What effective Creative Problem Solving looks like

• You are open to novel ideas of how to bring your idea to life.
• You look in areas that may not be directly related but you somehow feel might hold some novel answers.
• You try something, then you tweek and iterate, and try something new, then evaluate,  tweek it and iterate, throw something new into the mix and see what happens to your idea.  THe problem solving component continues until you have shipped but it starts the chain off.

What can get in the way of Creative Problem Solving

• Rigidity (the idea assassin)
  • A really loud aggressive critical voice that assassinated your ideas before they have a chance to be properly explored.
  • A feeling that there is only one way to solve the problem
  • A feeling of overwhelm and shut down.
  • A fixed mindset
• Chaos (The Rabbit Holer)
  • Using research as a tool of escape from actually pushing forward
  • Perfection paralysis and fear of failure so you research it to death to try to avoid losing face.
  • Endlessly scrolling others creative works and not generating your own
  • Jealousy of others who have done the work

How to get back on track

• Plan for failure
  • imagine the week ahead and your desire to submit an image you are very proud of.
  • Now imagine it is class day and I ask you for your image.  You have nothing to show but a collection of excuses.  I raise an eyebrow and move on to the next student who I am able to cheer and give feedback on their image.  How does that make you feel?  As valid as the excuses feel they don't get you any feedback and you have lost confidence in yourself and you have no one to blame but you...and if you do try to blame others you are only giving away more of your power.  Because even if you submitted an image that you weren't proud of you would have gotten feedback that would have helped you next week.  Now lets reverse engineer for a different outcome...
  • After your workshop with me try and look at the week ahead.  What could cause the above scenario?  How can you plan now to avoid that fate?  Sweet do that.
  • This method is called Fear-setting.  It an ancient process I believe invented by the Stoics.  Marcus Aurelius wrote about it and he managed to be a beloved leader in Rome during a pandemic, he was a dude who got things done.  A modern day Stoic Tim Ferris writes about the technique here. 
• Just freaking take the picture
  • It doesn't have to be an award winning image.  Some weeks you will be lucky to have time or energy to take a selfie.  And these challenges are challenging.  I'm not babying you guys here, I am doing my best to develop your creative chops in the few weeks I have you in my care.   But just take a picture.  If you can't get in all components of the creative boundaries (backlight, high key, low key, colour etc)  submit something that shows some thought and effort.   Because you will get feedback.   And you will be proud of yourself.   and you will grow.

 

Mandi's way to solve a creative problem.

• Ask your self what is it you want to achieve.
• Noodle it until you can't think of any other options.
• take a break and do something else for a bit?
• Any new ideas?
• Choose the one that seems to hold the most light for you.
• Try it out. - What's working?  What could be better?
• Tweek it and try again.
• Repeat until you have a solution you are happy with or you realize that it isn't going to work, consider the time spent into is as sunk costs and move on.

The most important part of the above is this...be kind with yourself in the process.  Self-compassion is a superpower that took me 45 years to develop.  I lost it when I was your age and I know if I hadn't, I would have made so much more difference in the world than I have.  Self-criticism can come from society, from bullying, or from habits we have learned in our families. Self-criticism is like a dial that dials down the energy you have available for your creative pursuits.

When your self-compassion is solid you have more energy for your creative pursuits.

So the greatest skill a young creative can master is the art of developing and fostering gentle humor and self-compassion in themselves and in others on their creative team.   Treating yourself as your own best friend, and treating everyone on your creative team as worthy of respect and support.

“Have no fear of perfection, you’ll never reach it.”
– Salvador Dali

 

Your power is sucked by Bottled or Blown emotions.  Meaning if you stuff painful feelings down they become like parasites that energetically sit in your body drawing energy from your day.  If you explode without first finding your centre then the fall out from your explosion requires more energy to clean up the mess and repair relationships.     So the technique that we explored gives you a safe space to uncork and look at the emotion and then safely choose your response.   This leaves you more energy in your life to do cool stuff that gives you joy.  Think of the technique I showed you as being a mental dewormer for your energy system.  If used daily I find it cleans the system out and then instead of writing down challenging emotions you start to find that really cool ideas come out in the free writing instead.  Daily use of the technique gives you a tool to help settle your emotions to allow space for you to problem-solve effectively.  Remeber that problem solving is the second step needed to manifest your ideas.  First we choose our idea, then we problem solve how we are going to get there.