I presented this speech to my Toastmaster's club to fulfill the requirements of Project 4: How to Say It.
Redecorating your bedroom can help you draft a compelling business proposal, and concocting a new recipe for rice pudding can help you write a better speech.
Sounds ridiculous, right? But what if redecorating your bedroom were the sort of activity that for you induced a feeling of calm concentration? What if painting walls and chipping away at old flooring were the sort of thing that, for you, made the hours feel like minutes?
The feeling I'm talking about is called Creative Flow, and people experience it when they are truly creatively engaged in any activity, whether it be fixing a car or composing a sonata. Engaging in a seemingly trivial activity, if that activity is something that brings about Creative Flow for you, can help you achieve it in the parts of your life where it matters most.
The term "Creative Flow" was coined by a cognitive scientist named Mihalyi Czikszentmihalhyi. He’s one of the world’s leading researchers in the field of positive psychology. He describes Flow as "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost."
Since Czikszentmihalhyi, a lot of other people have written about Creative Flow. In his book Free Play, composer Stephen Nachmanovitch talks about how it’s what lets urban planners find new ways to manage sprawling cities. It’s what leads doctors to come up with brilliant diagnoses, and it’s what leads entrepreneurs to come up with breakthroughs in business. And it’s something I’ve been struggling to achieve in my writing for a long time.
The reason for that is that an important characteristic of Flow is a lack of self-consciousness. You literally have to lose yourself in whatever you’re doing, but I couldn’t do that, because every time I sat down to write, in my head, I heard the voice of a particularly nasty TA I had in journalism school. She’d say things like, “You know, this is really boring.” Almost the entire time I was writing my novel, she was sitting on my shoulder, hissing at me.
Artist and writer Julia Cameron talks a lot about such blocks in her books The Artist’s Way and The Vein of Gold. To help people get rid of them, she assigns a series of tasks which usually have no direct relevance to anything in real life, and very often, those tasks are what many people would consider childish: things like making dolls, collaging, or painting plaster masks. What they have in common is the goal of silencing the inner critic. For me, though, the thing that worked best to silence the inner critic wasn’t any of those exercises. It was scrapbooking.
I discovered my love of scrapbooking by accident. I wanted to give a gift to my boyfriend’s parents to thank them for taking me to Barbados with them, but I couldn’t think of anything to buy. When the trip ended, though, I had a bunch of great photos of their family, so I decided to make them a scrapbook. I was excited to have what I thought was a pretty good gift idea, but I what I didn’t anticipate was that scrapbooking would help my writing.
But I found that selecting the patterned paper, tracing stencils, sprinkling sparkles and mucking around with layouts induced in me that state of relaxed focus I’d been lacking. I lost my sense of self-consciousness, because my abilities as a scrapbooker had very little to do with my actual self-concept. And because scrapbooking is so far removed from anything in my nasty TA’s field of expertise, the voice in my head that sounded like her had nothing to say about it.
When I sat down to write the morning after a solid night of scrapbooking, she was still keeping quiet, and I was able to feel that same sense of flow.
In a book called The Talent Code, Daniel Boyle describes what happens to the brain during the development of a new skill. It just so happens that engaging in any creative activity helps build neural pathways on the right side of the brain, which makes it easier to be creative in other areas of your life.
For me, scrapbooking was both a way to silence the inner critic, and a way to practice engaging in the creative process itself. For you, the thing that induces creative flow might be different. It could be building model airplanes or baking or tinkering with your car. Whatever the activity, if the critical voices are yammering away inside your head and making it impossible to lose yourself in work you thought you loved, I’ve found the best way to shut them up is to get up and do some other joyful thing.
Sounds ridiculous, right? But what if redecorating your bedroom were the sort of activity that for you induced a feeling of calm concentration? What if painting walls and chipping away at old flooring were the sort of thing that, for you, made the hours feel like minutes?
The feeling I'm talking about is called Creative Flow, and people experience it when they are truly creatively engaged in any activity, whether it be fixing a car or composing a sonata. Engaging in a seemingly trivial activity, if that activity is something that brings about Creative Flow for you, can help you achieve it in the parts of your life where it matters most.
The term "Creative Flow" was coined by a cognitive scientist named Mihalyi Czikszentmihalhyi. He’s one of the world’s leading researchers in the field of positive psychology. He describes Flow as "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost."
Since Czikszentmihalhyi, a lot of other people have written about Creative Flow. In his book Free Play, composer Stephen Nachmanovitch talks about how it’s what lets urban planners find new ways to manage sprawling cities. It’s what leads doctors to come up with brilliant diagnoses, and it’s what leads entrepreneurs to come up with breakthroughs in business. And it’s something I’ve been struggling to achieve in my writing for a long time.
The reason for that is that an important characteristic of Flow is a lack of self-consciousness. You literally have to lose yourself in whatever you’re doing, but I couldn’t do that, because every time I sat down to write, in my head, I heard the voice of a particularly nasty TA I had in journalism school. She’d say things like, “You know, this is really boring.” Almost the entire time I was writing my novel, she was sitting on my shoulder, hissing at me.
Artist and writer Julia Cameron talks a lot about such blocks in her books The Artist’s Way and The Vein of Gold. To help people get rid of them, she assigns a series of tasks which usually have no direct relevance to anything in real life, and very often, those tasks are what many people would consider childish: things like making dolls, collaging, or painting plaster masks. What they have in common is the goal of silencing the inner critic. For me, though, the thing that worked best to silence the inner critic wasn’t any of those exercises. It was scrapbooking.
I discovered my love of scrapbooking by accident. I wanted to give a gift to my boyfriend’s parents to thank them for taking me to Barbados with them, but I couldn’t think of anything to buy. When the trip ended, though, I had a bunch of great photos of their family, so I decided to make them a scrapbook. I was excited to have what I thought was a pretty good gift idea, but I what I didn’t anticipate was that scrapbooking would help my writing.
But I found that selecting the patterned paper, tracing stencils, sprinkling sparkles and mucking around with layouts induced in me that state of relaxed focus I’d been lacking. I lost my sense of self-consciousness, because my abilities as a scrapbooker had very little to do with my actual self-concept. And because scrapbooking is so far removed from anything in my nasty TA’s field of expertise, the voice in my head that sounded like her had nothing to say about it.
When I sat down to write the morning after a solid night of scrapbooking, she was still keeping quiet, and I was able to feel that same sense of flow.
In a book called The Talent Code, Daniel Boyle describes what happens to the brain during the development of a new skill. It just so happens that engaging in any creative activity helps build neural pathways on the right side of the brain, which makes it easier to be creative in other areas of your life.
For me, scrapbooking was both a way to silence the inner critic, and a way to practice engaging in the creative process itself. For you, the thing that induces creative flow might be different. It could be building model airplanes or baking or tinkering with your car. Whatever the activity, if the critical voices are yammering away inside your head and making it impossible to lose yourself in work you thought you loved, I’ve found the best way to shut them up is to get up and do some other joyful thing.
1 comments:
被人揭下面具是一種失敗，自己揭下面具卻是種勝利。..................................................................
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