The Creative Process
I am fascinated by the creative process. Do you find that sometimes you are really in sync and great ideas come to you very easily and other times you struggle to even focus for a few seconds on a concept? Have you ever thought about what is happening when you are trying so hard to be creative?
Recent research shows that when you are distracted from a creative challenge for a few minutes, you are more likely to come up with a creative solution than if you focused your attention on it. In the study done at the University of Amsterdam, students were given a creative problem to solve. One group was told they had three minutes to think it through before giving their answers. Another group was given an unrelated task to do for three minutes to distract them. This task was a non-creative one that was designed to use their conscious thoughts. The third group was asked to come up with ideas immediately.
What was the result? Well, you might think the group that was given time to focus on a solution would have better results and more creative ideas, but the opposite occurred. It was the distracted group that generated more creative solutions. Here’s the reason given: the distracted group had a task that occupied their conscious thoughts, thereby freeing up their unconscious mind to do some creative work.
Don’t you find this is true yourself? How often have you tried consciously to focus on a creative solution and come up empty?
I remember trying to rename my radio show last January. I spent hours trying to think of a new catchy name. It wasn’t until I let it go and focused on other activities that the answer came to me, Head over Heels!
It’s an incredible “ah-hah” moment when the conscious part of your brain receives the answer from your unconscious.
There is a great lesson here for all of us. When we are attempting to find a creative solution, we need to distract ourselves and do something totally different for a while in order to free our subconscious brain to come up with the answer.
Let yourself be distracted and amazing things will happen.
Have you experienced this?
Our Girlfriends Keep Us Healthy
This article was emailed to me by a friend this week and apparently it has circulated around the internet. I was unable to find the source, but I am passing it along regardless because I think the message is important. I would love to know your thoughts on the subject.
In a class given at Stanford, the last lecture was on the mind-body connection–the relationship between stress and disease. The speaker (head of psychiatry at Stanford) said, among other things, that one of the best things that a man could do for his health is to be married to a woman whereas for a woman, one of the best things she could do for her health was to nurture her relationships with her girlfriends. At first everyone laughed, but he was serious.
Women connect with each other differently and provide support systems that help each other to deal with stress and difficult life experiences. Physically this quality “girlfriend time” helps us to create more serotonin–a neurotransmitter that helps combat depression and can create a general feeling of well being. Women share feelings whereas men often form relationships around activities. They rarely sit down with a buddy and talk about how they feel about certain things or how their personal lives are going. Jobs? Yes. Sports? Yes. Cars? Yes. Fishing, hunting, golf? Yes. But their feelings?–rarely. Women do it all of the time. We share from our souls with our sisters, and evidently that is very good for our health. He said that spending time with a friend is just as important to our general health as jogging or working out at a gym.
There’s a tendency to think that when we are “exercising” we are doing something good for our bodies, but when we are hanging out with friends, we are wasting our time and should be more productively engaged–not true. In fact, he said that failure to create and maintain quality personal relationships with other humans is as dangerous to our physical health as smoking! So every time you hang out to schmooze with a gal pal, just pat yourself on the back and congratulate yourself for doing something good for your health! We are indeed very, very lucky. Sooooo, let’s toast to our friendship with our girlfriends. It’s very good for our health.
What are your thoughts? Do your girlfriends keep you healthy?
Do You Need to Fake it to Make it?
Do you know that low self-esteem can sabotage your career success? In a recent article in Forbes Woman, author Laura Sinberg states that people with low self-esteem often unconsciously sabotage their careers. Sinberg quotes Lois Frankel, PhD, author of Nice Girls Don’t Get The Corner Office.
People with low self-esteem often try to remain under the radar screen because they don’t want to be noticed, but especially in this economy, that is the wrong thing to do.
This quote caught my attention because the focus of my coaching for professional women is to help them create visibility and be on the radar screen of key influencers at work. This is critical for career advancement.
The article also states that, in general, we tend to make assumptions about people who exhibit behavior associated with low self-esteem. One common assumption is that they are not very intelligent. We make these assumptions based on the fact that these people seldom speak up in meetings and if they are called on, they are timid and don’t readily express an opinion.
Other self-sabotaging behavior that is associated with low self-esteem is not asking for raises or promotions. It’s easy to see how all this can negatively impact your career.
Sharon Fontain, who is an expert in self-esteem, states that self-esteem can be learned through the practice of positive self talk.
What you’re doing is working with the unconscious mind, which is extraordinarily powerful and extremely stupid. In other words, it is perfectly within your power to fool your unconscious mind, allowing you to banish low self-esteem for good.
Wow! that’s great news. A regular practice of positive self talk can actually boost your self-esteem. If you feel you are in this category and are victim of negative thoughts about yourself and your ability, it’s time that you did something about it before it dramatically affects your career.
Notice when negative thoughts come up and think of a positive thought to replace it. Practice the positive thought over and over, until you can “fool” your brain. For example, “I will never make it in the company” can be replaced with “I am talented and have a great deal to offer this company. I know that I have the capability to succeed at whatever I attempt”. See how it works?
Make a conscious effort to speak up in meetings with confidence, offer your opinion, volunteer for special projects and other initiatives in the company to make yourself more visible.
Lois Frankel recommends you go one step further and fake it.
Fake it until you make it. This will not only convince your superiors, but it will also help you rejigger your thought processes.
What do you think? Does it work to fake it until you make it?
Listen to my Head over Heels Radio interview with Lois Frankel to learn more ways women unconsciously sabotage their careers and advice on how we can modify our behavior to better position ourselves for advancement.
Ice Cream Melts and Three Other Marketing Tips for Summer
This week’s guest post is by Jamie Eslinger, a friend, colleague and fantastic marketing coach.
Jamie “Sling” Eslinger loves to make consumer brands shine. As the founder of MarketingTiara she also coaches entrepreneurs and marketing mavens to be brilliant.
We all have experience chasing ice cream around the top of the cone before it falls off slowly dripping into a puddle on brand new summer sandals, right? But that’s the fun of it! The point is… you KNOW this because you have EXPERIENCED it first hand, or first lick whatever the case may be.
Let’s pretend you are from a far flung universe and ice cream is new. How you would explain it? Describe it? Package it? Convince others to try it?
Let me just get to my point. You know and experience YOUR OWN product better than anyone. You live it, sleep it, dream it, work it. In many cases, especially for consultants or entrepreneurs, TAG you ARE it.
So here are three tips to make sure your marketing plans don’t melt this summer:
1) Drinking Too Much Cool-Aid
Sometimes marketing people fall so in love with their own ideas, they forget to ask the most important person on the planet (hint: the customer) what they might think about it.
Solution: Reach Out and Touch Someone
Even if you already subscribe to third party consumer research, conduct your own.
You can easily create surveys, do in-store questionnaires or hold focus groups with your best customers. And sometimes it’s even better to talk to your worst customers (the ones who don’t hold back any comments). In the end it doesn’t matter how you do it, just make sure you take some advice from the old AT&T ads …reach out and touch someone. Find out why they like your product or why they don’t. It will be insightful for your next product launch and you might be surprised what they say.
2) Analysis Paralysis
If you’ve ever made fifteen spreadsheets to prove what just one will tell you, you know this state of being. Usually it means there are other issues at hand. For most projects you can only measure so much before it’s time to take action. Of course, it’s the measuring that leads to success so use the age old advice of measure twice cut once — not measure two billion.
Solution: Testing Schedules
If your team is stuck in the land of analysis it’s time for a test. Encourage them to take action. One way is to set up a market test. Be sure the market is small enough to be measurable. It is also critical to give the test a start date and end date and know what you want to measure BEFORE the test begins. The classic questions to ask are: will this meet sales goals, profit goals and consumer interest? It is easy to get sidetracked once a test starts so make sure you set success parameters ahead of time. It should be very easy at the end of the test window to know if the test passed and the launch is a go. If not, you go back to the drawing board but now with a lot more information than just a spreadsheet.
3) Social Media Blues
Feeling behind the times with social media? Who doesn’t’?! It changes every day. That’s what makes it fun and so hard to keep up with too. In the old days of advertising a marketer paid for tons of research to prove if a television ad or radio commercial was on brand, or if it was compelling enough to sell before the ad ever saw the light of day. Not so these days.
Solution: Merge It
If you are a little weary of how to add social media to your standard marketing, let me just point out there is a huge international focus group in real time just waiting for you – it’s called facebook, sometimes referred to as twitter and other times it comes in the form of a blog. You can tap into this instant information engine to gain free insight about your products. It can be a barometer of what your current customers actually believe and tip you off to important messages you need to address in your advertising. By merging consumer thoughts collected through social media into your standard marketing mix, you can effectively create traditional media (tv, radio, even internet ads) with social media intelligence.
To see a three month plan of how this works, read this great article by Bill Flitter:
http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/27277.asp
For a marketing strategy that won’t melt I recommend mixing consumer insight with action (test something, do something, don’t just sit there looking at your computer screen) and tap into your social media friends and followers for some key insights and messages. And to the Dog Days of Summer I say enjoy the ice cream and leave the Cool-Aid behind.
Sign up for MarketingTiara’s Shine On newsletter at: http://conta.cc/signupforshineon
Follow her blog at: www.consultsling.com
Check out Jamie’s marketingtiara retreat in September here: bit.ly/aLzx56
The Language of Power
In her book, No Ceilings, No Walls, author Susan Colantuono says:
As essential as it is to understand the business of business, it is necessary but insufficient. You not only have to have business strategic and financial acumen, you must also be able to demonstrate it by using the language of power.
Susan talks about the language of power being the language of outcomes and the importance of stating clear business objectives and outcomes to demonstrate the power of your solutions, ideas, goals.
I think that there is, however, a universal language of power that women need to embrace to advance their careers and be successful in any business. We, as women, tend to “skirt” around powerful language.
Case in point, I was at a training class a couple of weeks ago and the presenter, who was exceedingly qualified, stood up to start her presentation with what I think is close to an apology. She said…”well, I just have some handouts here”. OK. Most people probably didn’t even tune into this, but since this is my area of expertise, I could not help but notice. “Just have some handouts”? Why did she feel the need to apologize for her work? It’s almost as if she thought she was putting us out in some way by giving us handouts.
But we all do this all the time. We apologize more than necessary. We use words that diminish or weaken our statements or points of view.
In her book, Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office, Lois Frankel dedicates a chapter, “How You Sound”, to this topic. Lois writes specifically about using minimizing words such as “just”.
She says,
Minimizing Words are those that diminish the importance or size of an achievement.
Lois emphasizes the point that if we want to be taken seriously, we need to drop these minimizers.
Here’s my point: You can do your homework and create an impactful message and an action plan on how best to increase your credibility and visibility in your workplace, but if you continue to use language that weakens your position, you won’t get the results you desire.
Be conscious of the words you choose. Listen carefully to other women at work and be mindful if they are guilty of the same self-sabotaging behavior. Tactfully let them know the affect it has on their overall message and professional image.
Once you increase your own sensitivity to this, you will be able to change your behavior, delete the minimizers, and use more powerful language to strengthen your message instead of weaken it.
Tune into Head over Heels Radio on Tuesday, August 3rd to hear Susan Colantuono discuss how to use the language of power and other skills that women need to know in order to advance their careers.
Also, you can hear Lois Frankel discuss this as well on Head over Heels archived show, November 10, 2009.
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