This year I have experienced a major disruption to the way I work, which through conversations with my coaching clients has jolted their thinking and feelings too, and through the various and continued versions of lockdown daily energy swings have changed and we have unconsciously become stuck. We have fallen into new normal patterns of working behaviour and gradually loss volumes of our old spark.
I noticed that my creativity was flattening after sitting for hours in my home office, staring at the screen, waiting, hoping for inspiration to show up!
Disruptions in and of themselves aren’t bad, they can stir new thoughts, pull us into review of what we are up to, but for many of us we have become consumed by the major pandemic and economic disruption and live more static planned schedules. As a result I notice in the way I was working and of many clients that we have lost the powerful mini-daily disruptions that can spark brilliant change.
Days have become movement-predictable, as you take your seat in your home office and wait or hope for something new to occur. Anxious thoughts accumulate, concerns and panic fester until you move.
The more I read about creativity and the triggers of new thinking the more the reports and evidence shows that our best ideas, our breakthroughs, occur on the edges of our daily events – have your edges got lost?
Potential creative edges are the cross-over points between events and meetings – pre-Covid-19 this may have been the journey from home to work, travelling between appointments or meeting locations, completing a period of concentrated effort and walking to the coffee machine, snatching brief conversations with colleagues en-route.
When your pattern becomes edge-less, the creative-spark moments dissolve. We simply feel flat, more often and adopt worn out, gritty methods to drag the best of us to the fore again and again.
As you review 2020 and think about 2021 it is time to find your edge. Nothing changes, until something changes!
At first you may need to experiment and manufacture some edges, be open mini-disruptions and accept them excitedly as potential moments of inspiration. As I experimented with finding my edge, I realised I needed to give myself permission to move, odd as that seems, my brain resisting the desire to stand up, insisting that sitting still is needed more.
Here are some ideas to find your edge:
Work in different places – just as breakout meeting rooms alter the environment in the office, find yours – sit for an hour somewhere else around your home, lie down for 30 minutes and let the spinning plates in your head slow down.
Get outside – the colours, sounds and feeling of being in nature indisputably relieves stress and supports relaxed thinking
Move – break your days up with one or more walks around the block. Every hour stand-up, stretch, pace around for 3-5 minutes.
Buffer zones – shorten your video meetings by 10 minutes and introduce more gaps and see if you can do nothing in those gaps.
Meditate – develop a mindfulness technique and make it a daily practice – there are many guided mediation apps you could trial, start with 10 minutes, and build up your patience (and permission!)
Journal – write for 15 minutes twice a day on what you are thinking about or aware of or are telling yourself you need to do or think about.
Disrupt your senses – shift the room temperature, change your background music, move the objects on your desk or in your everyday peripheral vision (e.g. ornaments, shelves), change tea to coffee, or ice-cold lemon water, light a scented candle.
I am inspired by the zen quote, sometimes attributed to Debussy:
“It is the silence between the notes that makes the music;
it is the space between the bars that cages the tiger.”
Keep it simple and find your edge. It is in the edges that ideas crystallise and pop-up. Who knows what you might experience and discover (and whatever it is, it wouldn’t have shown up without your edges)!
Simon
PS - Chapter 40 “Mind the Gap” in The Impact Book expands on this too for further work on this