What or where can you trace your creativity back to?

Posted on March 16, 2015 by Natalia

I recently discovered a treasure when I was sorting through some of my old school assignments that my mum had unearthed from her cupboards. It was a graphics design assignment called “Compass Design” that I had done back in Year 8 of high school. I got a bit of shock when to my surprise I discovered that I’d made my first mandala at age 13.

I can’t actually remember creating this design. And I am not sure what the brief was for this assignment – my only assumption is that we had to use a compass. However, I can’t imagine that my ‘no nonsense’ graphics teacher would have asked us to create a design based on a mandala. In any case, I never even knew what a mandala was until a few years ago. So that’s why finding this little gem amongst my old school documents was such a lovely find. Continue reading →

How are you going to live your big dream today?

Posted on January 24, 2015 by Natalia

With the start of a new year there’s lot of talk about resolutions, setting goals and dreaming of the future.

I think that it’s important to dream, explore the possibilities, and imagine what could happen. We need something to aim for, inspire us, and to help us work out which way to go and what choices to make. But sometimes our dreams can feel a little too big, almost impossible. Some may tell you to give up on your ‘fantasy’, or to translate it into something more realistic and manageable.

I say ‘ Dream big, step small.’ We need to stretch ourselves and our possibilities And we can’t do that if we’re staying small and in the realm of tangible fact and our current day reality. So, go for it! Dream big, step small.

So you might think that the rest of this blog might be about how to work backwards from your big dream and chunk it down into smaller steps that you can slowly work through towards your dream. And that’s a totally valid and sensible way of going about it. However, I’m going to talk about how to go even smaller, and to think about what you can do today: how are you going to live your big dream today? Continue reading →

Planning Tool – Stop, Start, Continue. Part 2.

Posted on January 15, 2015 by Natalia

Creating a vision for the year ahead (or for a new project) is always fun. But before you can start to work out what you want, it’s good to think about where you came from.

In the previous blog (Part 1), we introduced the Stop, Start, Continue tool (the 3 questions):

What do I want to stop?
What do I want to start?
What do I want to continue?

We also covered how to pick the topic to focus your questions on. You can use this tool in any personal, work or business context, from creating your vision for the year ahead to reviewing your business plan. This tool is useful for anything that you would like to change, or a problem that needs exploring.

In this blog, we’ll be unpicking those 3 questions a little more, and expanding on them so you can work out what you need to do to make and support your changes. Continue reading →