Category Archives: Creativity

Daffodils, Duolingo and the power of really small goals

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Some years ago, a beautiful story about planting one daffodil bulb a day for 40 years went viral. Although it might well be an urban legend, the daffodil principle remains a lovely metaphor about the value of doing something small but regular on a daily basis. Of course this is the same principle around compound interest – if we invest a small amount of money for a number of years, we will eventually be rewarded in years to come.

Nearly two years ago, I started learning Spanish on Duolingo in preparation for a trip to Spain. Two weeks learning was only enough to get some basic phrases under my belt (¿Dónde esta el baño? quiero la cuenta por favor) But it was such fun that I kept it up and now have a fairly decent vocabulary. This year I started some conversational Spanish classes and my teacher was surprised with what I’ve achieved with an app and fairly regular practice. As someone who has never really been very good about daily disciplines, learning Spanish has been a satisfying experiment in my own personal daffodil principle.

Writing mentor Jeff Goins talks about the value of starting small.  I’ve always had a tendency to over-estimate what I can achieve in a day and underestimate what I can do in an hour.

But the trick I’ve learned, is to take really small goals or chunks of time and turn them into a daily discipline.  Author Fiona Snyckers told our book writing circle to write just 300 words a day – so much more accessible than the loftier 1000 word goal I had in my head but have been finding tough to achieve.

Happy Spring Day to everyone in the Southern hemisphere. (and here is my 300 words for the day done and dusted)

Fairies and Custard – why radical creativity beats chocolate

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My grandmother was quite convinced that she saw a fairy once.

So it’s not surprising that fairies and fairytales were central to my childhood. My mother filled our heads with magic and other whimsical creatures  and I formed my own code for what was good and bad in the world

Fairies were a metaphor for anything happy, hopeful and filled with possibility. Holidays, surprise parcels, exciting emails still fall into the fairy category.

On the other extreme were custards. (How I loathed the lumpy stuff especially when it formed a skin)

So a fight with a friend, a piano lesson when I hadn’t practised my scales, a dentist visit   – custards.

I still find myself scanning my day, my week and my life to see the ratio of fairies and custards at any given time. I have even hosted a Good Fairy Week and Wonderful Wizard Week to encourage those of us jaded by work, bills and responsibilities to get back in touch with magic and the joy of paying it forward.

Whenever I feel myself getting sucked back into lumpy custard territory (and yes, there have been times when my Doc Martens have felt a little soggy of late) it’s time to recommit to fairies once again.

How we do so is the key question.

Too often when we want to get the magic back we turn to addictive behaviour like sugar, facebook or shopping when what we are really craving is something far more nourishing and far more radical.

When I scan the last 25 years of my working life, my favourite projects and those I’m still most proud of – are those I created with attention to curiosity, creativity and a fair dash of risk. All the elements which make for grown up magic.

It’s the kind of work that makes me feel most alive. I believe too that it’s the work that makes the most difference in the world. Work that brings surprise, courage  and magic into a world that needs it.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But it’s always fun. And it always includes wonderful people and great conversation.

Wishing you an abundance of fairies and no lumpy custard in your favourite shoes

with love and a renewed commitment to radical creativity

Debby

QUAL 15

With my own Wonderful Wizard at a Good Fairy Week celebration

 

An invitation to co-create a way for women to lead together: the #WeLead Manifesto (By Debby Edelstein & you)

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This is an invitation to join me in writing a new manifesto for feminine leadership. It’s an experiment in feminine, creative collaboration and this post is about why I need you

My creativity is a dance between finding my voice and creating conversation. It’s a kind of a dance in and out of the light. The cool shade of thought and contemplation and then the scarier notion of exposing blemishes in the sunlight in heady conversation with a carefully selected circle.

I have succeeded and failed at both aspects of this dance in equal measure. I have allowed fear, disguised as false modesty to prevent me from putting my best ideas out into the world. I have used collective wisdom as a safety net for being stingy about sharing my best work. (“There’s so much brilliance in the world already, what could I possibly add?”) I have regularly squeezed the handbrakes to stop myself from doing both in full flight. I have made excuses that have sounded so elegant that I’ve almost convinced myself.

This post is a public declaration of intent to stop self sabotage and stinginess and to experiment instead with radical collaboration and generosity.

From now on, I will reference and give credit to the people, authors and thinkers who inspire me. I will invite whoever wants to, to join me in co-creation. I will hold on to the confidence to share my best leadership vision and energy to make inspired projects happen.

  • The first step to lead in this new collaborative way is to get to a place where you accept that you have value to offer the world. (I’m about as close to this step as I will ever be)
  • Then perhaps you need help accessing your voice before you have the courage to speak or write your ideas. (that’s where you come in) I know there’s no escape from this most fundamental form of creativity –I have to articulate it and share it with the world before the next step.
  • Which is to engage others in conversation to take an idea from good enough to brilliant.

Sometimes I pick up a book that makes me want to jump. It stirs my thinking and shakes me so deeply that I physically have to put it down and stop reading. This counter-intuitive response has to be the worst form of procrastination.

In fact, maybe it’s more serious than procrastination and is actually a kind of a death-wish.

Because after all, a fear of experiencing intense creativity and the desire to return to the far more familiar state of inertia is an attempt to kill something beautiful rather than allowing it to flourish.

So it’s a rather serious problem. Because it means that I have the ability to elevate garden variety procrastination to an art form. It’s all very well to postpone tidying my desk. But procrastinating the ideas that excite me the most and which deserve to blossom in the world is a self-destructive way of living that I would not recommend. I also suspect that this is a malaise that anyone familiar with the creative process will find familiar.

One of the books that made me jump is We-Think by Charles Leadbeater. Today I picked it up again. I last looked at it years ago. It was also a good few years after being exposed to a workshop with Leadbeater for the first time at the Tallberg forum in Sweden when I didn’t yet know who he was. Charles Handy was in the same workshop and I was starstruck by the bigger name of another great thinker whose work I admired.

When I discovered We-think I loved it so much that of course I put it down. But it had made its mark and inspired the name of the women’s leadership circles I launched two years ago which I called Welead.

I chose the name because even though they were created for women, the name isn’t gender specific so that we can allow for the concept to evolve to include mixed gender circles. I like the implied collaboration in the word “we” which is integral to what we believe about a more feminine leadership approach.

Leadbeater explains in his forward how half-way through the writing of his book, he realized it would be “odd to write about the growth of collaborative thinking in the traditional way: the writer at his desk, isolated from the world, alone with his thoughts.

“With the support of my publisher, Profile, I posted an early draft on my website so people could download it, print it, read it and comment on it. They could also go to a wiki version to change the text and distribute it to their friends and colleagues” 

This approach excited me when I first read it and it excites me now. Co-creation is the most fun way to learn and it’s the way we learn about leadership in WeLead circles. If you’re an ambivert like me, (thank you Susan Cain for making it OK to be an introvert) then you’ll understand the need to alternate between quiet thinking and writing time and the more exuberant energy of bouncing ideas around in conversation.

It’s also a brilliantly efficient way to work and we need to do it more – both at school and university and at work.

My 16 year old daughter wrote a mammoth English literary essay this year. Their Grade was tasked with exploring the notion of power and powerlessness in 5 books – 3 prescribed and 2 elective options. It’s by far the most ambitious English essay they’ve been tasked with yet and she was feeling a little overwhelmed. So she completed 90 per cent of the essay and then spent an hour discussing it with her older brother. This conversation and the insight my son could give her made the difference between good and brilliant and it got me thinking.

Rather than letting my energy fizzle out towards the end of a big project, (or sometimes in the middle) who can I ask to help me with the last gloss of brilliance that will take my work from good to great?

That of course is where you come in. This is your invitation to join me write the manifesto for WeLead Circles.

  • What does the best possible form of feminine leadership look like?
  • Where have you experienced it before?
  • What have you read about leadership (collaborative, feminine or otherwise) that inspired you?

I invite you to comment, contribute and add your voice to a new way of leading in the world. Whatever you’re thinking, I want to hear it . It’s time to discover and describe another way of leading together and its far too exciting to do it alone.

“We are the leaders we’ve been waiting for”

#WeLead

Magic happens “when some friends and I started talking.” #wordsandmusic

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On Sunday night a few friends decided to get together to host a special evening with food, music and poetry. They called it #wordsandmusic and I’ve been thinking about what they did to get it so right.

“It all began when some friends and I started talking” says Meg Wheatley, one of the authors who has most shaped my definition of leadership.

While her quote refers to social change, it’s equally relevant when it comes to dinner parties. Because a conversation has the ability to gather magical momentum whether we’re talking about starting a movement or hosting friends.

First came the inspiration of Lionel Bastos (who I’m delighted to say will perform once more at our Women’s Leadership Conference this year with Wendy Oldfield) Now I know that Lionel is a great musician and also that he has retained his humility and remains a mensch. But I could never have guessed at his sensitivity as creativity coach as he shared the stage with Mandy Collins. He knew just how much to support and how much to let go – a rare talent

Then of course was the courage of the evening’s convenor Mandy Collins who took action and turned Lionel’s suggestion into reality by acknowledging that it was time to let the world hear her original music and her voice.

There’s something powerfully generative about doing what makes you scared. Mandy said she was terrified but by facing her fears and going where her creativity needed her to go she unleashed a special kind of magic. She did so with a gentle presence and musicality that saw her harmonise easily with one of SA’s best musical talents.

Poet Ruth Everson brought a gravitas to the evening with her courage with words that made us all feel that truth is the only option. What better gift could a poet give? The fact that she was Robyn Clark’s English teacher was one of the many delightful little connections which lit up the gathering like the fairylights in Mandy’s garden,

Clive Simpkins was the perfect MC. ( one member of the audience tweeted that he was “starstruck to have met him) As much facilitator as raconteur, he was perfectly tuned in to the atmosphere and to what needed to be said when. (Not only to all the performers but his easy reference to many members of the audience too made us feel we were at a big dinner party rather than an event)

There was also gratitude aplenty – I’ve hosted many events and I can’t tell you how often speakers forget to say thank you to the host.

But not this time. Everyone was beautifully aware that we’d been invited to something intimate and special and we were more than happy to pay for the privilege of being there. There was also a spirit of collaboration – not one of the performers tried in any way to overshadow any of the others

I left wanting more and inspired that there’s a group of people up the road from me who are genuinely committed to creativity and collaboration.

If you’d like to lead like Mandy and start your own conversation, this is the simple guide I give at many QualityLife events which #wordsandmusic followed so instinctively

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Work like you’re on holiday

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I always do some work on holiday. Much of our first #wiredwomen conference happened via twitter on trains in Europe. Last year ExCo (that would be me and Dunne) had a great strategy session at the Palace while both kids were at camp. And this year, in between walks, chilling and putting body and soul back together, we sharpened our vision and redesigned our website (still to be revealed) It’s the kind of thinking that we seldom have time for during the year.

It feels a bit like tidying my desk on a Sunday in preparation for the week ahead. It’s hard for a chaos junkie like me to learn this lesson, but as Gretchen Rubin author of the Happiness project says “outer order contributes to inner calm”

I know that many people disapprove (I am rapped over the knuckles by well-meaning friends and family when they see work-related status updates on facebook) but the truth is, I find a creativity and clarity on holiday that often escapes me in the hype of the year.

In fact my best ideas probably happen in between. Often I’m able to accomplish more in the few hours the family is still sleeping on holiday than in entire days spent slogging at my desk. Which makes me wonder of course how efficient I might be if I worked a whole lot less during the work year, played a whole lot more, went for more walks and gave myself the gift of uninterrupted extended relaxation time more often.

And that will be my resolution for 2014. To bottle this feeling and try to organize my year as if I’m on holiday the whole year through

Wish me luck – I’ll keep you posted 🙂

What entrepreneurs, bloggers & Rumplestiltskin have in common

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My Dad says that much of the work that I do is to create something out of nothing. I’m not sure whether he thinks this is a good thing but it’s a concept I think about a lot.

I thought about it again when I read Matthew Buckland’s article on entrepreneurship yesterday where he describes “the entrepreneurial way “— starting your own company, raising capital for it and do what entrepreneurs do best — create something out of nothing and follow their own destinies.”

In fact  if I was to choose a fairytale character I relate to the most it’s probably the rather random Miller’s daughter in Rumplestiltskin because when there is important work to be done, I know  that, like her, I should lock myself in a dark room and spin straw into gold.

That I think is the challenge of the digital economy. To take the straw that is verbage, information and clutter and transform it into something that adds value to the world.

It’s also the dilemma of the freelancer, the leader navigating uncertain territory, the knowledge worker.

In an age which prizes collaboration and working together, all introverted workers (who thanks to Susan Cain and her book Quiet are now proudly coming out of the closet)  know the value of locking yourself up, facing a dark night of the soul and trying to produce gold.

Gold of course doesn’t need to be lucrative. (although if you’re in business, whether or not people want to buy is a convenient test of whether or not you’ve hit the mark) But sometimes it’s a sense that you are proud of the contribution you’ve made.

Whether or not it’s completely original, as long as it has a unique and authentic stamp to it, there’s nothing to beat the feeling of pride when you’ve created something you’re proud of. Something that makes you feel: ‘I worked hard, this might not be perfect yet but it’s good and I’m ready to show it to the world.’

And this is probably why we should all blogImage