“Life is trying things to see if they work.” — Ray Bradbury Guest Blogger Suzanne Murray: I recently met a man in line for coffee who works for a company that offers technology for grade schools that allows learning to be personalized to the level of the individual student so each can get the specific support they need. I love hearing about such innovative practices. As we talked he mentioned a report about why gaming is so popular among the young. Even though they experience an 85 to 90% failure rate as they play, they learn from their mistakes and get better in the process. “It gives them a safe place to fail” he said. I love that idea. “That’s exactly like creativity,” I responded. It’s why as a creativity coach I encourage people to fall in love with the process. Just like the experience of gamers, when we relax…
Tag: Suzanne Murray
Your Creative Self is Eager to Explore
Today’s Guest Spot goes to Suzanne Murray. I recently watched a video of a 42-year-old neurosurgeon from California who dances for his patients to cheer them up during their check-ups. He gets them dancing too, including a young woman in a wheelchair seen waving her arms and shimmying her chair. I love that this doctor had found such a creative way to tend his patients spirits as well as their bodies. I imagine it’s a great help to their healing. It has me thinking more about how being creative can help heal our world. Creativity allows us to access new ways of looking at a problem and find fresh solutions. We touch expanded capacities and find ourselves capable of more than we think. We connect more to our heart and spirit. We are often surprised and delighted by the unexpected inspirations that arrive. We can learn to bring the creative…
Creativity Is A Practice
Suzanne Murray writes about the rewards of engaging our creativity. There is a growing awareness that creativity is a capacity that everyone has, though they may not understand what is involved in accessing it. One of the main things that gets in the way of people embracing their creative gifts is a belief that creativity should be easy; that it should just flow out. They think they should be good at it immediately. If they are not and it’s not easy, there is a tendency to think there is something wrong with them and it’s never going to work. Yet creativity in whatever form you choose to pursue is a complex process that actually asks a lot of us. This is why is feels so good to engage since it helps us discover that we are capable of more than we thought possible, including working from expanded abilities. It is…
Imagination and Mentors
Imagination is everything. It is the preview to life’s coming attractions. – Albert Einstein Guest Blogger Suzanne Murray and imagination: I’ve been asking myself, how can I best help empower others at this time of great global change. The first answer that came in the flash of inspiration was the word imagination. Einstein regularly insisted that imagination is more important than knowledge. But the thing is, it’s not just for geniuses. It’s for everyone. We have been taught to favor the rational mind at the expenses of capacities that actually can help us in amazing ways. It’s easy to reclaim. Years ago, I learned an exercise from Jean Houston, noted author, visionary and one of the founders of the human consciousness movement. It involves working with an imaginary mentor to get advice on any question that we have for any area of our life. Using our imagination and intuitive mind give…
Just Walk!
Guest Blogger Suzanne Murray suggests walking to inspire creativity. WALKING HELPS YOUR CREATIVITY When you are engaged in a project and feel the creative inspiration has dried up, take a break. Anything that occupies the consciousness mind in a physical way can open you to the flow of fresh ideas and insights. Doing the dishes or taking a shower are good ways. One of my favorites is taking a walk. You could simply stroll around the block or walk deep into nature. I have not been alone in my awareness that walking opens creative channels. There is a long list of well known creatives who walked to allow ideas and connections to flow. Charles Darwin, Virginia Woolf, William Wordsworth, Nikola Tesla, Aristotle, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Jefferson, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Dickens, Beethoven to name but a few. Scientific studies have now found that creative problems can indeed be solved by walking,…
The Joy of Creativity
By Suzanne Murray Years ago I heard Nobel Prize winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney give a lecture at the University of Washington. In the middle of this very academic speech, he paused, threw up both his hands and said, “Oh, just write for the joy of it” and then dipped back into the lecture. I don’t remember anything else from the talk, but Heaney’s sudden burst of inspiration stayed with me because it really captured an essential element in being creative. Whether you are cooking a great meal, growing a beautiful garden, writing a poem or singing in the community choir, you likely feel a deep sense of satisfaction and a joyfulness that comes with being creative. Creativity draws on the best of human nature: perception, imagination, intellect, inspiration, courage, intuition, and empathy. The urge to create asks us to bask in the experience of the world, to see, feel, taste,…
Surrender to Creativity
Guest Blogger Suzanne Murray encourages creativity by surrendering. SURRENDER IS CRITICAL TO CREATIVITY We can’t force creativity. We know this intuitively. If we told a painter that we wanted a masterpiece by five o’clock tomorrow, they would look at us like we were crazy; that we clearly didn’t understand what being creative was all about. An important part of being creative is learning to surrender to the flow of the universe, allowing something greater than our everyday self to move through us. It’s not something we can figure out with our linear mind. Of course, if we want to paint we need to learn how to work with our chosen medium and studying the work of the masters can help. If we want to write it’s really valuable to read widely and deeply, to show up daily to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and perhaps…
Calm Your Brain
Guest Blogger Suzanne Murray has this to say: With anxiety and fear running high in the world these days, I wanted to share how we can make friends with these feelings and use them to our advantage. Anxiety and fear can prevent us from being creative or living a life we love. To live and create fully, we be must be willing again and again to step out of our old comfortable life and into unknown territory. This always feels scary. Many years ago I read the self-help book Feel the Fear, And Do It Anyway which presents the premise that just because we feel a sense of fear about a project or moving in a new direction in our lives doesn’t mean we are supposed to stop ourselves from proceeding. More recently I’ve been fine-tuning my understanding of what this really means and feels like, how to best use it in…
Help Your Creativity Blossom
Guest Blogger Suzanne Murray shares why freewrites inspire writing: I have taught the creative writing process for more than twenty years, working in part with a technique known as “freewriting” where I encourage participants to “just let it rip”. We don’t worry about punctuation, spelling, grammar or whether it is good. We suspend the censor and let our first thoughts spill out onto the page. People new to the class are always nervous about this kind of letting go. Since I write and share my own raw writing with the group, I was rather nervous when I first started teaching the classes but found that by maintaining a safe and sacred atmosphere of unconditional acceptance for whatever wanted to come forth it really calmed the fear for everyone. We learn quite early to fear making mistakes. We all have a well-developed censor that confines us within the limiting parameters of…
You Can’t Wait For Inspiration
Today’s Guest Blogger post is about inspiration, by Suzanne Murray. Excerpted from Suzanne’s September 5, 2020 Creativity Goes Wild Blog Post. “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” — Jack London Recently a new writing coaching client emailed me to say, “I haven’t been writing. I just don’t feel inspired.” I immediately shot a message back, “You can’t wait for inspiration. If you get nothing else out of our coaching together, this awareness will make a huge difference in your creative life.” No writer or other artist waits for inspiration before showing up. Painter Chuck Close said, “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.” Flannery O’Connor, the noted Southern writer, described her habit of going to her office every day from 8 am to noon, “she wasn’t sure if anything was going to happen but she…