creative maverick

I started another blog (a very bad habit of Scanners and Creative Mavericks like myself) a few weeks back. It was driven by the idea that much as I love the self-improvement business I work in, some elements of it make me laugh out loud. Whether it’s the American gurus who increasingly look like shop dummies or the more extreme and obscure books and workshops.

So I started compiling some of my findings in Successology.Biz. It’s a place to poke gentle fun at this industry and encourage those of us who work in it to retain a sense of humour about what we’re doing.

Visit Successology.biz

Techie side note: Successology is actually a Wordpress site built using a theme that looks like a “Tumblelog”, that’s a blog that is just a long list of images and quotes. I offer consultancy on how to use Wordpress for your business. Get in touch if would like my help.

My London Scanners Night event was on Wednesday and some attendees told me it was the best one yet. Joanne Mallon showed us how to get publicity for our projects and businesses and we then did a little bit of Scanner-style networking to help everyone get contacts and ideas for their current projects.

A Scanner if you don’t know is someone who has lots of different interests and wants to indulge all of them! The next Scanners Night is 8th April. Come along if you’re anywhere near London.

You can listen to the recording of Joanne’s whole talk on how to attract publicity for yourself or your business here for free

Make sure you enter your email address at the bottom of the main Scanners Night page to be told in advance of future events.

Is the economic doom & gloom in the media wearing you down?

If so, there is a way to get a lot more business (or visitors to your web site, or people at your gig, or eyeballs on your art project) which costs next to nowt.

Think about this. What proportion of people in in the UK (or even the world) currently have ever heard of you? A tiny fraction. And yet all your customers/clients/buyers/fans come from this small audience.

So what would happen if you tripled or quadrupled the number of people who had heard of you?

And all without spending a penny on advertising.

You too would be saying “Pants to the recession!”

This is why I’m excited about the expert speaker we have booked for Scanners Night on Wednesday 4th March - Joanne Mallon.

Joanne is a trained journalist and has produced TV programmes for all the major UK networks, including the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 and has worked on shows such as GMTV  and This Morning.

As a coach Joanne has attracted loads of publicity for her business including features in The Guardian, The Independent and London Evening Standard. Now she’s going to tell us how to become media darlings and do the same thing for our own businesses and creative projects.

If you’ve never been to my monthly Scanners Night event in London, you’ve missed a treat. Mosy on over to ScannerCentral.co.uk and book yourself in.

If you can’t make the 4th March, enter your email into the form at the bottom of the page to hear about future Scanners Night events.

Since taking the Lightning Process training, I reckon I’ve got the answer to that old secret-of-happiness question. Want to know it?

How to be happy

Think happy thoughts, recall happy memories, create happy visions of the future.

Er that’s it.

Michael Neill makes a great case in his book Feel Happy Now! that happiness is not dependent on external circumstances, it is something we create. Quite simply if we think happy thoughts and create happy images in our mind, we will feel the feelings of happiness.

“But that’s fake!” you’re probably screaming. It’s no more fake than the feelings we experience at any time. Come with me here. Our thoughts create our feelings. If a new feeling suddenly comes over you (eg sadness), you can bet that if you backtrack a bit, a sad thought flitted across your mind moments before even if you didn’t clock it.

Do you think it’s possible that if you take two people in exactly the same situation, perhaps something seemingly negative like being dumped, one could feel happy about it and one unhappy? It’s the thoughts we have about the situation that make the feelings different. If one person thought “what am I going to do, no one else will want me?” and the other thought “hey, now I can go after that person I fancy in the office!”, the resulting feelings will clearly be different.

When I have clients who want to address low self-esteem and confidence in their work I always ask them what they’re telling themselves in their head. Of course, it is a continual stream of negative statements; Someone else will be better qualified for this job, I might fall flat on my face, people will be shocked when I tell them my daily rate, I’ll never get any work and I’ll end up broke. And I put it to them that anyone who heard, and most importantly, listened to that stream of negative comments would have poor confidence and self-esteem.

Instead of this, when you have a negative thought, stop it in its tracks, pause and recall a positive memory. If you want to feel confidence, close your eyes and recall a time when you were confident. It could be something very simple - are you confident you can drive a car? That’ll do fine. You will feel a few moments of confidence. I’m not saying this will stay with you, the secret is repetition.

Imagine you stopped every negative thought in its tracks and then recalled a positive memory and felt the resulting feelings. Eventually the old neural pathways of low self-esteem start to die away (just like your algebra has if you haven’t used it since school) and the new pathways of confidence build and get stronger until you naturally create confidence in yourself as your default state.

Create the feeling you want right now. Stop any negative thought. Decide what feeling you want to experience. Then close your eyes and recall a memory that will give you that feeling. What do you notice? Leave me a comment and let me know how you get on.

In truth, there is something of an art to mastering this and making it part of your life. It’s best learned with a good teacher. The Lightning Process training has these kind of ideas at its core. It’s most famous for its radical effects on physical illness like M.E and chronic pain but I reckon it could well become recognised as one of the best trainings in happiness yet invented. See simpsonandfawdry.com for more about the 3 day course I took.

Last night I drove through 3 hours of snow to get back from Suffolk where I had taken the 3 day Lightning Process training. I had plenty of time to reflect on the training and even use it in my head as the snow got thicker, visibility dropped and the traffic on the roads slowed from 60 to 50 to 40 to 30.

The Lightning Process is notorious for its rapid effects on chronic fatigue and M.E. There are many reports of people restricted to wheelchairs seeing improvements within just a few days, even being able to walk by the end of the 3 day training. Even if you do not have any condition like this, what the LP is doing is worth understanding because it points to a radical new model for health and happiness.

I had experienced a mild version of what I would call Adrenal Fatigue for several years and thought that the Process might help me get back on form.

The LP is called a training, not a therapy. That means we are taught a process that we need to use regularly until our symptoms are gone.

So what is it exactly? The process is actually rather simple. You can find all the components in it elsewhere - in NLP, hypnotherapy, and life coaching. And yet I still can’t think of a way to get the same results as effectively as doing the LP training.

The Lightning Process website (and book) is very cagey about exactly what the training entails. That’s because it’s difficult to describe the process in written form and do it justice. Imagine someone writing a book on how to drive; when to press certain peddles and when to change gear. Reading it wouldn’t give you very much at all until you went and did it.

For those who are interested in the Law of Attraction and who’ve watched films like The Secret and What The Bleep Do We Know?, the LP tells you how to actually do what they only talk about. But that doesn’t mean there is anything remotely spiritual or New Age about the process - it is very practical.

The Process is based on new understanding of biology; about the plasticity of the brain (ie that we can form new connections by thinking different thoughts) and how the brain influences the rest of our biology.

If you think a stressful thought, the brain puts the body into a fight or flight state which is fine in the short term, but if you keep thinking stressful thoughts that state of readiness (with raised adrenalin and cortisol) is damaging to your health.

And the thoughts you regularly think form stronger connections in the brain that fire more readily and quickly. So thinking stressful thoughts then becomes easier, even automatic and unconscious. The resulting affect on your health is what causes M.E according to the Lightning Process. (This is not suggesting M.E. is all in the mind. The theory is that it is a way of thinking that depletes your health which in turn gives rise to M.E.)

So if you then make a habit of thinking a different, more positive thought, the old connections start to die away and the new one gets stronger. Thinking positively then becomes the habit. At first, we use the Lightning Process to do this until it builds the structures in the brain that make it easy and automatic.

Aside from how effective it is on M.E. and psychological states like depression and anxiety imagine what it could do for your creativity!

I’ll report more on how I get on using it later.

I did the Lightning Process with the wonderful Kate Simpson (the bonus is you get to stay in their beautiful farmhouse in the Suffolk countryside). See simpsonandfawdry.com

I went to a networking event last week with a friend. There were lots of people there from big companies that I thought would be good to talk to. The problem was I ended up having conversations I wasn’t interested in. My friend looked bored and I realised I was too. I was choosing people I thought I should talk to, not the ones I really wanted to - a habit ingrained from my many years of consultancy work in big corporations.

So, thinking back to the first Creative Maverick habit, I realised how differently I would behave if I wasn’t thinking about growing my business. I would just talk to whoever looked interesting, and I would talk to people I already knew and I liked.

I started to do this that night and met a couple of great people and had fascinating conversations - ones that spurred new ideas and possible new connections for my business; connections I would love to make.

Imagine what would happen if I always worked on this basis. My business would continue to grow with less strain and a lot more fun.

And yet there’s that habit ingrained from so many years of ignoring what I really want - the part of me that says “I should speak to that guy from Microsoft - he could bring me loads of work”.

So I thought of a quick test, a kind of mantra to keep me on track:

If I were a millionaire, would I do this thing I am considering doing right now?

If I was sorted for money and didn’t have to work, would I do what I am about to do? Would I talk to that person? Or would I talk to someone else who looks interesting but might not appear to be an important connection?

Moment by moment, this simple, rather materialistic-sounding question will guide me towards my heart. Of course, there are sometimes things we need to do in our work that we are not in the mood for but if the answer to the question keeps coming up no, a rethink is clearly needed.

Theoretically you could just ask the question “Do I really feel like doing this?” but it’s amazing how many of my clients cannot answer questions like that effectively. (Read more about what causes this)

If you want to try this habit, carry around a reminder of it. You may need to change the wording to work for you. “Millionaire” can mean many things but to my mind implies a level of established wealth that while you may not be able to retire for good, you would have a great quality of living without working for several years. This is a good position to make choices about your work from - the heat is off but you may still need to work further down the line.

Note, I avoid the word rich, because really I am already rich. Anyone on even a passable First World income is. If you don’t feel rich right now, let this convince you.

Leave a comment and let me know how you get on.

A Block Busting day is something I created to solve two of the biggest problems of working on your own - having no boss to hold you accountable and feeling isolated (particularly if you work at home).

The result of these two issues is that some big ugly tasks stay on your To Do list forever. A great example is clearing clutter - which I know many Creative Mavericks struggle with. You know you need to take a day out to clear up your home office but you never get ’round to making the time. You could add to that clearing your email inbox, sorting your filing out, doing your tax return (you have done that right?) or generally making your workspace a nicer place to be.

The Block Busting Day is the best way to tackle these. It’s a real appointment in your diary when you commit to doing that thing you’ve avoided. And there’s a whole group of us making the same commitment on the same day. On top of that we connect with each other, firstly in a quick conference call at the start of the day and secondly by using a simple online chatroom throughout the day.

The Block Busting Day is something I created a couple of years ago. I built a site and wrote an eight page guide for it. I ran the day once and it worked really well. There were a lot of funny comments in the chatroom like “Right, I’m going under my desk to dust, I may be some time”.

And despite the fact that I proved it worked, like a typical Scanner I never ran it again! (Worse still, because I ran the first one for free, I never made any money out of it.)

The good news is that you can now take part in a Block Busting Day with me every month because we’ve made it one of the benefits of being a member of the Creative Entrepreneurs Club. And we’ve set the days to be the last Friday of every month so you can clear your To Do list before the new month starts.

(If you happen to read this before 11am today, you can actually still join us on this first Creative Entrepreneurs Block Busting Day for free by taking guest membership)

Read more about the Creative Entrepreneurs Block Busting Day here.

If you’re concerned about the number of clients you have or the amount of income you’re getting right now, try this surprisingly effective daily habit.

Mark Forster suggests tackling your top priority at the beginning of your day. It’s surprising how few people apply this principle to money. If you’d like to bring some more money in, spend an hour at the beginning of your day explicitly aiming to do so.

This is a time when it’s OK to think short term. Apply the 80/20 rule - what action is most likely to make a direct difference to my bank balance if I do it right now? Then do it.

Out of the all the possible stuff to do, start with the things that will have the most immediate effect. Approach tasks in this order:

• Deposit money available right now - that cheque you’ve been carrying around for a week, or go to Paypal and withdraw funds.
• Claim money already earned - invoice clients who owe you money
• Pick the “low-hanging fruit” - follow up on warm enquiries for your work that you may have dropped the ball on. If you have a back-log of email, fish through it to find the work enquiries and leave the rest right now.
• Then, starting to think a bit longer term, move to winning new work. Think, who is most likely to respond? What product/service do you already have that you know sells well when you promote it? What’s likely to sell best in this economic climate / at this time of year? Run a promotional campaign on it.

This may sound very simple, even obvious, but it’s surprising how effective it is. And even if the amounts are small, it’s remarkable how they add up and can transform your cashflow.

As creative people we might not naturally think to prioritise money in this way but it’s this steely focus on cash that makes entrepreneurial types rich. Try it out and leave a comment to let me know you how you get on.

Longer term of course, you will need a strategy to provide something people really need, based on work you love doing, and then market it well. (See my Make More Money programme)

“Know thine enemy as completely as you know yourself and you will always be victorious.” Sun Tzu

The number one enemy of your creativity and happiness is your Top Dog. Every creativity exercise ever invented was designed to get past it.

Life Coach Pete Cohen says:

“The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your internal dialogue”

and the most important part of that dialogue is with your Top Dog.

Origins of the Top Dog

Babies know what they want and express it freely. Hungry? Just scream. They don’t have creative blocks. Of course, this isn’t a great way for adults to behave so we raise our children to act in a more sociable way.

But sometimes teaching good behaviour isn’t done cleanly. It strays into criticism, shame and humiliation. Snapping at the boy that cries, laughing at the girl that gets angry, the silent flick of the eyebrows that disapproves of a child “showing off”.

I believe it’s these incidences that create your Top Dog.

Fear

In reality these messages were fueled by the fear and anxiety of the person giving them. And that fear and anxiety was learned in their childhood.

So your Top Dog is driven by fear - fear of failing, of “making a fool of yourself”, of getting hurt, of being humiliated.

There’s not a lot of logic to it either. It often gives conflicting messages - “you should stand up for yourself” / “don’t make yourself unpopular”. After all, this is a very young part of you. Have you ever seen two young children walking down the street and the elder sibling is admonishing the younger using words that are clearly from its parents; “oh I don’t know what we are going to do with you!”. That’s all your Top Dog is doing - aping the messages from your parents.

In a strange way, your Top Dog is actually trying to protect you. Like the overweight guy at lunch who gets the joke in about diet before anyone else can. But the message only serves to make you feel worse.

Top Dog messages are culturally influenced. Classic British ones are “Don’t get your hopes up”, “Don’t get ideas above your station”, “Don’t show off” and even the shockingly unhealthy “‘I want’ never gets”.

Your first step

The greatest mistake we all make is to take the Top Dog as the Voice Of Reason. It is not.

So your first step to managing your top dog for greater creativity and happiness is to identify it. I’ll be coming back to this topic but for the time being just start to notice your internal dialogue and if you spot something that might be your Top Dog, simply label it; “Ah, that sounds like Top Dog”.

Leave a comment to let me know how you get on.

If you’re creatively blocked, if you can’t work out what you’d really like to do with your life, if others’ criticism cuts you to the bone, if you’re haunted by negative visions of the future, or if your mood takes a dive at the smallest trigger, there’s one culprit behind it all.

It’s the number one enemy of your creativity (and your happiness). And the enemy is inside of you. It’s a subpersonality referred to in Gestalt Psychology as the Top Dog.

The Top Dog is the part of you that says the most damning things:

• “You can’t write to save your life”
• “So now you want to be a starving artist?”
• “You’ve always been useless with money”
• “You’re mad to change career in a recession”
• “If you start a business, you’ll lose your house and end up on the street”

And if it doesn’t come out as words, you might see images in your mind or feel sensations in the body which represent the same message.

When you believe and obey these messages, you limit your creativity, your happiness and your life.

Others call Top Dog the internal critic but I find it more helpful to name it as a separate subpersonality. And “Critic” suggests it might give some constructive criticism. The Top Dog’s messages are not constructive.

The Top Dog grew inside you as a child with repeated messages from your parents and other significant authority figures.

You see, the same people who taught you important things like “don’t run into the road” and “keep away from the fire” also taught you less useful ideas like “all artists are broke”, “you have to sacrifice your happiness to be successful”, and “no one enjoys their job”. The most charged of these created your Top Dog.

Now these messages are a deeply ingrained habit within your own mind. And the first step to conquer it is to recognise it.

What messages does your Top Dog give you about your creativity and your work? Leave a comment and I’ll come back to this topic to help you get a leash on the beast.