by Heather Plett | Jan 4, 2012 | Creativity, mandala
Yesterday while making a doodle mandala (above) I had a flashback to all of those lengthy board meetings where I used to sit doodling through endless discussions about program parameters, policy adjustments, partnership agreements, and balance sheets.
Back in those board meeting days, I felt a little silly doodling – like I was an oddball at that table full of highly intelligent people with my pages full of childish scribbles – and yet I was management so I was expected to be present and the doodling helped keep me awake and semi-engaged.
It’s not that I wasn’t good at my job or that I didn’t fit at the table – I was and I did. I was really good at communicating about hunger and I knew how to lead people in doing the work of fundraising and educating. What I wasn’t very good at though, was feigning interest in programs, policies, and financial columns.
And so I doodled. At the very least, my right brain thanked me for keeping it happy.
Yesterday while I doodled and remembered those board meetings, I had a sudden epiphany. “What if THIS is the important stuff? What if the doodling – the stuff we all tend to dismiss as silly and trivial while the more important work is being done – is actually just as valuable as the programs and policies?”
Maybe we’ll get further if we throw doodling, art, play, and silliness into our conversations about policies and programs.
Maybe the world really needs coloured markers and vision boards as much as it needs perfectly balanced financial columns.
Maybe we’ll get better at solving the world’s big problems if we bring artists and dancers to the table along with the economists.
Maybe I would have served the board of directors as much (or even more) by teaching them to play and doodle than I was able to serve them with my carefully written reports and proposals on fundraising and social marketing.
Maybe the corporate world needs as many play sessions as there are board meetings.
Maybe the experts and decision-makers at every organization need to pair up with children and play games and have story time in between work sessions.
And that, my friends, is why I no longer sit at those board meetings. At first I thought it was because I wanted to make a living as a consultant, peddling those same skills that convinced that board of directors I was competent and worth what they were paying me.
But the truth is, I’m not there anymore because I chose doodling over policy discussions, creativity over branding, play over work, art over strategic plans, stories over annual reports. Not that those other things aren’t necessary – I just knew I could serve the world better if I followed my true passions and taught people how to make mandalas or tell stories instead of managing another strategic planning session.
Now, if I were to be hired as a consultant by a board of directors like the one I once worked with, I would hand them coloured markers, make them sit in a circle, and tell them to play, create, and imagine themselves into new stories. I wouldn’t sit through endless discussions about the way things have always been done – I would pass a talking piece around the circle and insist that they tell me their real stories. I wouldn’t make an action plan, I’d get down on the floor and paint a growing tree.
I don’t wonder anymore – I KNOW that doodling is important stuff.
by Heather Plett | Nov 17, 2011 | art, Beauty, Creativity, writing
I finished the first draft of my memoir in the Spring. The writing flowed freely and quickly, mostly because it was a story that had been simmering and growing for more than ten years since my son Matthew died and then was born.
Once I had about 60,000 words and it felt like I’d reached the end, I set it aside for a couple of months so that I could return with fresh perspective.
But then… every time I tried to return to it, I felt stuck. “Re-writer’s block” you might call it. I knew it needed work, but I didn’t know where to start. I knew I was losing the thread in parts, but I didn’t have a clear enough sense of what the thread was to fix the places where it was broken. Every time I’d come to the page, I’d do a little tweaking here and there, knowing full well that it needed more of an overhaul than a tweak.
Finally, in mid-October, I felt ready to put some serious work into it.
My return to it started in a roundabout way. First I cleaned my studio. Call it a metaphor… “clearing space, clearing mind”. Once there was space for my creativity to blossom again, suddenly I found myself eager to return to the page.
I got back into it and started doing some deeper editing than I’d done before, re-arranging ideas and playing with threads. But something told me I still wasn’t going deeply enough. The primary thread still looked blurry.
That’s when I knew it was time to step away from words and let colour and play do their magic.
I picked up my coloured markers, made space on the floor for a large piece of posterboard, and got busy. Before long, I had the beginnings of a question mandala on the page. Over the next few days, whenever I could find a few minutes of spare time, I’d disappear into my studio, grab my markers, and add a few new elements to the design. I think it’s complete now.
And guess what? I’m unstuck! I found the thread for my book and I know how to weave it more strongly through the weak places! I’ve already begun to rewrite it, and my new goal is to have the next draft completed by the end of 2011.
In case you’re stuck in some project, here’s a bit more information about my process:
What’s a question mandala? A mandala is a circular art form that is common in Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. It is considered sacred art and is used as a form of meditation and spiritual discipline and awakening. In Jungian psychology, mandalas are seen as representations of the unconscious self and as a way to work toward wholeness in personality.
To create a mandala, you start at the centre and move out to the edges. Different traditions have different meanings and rituals involved in mandala design. In Tibetan mandalas, for example, there is generally a square in the centre (the palace or temple) with four doors (symbolizing the bringing together of the four boundless thoughts namely – loving kindness, compassion, sympathy, and equanimity), surrounded by three concentric circles (representing the spiritual birth, the awakening and the knowledge).
Some mandalas are very symmetrical and follow “sacred geometry”, while others simply look like free-flowing art in the form of a circle.
For me, mandalas are free-flowing (yet generally fairly symmetrical) and I don’t attach meaning to any particular shape. I simply allow things to evolve as the mandala grows. In recent mandalas, I’ve begun to incorporate questions and words as they come to me, as in my Occupy Love mandala and this most recent mandala (at the top of the page).
How does a mandala “work”? First of all, it’s important to remember that a mandala is not a means to an end. Yes, I used it to help me get unstuck, but I didn’t sit down with a specific problem in mind and expect the mandala to resolve it for me. A mandala, like any form of meditation, is meant to help us step away from our thoughts, logic and problems into a deeper level of the unconscious. Like prayer, it’s a way to clear space for an encounter with the Divine.
How did it help me get unstuck? Words emerge from the left side of the brain, so the writing and re-writing I was doing, though creative, was largely left-brained work. When I get stuck in my left brain processes (logic, analysis, naming, critiquing, defining, judging, fixing), the best solution is to step away from the problem and engage my right brain. That can be done with colour, movement, play, images, and free-flowing creativity – all of which are incorporated into my process. Before long, my left brain is jolted out of the old patterns that got it stuck and begins finding new pathways to unexpected solutions.
How can you make your own question mandala? Your mandala will be as unique as you are. It emerges out of your own brain, so it shouldn’t look like mine. If you’re new to this process, though, and want some guidelines, here are the steps I took for this particular mandala.
1. Start with a large white piece of paper. Something heavier like poster board or watercolour paper works well, especially if you’re using Sharpie markers, as I do. (You could also use paints or pencil crayons. Or if you’re doing this at work – at a board meeting perhaps – use a pen or pencil or whatever you have handy.) I find it best to get down on the floor with the paper and markers and let my body movement around the circle become part of the process.
2. Think about a simple image that is connected with whatever you’re wrestling with, or one that helps you define yourself. In my case, a butterfly is closely connected to the story that emerges in my memoir. For you it might be a candle, a walking stick, a pencil, a book – anything.
3. Draw that image in the centre of the paper. Don’t worry about what it looks like – this process is for you alone and you’ll have to let go of perfection for now. (Note: many mandalas don’t start with an image in the centre, but for this particular process, when I’m wrestling with something specific, it’s where I like to start.)
4. Draw a circle around the image. If you want it to be symmetrical, use a protractor, stencil, or bowl. If you’re not worried about symmetry, simple draw it freestyle.
5. Outside of the circle, begin with whatever shape comes to mind. Don’t over-think this. This is meant to get you out of logic and self-critique, so don’t let yourself get stuck in what will look best. Just draw! If triangles feel right, draw them. If circles feel better, then just go with it. Spirals, boxes, ovals, hexagons, squiggles – whatever. Just choose a shape and repeat it all the way around the edge of the circle.
6. Keep adding new shapes around the edge, always repeating whichever shape you choose around the entire circle.
7. Once you have a fairly substantial circle, begin a spiral of questions. Again, it’s important not to over-think this. Ask whatever pops into your head without sensoring it. (As you can see, I chose to blur out the questions in the image above, because some of them are fairly personal.) Keep writing until no more questions show up.
8. Add a few more rings of shapes outside of the questions.
9. When you feel like it’s almost complete, incorporate a circle of words that represent the themes that began emerging in your mind once you wrote your questions. Again, don’t over-think it. Even if a word seems puzzling or challenging when it shows up, write it down. It might surprise you with some new insight.
10. At the edge, decide intuitively whether you feel it needs closed energy or open energy. If you feel the need to enclose it, draw a complete circle around it and decorate the circle if you wish. If you’d rather have more open energy, finish it with shapes or squiggles or spirals reaching out beyond the page.
In the Tibetan tradition, where monks make elaborate mandalas with coloured sand, they destroy them soon after they’re complete as a meditation on impermanence (a central teaching of Buddhism). The sand is brushed together and placed in a body of running water to spread the blessings of the mandala. Though I haven’t managed to destroy the mandalas I create on paper (I suppose I’m not as evolved as Tibetan monks), I occasionally do body mandalas on my skin (like the one below) that disappear after a few baths.
I love my paper mandalas and find places to hang them on the walls around my studio or in the hallway leading to my studio. They remind me to bring colour and meditation back into my life, and sometimes they surprise me with new insight when I look back over them.
Try it next time you’re stuck. Even if you don’t have a huge epiphany, you might be surprised just how much fun it is to play with markers again.
by Heather Plett | Nov 14, 2011 | Beauty, change, Community, Creativity, fearless, journey, Joy, Leadership, Passion, personality, Spirituality, things I've learned
* I would rather teach people to think beautiful thoughts than to create grammatically correct sentences.
* I believe that beauty and justice are inextricably intertwined and I want to bring more of both into the world.
* I believe that the greatest inventions, discoveries, and solutions emerge when people start asking the right questions.
* I believe that you have to ask a lot of questions in order to get to the right ones.
* I am happy when I can help bold creativity blossom in those around me.
* A little part of me shrivels up inside when I find myself stifling creativity with too many rules and judgements.
* I am easily distracted by colourful markers and clean white paper.
* I believe that personal leadership is more important than positional leadership.
* I choose community over team, circle over hierarchy, and family over corporation.
* I believe that shared stories open doorways to transformation.
* I am less productive when I haven’t had time for deep contemplation and equally deep play. The two go hand in hand.
* I believe that our differences are important but that they should not divide us.
* I delight in making new connections with people whose ways of looking at the world intrigue me. I am open to letting them change me, if it’s for the best.
* I am committed to hosting and being part of more conversations and inquiries that follow spiral patterns (moving inward to deeper wisdom) rather than linear pathways.
* Deep and soulful listening is often the best gift I can give anyone, and so I strive to keep my mouth shut and my ears open more often.
* I believe in walking lightly on this earth, and hope to some day use fewer resources for my own personal gain.
* I want to be open-minded and open-hearted and to live with delight as my constant companion.
* I believe that vulnerability and truth-telling can serve as catalysts for deep relationships and profound change.
* I believe that in order to create one great work of art you have to be prepared to create at least 100 mediocre ones first.
* I believe that time spent in meditation, prayer, and body movement is never time wasted, and I hope to some day live like I believe it.
* I believe that God created each of us to do good work and that we cheat our Creator and our world when we let our self-doubt and fear keep us from doing it.
* I want to bring more colour and light into otherwise dreary spaces.
* I strive to be more courageous tomorrow than I was today.
* I believe in daily transformation, continuous learning, and growth that doesn’t end until the day I exhale my last breath.
* I am committed to doing my best work, which is at the intersection of creativity, leadership, community, and story-telling.
by Heather Plett | Nov 7, 2011 | Creativity
Sometimes I let myself get stuck in the wrong stories.
Stories like:
– I would accomplish more if I had a nice office with big windows letting in the natural light. And a nice art easel. And more space for bookshelves.
– It’s okay to want what I want… in fact, I’m probably ENTITLED to a bigger space with natural light. I can’t create without it. Why do I bother trying?
– If I had a beautiful healing room like my friend Diane, I could host story circles in my own space and wouldn’t have to be satisfied with a rather ugly room in the back of a church. In fact, I shouldn’t bother hosting any more circles until I have the right space.
– If this house weren’t falling apart, with peeling linoleum in the kitchen, broken chairs in the dining room, and ugly carpet in the living room, I’d feel more comfortable hosting people here and I could do more of my work in-person.
– If only… (and the list could stretch to 101 more items)
It’s not that it’s wrong to want those things. It’s just that it’s wrong to let myself get stuck in the limitations of wanting them too much. When I get stuck in them, I forget to be grateful for what I have. I forget that I too can be resourceful and make new things out of old, like the people I’ve seen in the poorest parts of the world, making shoes out of rubber tires, or spoons out of seashells. I forget to treat the gifts I’ve already received with reverence and respect.
I let my house get messier “because it’s not good enough to host people in, so why should I bother keeping it clean?”
I let my tiny storage-space-turned-studio become a dumping ground for clutter “because it’s too small, cramped, and windowless for me to create in, so why bother?”
Last week, I knew that it was time to loosen the grip those limiting stories were having on me. I spent Friday morning clearing the clutter out of my tiny windowless space that used to be a storage room in a dark corner of our basement. It’s a space I poured my creative resourcefulness into last year before I quit my job, putting cheap fabric and old paneling on the wall and free hand-me-down carpet on the floor.
And now I am grateful for it again.
I finally did some creative work in this space again (see the mandala in my last post), and now my head is buzzing with new ideas.
Here’s my tiny space, with my creativity board in front of me and my art supplies and favourite books within easy reach.
On the ceiling by the light hang the butterflies that told me to write a book.
Here’s a corner of my creativity board, with elephants from Tanzania (oh how I loved seeing them in the wild!), a dried leaf from the centre of the labyrinth at Tranquil Spirit (my friend Diane’s healing space), and some of my creative meanderings.
One of my favourite trinkets, a gift from my sister that reminds me to continue to stare with wonder at the many possibilities that this big, wide world has to offer.
Another corner of my creativity board, with a photo of my sister and I backpacking around Europe many years ago.
My favourite view – lying on the floor looking up at the iridescent fabric hanging from the ceiling. This space – though it may not seem like much – is sacred space.
Here’s Maddy, who is delighted when I let her into my creative space so that we can do some co-creating (which we did lots of this weekend). She made a special magic wand for me. On its handle it says “be magical”. I’m going to wave it around the room whenever I need to make old stories disappear, or I need to make new things out of old things that no longer serve me.
One more view… the entrance to my tiny space, where I painted a tree of dreams (follow the link to see a video of me painting it) and Maddy painted a magical character out of her favourite book, Harry Potter.
by Heather Plett | Aug 12, 2011 | Creativity, Leadership, Wisdom, women
There is so much bad news out there, if you look for it. Riots in London, failing economies, famine in East Africa, changing climate causing erratic weather disasters… the list goes on and on. Some days it feels like the whole world is crashing in around us.
It’s enough to make a person completely discouraged. It’s enough to make a person want to bury her head in the sand, and choose to live a self-focused life instead of spending seemingly useless energy on problems that are too big to manage.
Everything I see tells me the same thing over and over again… we need a big hairy audacious paradigm shift.
We need to imagine the world differently.
We need to imagine leadership differently.
We need to imagine ourselves differently.
We need to imagine community differently.
We need to get our heads out of the sand and instead of paying attention to the big ugly negative news, turn our attention toward each other.
We need to keep on caring for each other even though it hurts sometimes and often feels like useless resistance in a tsunami of bad news.
We need to start insisting that our news media focus on the good in people and not just the bad.
We need to engage our creativity and collaboration and stop listening to those people who tell us that consumption and competition is what makes the world go round.
We need to stop believing that the economy is our god and over-consumption is okay because it feeds the economy. We need to seek happiness in other places than shopping malls.
We need to turn to each other, focus on building our communities where we live, and trust that the benefit of local communities will have far-reaching impact (as my friend Kathy Jourdain so eloquently suggests).
We need women and men who will rise up and shift the tide away from aggressive “command and control” leadership to participative “engage and collaborate” leadership.
We need to sit in circles and tell each other stories that will help us understand and celebrate each others’ differences and similarities.
We need to engage our right brains in conceptual, creative, intuitive, spiritual thinking and start imagining new patterns that will shift us away from our self-destructive paths.
We need to get our egos out of the way and start admitting that the only way to find a new path through the weeds is to trust each other to contribute the necessary skills. And then we need to believe that we are better together than alone.
THIS is why we need more feminine wisdom in leadership. It’s not about women taking over from men (and making their own sets of mistakes). It’s about trusting the wisdom that tends to be more inherent in women than in men. (Even the Washington Post says so.) It’s about engaging our creativity, spirituality, compassion, collaboration, and empathy in the way we lead. It’s about letting our right brains contribute to our decisions as much as our left brains.
None of these problems is going to be fixed overnight. In fact, even using the word “fix” shows limited thinking on our part. These things are not simple problems with simple solutions. There is no linear logic to apply, like a math problem on a high school exam. We can’t just assign more police to the streets of London, for example. We need to look at the systemic problems that shaped what happened long before anything erupted. There is deep complexity that will require a lot of deep thinking and collaborating and failing and trying again and meditating and engaging in conversation.
When change happens, there is always a time of great chaos before new solutions are found. It feels like much of the world is in that place of chaos now. This is not a time for despair. This is a time for hope and creativity. This is a time to gather together and lean on each other.
The world needs new ideas. The world needs YOUR ideas. Get your head out of the sand and start sharing them.
by Heather Plett | Mar 3, 2011 | Creativity, Language, Leadership
The language of business and government is largely the language of men. It’s language that’s been shaped by sports and warfare – masculine arenas.
Think about it for a moment – strategic planning, performance reviews, bite the bullet, fast track, jump the gun, keep your eye on the prize, rally the troops, ball park figures – they’ve all been influenced by sports or warfare. Even coaching, though it has developed softer edges, is still a word that comes out of sports, where performance is everything.
Language is not only shaped by the culture in which it is formed, it also helps shape the culture. When you enter a new workplace, you learn to speak in the local lingo. Before you know it, you’re not just talking in those terms, you’re thinking in them too.
Case in point: Not long ago, in my Writing for Public Relations course, we were talking about communications strategies, and I was telling the students how important it is to evaluate after the work is complete. “Even if you don’t have time for a full-fledged evaluation,” I said, “at least do a post mortem with your planning team.”
The students wanted to know what a post mortem was, and I explained that it’s a meeting held after work has been completed to discuss what went well and what needed to be improved next time. I was so used to using the word, I didn’t even think about what I was saying, until a student raised his hand and called me on it.
“Remember how you were saying that language in the world of business is too often based on sports and warfare?” asked the student who’d spent time in the army. “Well, ‘post mortem’ is an excellent example. Interestingly enough, the army no longer uses that term. They now refer to it as ‘after action review’.”
Needless to say, I was sufficiently humbled by my student who’d caught something I didn’t even recognize in my own language. That’s how language is – it becomes so embedded in our psyche, we don’t even recognize how it influences us anymore.
I’m on a personal mission not only to change my own language, but to influence the language of the corporate world. I think it’s time for more feminine language – the language of art and intuition added to the language of sports and warfare.
This morning I delivered a speech to a local business club. I spoke on “How to Lead with your Paint Clothes On.” I talked to them about how to think more like artists, how to incorporate creativity and pauses and white spaces and practice in their business planning. I encouraged them to allow for mistakes, open themselves to possibilities, and trust their intuition. I handed out markers and doodle pages and told them to doodle while I talked. I encouraged them to hold art parties with their staff.
I don’t think the business club (mostly men) knew exactly what to make of my talk. A few of them offered stories of how creativity had shaped what they did, but most of them simply thanked me politely and then left.
It’s a new language for many people – not one that’s particularly comfortable in a business world. Speaking a new language into an old culture can be intimidating and downright scary. But change doesn’t come without a bit of risk. If we want things to shift, sometimes we have to be willing to be the oddball in the room.
Here’s the handout I used this morning. On the back of the page it said “Go ahead and DOODLE!”
Yesterday while making a doodle mandala (above) I had a flashback to all of those lengthy board meetings where I used to sit doodling through endless discussions about program parameters, policy adjustments, partnership agreements, and balance sheets.
