Close your eyes. Yes you read this sentence correctly, stop reading for 20 seconds and visualize your future and the future of the world. What does it look like? What does it taste like? What are you doing in the future? Are you playing, creating, laughing, designing, singing, dancing or innovating?
Now, what if I told you the future is already here and that you have the choice and freedom to decide what your future - your today looks like. Our destinies are completely framed by our actions today and I think many of us are so stressed out we don't realize that we must stop obsessing over tomorrow and realize that tomorrow is actually today. In fact, your future is happening to you right now, this very second.
Creatives, or right brainers, have known this for centuries but left brainers, or logicals of our society have lead us to believe that tomorrow is something independent and separate of today. I am no expert on the brain but I find myself regularly researching, writing and contemplating this notion of creative power. In search of confirmation that I am not going crazy and that others are beginning to notice the creative shift which is starting to happen, I recently found the confirming answer in Daniel Pink's book,
A Whole New Mind. If you haven't read this piece of brilliance, get it today. Not tomorrow, today. And, no, Daniel isn't giving me a cut for this endorsement. I am a believer in the sharing of brilliance - not just because it's a nice thing to do, but because it's the socially responsible thing to do. Daniel argues that creatives will be the new leaders within what he calls the conceptional age - which is the age we are living in now and he is right!
As a personal branding advisor, I am finding that many of my clients have a quiet creative genius within them and don't know how to listen or trust it. Trying to get them to a place of comfortability with their creativity has not been easy and convincing them that a MBA just ain't enough these days is even harder. We have been brain washed to believe the analysis and measurable always wins over the philosophical and qualitative and this ladies, and gentlemen is not longer the case. This former paradigm, which celebrated the logical, numerical and sequential attributes over the creative is gone.
In fact,
some are even going as far as the say, the MFA is the new MBA. This revolutionary shift is a huge opportunity for every creative on this planet who has been misunderstood, underutilized and under valued. And if you are one of "those" who believes you don't have a creative bone in your body it is time to start looking at yourself differently. Every functioning person on this planet has a right side to their brain and all we have to do is activate and exercise it.
So if you haven't tapped a creative thought in over a century, which is possible, begin to actively listen and honor your creative side. Again, not tomorrow but today. Whether it's writing, singing, painting, sketching, cooking, designing, building, playing an instrument, begin to honor that inner creative for a new world will open up for you once you do. How do I know a whole new world will open for you? Because it has for me since deciding to honor my own inner creative as a writer.
On Creativity and Business
If you are wondering thinking, "Well, Gina this all sounds great, but I have bills to pay and don't have time for this," my response to you is find a way to use and bring your creative genius with you to work. In fact, begin to approach your work, what ever that may be, from a place of creativity. Remember, the trick is to shift the paradigm. Out with the old and in with the new. Find ways for creativity not to be the afterthought but to be the foundation of the thought or activity itself. Ultimately, creativity can always mean business and business should always mean creativity.
I am so inspired by this notion, maybe even obsessed, that I have decided to host an experimental event in NYC on May 13th which I am calling "
the experiment", to explore this notion of colliding right brainers with left brainers for a multi sensory exploration of creativity. If you are based in NYC or have been wanting to take a trip, I invite you to join me for this experiment which will be a workshop / networking event accompanied with an art exhibit and a DJ spinning everything from Mozart to Common. The objective of the experiment is to explore from a non-transactional place our creative talents, attributes, and assets and to begin to shift the consciousness we have regarding the creative sides of our identities.
For more information on the experiment,
click here and at minimum start to consider how creativity plays a role in your own life - today.
Let the Creative Revolution Begin