More than a year ago I wrote an article on writing out conversations between myself and the wiser part of me – “Conversations Between Me and U.” The tool of having dialogues with myself has been so useful, and in such surprising ways, that I want to tell you how it’s evolved.

While exploring Lora Sasiela’s Financially Smitten website, I found her “Money Dialogue Exercise” (which she adapted from Olivia Mellan’s Money Harmony). Sasiela suggests:

“Start by imagining that your Money is a person with whom you are having a relationship. Imagine having a conversation with your Money about how the relationship is going.”

I tried it and discovered that My Money has the voice of a swank benevolent dictator with a B.S. meter fine-tuned at the atomic level. After only one extremely intense, handwritten dialogue with My Money, everything – and I really mean everything – shifted for me. Since then: growth spurts on multiple fronts, including financial.

Next, I started the Unravelling e-course offered by Susannah Conway and, one day, while checking out the books she recommends on her website, I found The New Diary, by Tristine Rainer (a pal of Anaïs Nin’s). How have I never come across this book before? It was published in 1978 and is chock-full of journaling ideas that shift the Earth on its axis.

One of the “Seven Special Techniques” Rainer covers is dialogue. Does your leg hurt? Write out a conversation with it and find out what’s going on. Have you been wondering where your sexuality has gone? Find out, simply by daring to invite it into a dialogue. Converse with friends and family members in your journal, or chat with your garden or with your aching heart. My most recent conversation was between me and My Gifts, and produced a wonderful shocker of a result. The possibilities are endless.

Rather than promoting an unhealthy splitting of internal aspects of ourselves, Rainier says these dialogues divide the self in order to “bring it together again in greater harmony.” And that’s been exactly my experience. The more I experiment with this technique, the more sharply and quickly my world comes into focus (with lights flashing to clearly mark my now-obvious path forward) and the more I feel both like myself and wise beyond myself.

Related reading: Hidden Lives Revealed, Revise the Story

Flickr photo: The Softest Light, by chaps1

What do you allow and what do you suppress in the privacy of your own mind? Does the habit of limiting and restricting input – light, sound, chaos, profusions, and multiplicities – extend to keeping your own thoughts at bay?

We are unobserved inside our own minds.

What if, in the pure privacy of your mind, you allowed yourself to be a god – brave, bold, benevolent, and endless? There’s room for everything in there. In here. Within.

We can go far, we can safely edge our toes out over the lip of too far, and yet never leave our cranial homeland. We can…

1. Redress wrongs
2. Explore parallel universes
3. Live out other lifetimes
4. Take what-ifs to the nth degree
5. Tempt Fate
6. Try on different personalities
7. Wildly mutate time and reality
8. Follow detours
9. Grow old or young
10. Glimpse the outermost edges
11. Unshackle and unharness
12. Flex the rust from timidity
13. Emerge victorious after all
14. Probe mysteries and depths
15. Become smaller or larger
16. Enchant people
17. Rewrite history
18. Evoke strong feelings
19. Move cities from A to B
20. Predict the future
21. Resurrect the dead
22. Fall in love a thousand times a day
23. End wars

Where does your mind end? What point have you stopped travelling beyond in your mind? Your imagination, the holy infinity in your head, can show you everything missing in your outer life, in multi-sensory detail, with amendments, revisions, special effects, instant replays, and timeless certainty.

What roams free in the timeless anti-history of your unexplored mind? Find out. Follow the arrowhead at the end of the minute hand, out past the edge of the clock.

Related reading: Keyholes

Flickr photo: Daydreaming, by Kr. B.

What’s it like to wear a bespoke suit, a suit custom-made to fit me and only me? I want a life like that. I want a plan, a pattern, a path that takes into consideration all the weird, unruly, shocking, steadfast little and big things that combine to shape me. But how?

“The word bespoke itself is derived from the verb to bespeak, to ‘speak for something,’ in the specialized meaning ‘to give order for it to be made.’”
~ Wikipedia entry for Bespoke

What plan speaks for me? Cookie-cutter solutions need not apply. If I can’t make it fit me, if I can’t make it mine, all mine, then forget it. I’ve scoured office supply stores, art supply stores, read books and websites by goal gurus and earnest cheerleaders of every stripe and found only an elite few who make the cut, including these two…

For the past two weeks I’ve been pulling together a strategic planner for 2010, guided by what artist and business school graduate (a combination that thrills me) Lisa Sonora Beam does for herself every year. Although I’m still creating my plan, the power inherent in the thoroughly self-customized system has already taken me so far further along my way than I’d imagined possible that I’m almost scared to continue. The zoom is palpable. For more about this intensely customizable system, see Lisa Sonora Beam’s “Goal Setting for Creatives: My 2010 Strategic Planner.”

One of the zoomy surprises to burst forth from my 2010 Strategic Planner process is that a friend offered to sponsor my fees for an e-course that seems perfectly designed to help me further custom-make my life: Susannah Conway’s Unravelling: Ways of Seeing My Self, which combines photography, journaling, comrades, Susannah’s strong heart, and the promise of deep self-connection.

The primary goal of both systems is to put me in touch with myself in a way that encourages invention, supports forgiveness and acceptance, and fills the silence with my voice, even if I choose to be quiet. What could be more fittingly comfortable than that?

Related reading: Book | The Creative Entrepreneur, by Lisa Sonora Beam

Flickr photo: (untitled), by bird_flew

The Original Deck

Years ago, I made a deck of creativity prompt cards for myself – 75 prompts that propelled me into a more expansive space for finding solutions. I formatted them in Excel, printed them on card stock, and cut them out by hand.

Months later, I put them to the test. I wanted to write an e-book to help empower highly sensitive people. But what about? I’d recently read Jump Start Your Brain, by Doug Hall, and agreed with his insistence that great ideas come easier when we’re having fun, so I decided to play.

I told my husband not to interrupt me for a few hours. I took teacup hooks, twine, India-print bedspreads, a CD player, pillows, a dictionary, a clipboard, paper, pen, and my prompt cards into the bedroom and closed the door. In half an hour, I’d raised a colourful tent over the bed by running the twine between hooks screwed into the walls and draping the bedspreads over it all. Everything else went inside, including a little lamp. I entered the bewitching world, settled in against the pillows, and started the music. I couldn’t stop grinning.

One by one, I went through each of the prompt cards, writing ideas down as they came – not judging or assessing, just collecting. Card after card sparked more ideas and as they piled up I started sensing patterns and nudges toward specific directions. It all came together when I drew the card that said, “Use the dictionary as a Ouija Board. Ask first, then close your eyes and point to an answer.” I did, and everything I pointed to in the dictionary was nautical in some way or another. It was spooky.

By the time I emerged from that glorious tent, I knew I wanted to write a light-hearted e-book about healthy boundaries, using a nautical theme. The result was Stay Afloat When They’re Rocking Your Boat: How to Feel Steady and Calm with Healthy Boundaries.

Daily Posts

After that, I was really hooked on using the creativity prompts. My friend Danielle persuaded me to post one prompt a day on my website, which I did. That was fun, too, and gave me great feedback as people commented on them. I did that for 202 days in a row, creating more than 100 new prompts in the process. A surprising number of people wrote to me and said they continually got just the prompt they needed on just the day they needed it.

But by the time I posted number 202, I was ready to try something different. New readers of the site had to ferret the old prompts out from the archives, and the every-day posting schedule was too much. If I stopped, I’d have time to pursue the idea of producing hard-copy decks of prompt cards.

Card Decks

Months of research and development later, I held a beautiful deck of 101 prompt cards nestled in a neat kraft-paper box. One of my website readers, a professional marketer, had contacted me to say she was interested in helping me market them. I was good to go.

But the more I ran the numbers and the deeper I got into preparing a marketing plan, the more obvious it became that the cards wouldn’t be profitable if priced low enough to actually sell, particularly if I included my time, and even though I’d streamlined the production process, with help from a design and printing professional.

Subscriptions

Now what? Musing took me back to an idea I’d had from the very beginning: to offer the prompts as a subscription, delivered by email. Unlike at the beginning, though, I now have enough Internet technology know-how to set up a subscription service. And there are many more prompts now, too.

I’m glad to offer daily Creativity Prompts again – this time in a way that allows anyone to start at the beginning and receive them all. Creativity Prompt subscriptions (www.creativityprompts.com) are delivered in three volumes of 101 prompts each. The first two volumes are the prompts previously posted. Volume 3 is all new.

* * *

Thank you very much for your feedback and encouragement along this journey. May I help you as much as you continue to help me by reading and commenting.

Flickr photo: come n say ‘hello’ to my new friend, by linh.ngân

My copy of Warren Berger’s book bristles with Post-It Notes. Its full title is Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Life, Your Business, and Maybe Even the World and it features the visionary ideas of Bruce Mau, along with other designers and thinkers on the topic. I’m forcing myself to stop at page 50 and recommend it to you right now. It’s important.

I have a new theory: highly sensitive people (HSPs) are perfectly suited for being designers. I’m so convinced that we’re extremely valuable precisely because of our various traits, and this book supports that idea in many different ways.

The innate curiosity, complex thinking abilities, and long-viewing we’re capable of as HSPs puts us within sight of visions that are out there, but that might actually work.

What if we saw ourselves as capable and effective at designing the world we want to live in? What if we start with the assumption that we’re built to press our faces up against the outer edge of the envelope and look beyond, to reach out and grasp what didn’t exist until we thought to touch it?

By relying on “abductive reasoning,” or the ability to think about and picture what might be, designers can glimpse possibilities that lie on the other side of the fence.
~ Warren Berger, Glimmer

Designers “live in an expansive world where they believe the only thing limiting us is the stuff we haven’t figured out yet. And they’re excited about it. You’ll hear them say things like, ‘I’m working on this really cool problem that has no answer!’ That’s what they live for.”
~ Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management, as quoted in Glimmer

We need you. We need you. We need you. Your valuable ideas, your whacky imaginings, your unpolished, half-formed, rough, barely describable flights of fancy contain miracles with the leverage to change the trajectory of the planet.

What we’ve found is, if someone has an enthusiasm or curiosity about many different disciplines, then they can be more flexible, more empathetic, and more engaged with the world.
~ Tim Brown, IDEO’s Chief Executive, as quoted in Glimmer

Find some way to pursue what intrigues you. Never mind if no one else is intrigued. That’s the point. Be first. Be brave. Be so curious you drench yourself in questions and come out cleansed, a gift cradled in your hands.

Feeling lost on a project can be the first step toward finding an original solution.
~ Warren Berger, Glimmer

Related reading: Bruce Mau Design’s Manifesto for Growth, Creativity Prompts Compendium

We think we can’t see. We think we are blind. We think we are looking at something tiny and limiting and there’s nothing there.

But the world is chock full of tricks. The eye, the mind, the spirit, expand and contract depending on how we look and where we look and what we want to see.

Before you dash off to another place, thinking you’ve got it wrong yet again, stay where you are for a moment more. Inhale the dim light of this place. You had your reasons. You followed a trail to right here. Now, even from the tight space in which you find yourself, focus into the distance.

You will find open doors. Shadows will lift. Perspective will grab you and pull you, intact and filling fast, through the keyhole. Into a world big enough for the new you.

* * *

Flickr photo: Look!, by AnnaKika

Related reading: Pep Talk | Zero In, Looking Up

The process of writing is a tool. It serves us, not the other way around. There’s something wrong when struggling with the writing process keeps people’s marvellous thoughts and much-needed wisdom from reaching the rest of us.

To make the writing process easier, to shift the focus from how to write to what to say, don’t focus on the words until the very end. Good, clear writing is mostly about thinking. When the thoughts are clear, the words appear.

Follow these four steps, in this order, to ease the pain. If you hit a stuck spot, circle back and start again at the top.

Brain Dump

Write down every thought you have about your topic for this piece. Using a word processor will make the subsequent steps easier. The goal is to get all related thoughts outside of your head so you can examine them with some detachment. Keep going until your brain feels newly breezy, like space has opened up.

Organize

Rearrange what you’ve just collected into a sequence that makes sense for what you want to say and who you want to say it to. Fiddle around. Add and expand as needed. Play with options until you hit on the organization of the thoughts that feels right. For now, ignore spelling and grammar errors. This is the time for order, not polish.

Connect

Now that your thoughts are in an order that makes sense to you, focus on linking them logically and clearly to one another so your reader can easily follow along. Experiment with paragraph breaks. Add, remove, or edit sentences and phrases here and there to improve the flow. Play connect the dots.

Words

Finally, and only now that your thoughts are organized and at your service, focus on the words themselves to give them polish. Tweak words and phrases to enhance zip and to more accurately speak in your voice. Continue experimenting, keeping what works and deep-sixing what gets in the way of clarity and meaning. Reread and continue removing everything non-essential. To ferret out the last stumbly bits, read the piece aloud.

Flickr photo: Eraser finished with cleaning chalkboard – BC, by frozenchipmunk

Related reading: A Moment of Silence, Please, Book | One Small Step Can Change Your Life

Dolly Hopkins, Creative Architect, started a great series on her site called “Woman of the Week.” I’m grateful and honoured to have been asked to participate.

Reading about the women she’s put the spotlight on makes me feel doubly honoured — they’re a varied bunch who take lots of different approaches to creativity and get up to some whacky things.

Dolly also has a Man of the Month series.

For more about Dolly, see Successfully Sensitive | Dolly Hopkins.

Thanks, Dolly!

Photo from Dolly’s website.

Do you have to be so picky about the lights / music / temperature?

Cripes! My human suit is so finely calibrated, ain’t it? And itchy, too. Well, tough noogies. We’re both stuck with it until I reunite with the mother ship.

* * *

Sometimes HSP seems to stand for highly serious person. Where are our highly sensitive humorists? Who can help us remove the sting from the human suits we were born into?

No-holds-barred quadriplegic cartoonist John Callahan sets the bar high for poking fun at one’s own vulnerabilities. In doing so, he’s won my devotion. I’m alternately fascinated, alarmed, and challenged as guffaws rise up in spite of my sense of what’s appropriate to laugh about. John Callahan’s bravery, insights, and irreverence inspire me to take my own self less seriously.

If we can make each other laugh about ourselves, if we can allow others to laugh with us, then maybe we’ll all be more inclined to find the lighter side of sensitive.

Then we’ll not only be okay, we’ll be downright giddy by the time the mother ship returns.

Flickr photo: He knows, Doctor.. He knows, by Mr McGladdery

Related reading: Funny Practice, Pep Talk | Embrace Corny

Hopefully, this screenshot image provides enough of a sense of the format to intrigue you. The tabs along the left margin indicate different “notebooks” – OneNote’s term for the equivalent of a ring binder. The multicoloured tabs across the top show the “sections” within the currently chosen notebook. They’re like the sturdier, tabbed pages in a ring binder used to separate subjects. Along the right side are “pages” within the currently chosen section.

And, suddenly, the brain dump has never been so easy.

The screenshot shows an example of how I use OneNote. This is my strategizing page for my Stay Afloat e-book, which is within the Products section of my Strategy notebook. In a separate notebook, I’m also working on a huge book project, which, prior to OneNote, was stymied in a morass of cross-breeding ideas and data with no cohesive organization. Now, I fly. Nothing slips through the cracks and nothing is more than a click or two away.

Beyond the brain dump is the mecca of retrieval. If you thrive on complexity, the layers of retrievable association possible with OneNote could make your head spin so much it actually screws itself on right.

* * *

OneNote has many other useful features, allowing users to…

• Insert links to other files for one-click access
• Insert images
• Organize data within pages in easily re-arrangeable and re-sizeable clusters (see the screenshot above)
• Quickly capture ideas, web information, snippets from other programs, audio notes, and more and send them to OneNote for later assimilation

See also the Wikipedia entry for OneNote, which has links at the end for further exploration.

Related reading: Effectiveness vs. Efficiency, 32 Ways to Increase Your Income