The Creative Leader Workshop

Last week, I mentioned being intrigued by comments from participants in the workshop entitled the Creative Leader. Before I can share the comment, I need to explain about one part of the workshop.

Over time I have learned that there are many ways to teach leadership concepts and I have used two of my favorite activities as extended metaphors to engage people in an exploration of different aspects of leadership. Leadership Dance and Leadership Yoga are two of the more popular results of this creative effort. Based on comments over the years, this way of using activities or hobbies that I enjoy strikes people as very unusual, as something they are not able to do. So The Creative Leader is one workshop designed to help people demystify this creative process.

The primary activity is simple. I ask everyone in the room to put their favorite hobby on a scrap of paper and hand it over to me. I shuffle them while they get organized into smaller groups of 5-7 people. Then each group draws one hobby from those in my hands. Once we're clear on what the hobby is, some are a bit obscure, I announce that their task is to design a leadership workshop based on that hobby and they have ten minutes to do so.

To the amazement of most participants, they are able to complete the assignment. Some hobbies work better for the topic of leadership than others. Some groups get more involved in their workshop than other groups. Some are very funny and clever whether or not they will actually work. A couple of ideas have been sheer genius! But everyone comes up with enough that with very little work they could develop a full-fledged workshop.

The comment I want to share is a variation on this theme. - 'I never would have thought we could come up with so many workable (clever, creative, useable) ideas so quickly.' It reminds me yet again, that so often it is our ideas about what we can and can't do that limit us. Much more so than money, or time, or The Rules. Our preconceived notions about how much time brainstorming takes keeps us from using small bits of time well. Our conception about our creative ability or the creative ability of others can mean we don't even try something different.

Next time you're stuck and need an idea for a workshop or a presentation or an article, pull out your favorite hobby, something you know well and apply it to the topic at hand. Maybe it will work perfectly, maybe it won't. But I can guarantee you, it will help you find a fresh way of looking at the topic. And that's an important leadership skill for all of us.

Best wishes,

Gage

Balancing Act

Balance – it’s an interesting concept and one that we use in a wide variety of ways. As I write this, there’s a cat balanced on my shoulder because she wants to be out and about with us, but she doesn’t wants to play with the dogs. So, I’m trying to balance my need to get this done with her need for companionship in a way that makes her feel safe and secure – hence the sitting on my shoulder.

Bear-Bear, the cat, is 15 years old. For most of her life she was mothered by a large golden retriever, but later she was shaken by a dog and since then she has become more fearful. Some of our five dogs don’t even know she’s out, but a couple of them, one in particular, find her fascinating and their style of play doesn’t work well for this old cat. So we spend our lives trying to meet our responsibilities to them by finding a balance for their respective, mostly incompatible, needs.

Balancing incompatible needs and meeting differing responsibilities – we hear a lot about that these days. It seems to be an unreachable goal and just adds to our feeling that we can’t quite manage it all, because we haven’t found Balance – with that capital B! But in my yoga practice, I’ve learned something important about the concept of balance. To illustrate it, I’ll ask you to take off your shoes and ‘balance’ on one foot. Try to stand there for a while – if you have to rest your hand on something or put your foot down, do, no one is watching. Now pay attention to your standing foot. You’ll begin to notice that your foot isn’t still, the muscles are making constant tiny adjustments, and you can feel yourself shifting slightly to be able to stand on that one foot. Add a heavy wind or minor earthquake and you’d start to feel your entire body adjusting. Balance isn’t static. Balance isn’t a goal I achieve and then I have it forever. Balance is a process. Even when we use it that way calling something a ‘balancing act’ we still think of it as something to achieve not something that is on-going. But keeping our balance is an on-going process.

This week as the holiday season draws to a close and we start the New Year, especially if you have a list of resolutions, perhaps it’s a good time to give ourselves a break and not try to find THE perfect balance point among all the demands in our lives. Remember that standing up takes all sorts of muscles let alone balancing on one foot. So maybe we can be okay with finding a sort of balance today and we’ll work on tomorrow’s balance tomorrow, if we even need to. Maybe we can even be okay with reaching a hand out for help or putting our foot down.

Have fun!

Gage

Lists, lists, lists.

So, what’s on your list? I know you have one. We all do. Some of us are list-makers; we like everything written down so we don’t forget something. Even more we like the feeling of accomplishment when we check something off or draw a line through it. (There are even a few of us who upon completing a task that wasn’t on the list will add it after the fact just for the pleasure of marking it done!)

Ok, you’re not that crazy. In fact, you don’t like to write down a list, too stressful to see it all in one place or maybe too confining. But admit it, even if you aren’t a list-maker, you have a list. It may be things you’d like to do sometime in this lifetime. It might be your New Year’s resolutions. It might be a ‘should’ list of things you ought to do someday like clean out the garage. It doesn’t matter what form it takes, we all have lists of some sort or another even if we call it our kid’s social calendar. From mid-November through the start of the year, those lists can be particularly full and crazy-making.

My original ideas was to write something about planning as a leadership skill, as a way to make things a little less hectic. It’s true that planning can help, but the reality is that no matter how well we plan, some days it doesn’t help. Whether it’s someone else’s poor planning, a traffic snarl, or the slow cashier, there are things outside our control, beyond the reach of our wonderful plans and it can all go awry.

Therefore, instead of talking about planning, here’s a reminder from Leadership Yoga – it’s not so much what we do as how we do it. I had a list for today and I’m off schedule. I could choose to rush through things feeling frazzled – that’s the way to a cut finger while slicing vegetables. Or I could choose to chop vegetables with my full attention, carefully, easily, enjoying the smells and colors and textures. Full disclosure here, after chopping two onions had me in tears, I asked my husband for help – also an important lesson in getting things done. After the onions, he kept on with the celery while I peeled carrots and it turned in to the fun of cooking together. If I’d been feeling harried and sorry for myself I would have missed out on that moment.

So, the next time your list is overwhelming, or you’re feeling frazzled, quit worrying about getting it all done and start paying attention to how you’re doing the one task in front of you. Take a deep yoga breath and let it out fully and see what there is to enjoy in the task, even if it’s just that when you’re done you can cross it off the list.

Enjoy!

Gage