introversion Archives

Gems #19 Valuing a quieter way

October 31, 2012

I’m reading ‘Quiet: the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking‘ by Susan Cain and (quietly) cheering and affirming what I’m reading on every page. It’s so wonderful to feel validated as a more reflective person and leader and to understand how this mode of being has become undervalued in our current times. It’s also helped me understand why social media works for me as a form of communication and self-expression.

You can learn more about the book and related thoughts at Susan’s website, The Power of Introverts. I especially recommend Susan’s ‘Manifesto‘ as an introduction to her perspectives on ways of valuing a quieter approach to life. My favourite is No 9:

Everyone shines, given the right lighting. For some, it’s a Broadway spotlight, for others, a lamplit desk.

The whole list is going to sit beside me at work in a prominent place for me to keep going back to and to discuss with others.

You can also dive into this great piece on ‘Brain-pickings’ which provides a link to an illustrated introduction to Susan’s work as well as her recent TED talk on the power of introverts.

A couple of other recent gems by my blogging buddy, Victoria Smith, at Corbae Cafe also emphasise the value of a quieter, more focused and selective approach to life.

In ‘Burned out on social media: pick a smaller pond‘, Victoria discusses how overwhelming and time-wasting social media can become and suggests we reconsider where, how and why we want to be connected.

In a review of Chris Brogan and Julien Smith’s new book, ‘The Impact Equation: Are you making things happen or just making noise ‘, Victoria highlights the value of this book to help us define our online platform and presence so that we can rise above the noise.

And finally, a TEC Canada piece, ‘Quiet Innovation: How rethinking the way your company works can create a culture of innovative thought‘, focuses on one of my favorite topics in the work context: fostering creativity and innovation. Tips include: embracing all personality types (including introverts); re-imagining your workspace; and rethinking your definitions of work.

How are you valuing a quieter way?

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creativity introversion

Gems #18 Creating sacred space

October 9, 2012

Living and working away from home for a while recently has made me reflect on space, the space I inhabit, the space I share, the nexus between partnership and independence, and between time together and time alone.

As an introvert, who is in a highly interactive, people focused leadership role, I need time alone to re-energise, ground myself and get in touch with my creative side. This time enables me also to feed my creativity with valued reading of books, blogs and other sources to shape my own developing thoughts and ideas. Or to interact with creative others through social media and blogs to also link and inspire.

It all comes back to making sacred space. Here are some gems on creating sacred space:

Defining your sacred space

Todd Henry, author of ‘Accidental Genius’ makes the case for having a sacred space and encourages us to find our ‘bliss station’ or:

a physical place where your only job is to pursue the things that ensure your sense of wonder and prod you towards the unexplored.

Quoting Joseph Campbell from interviews collected in ‘The Power of Myth‘, Henry celebrates the power of this type of sacred space in ‘creative incubation’:

[A sacred place] is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be.

Love that place and that thought, and holding onto it. Read Todd’s great article for more thoughts on sacred space and its value.

‘A Room of One’s Own’ – Virginia Woolf

One of my favourite books that sits on my rolltop desk always, ‘A Room of One’s Own’ makes a clear case for both physical and intellectual space to write especially for women. Walking us through the history of women and those who have paved the way in making space for creativity, Virginia Woolf’s classic book is full of gems that remind us of the value of space to be able to create and express one’s unique vision and work:

Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream. For I am by no means confining you to fiction. If you would please me – and there are thousands like me – you would write books of travel and adventure, and research and scholarship, and history and biography, and criticism and philosophy and science. By so doing you will certainly profit the art of fiction. For books have a way of influencing each other. Fiction will be much the better for standing cheek by jowl with poetry and philosophy.

More quotes from Goodreads here from ‘A Room of One’s Own’, or dive back into this wonderful essay and read it in all its sinuous and intelligent entirety.

And finally, my own poem celebrating sacred space:

Poem without silence

I want to write a poem
without the word silence.
The allure of its sleek long vowel
fights to identify this
late night sensation,
wise without sound.

After the traffic
punctuating rain,
the music I become,
beyond the reach of reading
all that marches past my eyes,
the exterior collapses
to a page to hold
the chatter
I confine.

And there though this loophole
of assonance or in its role
defining that breathless space,
the secret finds its way,
this pleasure I make.

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creativity introversion writing

Making space to speak

July 29, 2012

The balance between partnerships and creativity, between being together and being alone, between doing/being and reflecting on the doing and being, is often a fine line. Like many people, I have sought to manage and maintain the balance. It is often easier to create when you have space and solitude; but relationships, family, work and friends are all so important.

Tillie Olsen’s, ‘Silences‘ published in 1978, is about the conditions for creating art, and the circumstances that inhibit and foster the development of writing and other art forms. She examines what works for creativity; the circumstances that she analyses include gender, race and economic situation. A product of its time, ‘Silences’ identifies the high number of women, for example, who have not married or had children and created works of art. Certainly the personal and social situations we create, choose and find ourselves in are an influence in what we create and the conditions in which it is created.

I wrote about this some time ago in a poem that still holds true for me about the balance between relationships and creativity:

Half a Man

If I had even half a man now
could I write the night,
out into its waiting wings
to penetrate delight.

If I had a part of one
who tried to gather all,
I’d run because his promise
is not wiser than the call.

If I had a whole man
who could teach me to receive,
I’d write between the space he gave
and love with sudden ease.

Sometimes , the space itself, when we do find it, can be almost too much, overwhelming in its vacancy to fill. The feeling of all that open space in which to create, once we have organised it or when it is just there due to circumstance, can in itself be intimidating as May Sarton writes in ‘Journal of a Solitude‘:

The ambience here is order and beauty. That is what frightens me when I am first alone again. I feel inadequate. I have made an open place, a place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself inside it? (p12)

I love the approach of Australian writer, Kate Grenville, to capturing every inspiration and opportunity to create. As she documents in ‘Searching for the Secret River‘, Kate uses a series of mantras to keep herself writing: ‘never have a blank page,’ ‘don’t wait for the mood’, ‘fix it up later’ and ‘don’t wait for time to write’. She further writes:

I learned to work in whatever slivers of time the day might give me – one of my favourite scenes in ‘Joan Makes History‘ was written in the car waiting to pick up Tom from a birthday party, on the only paper I could find, the inside of a flattened Panadol packet. I had slivers of time, so I wrote in slivers of words: a page here, a paragraph there. Eventually the slivers would add to something. (p145)

So it seems there is no perfect formula for making space to speak. Whilst some conditions might make writing and other creativity more likely, if we are serious about it, we need to write and create in whatever situation we find ourselves. It’s possibly also that waiting for the perfect conditions is just another form of resistance to getting down to work.

That’s why this blog is so important to me; it’s a stay against silence, a way of creating space to speak, a way of practising making space, so that my writing here now (nearly) each week is an achievement, a making of space in an otherwise very busy life.

So with all this in mind, what habitat suits you to create? What conditions help you write or create art? What have you learnt from your experiences in creativity over time ?

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blogging creativity introversion

Collecting ourselves

July 22, 2012

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

‘Song of Myself’ – Walt Whitman

We collect many things: shells, stamps, books, art…you name it, someone is collecting it. The urge to collect, to gather possessions and things we love is an extension of ourselves. You wonder what attracts us to collect or gather just those specific items.

A collection seen in a museum or gallery is meant to represent an entire people, but our personal collections show who we are as individuals. Walking into someone else’s room is like walking into a small museum where a person’s identity is preserved in its original context.

Comment, blog post: Response to James Clifford’s, ‘On Collecting Art and Culture’

When we think about the definition of ‘collect’, it’s really about ‘gathering together’ and we can bring together two key definitions or senses of the word:

To bring together in a group or mass; gather.

To accumulate as a hobby or for study.

with…

To recover control of: collect one’s emotions.

Definitions from ‘The Free Dictionary’

In collecting what we love around us, we are in a sense gathering ourselves, bringing the different pieces of the multitudes of what we are and what we love together to reflect the whole and make sense of it.

This can be physical or virtual. A blog is really an online gathering of ourselves, a collection of ourselves we present to the world, with all our loves: books, photos, words, thoughts, family, passions. Like journal writing, but more edited and audience focused, blogging is about reflecting, collecting and building for the next phase of our creative endeavours.

Likewise, Pinterest is a perfect example of how like bowerbirds, we scan for images that reflect who we are to display in an online gallery of ourselves portrayed through our interests and style preferences.

My ‘Blogging from the Heart’ friends also wrote about this theme at the same time as we learnt and connected together. We reflected in various forms about how we collect ourselves: gathering, noticing, stopping, recollecting, appreciating the present moment and preparing for moving onto the next phase.

In ‘Summer of Me – Moodling‘, Jessica Brogan writes about the value of doing nothing and being idle as a way of incubating for the next phase of creativity.

I wrote in the same week about unplugging and rebooting and how an enforced break from technology through circumstance brought home the message about needing to stop to reconnect the pieces.

Many posts connected at the same time via our ‘Blogging from the Heart‘ e-course and seemed to have some link with stopping to gather in some way, like a collective exhale.

So, just like we collect, physically and virtually, as an expression of ourselves, sometimes we need to gather ourselves, to recollect, as preparation for moving on, settling our identity and what defines us before we move on.

Here are some ways I have found to be of value in collecting myself:

Writing poetry, journal writing and other personal narrative writing has been of great value in re-grouping. These activities are all about collecting ourselves, taking stock, maybe a catharsis, in a way that summarises the experience in language that captures it and then holds it, enabling us to reflect and move on, whether public or not.
Writing my blog, an example of personal narrative writing and expression – and just take a minute to listen to what Seth Godin and Tom Peters have to say about the power of this act!
Reading and working through ‘Style Statement: Live by your own design‘ by Carrie McCarthy and Danielle LaPorte has been a wonderful way to work through what’s important and to create a personal style statement to define your authentic self. I have found my two word style statement, Sacred Creative, something I return to again and again.
Linking what I’m learning in the work sphere with what I am learning in other creative aspects of my life and vice versa: blogging, reading, photography, twitter, online reading, strategy, productivity and change.
Taking photographs, collecting and connecting them including on flickr, instagram, facebook and the blog. The value of this was learnt through the Unravelling e-course with Susannah Conway; it is such an accessible way of recording, sharing, tracking and celebrating.
Walking, especially on the beach; my poem, ‘Narrative‘ was very much about the theme of collecting yourself through a walk on the beach. It’s amazing how during a walk, ideas often connect and come together, seemingly resolving themselves.

So what have you found to be of value in collecting yourself and regathering for the next phase?

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creativity introversion

Gems #7 On Creativity and Solitude

August 21, 2010

Some gems on creativity and solitude…

Leo Babauta opens a great piece on creativity and solitude with this quote: “In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.” ~Rollo May

Like Leo, I am endlessly fascinated with creativity. When I worked assiduously through the wondrous ‘Style Statement‘ book by Carrie McCarthy and Danielle LaPorte, I ended up with ‘Sacred Creative’ as the two key words for where my essence meets my expression. I love reading biographies of writers, looking at their workspaces and engaging with how they created their work.

Leo’s article, The No 1 Habit of Highly Creative People, comes up with solitude as the No 1 habit for creativity and reflects on the ways solitude fuels and supports creativity. He includes some thoughts around solitude as a source of strength from current creative people as well as some famous creative people from the past . His article, linked to this one, The Little But Useful Guide to Creativity, is a further reminder of ways of being grounded in a creative mindset. The ones that ring true for me: long walks on the beach, shutting out the outside world, getting things down and working in small steps.

I love May Sarton’s ‘Journal of a Solitude’ for capturing what it’s like sometimes when solitude and creativity come together and the raw, vulnerable feelings that come up when you do manage to get that space and time:

‘The ambience here is order and beauty. This is what frightens me when I am first alone again. I feel inadequate. I have made an open place, a place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself inside it?

I think of these pages as a way of doing that. For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been a collision. I feel too much, sense too much, am exhausted by the reverberations after even the simplest conversation. But the deep collision is and has been with my unregenerate, tormenting and tormented self. I have written every poem, every novel for the same purpose – to find out what I think, to know where I stand. I am unable to become what I see. I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful halt, “won’t go,” or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person’s face.” (p12)

And I love these words from the end of the No 1 Habits piece for helping to still that maelstrom of vulnerability:

‘Lastly, being creative means living a creative life. Expect yourself to have one. Believe you are creative. Know that you are. Make that the most important habit of all.’

A recent Creative Penn podcast interview ‘Authenticity And Creative Expression With Robert Rabbin’ provides some excellent tips for moving through these barriers and into the authentic and creative directions of your plans and dreams. The interview provides practical advice on how to conquer your fear of being authentic. Being playful and having fun are part of the solution. There is some really great advice to think about for moving on with creative adventures like a writing life.

Image, Gold enamelled gem-set pendantby kotomigd from flickr and used under a Creative Commons license with thanks