I’ve been thinking a lot about the subject of  “Time” lately, especially in terms of how we view it and use it and abuse it. Since watching the time and meeting deadlines and so forth seem to be fairly common concerns among  so many creative people,  I’ll be writing about time and our beliefs and […]

Stirring Broken Eggs

by Barbara Martin

in Try This

At the beginning of my creativity coach training with Eric Maisel, one of our assignments was to break some fine fresh eggs into a bowl, shells and all, and stir them around.  Keep the bowl of broken eggs at your workspace and each time you feel tempted or compelled to get up and go do some distraction, […]

Many creative people apparently believe or subscribe to the idea that “inspiration” must strike so that we can be creative, regardless of how motivated we may feel about our creative work.  Do you believe it? More important:  How have you tested your belief? What conditions make that spark of “inspiration” more likely to happen? Is inspiration the same as flow? […]

Creativity can be so Messy

by Barbara Martin

in Creativity

A behind the scenes look at a Real Artist or Real Writer or Real Creative-Person-Doing-Fill-in-the-Blank in action frequently reveals a less than neat and tidy process going on. Let’s face it, the creative product is the result of many forces at work over a period of time. Some of these forces are predictable, like learning […]

A few weeks ago I suggested making small changes to your daily life to help your brain practice thinking in new ways. You can open your mind to new thought patterns by purposely setting yourself up to adapt to change. How did you do? (Here’s the list of suggested mind expanding changes.) Did it put […]

I sometimes write in a coffee shop. I might go there because the peeps at home are driving me nuts, sometimes because I am feeling uninspired and hope a short stroll and change of scenery will help jolt my creativity, sometimes because I am away from home and just plain need a pit stop with […]

Listed below are a few deceptively simple ways to implement small incremental changes to help you become accustomed to generating fresh thought patterns and building creative momentum. Changing routine habits helps develop and strengthen your creativity “muscle”. As your mind becomes accustomed to processing change and filtering experiences through different perspectives, it also becomes increasingly […]

Ultimately, whether creative ideas are large or small, they are firmly rooted in the details we process through our minds. Every new idea, regardless of scope, begins from a small detail, something that catches our attention and holds us rapt long enough to think outside the immediate. All it takes for this to occur is […]

You know how you come back from vacation or the weekend at the same time relaxed but also all jazzed up and ready to roll? And then you re-enter the routine of daily life and the energy seeps out of your being until you are right back where you started with the same sapped-out feeling […]

So it’s #FF (follow friday) time on Twitter and I am missing Los Angeles — city of creativity crack — so much this week. Twitter is the closest thing I’ve found to not being there. Living in and traversing LA — that city or county or MSA or sprawled out metropolis or crazy place or […]