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Creative Emergence Newsletter
| January 2015
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Happy New Year! Now that I am more settled in my new town, I will resume more regular newsletters again in 2015. Also watch for some new programs and some revised programs to be introduced throughout the year, including a 2-day Polarities and Creative Thinking public workshop with my friend and colleague, Cliff Kayser, in DC in June. More details on that and other new unfoldings in the next newsletter. Quick update since our last newsletter: still doing Improv for Leaders, Innovative Leadership, and Creative Thinking classes regularly at the Federal Executive Institute as part of being their adjunct faculty. Been hosting monthly Cville Creativity Network meetings (details on the next meeting below) and facilitated one recently on Play and Creativity for Creating Meaningful Goals. I presented Improv for Thinking and Speaking on Your Feet at the Toastmasters Conference in Chantilly, VA, and have been creating several Creative Thinking and Applied Improv-based programs for new clients:
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Co-facilitating an Improv for Creative Culture workshop in NYC (I'm 2nd on right)
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Also was interviewed on the Conscious Software Development Telesummit (interview below). They are turning all the interview transcripts into a book - will share details when it's out. Continuing with individual coaching clients on their signature work, and finally (woohoo!) found a way to stay focused on my Pattern Breaks book - by talking it out loud and having someone transcribe what I say - then I go back and edit. Still all my words, but talking it out to another human in real time brings it more to life for me! Movement! Scroll down for articles, musings, links, and more! And have a generative, juicy 2015! ~ Michelle
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 Creative Emergence Coaching
4 spots open!
We "graduated" several coaching clients in 2014 who have successfully started a new business or took their existing one to the next level, and now have openings for 4 new clients! Call now to schedule a FREE 30-minute consultation!
Creative Emergence Coaching is a unique, whole-brain coaching process designed to accelerate your personal, professional, and business development. In the sessions, we cultivate your "inner creative landscape" as the foundation for creating what's next in your work or business. Using an integration of arts-based, reflective, and action-oriented processes, we focus on structuring your purpose, passion and aliveness into an income-generating business or work...or creating anything new: your signature approach/model/process/methodology, workshop, product, or service.By using whole-person, whole-brain creativity you get deeper and more surprising solutions than with just left-brain thinking alone; quickly access deep layers of your potential and understand big picture patterns; discover new and often surprising solutions to both old and new situations; feel a sense of connection to something larger than yourself; experience an excitement from bringing something that is uniquely yours into the world; and get clarity on your direction and next steps as they emerge.
Make 2015 the year you do what you enjoy and get paid for it!
* Discover, design, and develop what's next in your work
* Unleash purposeful, meaning-centered, income-generating work
* Cultivate new dimensions of your creativity and partner with your Creative Self
* Focus your creative intelligence in meaningful, practical and relevant way
* Uncover and design your unique "signature" offerings and approach
* Develop a solid, structured framework of what you have to offer * Open up new avenues in your work environment or your consulting practice
* Draw forth the energy, passion, and commitment already within you
* Generate more creative, immediately applicable options or choices
* Develop more clarity, integration and direction; focus all of your great ideas
* Activate your imagination and intuition; transform creative blocks Call or email me about a free, no obligation consultation to see if this immersive creativity-centered - and still practical! - approach is right for you. Only 4 coaching spots available.
Special thank you! As a thank you to current or past clients who want to renew a coaching package, call about your New year's Discount - 10% off any renewal packages in January or February.
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 Workshops we Offer - A Sampling
We offer organizational and public workshops including, but not limited to, the list below. All of our workshops are content-rich and highly experiential, and use the whole brain - arts-based learning, improv theater, the body/movement, visual thinking, reflection, storytelling and the creative imagination combined with linear processes and frameworks. For more, check out the Workshops page on our website or call 434-995-5077.
Creative Thinking Applied Improvisation Improv for Leaders
Applied Creativity Business Storytelling Co-creative Teams
Creative Leadership Creativity for Coaches Nonverbal Creativity
Creative Work Culture Creative Facilitation The Creative Body
Creative Emergence Improv for Sales Improv for Conflict Resolution
Creativity for Work Improv for Interviews Bringing Your Whole Brain to Work
And more...along with 6 train-the-trainer programs (see website). Nothing cookie cutter - all workshops are programs are custom-designed. Clients have included Microsoft, Panasonic, GEICO, Dominos, John Deere, Federal Executive Institute, NetImpact UVA, The World Bank, Teach for America, Kaiser Permanente, Deloitte, NIH, the Imagination Toolbox and the Front End of Innovation conferences among others.
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Ceramic plaque I made at the Crafty Fox in Charlottesville
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Whole Brain Thinking and Applied Improvisation for Innovation, Ideation and Creative Problem Solving
I was recently interviewed on the Conscious Software Development Telesummit on Whole Brain Thinking and Applied Improvisation for Innovation, Ideation, and Creative Problem Solving and how it applies to software development and team collaboration. Click here for excerpts from the transcript of the interview: http://bit.ly/1r2Wciv
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 | | Latest poster ©2014 |
Creativity is Living Paradox
Living creativity means living paradox. It is ubiquitous and universal and also uniquely personal. It contains a balance of left and right brain, cultivating and emergence, thinking and being, reflection and action, receptivity and generativity, planning and improvisation, heart and head, left brain and right brain, mind and body, analysis and intuition, movement and stillness, order and chaos, expansion and contraction, inward focus and outward focus, capturing and letting go, individuality and connection, taking in and releasing, and structure and flow.
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 Cville Creativity Network - Jan.28
This month's session: Leadership and the Arts. One of the most important ideas in leadership is that a leader has to develop his or her own leadership story. In this highly experiential session we will use techniques from the creative arts to explore some central ideas about leaderships and develop your own personal leadership story using some acting exercises, storytelling games, and improvisation. Presenter Ed Freeman is a University Professor at UVA's Darden School. He's best known for his work on what has come to be called "stakeholder theory". He teaches courses in ethics, business strategy, and the use of the creative arts in leadership. If near Charlottesville, come join us the 4th Wednesday of every month at 7pm. Details and registration are on the Meetup web page here. |
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CreativiTweet Links & Quotes 
Every issue I include some of my recently tweeted links - articles, videos, and other creativity-related links of interest. Join me there at @CreatvEmergence.
1. One of the keys to Creativity, Intelligence, and Scientific Thinking: Making Connections - http://bit.ly/1sVLPh72. Art as Therapy: 7 Psychological Functions of Art | Brain Pickings - http://bit.ly/1BCb6ws3. MIT STARTUP supports arts-based entrepreneurship | MIT News - http://bit.ly/1yGKuf74. 5 Improvisational Acting Techniques That Will Make You a Better Blogger - http://bit.ly/1nbJdCS5. Bringing Fun and Creativity to Work - MIT Sloan Mngt Review - http://bit.ly/1xKoErb6. Psychology of Side Projects: Creative Hobbies Improve Performance - http://buff.ly/1zBoK417. Do You Recognize These 10 Mental Blocks to Creative Thinking? - http://bit.ly/18vqoHd8. "If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play" ~ John Cleese 9. "The future of design is less and less about discrete objects and more and more about continuous experiences." - http://slate.me/1CCfZKw10. Emergence: A unifying theme for 21st century science - Santa Fe Institute - http://bit.ly/119YHDo11. Natures awe-inspiring artistry! Pufferfish creates INCREDIBLE design on ocean floor. MUST SEE! - http://on.fb.me/1z470fk12. Improv Helps Ph.D.'s Explain Their Work-and Loosen Up - http://shar.es/10Fly113. "If people didn't do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever happen." ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein 14. Ideation Central: How Applied Improv fuels idea-sparking/design potential - How Design - http://shar.es/10DlG615. This Is Your Brain On Dance! - Huffington Post Arts - http://huff.to/yxltZ4
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CreativiTweet Musings
Every issue I also include some of my own musings in 140 characters or less. These are some of my recently tweeted explorations about creativity and emergence....tweets for thought:
1. By following and cultivating what's most alive and juicy for you,
you create a strong inner foundation upon which to build your
signature work.
2. Applied Improv creates a spaciousness that allows you to makes new
discoveries in the moment that habitual thinking does not.
3. Facts are flat and dry until creativity & imagination weave them in to a story, invention,
project, or discovery, etc. and bring them to life.
4. There is no room for discovery in certainty.
5. Talking about creativity in a lecture is not the same as engaging people people full-on in
their OWN creativity where their unique insights can emerge.
6. Improv lets us leave plans and be in the moment with no safety net except for the
naturally self-organizing creativity that can't do anything but emerge.
7. Creativity is the same force that paradoxically expresses our absolute individual
uniqueness and connects us in community.
8. Creativity is that energy within all of us and all living things which animates, liberates,
and generates.
9. By expanding your definition or what it mean to be creative, you can become more
comfortable with knowing your self as a creator.
10. Your Creative Self need space, time and attention, like all living things, to flourish.
11. The brain thinks non-linearly, in colors, shapes, images...it doesn't make sense to have
business communication expressed in words only.
12. Living the Creative Life means chipping away all the irrelevancies while shaping and
forming what is most alive for us into being.
13. Follow the future by being present to the emergent impulses and staying committed to
the higher vision, not the returning limiting pattern.
14. As the new emerges the old often fights to maintain its status quo, becoming a battle
between the habituated familiar and the creative unfamiliar.
15. "Creative reading" is engaging with the information you're reading: questioning it,
making connections, taking what's useful and leaving the rest. Not blind acceptance.
16. We can defend our current thinking and be "right" or expand into a larger framework
and be creatively uncertain - it's our choice.
17. When 'What do you do?' becomes 'What is your story?' real connecting can take place.
18. Conventional wisdom supports...convention. To evolve beyond the status quo, we need more unconventional wisdom... #daretodiscover19. Words inspire. Engagement transforms. #creativity20. Resistance in the creative process can serve to strengthen what actually is emerging. It's to be moved through, not avoided or condemned. |
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Our Services
The Center for Creative Emergence is a creativity consulting, facilitating and coaching company dedicated to integrating inspired creativity, meaning, organizational culture and business for a happier and more productive work life and a richer bottom line. We cultivate breakthroughs and emergence with entrepreneurs, teams, and organizations. CEO Michelle James has a mission to engage people into their full humanness via whole-brain (and somatic) creative process for innovative work, positive social change and consciously creating a generative, life-giving future.
Our Services include creativity and emergence coaching and facilitating, whole-brain corporate and public workshops, conference presentations, creativity events and Quantum Leap Business Improv.
Creative Emergence Coaching clients include Entrepreneurs who want to discover their calling, develop their signature approach, products and services, or create their new future story; Leaders who want to draw out and focus the creativity of their work force; Pioneers who are forging new territory or creating new models; Facilitators who want to create new programs or workshops; Business Partners and Teams who want to co-create or establish a creative work culture.
Organizational Clients have included Dominos, John Deere, Panasonic, Deloitte, Microsoft, GEICO, RAPP, Kaiser Permanente, Federal Executive Institute, Inova Health System, NetImpact UVA, Teach for America, Hands On Network, National Institutes of Health, The World Bank, Invest Northern Ireland, Service Employee International Union, Clean Currents, Center for Nonprofit Advancement, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration among many others.
Blog: is The Fertile Unknown at www.creativeemergence.typepad.com.
Web: www.creativeemergence.com
Creativity in Business Conference: www.creativity-conference.com
Creativity in Business Telesummit: www.bizcreativitysummit.com
Twitter: CreatvEmergence Email: michelle_@_creativeemergence.com
Phone: 434-995-5077
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