Recently I shared a ride home from Saratoga Springs with a lovely new friend, Denise Williams.  We were talking about the book she’s working on and her blog.  Her doctoral thesis had focused on leadership and women.  From that came the seeds of her current book which looks to answer questions on how they lead, the lessons learned, and what they know now that they wished they knew then.   I commented on a book I was reading on creativity and how it seems that the lessons to be learned are not new; the newness is in our listening, staying present, paying attention.  Denise asked if I would write my thoughts on this topic on her blog.

Please stop by, meet Denise, read my thoughts and share your own at   http://latelessons.blogspot.com/

One of my sisters said to me “I never thought you were a perfectionist”.  She had read my previous blog post and was commenting in person.

Well, it’s true I don’t agonize over the daisies in the vase.  You won’t find me up at 2 AM fretting over the finer details of anything (although the wee hours could find my nose firmly stuck inside a good book).  Don’t get me wrong.  I like things nice and I like nice things.  I am not slap-dash.  I could not be genetically attached to my family and be slap- dash.

So, I sat with my sister’s comment to try to get closer to what had prompted the blog piece in the first place. What was I really trying to say?  What came to me was that the perfection I was talking about had more to do with the internal me rather than the external things I might create.  Yeah, that’s more on target.  Can I separate me from what I do?  Hmmm, this may be a very fine point I’m belaboring.

It has to do more with being ok as a work in progress rather than a finished polished perfect being.  It has more to do with putting my WIP self out there, maybe getting slapped down or having rolled eyes pointed my way (or, maybe not!).  It has to do with being comfortable in my own skin and letting you in to see.

It has to do with letting you know I don’t know it all (not that you thought I did or that I should).  It has to do with claiming my power, taking more chances, having the occasional need for elbow and knee pads.  Maybe using the knee pads to kneel down at the feet of others and learn from them.  Do I sound arrogant?  I hope not.  It’s really just about not being all finished and kicking back and relaxing into the journey.  Hey, I’m perfectly normal!  Click!!

There is a pretty church that sits in the Washington Valley.  They keep a message board out front; a white sign framed in brick with big plastic letters that slide in and out like prices per gallon at a gas station.  Many churches have signs like this with clever statements – food for thought.  I love driving by and seeing what morsel I can carry away. 

Well, recently, this church’s message was “Imperfect people welcome here”.  Love it!!  I should have taken a picture of it.  I could have hung the photo up on the door from the garage into my kitchen.  That’s the door I use the most.  I might have put it on the header of this blog site.  I might have pinned it on my pillow or in my bra or hung it by where I hang my coat.  I’m so happy to be welcome here and there.

So, as I passed this sign several times a week, the idea of imperfection started to settle on me more comfortably.  I know perfectionism can be paralyzing but did I realize how freeing imperfection could be?  Reframing it helped to make it more than okay – almost desirable.  Like twisting the thought tiles in the Rubik cube of my brain – Click! Patterns come together.  Click!  Imperfect is normal.  Click!  Imperfect is ok.  I’m imperfect; you’re imperfect.  We’re ok!  Click! 

To be honest, I do find perfection very bland. From landscapes to dear faces to the apple pie on Thanksgiving, picture perfect is boring. 

I like a strong nose on a man and a little road dust on his brow.  Frankly, Tom Cruise is too pretty; no appeal for me.  Meryl Streep wears her years beautifully as does Helen Mirrin.  They maintain an imperfect line or sag.  If they’ve had work it’s very subtle.  The fine network of lines on my mother’s face carries her beauty and life much better than the supposedly perfect, beautiful women who recently walked the red carpet.  Click! 

And think about the imperfection in the landscape.  The wrinkles and the heaving and pushing of mother earth’s skin; the lines etched by ancient rivers of ice.  What could be more stunning than the Grand Canyon or more eye popping than the Badlands.  How else would we get the sharp, rugged, brown Rockies or the soft Blue Ridge Mountains?  We would have missed all this if it were all smooth perfection.  Click! 

The world around me is full of glorious imperfection and, thankfully, I fit right in.  So, I may put my feet up on the furniture and eat ice cream with my fingers and drip the wrong words on the page.  All is well.  I can prepare an art journal page and change my mind and paint over it or start a new page.  I can forget an ingredient in a recipe and make it up as I go.  I can order business cards that might not be perfect and put myself into a women’s networking group before I think I’m ready.  (Because perfectionists are usually never ready!)  My hair is curling in ways not intended; I have no make-up on and I’m not holding my stomach in.  I do my best and keep moving forward.  I’m not perfect, you know.  Click!

Being a student of the creative process, I love finding new (to me) ways of approaching creativity.  Lately, the lens of the camera has been calling me.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, I signed up for a photography class.  One of the exercises had us playing with a little viewfinder, a 1 inch square cut into an index card.  (Hey, it works!)  At the same time I became aware of the work of Dewitt Jones.  He is an award-winning photojournalist; a lecturer and author whose training film “Everyday Creativity” caught my attention.  I have looked at the 20 minute clip several times.  The magnificent photography aside, his message is one that has been dancing in my mind for a while.  Watching and listening to him brought the fragments together.  Using our innate creativity and curiosity makes our world and our work extraordinary.

Yes, this is what I’ve been trying to say!  Creativity is not just about the arts.  It’s really about everyday life!  So many people say to me, “Oh, I’m really not creative” or “Oh, no, I don’t write”.  Very self deprecating, very modest.  Well, Dewitt Jones has the perfect comeback:  “Life can be my art.  Every act has the potential to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary.” 

You know who else has great comebacks?  The muse Albert.  He says, “You are creative relative to whether you think you are creative or not.”  Or “Ever-new solutions and ever-new possibilities are relatively easier to discover than you may think.”  (He is prone to speak in relative terms.)  Who is Albert, you say?  He is the creation of Jill Badonsky and is found in her book “Nine Modern Day Muses and a Bodyguard” which is also the foundation for the Kaizen Muse Creativity Coaching model.  The muse Albert is someone we Kaizen Muse Creativity coaches call on when we and our clients need to expand our potential for creative thinking, ask more questions, look for more answers. 

Albert would take a question or dilemma and approach it from behind his left ear.  He would keep saying “what if???”  He would reframe it, turn it upside down, maybe look at it through my small paper viewfinder.  He would put on a different lens, maybe peer through the other end of a telescope.  He would resist default thinking.  He would play with ideas the way your cat plays with a piece of string.  And the result would be a cool twist on an old recipe, a rearranged living room, a new way of serving your client, more fun with your children, a new career. 

The next time you feel your brain slip-sliding into the rut of ordinary default thinking, try playing an extraordinary game of what if.  Reframe the situation.  Ask more questions.  Allow more space in your mind for the potential of possibilities.  Call on Albert for inspiration or call on me for help.

When I sat down to write today I was thinking about the photography class I am taking.  It is a 4 week teleclass (www.pointandshootphotocourses.com) with Sheila Finkelstein whose purpose has more to do with the seeing than the snapping.  She takes us into the details of a photograph, looks at the lines and textures, light and shadow, plays with the different hues of the color wheel and how color changes what we are looking at.  We dwell in the images, ponder them and see where they take us.                       

While there is some technical information (which makes me realize how much more of that I need) my intention in taking the class was to shift my vision, to learn to look at things with a different eye.  At the same time I happened to pull out some papers from a recently attended Women Reading Aloud Winter Writing Wellness Day (www.womenreadingaloud.org ).  This quote was on one of the hand outs:

 “Dwelling, for most of us, is a discipline that has to be learned and practiced.  It has become increasingly hard, in a culture dominated by movement and speed, where we get our visual habits from moving pictures or the rapid riffling of magazine pages, to pause and ponder the subtleties of a line, a ray of light, a nuance of color tone.  We must learn arduously what may have come more naturally in quieter times and places: to dwell on, dwell in, or dwell with an object of contemplation.”

            In Quiet Light – Poems on Vermeer’s Women by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre

 Perfect!!  There it was again; the same message to slow down, ponder, bask in quiet contemplation.  A marriage of the inner and outer eye, a lifetime of riches.

Kaizen – continuous improvement through small steps.  That’s my coaching mantra and how I try to live.  For example, the other morning my yoga class was cancelled.  I had a few hours until my next appointment.  I asked myself what seemed best for this unplanned free time.   The previous days of rain had left and the sun was beaming happily down.  Indian summer had stopped by for a visit.  She could only stay a few days and then the chill rain was scheduled for a return.  My garden beckoned.

For many reasons, big and small, my garden has been neglected this year.  At summer’s end, when I finally picked my head up, it was overwhelming.  Weeds had flourished, shrubs were overgrown and perennials were straggly and crying for my attention.  To be fair, the birds and gentle summer breezes had tried to help and flowering plants had shown up that were a delightful surprise (try not to think weeds!)  But, I didn’t know where to start.   How could I have let this happen I wailed to myself (and to my patient husband)?  I love my garden.  It’s a huge creative outlet for me.  It’s a canvas that I can paint and repaint to my heart’s desire.  Its needs wax and wane with the seasons.  In winter its only task is dreaming.  

Small steps, I reminded myself.  By nature I am an “all or nothing” type, so I often have this conversation with myself.  Think Kaizen; break it down into small steps.  Only a few minutes?  A few weeds.  A bigger time block?  A bigger task.  (A sister’s help for the afternoon?  Priceless!)  Small step by small step I concentrated on my one priority area.  I wanted this section of the garden to be low maintenance.  It would have shrubs that bloomed in the early spring that I could see from my kitchen.  It was mostly shady so the shrubs and plants needed to have different colors that would show in the shade and not disappear into the privet hedge behind it. 

Small steps moved that big PJM rhododendron from the invisible corner of the yard into my kitchen view.  Small steps prepared the bed and planted the new hydrangea.  Small steps shuffled the primrose and coral bells and pulmonaria.  Small steps allowed me to sit back and think about what would be next and let me know when it was time to stop for the season.  

I will happily move to the season of winter dreaming armed with a list of ideas for next year along with the small steps to get it done.

This is wonderful. I love your writing, what a great first post. I look forward to more.
Bestest,
Maureen

Hello world,  My name is Kathy.  

I am a Kaizen Muse Creativity Coach.  It’s a wonderful thing to be.  But I wasn’t always in this happy place.                        

Like a lot of you I spent the last 30+ years going and doing and striving and working.  Somewhere along the way I lost my creative self.  That self used to dance and play music and paint.  She played tennis and read lots of books.  She had dreams.  Then she started fading away.  Over the years she shriveled up into a small hard raisin in my deepest self.  I will admit I knew something was missing.  There was a vague sense of unease; of irritation; a scratchy label at the back of my psyche, sand in my spiritual sneaker.  But I didn’t allow it access to the upper layers of consciousness.  I didn’t allow it the light of day.  I put on my Scarlett O’Hara persona and left it for another day. 

I think I was waiting for an epiphany.  A great swelling of angels’ voices leading up to a Hollywood moment that would show me how the rest of my life was going to pan out with step by step instructions.  Finally, one of my inner voices, the wiser one, finally got a word in and let me know that this was not how it worked.  It let me say out loud that I was feeling like a square peg in a round hole.  That’s very painful, you know!  My spirit was scraped and bruised and there were empty spaces that needed to be filled.  Hmm, did I say that out loud?  Now I had to listen; now I was ready to listen. 

Creative recovery does not necessarily happen overnight.  Creative recovery is not a straight line.  I am more like the Family Circus comic strip character Billy.  Billy gets sidetracked a bit.  His path is never straight; it zigs and zags and sometimes travels the same stretch of road twice.  It’s a path of discovery. However, staying aware and awake on that path does produce serendipitous results.  I accepted that my creative self needed to be tended.  What to do; what to do?  Where to start? 

Writing.  It should have been obvious; it should have been obvious since about the age of three when I would sit in my little rocking chair and dream up stories.  But there it was; bubbling up into my consciousness.  I took some writing classes; joined a wonderful writing group.  At the same time I joined a creativity group.  I then went for training to lead writing groups and I am now a certified creativity coach. 

Again, none of this happened overnight. One thing led to another as I listened to my intuition and stayed aware of what felt right for me.  I met people of like minds and learned that the creative process was just that – a process; that my creative spirit got stronger when fed. 

I continue to listen and stay aware.  I allow this awareness to keep feeding my creative self.  The writing group nurtures me.  Art trading cards, water colors and funky colored twig pencils remind me of what’s fun.  I walk outdoors and play in my garden.  My path may be a little circuitous like Billy.  I’m okay with that.  That path is leading me in the direction I want.  I can see a glow ahead of me; my guiding star.  The needle on my compass still quivers a bit, but I know I’m headed in the right direction.  I am living creatively and trusting that my inner wisdom, my listening and my awareness will keep me true in my journey. 

Where is your compass pointing?  Are you paying attention?  How can I help you in your journey?