|
The Creative Projects Group - Benefits of Group Membership:
- Exclusive regular teleconferences for insight, support and guidance related to your creative endeavors, personal needs and goals.
- 2-day experiential environments every 4 months to initiate insight and motivate.
- Group synergy and priceless support from like-minded individuals.
- Inclusion in a small, focused, cutting edge team intent on success.
- Regular contact and support from me based on my extensive consulting and publishing repertoire as well as exclusive first look at new and evolving work.
- Dedicated intranet and bi-monthly newsletter to address on-going group concerns.
FOR THOSE CONSIDERING GROUP MEMBERSHIP:
Below is a model I frequently use when consulting with corporations or coaching executives. I include it so you might witness my general approach and teaching philosophy as an aid in your decision whether to commit your energies to the group. It is an offshoot of a 5-phase model first developed by Edgar Shein at MIT and modified by me using concepts from my various books as well as my teaching and consulting experience.
I. Discovery
Initial group discussions will focus on our respective situations and desires, the related stakeholders, competitive frame, major players, and a review of our struggles, opportunities and strengths. We are deliberately NOT trying to change anything in this phase. To paraphrase Lao Tzu, “The problem we can understand at first glance is not usually the problem.” In any consulting situation, the client and I must first “admire” the situation for a while and avoid the tendency to choose solutions before we have time to let our intuitions mingle with the facts. The truer answers usually surface over a period of time and are best not forced or hasty.
II. Strategy, Abilities, Rewards
As we gain a sense of each group member’s current reality, future goals and resources, we will forge both a group and individual strategy. We will work together to leverage individual and group strengths and establish a common language of creativity as well as instill the 3 main habits of a creative life. We will also mutually decide on accountability, incentives and degree of optimal on-going support.
Though my teaching, coaching and consulting approach goes well beyond my published work, we will occasionally use lessons and metaphors from my books, though it is not imperative you be familiar with them at the start. You will pick up any jargon unique to my work as we go. For instance, for our group to succeed, we will first have to establish a basic level of trust in order to feel safe. In the language of The Artist’s Way this would be called “forming a sacred circle,” in The Artist’s Way at Work, “building a container,” in the parlance of psychology it might be called “establishing a therapeutic alliance or psychological holding environment”. The point is, what we call it doesn’t matter, as long as we accomplish it.
I will spare you the inclusion of my more well know techniques here, but rest assured that we will rely on proven approaches to enhance personal awareness, increase rapport, deepen communication and help establish the necessary rhythms of the creative process. Working together with these techniques we will identify a customized strategy for each member’s success and then vigilantly support them as they capitalize on events (both predictable and surprising) as they unfold over our time together.
III. Weekly Support
Knowing how important regular follow up is to the success of any change process, we will establish regular convenient check ins with at least one other member of the group, and meet together as a plenary group twice a month by phone. This way we can avoid some common pitfalls and monitor and implement our mutually decided system of rewards and consequences.
IV. Resistance, Obstacles, Reconstruction
Some situations do not change easily or quickly, though they might. Either way, change is a process that brings up anxiety and therefore resistance. It is my job to manage our individual fears and anxiety -- to maintain enough anxiety that the motivation to change continues without one’s anxiety level getting so high that the effort is abandoned or sabotaged. It is important to remember throughout our work that even positive change is still change and can cause stress – stress that must be addressed whether the change is simple, such as the completion of a specific project or goal – or more complicated, as in a long sought after career, financial or familial transition that has been months or years in the making. In this advanced stage of our effort, we will potentially face the subtle internal and external struggles that can impede progress to our established goals. This is natural.
By this phase of our work, our group relationships should be strong enough to allow for a degree of candor that should inspire us all. At no time in the process should you be shy about privately sharing any feelings or expectations with me. Our relationship will become a laboratory for experimenting with new interpersonal strategies – mistakes are expected, even welcomed. Be forewarned, I often use a form of paradoxical intervention to help someone overcome resistance and reach the next level of achievement without self-destructing or sabotaging his or her success.
V. Celebration and Completion Ritual
Modern humans all too often wait to celebrate until we are “finished” – retired, a millionaire, our kids are grown– each of us forgetting to rejoice at more frequent junctures. Throughout our work together we will celebrate achievements large and small, all without singing Kumbaya.
On the natural ending of the group process we will address the emotions that keep many of us from being able to address goodbye head-on. We need to reach healthy closure with projects, with people, with phases of our work. These times should be celebrated, grieved, or both depending on the circumstance. In short, we all must learn to celebrate our wins and properly say goodbye. This final phase will model that behavior for us all.
List of Potential Group and Individual Objectives:
- Initiate and complete creative projects – in business, science, and the fine arts.
- Rebuild damaged family or business relationships.
- Restructure a business, scientific or artistic career.
- Design and develop new products, processes or services.
- Transition from one career or life phase into another.
- Balance home life and work life for the benefit of both.
- Accept and overcome personal loss, career disappointments or abrupt change in circumstance.
- Find new meaning in life or in work.
- Increase morale, attendance, and productivity in an individual, team or work force.
- Identify new marketing, advertising or branding strategies.
- Capture non-linear business opportunities.
- Leverage the effects of success, wealth and/or fame.
- Propel initial success into a career.
- Create respectful dialogue between creative talent and business representatives.
- Manage recovery from substance abuse, impulse or mood disorders.
- Organize an adventurous corporate or artistic community that lives on the edge of intuition and creative advantage.
- Work through the underlying emotions that cut productivity and damage team communication.
- Utilize the anxiety caused by deadline pressure.
- Resolve costly conflicts.
- Rediscover the fun and humor in the creative process.
<< Back to Creative Projects Group
|
