3 Things I want to share with you today…
1st…If you want something NEW to happen in your life, your business, or anywhere, you have to do something DIFFERENT.
2nd…When you do something DIFFERENT you change the way you are thinking, making the shift from left-brain routine to right brain innovation. This is being supported by both brain scientists and spiritual leaders.
3rd…My mission to illuminate for you the ability you possess to “flip the switch” from left to right brain thinking using Creativity Workouts and the Arts is going to provide you with what you need to create the change you desire in your world, to evolve your thinking in this rapidly evolving world, & to lead a blanced and fulfilled life.
First, let me take you on a little tour to illustrate a Creativity Workout. Follow along with the intent of getting into your right brain (if you are sitting at your computer right now, obviously, you are engaged in the heavily left-brain dominated world and a little right brain exercise is always good.
I recently visited UMMA. The Univ. of Michigan Museum of Art. I hope this motivates you all to go to an art museum as soon as possible. It is a FABULOUS right brain workout. Take your business team. Take your children. Go alone. You will leave with new ideas, more energy, and a sense that you too can create something new.
Imagine that you are walking into this room at UMMA. It is an art installation by Heather Rowe. http://www.umma.umich.edu/view/ (I don’t know why the pics on the UMMA site are of a different install, but enjoy that one too.) It is a totally separate room. I had it all to myself. It is a series of platforms or open boxes perched upon different lengths of metal and glass supports. Notice the glass cubes at the foot of some of the supports. (I really liked those….). The goal of the installation is to engage you in an altered perspective. The key is to slow down, look around and take it in. Throughout my tour here today, look for the reflection of the orange, metal sculpture outside the museum.
So, these mirrors were placed as close to the universal eye-level height and each open “box” had these mirrors and other “random” objects arranged differently to catch the reflections. See the orange sculpture? Try to really space out on these images. Just give yourself a little mental vacation from the to-do list scrolling through your mind. You can’t innovate if your mind is busy processing lists. Now, let’s move to a different part of the room.
Hi! Here I am with my trusty iPhone (LOVE it!). Now, see the orange? How many times do you see my face? Look in each piece of mirror. Or almost all of them. Can you tell which sections are mirror and which are real? Look again….
Now, here is the last part of the tour.
Now, even I still can’t figure this out. See my face taking the picture? See the orange sculpture? I promise, that orange sculpture was BEHIND me. It looks like you are looking through the art install to the outside and there is the sculpture. No. That is a reflection of the sculpture. I promise. Even when I was there I had to turn around and look behind me there it was. Then I looked in front of me and there it was too. OK. At this point, I admit, I started fantasizing about me alone in that room for hours with a bottle of wine and nothing else. Except that I would surely need a pad of paper because of all the new insight and ideas that would come flooding into my consciousness as I opened up more and more in my mind–right hemisphere, remember.
OK. So I could go on and on. I will just say that just yesterday I bought two books. Joe Dispenza’s Evolve Your Brain (this author was featured in the movie What the Bleep!?!?–rent that if you have not already) and OSHO’s Everyday OSHO. Within 24 hours, after only reading a total of 15 pages between the two books, I read BOTH of them say that the key to ANY kind of innovation is dependent on your creativity, which is a task of the right brain, and that your left brain is responsible for information or skills that are routine or already processed by your mind.
Dan Pink reveals this fact as well in his new book DRIVE. If you want NEW innovation in your organization, it is dependent on right hemisphere thinking. You can learn to FLIP THE SWITCH in your own mind. We all live in a left-brain dominated world, so if you think, “Hey, I want to new solution to this problem.” That should trigger the thought, “I better get in my right brain.” In which case you give your right brain something to do (go to the Creativity Workout section of this blog for ideas OR buy my book The Artist Within, A Guide to Becoming Creatively Fit, that is chock full of right brain exercises), thereby shifting the energy in your mind (What the Bleep?!?!) to the side responsible for the creativity, focus, and openness required for innovation. I will be back with more from UMMA. I have to dole it out because otherwise this would be a 20 foot long blog entry.
Come back soon…subscribe to this blog–look under my pic–…learn more about Creatively Fit. We will be launching the Creatively Fit Program in March 2010. It will be ther “Jenny Craig” for the Right Brain. It is going to be fun….
Creative wishes this holiday season, Whitney