in various ways, but one of the most potent is to say that when we’re pursuing creative work — whether that means planning and executing a specific artistic project or divining a large-scale, whole-life direction — we have to get out of the way of the creative energy itself.
Many creative people experience depression. It is vital to get help, but also to consider how we label and respond to mental health challenges.
In her article “Clinical Depression Then and Now,” Patricia Waldron, M.D. noted that art historian Erwin Panofsky referred to this famous artwork, Melencolia I (from 1514) as Albrecht Dürer’s “spiritual self-portrait.”
She added, “We know, indeed, that Dürer thought of himself as melancholic and frequently experienced dejection and a sense of ‘powerlessness’ in the face of the staggering intellectual and technical demands he placed on himself."
John Kounios: The neuroscience behind epiphanies - John Kounios is a cognitive neuroscientist and Professor of Psychology at Drexel University who studies the neural basis of creative insight.
His work is referenced in the book The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present, by Eric R. Kandel. http://vsb.li/PfWeKx
Part of her exceptional success as a musician and performer is in the themes of Katy Perry's music to embrace who you are, and let your talents shine.
"You just gotta ignite the light and let it shine Just own the night like the 4th of July ‘Cause baby, you’re a firework Come on, show ‘em what you’re worth Make ‘em go, oh, oh, oh As you shoot across the sky..."
“For my mom, education was the most important thing. She said, ‘You know, the modeling stuff is all well and good and a pretty face will get you through the door, but what are you going to do when you get there? What’s gonna happen when you open your mouth?’
“Also, when you work with these photographers, when you go into a career like modeling, you can’t just go in empty-handed or empty-headed."
A number of dynamic actors and other artists like Milla Jovovich talk about keeping in touch with their child self, and actively finding inspiration rather than waiting for a Muse.
"Ellen Page is no stranger to the role of an outsider soul flirting with the desperate edges of life — she’s been there before in “Whip It,” “Mouth to Mouth” and “Super” — but now she’s skirting the emotional ledge for a video game." [The computer-generated image is from the game.]
She says, "This is an incredibly emotional story and journey for this girl. Because it’s a game, you’re also having to record multiple responses for any one scene. So you’re having to make these snap transitions between an incredibly wide range of emotions. Going from one response to the other in rapid succession within the same scene and making sure that each one was an honest moment was difficult. But it also ended up being my favorite part."
Imagine a creativity cap. A device that would free you, if only momentarily, from your mindsets, from your prejudices, from the mental blocks to creativity... These words are emblazoned on the website Creativitycap.com, and they represent the vision of neuroscientist Allan Snyder.
Snyder believes we all possess untapped powers of cognition, normally seen only in rare individuals called savants, and accessing them might take just a few jolts of electricity to the brain.
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Related:
The genius brain: Psychiatrist Darold Treffert on savants and hidden potential
Since the time of Aristotle, creativity in the arts has been linked to melancholia...but depression itself doesn't necessarily enhance creativity. Quite the opposite: most poets, artists, and composers have reported over the years that they are decidedly unable to work during episodes of severe depression. In fact, many have found their inability to create while depressed to be an impetus for ending it all. Virginia Woolf, for example...
Many creative people deal with mental health challenges, especially depression. This article notes: "Dr. Joanna Moncrieff, a mental health expert from the department of mental health services at University College in London says that although doctors, the media, and society in general has latched on to the idea that depression and anxiety, for example, are just evidence of a “chemical imbalance” in the brain, there is no hard evidence to support this.
“Scientific research has not detected any reliable abnormalities of the serotonin system in people who are depressed.”
While many people are convinced this is indeed their problem and therefore are okay with being offered a drug to solve the “problem”, she says the problem is that we are minimizing the seriousness of taking drugs to solve a “mental disorder.”
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Related: Giftedness, sensitivity and psychiatric drugs: why do we take them and why do we quit?
"I had an audience and was writing, but I wanted to hide. I never felt good enough. What if I was found out and exposed? But I’ve learned something important about my audience: They think I’m a writer. They believe something about me that I’m still wrestling with. That I can actually do this thing called writing."
Do we need to invest exceptional levels of time and attention in becoming experts before we can make significant creative contributions?
One of the key ideas of author Malcolm Gladwell is that “outliers” on the upper end of intelligence, ability and achievement have engaged in about 10,000 concentrated hours of practice and study in a specific knowledge area.
But a new article by entrepreneur and philanthropist Naveen Jain, the founder of World Innovation Institute (among other credits) writes that while this may be “an interesting thesis” and perhaps true earlier, it may not apply “in today’s world of growing exponential technologies.”
George Bernard Shaw on School: “... there is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school.To begin with, it is a prison. But it is in some respects more cruel than a prison..." Read more. Thanks @GiftedHomeschoolersForum
From the article by Michael Michalko, author of Creative Thinkering: Putting Your Imagination to Work. http://vsb.li/Wb5XxV
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Related post: Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?
The Creativity Crisis is not an event, but an era of continued decline in most measures of creativity. Reversing the trend will be a process.
Dr. Kyung Hee Kim is Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at The College of William and Mary, and in 2010 published her study “The Creativity Crisis,” in which she showed the United States has been experiencing a decline in creativity since 1990.
Creativity is the most essential skill for navigating an increasingly complex world — or so said 1,500 CEOs across 60 countries in a recent survey by IBM.
From the article: "Reduce stress, but don't relax too much. Stress affects our creativity. A study conducted in 2006 by Christina Ting Fong, an assistant professor at the University of Washington Business School, suggests that the optimal sate for an individual seeking maximum creativity at work is to embrace an in-between emotional state, neither happy-go-luckily complacent nor anxiously stressed out."
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