When it comes to creativity, there’s an apparent paradox.
You see, you and I both know that creativity stems from presence.
Which means it feels kind of spontaneous; a proper right-brain-consciousness experience 🧠 ✅
And it doesn’t seem like there should be much left-brain-consciousness activity (like planning) going on ❌ 🧠
And yet, when you better understand the mechanics of creativity, you know what’s most important is not stemming the flow 🌊
And paradoxically, sometimes if we don’t do any planning, that really stifles our creativity.
Here's why.
Back in the day, I used to deliver lectures on Productivity, because I was quite the disciple of David Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done’ (GTD) methodology, which I realise now, is the equivalent of bringing the Innate Health understanding into the world of Business Productivity.
Because its guiding philosophy—what underpinned all the fancy techniques and rules that form the GTD system—was maintaining a quiet mind, to let creativity rip.
And the best way to do that was to separate out all the analytical thinking (left brain) from the flow-state doing (right brain).
It was genius, really. A genuine codifying of the human experience.
So, case in point: If I just rock up every day to write these Daily Reminders without any planning, it can be a slow, arduous, frustrating process. I have to do a whole bunch of analytical thinking and creative writing, all in the same sitting.
And that’s really not very good for creativity.
But if I map out the structure of several days’ Daily Reminders, work out how best to slot them all together, and have that all ready and waiting for me in a trusted system (I use Trello), then when I rock up, I’ve done all the analytical, left-brain stuff in advance… which allows the more right-brain creativity aspects to flow more easily.
It’s simple when someone’s pointed out to you how it works.
So here’s your Paradox Alert:
😲
Now, don’t get me wrong, it can be quite a subtle distinction and there’s a fine line between planning for presence and simply procrastinating on producing!
Beware of becoming a slave to it; planning the juice out of life.
Because that way anxiety lies.
For me, it’s all about doing what makes sense—working with the mind, not against it—and I’ve found the deeper my grounding in the Principles around the topics of creativity & creating has become, the more obvious those distinctions are, and the easier the process is.
I'd encourage you to get your own evidence, and for me, that evidence is right here, on these pages.
Because I've not missed a single Daily Reminder (and all the creative writing that entails) since I started, three months ago… something I simply could not have comprehended, three months and one day ago!
🤷🏻♂️
Giles
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Giles P Croft