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Apparently, I’m a parent. And every 2.56 seconds, one of my children gets bored. They get bored more often than they blink their eyes. So, how do they respond to their boredom?
They fidget.
I’m talking full-on “power fidgeting”!
They drum their fingers. They drum their toes. They flutter their hoodie zipper. These kids can even fidget with their bellybuttons!
It drives me nuts.
And, every time I ask them to stop, they answer the same way:
“Whuut?”
“What? You don’t hear that obnoxious sound you’re making?”
“Whut? That bothers you?”
“Nah, son… I dry heave whenever I’m happy.”
Now, fidgeting actually does absolutely nothing to solve their boredom problem. However, watching a parent blow up must be a nice change-of-pace for their mundane lives. Plus there are added benefits: destroying their father’s sanity leads to an early inheritance!
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that I don’t deserve all this. In fact, I’m convinced this is all God’s doing. When I was a kid, I myself used to loudly fidget… even at school. When I was in the seventh grade, I would drive my teacher so insane, he would throw erasers across the room at me. It was like a napalm bomb full of chalk dust! But it never slowed me down. I just kept on fidgeting like an oblivious dope… aka teenager!
Like I said… it’s not like I don’t deserve it!
Next, my buddy Bob Stromberg joins the show.
Every day, I check my email inbox and I find the most creative daily musings from Bob. They spring from the well of creative thought that also led to Bob’s Mastering the Craft of Creativity online course. What’s amazing is that Bob discovered that creativity is not some special gift that only a few of us are blessed with. No, it’s actually a craft that we all have woven into our genes. Unfortunately, it gets “educated” out of us pretty quickly when we are young. By junior high, it’s pretty much squeezed out of most of us entirely.
What we need to do is find a way to get it back! And, like any craft or skill, in order to get better at it, you simply need to practice it.
Bob recommends practicing three disciplines that help people to emotionally wake up. This is necessary because most creativity comes out of our emotional world. In other words, art and emotions are closely related. Yet, because life often gets too busy, too boring, or too distracted, we often shut off or emotional life. Yet, neuroscience tells us that every single thought that goes through our brains actually has an emotional component to it. Of course, they vary regarding the levels of emotion, but they are there. Sadly, most of us are closed off to everything except the major emotional moments of our lives.
So, to begin with, Bob recommends grabbing emotional moments. Everything that touches us emotionally, spanning from laughing out loud to crying and all stimuli in between… whenever we encounter something within this spectrum, we should “grab it” by writing it down, speaking it into our cell phone notes app, or whatever else you can do to “grab it” so that it cannot go away. Because, the hard truth is that if we don’t “grab it”, we will inevitably forget it!
The second step, or discipline, is to interrogate it once you’ve grabbed it. Dig in and ask, “Why did this touch me emotionally? What is it about this that I find so interesting and compelling?”
When that random thought becomes an actual idea, you have your AHA moment! That’s when you realize that you can actually do something with that emotional thought / idea.
Then comes the third step: Transforming it into something that communicates with the world.
So the process is: Grabbing, Interrogating, and Transforming!
That’s how you G.I.T. your masters in creativity!
You can learn more of Bob’s wisdom and receive his daily musings by visiting BobStromberg.com.