creativity and transformation
I stumbled across a number of pretty darn good TED talks the other day.
I am naturally interesting in learning, performance and creativity, and several of the topics seemed to be in alignment with my previous reading about sports and performance psychology. A couple of them are simply startling barn-burners.
Here’s a mix of short TED talks, a blurb on creativity, and a couple of long videos on how to be a really good photographer.
Have fun.
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Chris Lonsdale is Managing Director of Chris Lonsdale & Associates, a company established to catalyse breakthrough performance for individuals and senior teams. In addition, he has also developed a unique and integrated approach to learning that gives people the means to acquire language or complex technical knowledge in short periods of time.
how to learn any language in six months
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0yGdNEWdn0
This has more relevance than to learning language.
Five Principles
Attention, Meaning, Relevance and Memory
Use The Tools Immediately
Comprehensible Input is Key
Physiological Training
Psycho-physiologic State
Seven Actions
Soak Your Brain
Get Meaning/Body Language
Get Creative/Mix It Up
Focus on the Core (80/20 rule)
Get a Mentor
Mirror/Mimic Feedback
Connect Learning to Your Mental Images
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Fundamentals of Physiological Psychology
http://www.slideshare.net/KrycesTorcato/fundamentals-of-physiological-psychology-by-author-carlson-neil-r
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The skill of self confidence | Dr. Ivan Joseph | TEDxRyersonU
As the Athletic Director and head coach of the Varsity Soccer team at Ryerson University, Dr. Joseph is often asked what skills he is searching for as a recruiter: is it speed? Strength? Agility? In Dr. Joseph’s TEDx Talk, he explores self confidence and how it is not just the most important skill in athletics, but in our lives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-HYZv6HzAs
[This is outstanding!] [13 minutes!]
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How to believe in yourself: Jim Cathcart at TEDxDelrayBeach (8.5 minutes)
(How to transform the world)(nurture your nature)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ki9-oaPwHs
http://cathcart.com/
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The psychology of self-motivation | Scott Geller | TEDxVirginiaTech
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sxpKhIbr0E
Scott Geller is Alumni Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech and Director of the Center for Applied Behavior Systems in the Department of Psychology. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the World Academy of Productivity and Quality. He has written numerous articles and books, including When No One’s Watching: Living and Leading Self-motivation.
Can you do it? Self efficacy
Will it work? Response efficacy
Is it worth it?
Competence, Consequences, Choices, Community
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Why people believe they can’t draw – and how to prove they can | Graham Shaw | TEDxHull
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TXEZ4tP06c
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Written by Helen Williams, Community Love Director at Holstee
I was recently given the opportunity to see author Elizabeth Gilbert give a talk in the city of Denver. It was an unseasonably warm evening in early May and the front of the Paramount Theater was pacing and alive with anticipation. Many of us had read Eat, Pray, Love, Gilbert’s 2007 bestseller-turned-movie. It was a novel that sold ten million copies and sparked a million responses, good and bad. But what gathered us together that particular evening was Gilbert’s newest output, Big Magic, a reflection on her personal experience with creativity.
I can’t summarize the book for you in a way that will do it true justice, but my one sentence rave review is this: it resparked me. I’ve always been a person who made space for creative endeavors. I dive into books for inspiration for my own writing. I listen to music that moves me enough to drive me toward the piano keys. I soak in colors and shapes to bring myself back to my original love of drawing. All these things and more made me certain, yes, I am a creative person because I participate in these things. I make stuff. I tune in.
“This is what we all must learn to do, for this is how maps get charted—by taking wrong turns that lead to surprising passageways that open into spectacularly unexpected new worlds.” – Elizabeth Gilbert
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But of course when it comes to the pace of life, there isn’t always ample time for the things that make you feel most like yourself. At least that is what I told myself when gaps of time would pass and I hadn’t picked up a pen or a paint brush and a thick layer of dust coated the chipping ivory keys. Other obligations would demand my attention and I would relent, letting those other parts of myself stay paused in midair until I had time to snatch them up again. During these times I would feel hollow, less engaged and sometimes even panicked at the time that would pass without my making space for feeling creatively inspired. These phases of life were dull, unmemorable. In this way, I treated my need for creativity as its own distinct feature of my existence, something entirely separate and extra from the rest of my more normal, responsible, adult life.
What I learned from turning the pages of Big Magic, however, was that I was looking at it all wrong. Creativity wasn’t meant to be a single strain among others. Creativity wasn’t supposed to be a hobby that would often conflict with “more important stuff” or be overtaken when duty called. It was meant to be the lens through which I viewed all parts of my life. Choosing creativity was what transformed an everyday experience into an adventure. Creativity could have a hand in all of it, if I allowed it to be so.
Well, that was news to me! I was so ingrained that creativity was a specific dedication to artistic endeavors that I couldn’t even picture it having a hand in my daily decisions, in the way I approach problems or interact with other people. I had reduced creativity to a rare moment that would come barreling towards me from a great distance and leave as soon as it came. Which, to be fair, was all it was capable of when I forced it into such a limited framework.
And while creativity can certainly make itself known to us in sudden, dramatic instances like these, it can also be more subtle, interwoven throughout the rest of us, the barely detectable hum beneath our every move. Suddenly, nothing was all that commonplace to me anymore. Everything had potential to be more than it was. And while some would view this revelation as daunting (“You mean I have to be creative every second, all the time, with everything?”), I choose to see it as a relief and an opportunity. Small seconds can balloon up and fill us with inspiration we would have otherwise overlooked. It’s looking one inch to the left instead of straight ahead. Mundane moments can present solutions we couldn’t allow ourselves to see. It’s asking internal questions instead of quitting. Conversations, interactions, passing people can all become more if we turn toward them, if we allow ourselves to pause long enough to find the connection. It’s saying, “Tell me more,” instead of simply nodding along.
It isn’t about always making or seeing something with an immediate and obvious purpose. It’s about engagement, simple awareness and appreciation of the here and now. So see what’s here. Soak it all in. It might not be anything except what it is. Let that be enough.
Suddenly, everything holds a new potential to me now, thriving, reaching, awake with possibility. To me, that’s something to look forward to. That’s the discovery of what happens next.
To get your own copy of Big Magic, go here.
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Helen Williams is a Colorado transplant who is passionate about cooking, writing and combining the two on her vegetarian and vegan food blog, green girl eats. She strives, every day, to be less sorry. When she’s not in the kitchen, you can find her reading, loving the community at Holstee or trying to pet your dog.
https://www.holstee.com/blogs/mindful-matter/117673349-creativity-as-a-daily-practice
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The 9 Types of Intelligence Which Make Us All Human
http://www.zengardner.com/nine-types-of-intelligence-make-us-human/
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The place where I have decided to take my creative yearning is back to the field of photography. As noted previously, I owned a Minolta SLR and bought a 28-volume Time/Life series on photography and a bunch of other books, got a subscription to several well-known photo mags, and even enrolled in a correspondence course with some very good school in the Big Apple. The course was pricey, and working in slides and stills can get pretty expensive too, but the course taught me some basics in how to see light, and more. I was a pretty decent amateur but one day some thief broke into my house and made off with the complete camera bag, a memorable event because the fellow left a prize of a pile of feces on the living room floor before he left. Aren’t people wonderful? Well, my step-mother knew I had a thing for photography and so insisted on going by the local mall to acquire for me a basic Nikon SLR. Oh, Nikon, everyone sighs, but frankly I didn’t like it, couldn’t get the physiology of learning to work and thus the psycho-physical state of flow rarely showed up. One day I inadvertently left the rear window open with the gear on the floor of the back seat and a thunderstorm came by and lingered just above the window. Bye bye Nikon. By that time, I had already scoped out the possibility of turning pro. I’d checked out two major photographic schools, one in Boston and the other out in Franklin Country where I’d spent some time. The one in Franklin County gave tuition-paying people a brand new medium-format rig worth $1,400 but I didn’t bite. I’d shadowed some people selling their wares at art shows and investigated the economics of selling 4×6’s and more at tourist shops, but the conclusion I came to was that I couldn’t afford to make the investment. One such potential competitor was displaying the most elegant and pristine very large prints shot with the best film printed on the best paper at pretty reasonable prices and, over the course of five hours in a good crowd, didn’t sell a single one. And just at that time digital photography was on the horizon; suddenly people could put their new device on automatic, skip going to school and reading books, and turn out the same kind of thing at radically-reduced expense. How could I sell them a masterpiece (assuming I had what it took to make one) when they could shoot one themselves? I gave up the pursuit and turned to different things. Today, everyone has an iPhone.
Then three years ago my daughter gave me a $65 Kodak 14-mp point-and-shoot digital camera. A little playing around, and I was hooked again, and so I began slowly to learn something about digital photography. Recently I took the next step up and bought a Canon EOS Rebel Vi with the kit lens and a zoom lens. Just today I bought an extra battery and a lens shade for the zoom. I’ve printed a page full of shooting sites and ideas, bookmarked a few events calendars, and started to avail myself of the incredible value of series of educational YouTubes put up by camera vendors on which pros share their tips and techniques.
Here are three of my favorites:
Photography: Talking to People (Adam Marelli)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJHfT7lYqCo (1:48:10)
The Art of Travel Photography (Lorne Resnick)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En0DIfiu6TA (47:21)
Steve Simon’s 10 Steps To Becoming a Great Photographer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JjwNiInIOk (58:30)
You’ll enjoy them if you are a photographer, painter, videographer or street performer.
I’ll be taking five to six weeks off to pack and unpack. I’m moving. I’ll be taking my camera, my writing books and tools, and mooving out closer to farm country.
Currently on my desktop:
“God Laughs and Plays” by David James Duncan, The Triad Institute
and
“The Big Picture: On The Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself”, by Sean Carroll (Dutton/Penguin House 2016)
Blessings…
music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2rGbFhZrpk
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