Categories
Blog Creativity Education

New book: 100 Days of Creativity

100DaysofCreativity_Volume1_Bigger
Sarah and I have just published a new e-book designed to trigger and support creativity. You can download the book on the Amazon Kindle store.
This book arose out of our own efforts to stay creative over a long period of time and I can say with certainty that it works.
This book is based on a very simple concept. Each day, the book offers you a few triggers to get your creative juices going. And then it sends you off with the message “Now go and be creative”, because that is where you really should be putting your time and energy and passion.
There are little milestones along the way as you achieve the important 4 days, 10 days, 21 days and so on. The book is designed to help you create a new habit of creativity (pun intended!). As Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do, therefore excellence is not an act, but a habit.”
We enjoyed making it and using it and hope that it will be useful to other writers, songwriters, drama folk, poets, business folk or anyone else that wants to be consistently creative over a long period of time.
Here is the description of the book (and the other books that will be coming out in the same series).
Welcome to the 100 Days of Creativity series of books designed to support your creativity. This series is titled 100 Days of Creativity because we believe that great things begin to come about when people are consistently using their creativity over a sustained period of time. Like other physical and mental skills, creativity is a muscle, and the more you use it, the better you get at it.
Every creative effort has to start somewhere. If you look at any finished novel or play or story or song, it was initially triggered by something that the creator saw or heard or felt.
This book gives you 100 days of triggers to fire up your creativity. Each day, the book gives you three thought-provoking or inspirational quotes that will help you to foster the habit of being creative every single day.
Download the book on the Amazon Kindle store.

Categories
Blog Other

PANSIG Conference

pansig2016-1080_0
This weekend, I’m presenting at the JALT PanSig conference in Nago, Okinawa. The theme of the conference is Innovations in Education. And we definitely need some innovations in education throughout the world. I’ve been reading and enjoying Ken Robinson’s book, Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education. It’s a great book by a well-informed writer who is also blessed with a sense of humour. Compared to some writing about education, this one is like watching Comedy Central. Hopefully, we will be sharing lots of ideas at the conference which follow along the same lines as Robinson’s suggestions.
Both of the PanSig presentations that I’m involved in are based on on-going research and teaching that I’ve been carrying out with various people over the last few years. Both are quite influenced by NLP. Both projects are also bringing more personalization and creativity into the classroom, two characteristics that I increasingly view as essential to real learning as I get older.
On Saturday at 1pm, I’ll be presenting with Ben Backwell about our course for helping university students to set and achieve goals. Then, on Saturday at 3pm, Sarah Mulvey and I will be doing a poster presentation on helping students to use more sensory language in their writing and speaking.
 

Categories
Blog Education NLP

Generative Skills

Generative-model-1-e1314984752853Not all skills are created equal. I’m a big fan of continuing to learn and continuing to learn new skills. Recently, however, I’ve been frequently noticing the fairly-obvious fact that some skills open up more possibilities than other skills.
For example, learning a language is what I would call a “generative skill”–the type of skill that opens up many possibilities.

Categories
Blog NLP Other

Thinking about Words #1 – Financial Security

Today I was thinking about financial security and recognized that somehow I felt a little uncomfortable with the term. This surprised me because logically it makes a lot of sense to me and obviously everyone can benefit from financial security in all kinds of ways.
However, every time I said ‘financial security’ to myself, I felt a slight twinge of stress in my shoulders and over the years I have learned that this kind of message from our somatic mind, or body or unconscious or whatever you want to call it, is generally worth listening to.
So I started playing with some metaphors and images in my mind and the word ‘security’ immediately brought up the image of a castle protected by a moat, a great gate and knights patrolling. The archers are always ready to launch a long-distance volley of deadly arrows on anyone approaching who looks dangerous. Inside, the king of the castle and the land, is living in ‘security’, protected by the water and walls and strong men.