I don’t have time to write this blog. Dealing with emails, clients, home life, meals, travel, social media and everything else seems to fill every waking hour. I've convinced myself that this is the way to do things – working intensively, researching new markets, making new contacts, blogging, networking etc – and I've built a rock-solid belief system around it.

If I want to see my life like that, I can easily make a convincing case for it. But if I take full responsibility for the way things are, I have to admit that I set things up this way. It’s not healthy, it’s not particularly productive, and it’s definitely not helping me achieve great things or have a wonderfully fulfilled and happy life.

It’s time the hamster got off the wheel

In myself, in others, in businesses, in organizations, in governments and even in nations, I see patterns of behaviour that, sooner or later, demand change before decline or destruction sets in. The process of evolution goes something like this:

1. Start – with passion. A business founder starts with a great idea; a community is inspired to initiate a project; or a politician gets fired up to influence improvements.
2. Articulate – with energy and focus. Do the research, the due diligence, proof of concept. Define the message and/or the product. Define the policy and practices.
3. Build – with close attention to detail. Do the physical stuff. Build the factory, prototypes, marketing.  Gather your team and get on the campaign trail.
4. Produce – with a highly refined system. Make sure you’re on top of things, build consistency, increase efficiencies, maximize profits. Keep the customer satisfied, garner more advocacy and loyalty.
5. Change the game – before it’s too late.

By the time you reach step 4, you’re in hamster mode. It’s taken longer than expected to get there (usually 3–5 years, for small businesses), you’ve expended all your energies on steps 1–3, and you need a break. After all your hard work, it makes sense to let the systems take over and run things for you. No need to change, now that you've finally got things under control, right?

There are several compelling reasons to change:

• Life moves on. Your original idea is now a few years old and may be out of date.
• Unless you have a particularly agile set-up, your processes, facilities and equipment that you broke the bank to pay for (and may still be paying for) are probably out of date too.
• Best practices are, by definition, historical and things change all the time.
• Market movement, the business environment, the competition and alnost everything else beyond your control have all affected your bottom line.
• Keeping up with new developments, tweaking and adjusting, firefighting, investor relations, administration etc all lock you ever more firmly onto the wheel.
• By now, you’re probably emotionally and physically tired.

Space – the final frontier

If you jump off your wheel when it’s going full tilt, you might get a bit battered and dazed when you land. But then something magical happens. Firstly, you find that it’s strangely peaceful. Secondly, you can actually see the wheel from a better perspective. Thirdly, you can better control the wheel's movement. Most importantly, though, you have space in which to creatively ruminate, dream, think abstract thoughts, doodle, commune with nature or do whatever feeds your creative self.

That may sound a bit trite, but our creative impulses are what drive change, and maintaining an innovative mindset enables us to adapt and grow as life unfolds. Yet we allow ourselves to get buried in processes, unwittingly blinding ourselves to whatever new dynamics may be unfolding within us. Stress replaces enthusiasm and more and more of our time gets used up – until we have none left.

Our original idea wasn’t born out of stress. It came from our intuition, out of left field – a dream, a social event or an off-the-wall conversation. It came when our head wasn’t filled with logistics, processes, meetings, staff issues, financial accounts or legalities.

We need space. No one’s going to give it to us; we must take it for ourselves. So, in the face of all the logical reasoning, pressing concerns and conditioned reflexes that modern living convinces us we need to subject ourselves to, the best way forward is to jump off the wheel. I find that it’s the only way I can tune back into my creativity – the most powerful part of me. It’s the part that has all the answers that I need and that I cannot possibly find by continuing with actions based on past experience. It’s the big priority that we avoid acting on because it's usually unpredictable, unstructured and chaotic, and seems, to our logical mind, to be irresponsible.

I've decided to have a ‘creative week’ every month. Like some of the most successful companies in the world, I am allocating at least 20% of my time every month to creative activity. Anyone else up for it?

Watch this space – it’s the best one!

The post Creatively Prioritizing Creativity appeared first on Tweak Your Biz.

Every business starts with a great idea, fuelled by passion and driven by a desire to succeed. As it grows, the survival instinct supplants new ideas, processes replace passion, and stress (if we're not careful) blurs objectives. It’s a cycle you see most businesses undergo at some point in their development – often 2–3 years post-startup. Why?

It’s the human condition

We start a business to make life easier, get rich, fulfill dreams. The original creative process draws on all our energies. A new idea needs nurturing. Sometimes it is so new that it requires help to overcome the resistance of others or to educate others to buy into it. But because we believe in it, we do whatever it takes to make it work.

That’s when the web bites!

It’s so convenient, isn’t it? It’s the first thing you're drawn to every morning. It pervades your life via your desktop and mobile devices. It sucks you in. After all, it’s your life-support system and it has all the answers. Or does it?

Undoubtedly, the Internet does hold a lot of answers, but how we use it and the expectations we have of it are key.

Increasingly, I see that we're becoming expert at providing and consuming ‘light’ information on the web. As Internet marketing and interconnectivity become more sophisticated, we are bombarded with half-useful information that never quite gets translated into practical improvements in our business. It consumes a lot of time, while seducing us with fascinating infographics, pictures, videos and never-ending threads.

Clearly, a lot of marketing activity is designed to keep you hooked, under the guise of ‘relationship-building’. Why, then, do I increasingly feel a sense of entrapment?  I've let myself become consumed by a process, and I need to take back control.

Here's my solution – something for you to try for a week. When you get up in the morning:

• don’t switch your phone on
• don’t go to your computer
• don’t think about researching a topic on the Internet

It’ll be tough, at first, but try to do it without calling your therapist or taking out your frustrations on the cat. Trust me: once you get through the cold-turkey phase, you’ll see some interesting things happening.

Five steps to e-freedom

# 1. You’ll start thinking for yourself

It’s been said that people who rely on Google for all their information are actually losing brain tissue. Think about it (if you can!). It makes sense. It's the ‘use it or lose it’ principle that applies as much to our physical as our mental health.

# 2. You’ll remember why you have a business

You may think that’s obvious, but Internet 'dumbing down’ can be insidious. Life changes, markets change, the environment changes. If you’re not regularly 'refreshing' your perspective, the initial impetus for your business may have shifted  – and left you behind.

# 3. You’ll notice new things

Apart from birdsong and the sweet smell of spring. You’ll also get a fresh take on how you operate and how you use your time. The absence of online 'static' will allow in fresh thoughts and better logic, and you won’t be governed by a ‘filter bubble’ restricting and distorting your view through Google algorithms.

# 4. You’ll de-stress and re-connect with yourself and others

While our creative faculties are neutralized by the all-pervasive Internet, we're also succumbing to ADHD. Our children are growing up in a frenzied state of performance anxiety and disconnection, and billions of dollars are being lost in industry, due to stress-related problems. The online lifestyle feeds this process. Mindfulness, meditation, exercise and real communication are the only antidotes to this, even if we cannot escape the unknown dangers of permanent wi-fi all around us.

# 5. You’ll get your life back

Having real human connections and staying grounded are the best routes to success. When you are present and emotionally connected, you can stay in touch with why you got into business in the first place. Whatever your reasons, you won’t find them online. You’ll find them in you – if you allow yourself that respect and take responsibility for your journey.

These days, I switch myself on before I power up. I figure out what I want to achieve each day before I enter the online world, so that I can use it to my benefit. Like an artist faced with a blank canvas, it can be hard, at first, to decide what marks to make and what picture to create. But it’s so much more satisfying than painting by numbers – both for me and for those who come into contact with me and my work.

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One of the problems I faced as a child was that I was creative and reasonably intelligent. Nice problems to have, you may think, but they come with downsides. Firstly, I was keenly aware of the many different roads I could travel, thanks to my creative imagination. Secondly, it was virtually impossible to decide what route to take in life because my active mind kept analyzing and, ultimately, rejecting options. Because my mind couldn’t actually experience each option to see if I would enjoy it, I couldn’t figure out what would bring the satisfaction and fulfillment that I craved.

It’s a conundrum that has followed me through life. On the one hand, it's led to an exceptionally varied and colourful life. On the other, it's kept me in a perpetual process of reinvention, which has also brought benefits – especially in business, and especially now. I have come to a new understanding of how creativity works and how it can help us make better decisions for our long-term success – both personally and in business.

As a ‘creative consultant’, I have often set myself up for unwelcome challenges. People hire me for my creative input – while absolving themselves of all responsibility for their role in the process.

“We’re hiring you. You deliver. We pay.”

It’s a dynamic that can effectively kill creativity at the gate, as anyone who has been tasked to think of a great idea against an impossible deadline can tell you. At best, the idea is compromised. At worst, it is flashy and shallow, driven by the whims of the client, rather than fully embracing its creative potential.

The best ideas emerge as a result of a very different process – a process that respects our human qualities and come from a deep understanding of the issue involved, giving emergent ideas more impact and life.

Creative inspiration doesn’t respect deadlines:

• it’s dynamic
• multifaceted
• non-linear and
• usually socially driven.

What is becoming clear is that the complexity of our modern life is best addressed through a new kind of creativity that embraces this process but is also collective.

Limited thinking and unlimited data leads to limited solutions

Let me explain. When looking for a solution, we often limit our thinking to a narrow set of defined parameters – our only option, we may claim, since exploring all options would be impossible. Small companies don’t have the resources to consider the vast amounts of data that would be needed to develop a sure-fire creative idea. Even large companies struggle to relate, interpret and connect lots of data in meaningful ways – long before they even get started on the creative work.

Ultimately, this is a mind-numbing approach, and it's certainly not going to get me fired up.

The key to a new kind of creativity

We need to get out of our heads and into our hearts to make the creative process work. After all, we are not machines. We have feelings, and it’s our feelings that dictate our actions – however much data we are presented with. Not only that, we need to do it together – and we’d be well-advised to lose the need for predetermined results in favour of discovering emergent results achieved through a process of developmental evaluation.

It’s becoming recognized in many organizations that collective creativity is the best way to address the complexity of our lives and create the biggest impact. An open process works far better than a closed one where we guard our ideas within a fortress of secrecy, and the creative process is much richer for it. It brings with it the opportunity for more people to learn, to synchronize efforts and find new and unexpected solutions to what would have been insurmountable problems in the traditional paradigm.

Not only that, it can engender great new thinking as a result of mixing seemingly unrelated factors within the framework of a common intention. In other words, rather than fixing on a predefined solution, (the definition of which may be based on insufficient data and knowledge) fresh, dynamic and more relevant developmental solutions are arrived at on an on-going basis through enriched interaction across a broader spectrum of knowledge and experience.

Sounds scary?

Well, it makes sense, if you think about it. We know that the process of creativity involves ‘joining the dots’ that we know in different ways, so that something new comes into being. Therefore, it makes sense to find as many ‘dots’ as you can and embrace as many thought processes as possible in cooperation with those who may be competing (sometimes unknowingly) with you.

Interestingly, it’s not the so-called ‘creative industry’ that seems to be leading the way in this thinking. I have seen great progress being made by local authorities, NGOs, city councils and other organizations that have discovered the benefits of breaking down the walls of their silos.

Using this type of creative process, they can each enjoy:

• collective benefit;
• synchronistic progress; and
• entirely new solutions.

Naturally, it can be argued that the lack of commercial imperative is a factor in helping such organizations embrace this process, but we already know that crowdsourcing ideas has been used extremely successfully for years by companies such as Proctor and Gamble. So, why not with the creative industry whose very purpose is creativity? And especially, why not with small creative agencies that lack the resources that they need to make better decisions and compete more effectively with larger companies?

As creatives, we know the value of brainstorming, but how far do we go with it?

How many of us reach out to our competitors and discover that collective creativity works so much better, lifts a weight off our shoulders and makes us all look better in the eyes of our clients? I would be fascinated to know if any readers have applied this way of operating in a commercial context, and to discover how well it works for them.

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We're lazy…

Tapping into the deeper levels of self is always challenging and may seem self-indulgent. Yet we all have riches buried inside us—in our brains, our hearts and our numerous life experiences. Recycling may be great for some things, such as saving our planetary resources, but it’s the new, catchy, creative, innovative, imaginative, fun, playful stuff that grabs our attention—and ultimately wins our vote as well as our dollar.

We are wired for play, fun, interaction, inspiration, laughter, passion and connectedness. Yet we so readily fall into the trap of churning out the same old stuff, reverting to seemingly reliable systems, or somehow reinventing the wheel. If we want to enliven ourselves, stimulate new ideas, create new opportunities, and find greater fulfilment, we must do some digging.

To get serious about innovation, you have to go out to play

Play is seriously under-rated in business, but it is one of the core activities that inspire great innovation. It's not a linear process, and it doesn't relate to intelligence. It’s all about letting go of strategic thinking, having fun with ideas, and generally allowing your chronically under-utilized brain to come up with some creative new ways of seeing things.

Think of any great innovation and ask yourself:

• What established process was the innovator following?
• What did the innovator draw upon to come up with the idea?
• What did you feel, when you first used this new product/technology?

Usually, the greater the innovation, the less established was the process that led to it. Since there was probably no established process, the chances are that the innovation was sparked by some form of play. And when the product or technology came to market, wasn’t it exciting and even somehow strangely inevitable? Didn’t it prompt you to connect existing thoughts and feelings in new and satisfying ways? Creativity creating impact creating success.

Think about your own life, your own experiences.

What’s unique about you? Your experiences, relationships, insights, opinions, tastes, humour and flair represent a blend of skills, talents and perspectives that provide a springboard for your own unique brand of creative thinking. All we need to do is to find ways to stimulate our creativity—rather than suppress, avoid or ignore it—and then believe in it enough to turn it into innovation. And, in doing this, we need to support each other in the workplace and beyond.

An increasing number of employees are getting burned out, suffering stress and low morale, boredom and frustration at a time when CEOs know that the key to sustainable success is innovation. Dissatisfaction and innovation don't work well together, but it's not as if no one knows how to remedy this situation. I won't go into that here but a web search reveals a ton of information and help on this subject, and also confirms that creative people live longer and are happier, healthier and more productive. So, what's to lose?

Creativity is our lifeblood

We are all naturally creative. As children, we are especially creative in play, which is encouraged until we 'need to take life more seriously' and buy into the delusions that are foisted upon us. As we use up the world's resources, get ever more crowded on our little blue planet and have to cope with increasing disengagement in the workplace as people become more cynical and disillusioned, surely we need to get creative again. We'll never solve personal, social or planetary problems by further study and emulation of the methods that got us to this point. Yet we all have the capability to innovate our way forward to a happy and sustainable future.

So I wrote this blog without reference to the web or any books. Right now, I’m focused on finding that healthy balance between striving for success and letting it unfold, while dwelling in the uncertainty of the creative process—and making time to just play and have fun. Hopefully, it will strike a chord, for some people, somewhere deep inside. Others may find it crass, obvious or boring kitchen-sink philosophy.

But whatever anyone thinks, it's from the heart and, after 60 colourful years, it's the only way I want to live. How about you?

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The post Dig Deep, Strike Gold appeared first on Tweak Your Biz.

At a recent networking event, a financial advisor invited me to meet up afterwards so he could 'get to know me' over a coffee. We learn the codes as we go through life and, sure enough, the obviously inauthentic veneer of personal interest rapidly evaporated. When a financial advisor you have just met wants to 'get to know you', it's usually for the sole purpose of picking through the intimate financial details of your life so you end up buying some sort of 'safety net'. It's a bit like when someone urges you to attend a meeting about an unspecified 'business opportunity'; you're being primed for an MLM scheme or an NMN (network marketing nightmare). Once he'd established that I was a caring family man, he started, with a broad smile on his face, to pile on the fear and the guilt. You have to plan. What's going to happen in ten years' time? You could get ill. How will your wife survive? You owe it to...' And so on. All designed to put a knot in my stomach and prompt me to sign a good proportion of my income away. It didn't feel good.

Fear - the easy choice

We all get indoctrinated into fear-based decision-making in our early years, and it goes downhill from there, pervading our entire lives. It's the instinctive reaction of:

• busy parents who are trying to keep things running smoothly
• teachers struggling to manage unfocused minds
• people trying to deal with difficult relationships
• employers keen to increase profits
• companies desperate to get customers
• religious leaders who want to 'save souls' and fund operations
• politicians who want to hold on to power

And even though we popularly believe, with the advent of social media and our modern-day connectivity, that we're in control, we see the same methods being used time and again. It's become a science. Identify the pain, emphasize the agony of getting it wrong, present a 'solution', mix in a string of testimonials, hound prospects who 'expressed an interest' with emails and offer a 'life-saving deal'. Does this make anyone feel good?

Related: Creative Innovation And How Company Aesthetics Appeal To Clients

Creativity - the refreshing option that works better anyway

The philosopher Ivan Illich famously said that "school is the advertising agency that makes you believe that you need society as it is". You don't. There are always different ways to look at everything. It's usually just easier to go along with the collective belief and not think about it. But when you do set aside those things you 'know to be true', really examine them and exercise your creative powers, great things can happen. Beliefs are, after all, just that. Many of them are born out of fear. If you create new neural pathways and connect disparate bits of information in new ways, new thoughts emerge that ultimately translate into new things. That's exciting.

It's called progress

It's also inspiring. And we are naturally attracted to it and compelled by it. Unlike the fear-based approach that leaves us with either a bad feeling or reluctant acceptance, creative solutions:

• inspire interest and engagement
• cultivate brand loyalty
• in management, build and sustain strong teams
• ensure evolution to keep you ahead of the game
• bring fresh opportunities to old markets and bring back lost customers
• re-ignite passion that may have been stifled by routine or problems
• stimulate better performance in employees
• exercise minds, keep people young and build strong character
• are the best insurance against irrelevance and failure

In short, creativity leads to innovation, and that is the way to ensure success, sustainability and really great relationships. Additionally, if you innovate, you don't have to compete with what is already out there. So it's enormously empowering as well. I invite you to look at the companies that you admire most in the world and ask yourself if they employ fear-based tactics or creative tactics. They don't necessarily need to be the most famous, successful organizations in the world (they could be local retailers, an NGO, a school etc), but I bet many of them are.

Expansive minds lead to expansive organizations

Staying in fear—whether we are giving or receiving it—is not expansive. It's defensive. And therein lies the nub of the problem. If you are coming from a place of fear, you cannot be in a state of service to mankind. As any good salesman will tell you, if your focus is on getting rather than giving, you will repel more customers than you will gain. But you can't be in a state of 'giving to get', either. That was my financial advisor's problem. As soon as he felt he had 'got to know me' enough, and sensing his approach had failed miserably, out came the glossy brochure. Photoshop-perfect grey-haired couples walking in the sunshine in sensible shoes, cutting lawns and making tea, presented a nightmare precursor to a satin-lined coffin. The carefully simplified graphs and alarmist data flashed before my eyes as I ushered him away from my table. I was done with consuming his projected fear.

I went back to my art studio and started again. A fresh canvas, endless possibilities, something new and vibrant was about to happen. It was challenging, exciting. I felt alive again. That's the difference I invite you to feel. The next time you get that knot of fear, step away from it and get into creative mode. It can be something simple like a walk or a bike ride, doodling or baking a cake. Fear is always obliterated when we truly give ourselves to the creative process and let magic happen.

Related: Relax, Don’t Do It: The Ultimate Way Forward

The post Creative Innovation: The Healthy Alternative To Fear Based Transactions appeared first on Tweak Your Biz.

My wife, Olga Sheean, working on the complex plot for her next book

 Conditioned responses, automatic reactions

The learned response to such times is to take a deep breath, organize things and get busy. And it's comforting, too.

• Frenzied action allays the feelings of guilt around not actively earning money.
• We can justify our existence; and we can blame the economic climate, the government, technology and even the weather, if things appear to have stalled.
• As long as we stay busy, it's okay. We're doing our best.

If the brain freezes, check emails, take a hike on Facebook (there are plenty of platitudes there to comfort even the most cynical of souls), maybe even do some housework. Anything to keep the mind occupied.

And does this all help?

Hell no! It's a downward spiral when all the doing is based on a fear of not getting. In this mode, we become tense, unattractive and unproductive, usually disconnecting from our intuition and from our authentic, creative selves. All the talent, wisdom and ability that we’ve spent a lifetime accumulating gets drowned out by useless, deafening, numbing noise.

Related: Are You Prepared For Doing Business In The Future?

Sometimes, the hardest lessons are really the easiest ones

Whenever my wife Olga experiences a lull in her work, she takes a counter-intuitive approach. She suggests we take time out, spend a day on the beach, go on a shopping spree, book a holiday. “But what about work?” I say, alarmed at the idea of spending money when there’s not much actually coming in. “Surely we need to secure more work first and then we can enjoy ourselves.”

I should really know better, by now. Over the years, I’ve seen that whenever I go along with her idea and we actually go out and enjoy ourselves, work floods in. At times when I’m consumed by the idea of getting money, this is bizarre and can even be slightly annoying. After all, I'm the one being serious and responsible here, am I not? Surely I deserve to be rewarded for that! But it seems that the universe doesn't operate according to my petty fears and concerns, which is just as well, if you think about it.

The rules of creativity need to be re-learned

Luckily for us, the universe operates according to the rules of creativity, and I think we can all agree that creation is pretty amazing evidence of power of creativity. One of those rules is that creativity happens when we are relaxed, not when we are doing, trying, pushing and getting stressed. I also believe that this elusive, much-ignored faculty is our best and most powerful asset.

When things aren't going the way we think we want them to, the best thing we can do is:

• STOP
• allow ourselves to integrate
• process and receive.

Only then can all that good stuff stored in our subconscious mind start to work its magic again. After all, our subconscious has its own agenda, and it harbours far more power and creativity than we can imagine. If we push too hard and try to make things happen, with our conscious minds, we override that deeper, creative part of us that has the power to create synchronicities, opportunities and new doorways, without any effort on our part. So when things stall, we just need to stay out of the way and allow our subconscious to bring us what’s required—whether it’s a new idea or a new client.

When doing things the 'accepted' way no longer works, we must discover new ways. They won't necessarily make sense to us immediately, but in allowing them to percolate and establish new neural pathways in our brain, we can move forward in unexpected ways. Things start to open up.

Re-connecting

When we re-connect with this magical part of ourselves, we can reverse the downward spiral of tension in an instant, stimulating inspiration, creativity and its practical partner—innovation.

It's a lesson that we would do well to remember. As we innovate, our automatic tendency is to establish processes to avoid the discomfort and ambiguity of staying in a creative mode. We think it will make things easier. To some extent, it does, but if we hand over all responsibility to a process, we risk getting caught up in the same old cycle.

Related: Why Sitting Pretty Inevitably Ends Up Pretty Ugly

Everything is in a dynamic state of change, so we must keep our creativity alive.

Nowadays, when everything is moving so fast, the need to embrace change, enjoy the creative process and cultivate a flourishing culture of innovation has never been greater.

Ultimately, we are all best at being our authentic selves. Trying to be something else isn't a long-term solution to even the greatest of challenges. Every journey we take ultimately leads us back to ourselves, so resistance is futile! In order to access our best, we simply have to stop doing, despite all our resistance and our fear of not knowing what comes next, and just relax.

The guy who invented the first wheel was an idiot.

The guy who invented the other three, he was a genius.

—Sid Caesar

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I was in a brainstorming meeting yesterday with four friends who are each running their own businesses. It's a weekly event that I have been attending for the past month, and it helps in clarifying objectives, defining pathways, identifying needs and more.  We all think we are making progress with our plans, but I think God must be laughing, as the saying goes.

In this week's meeting, we learned how a key person in one small company nearly chopped his finger off while using a band saw. The guard had been taken off the saw to make it easier to use. Major ramifications—insurance claims, regulatory inspections and a real risk of the business going under. The previous four weeks' plans were out the window.

Another colleague's contract had been cancelled so he no longer had an income to cushion his planning. With a family to feed and a Lexus to pay for, he was getting stressed. Different plans were called for. And so on. As each week's plans were prepared, life happened, creating complications, reassessments, re-evaluations—all of which had to be manipulated to meet our stated objectives at the end of eight weeks of brainstorming.

Planning

I've become very adept at planning. It's a kind of respectable activity that gives me the illusion of doing something useful, being responsible and thorough, making progress, establishing solidity.

• If I'm honest though, I think I'm becoming paralysed by it, and there's pressure building in my head (a brain storm?) that's going to explode, unless I take some action.
• It doesn't feel healthy any more and I'm beginning to peek past the illusion of future security that it deceptively promises, and seek a more balanced approach to dealing with future uncertainties.

I decided it was time to turn this problem around and get creative. We plan because we want to reach a certain point, at a certain time, so we try to figure out all the factors that will affect our progress, and engineer a path to it. But, of course, it doesn't work.

Related: You Will Thank Us – 11 Tips About Business Plans You Need To Know!

Sense and respond

The last time I checked, I found I didn't have total conscious control over outside events - or even, a lot of the time, over my own mind and body. So, instead of trying to live in the world of 'predict and control', I find I'm much better suited to the world of 'sense and respond'.

• It's a big shift—one that every bit of my business conditioning resists with a kind of rabid aggression, but one that definitely works.
• The reason it works is that the only things I actually have conscious control over are the choices I make in this moment.
• Also, there's only one point I know with absolute certainty I'm going to reach and, when I do, I doubt I'll be thinking about my business.

Premeditation

If meditation is all about being in the here and now, then premeditation must be something to do with being in the now before we get there, which is nuts. But isn't that what we try to do? Isn't that what planning is? Once you realize this, the advantages of being in the here and now start to become apparent. If I can learn to respond to real situations rather than future uncertainties:

• Isn't that a better use of my time?
• Isn't that more empowering?
• Isn't it just a whole lot more sane?

It's also a lot more relaxing, and it tends to bring into play the other parts of our brain that are suppressed by this largely wasteful, manic activity. That's when inspiration can come in, disparate dots can be joined together, ambiguous ideas can align themselves into new pathways and we actually make some real progress.

Why do we resist that process so vehemently every day, when we know that every single breakthrough that mankind has ever made has been as a result of creative thinking? In business, it's the only thing that gets people excited and in the news. In our leisure time, it's all about creativity.

Vancouver MeshUp

One evening every month, here in Vancouver, I organize the Vancouver MeshUp. It's a place where people gather to take themselves into the creative space, push themselves outside their comfort zones, and experience new things that can help move them forward in some magical way. I'm really looking forward to our June event.

The speaker, Isabelle Mercier of Leapzone Strategies is a good friend—a brand-builder extraordinaire, a true professional, a great character and very brave. She called me to let me know that she hasn't prepared anything for her talk, and she's not going to. She's just going to stand up and speak.

For such a diligent, detail-oriented and thorough person, this is really freaky, but I am really looking forward to her talk. As a long-time creative, she's not afraid to step outside the box and her own considerable creative comfort zone in order to be authentically in the moment—and see what comes. To me, that is so much more powerful than a scripted delivery, a prepared Powerpoint covering all the bases, the selling agenda.

As Daniel Pink so eloquently pointed out in his book A Whole New Mind, we live in an age when being clever is no longer enough.

• Information is just a commodity that anyone can find. It's what we do with it that counts.
• Now that, for most of us, survival is not such a pressing issue, we must engage our uniquely human, higher qualities to achieve meaningful satisfaction in our lives.
• Design, stories, 'symphony' (synthesis, the ability to see the big picture and combine disparate pieces), empathy, play and meaning cannot be driven by technology and left-brain thinking alone.

Related: Five Potential Digital Futures

However, if we can step out of the future and get back to the now, we will realize that we're naturally equipped with these qualities to thrive, come what may.

“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.” — John Maynard Keynes

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The post Are You Prepared For Doing Business In The Future? appeared first on Tweak Your Biz.