This week’s Inspiration Mandala is for Mother’s Day.
In celebration of all of those Mums in our lives -whatever shape or guise they may be – and a big thank you for all of their love and support.
This post also shares how to create your own version of this mandala, so keep reading.
Have you lost your creative spark or mojo? Do you feel like the past week, month, or even year, feels like a blur? Does it all feel a little routine?
It’s so easy to get caught up in our day-to-day routine that we forget to find the joy. We lose our spark; that zest. And it’s especially tricky when you’re relying on your creativity to make a living or produce those exceptional results at work.
Connecting with our joy is one of the easiest way to get into a creative flow.
The act of creation is not just a physical activity. The mindset and attitudes that you bring to the task play a big role in your creativity. As I have said before, you are more likely to be creative when you are feeling joyful, focused and relaxed, as opposed to when you are feeling tired, anxious, and stuck.
When I run a creativity class it is my duty to create a safe environment, not only physically, but where everyone feels free to explore different ideas, try new things, and express themselves. So in my class introduction, I set the tone by asking participants to keep some principles back of mind as they do the class activities. Continue reading
So the 30 day mandala Play Adventure has come to an end. It has been challenging but it was definitely worth it. It’s been so rewarding, and I had so much fun! And I think that keeping a playful mindset was definitely a contributing factor.
At the start I wasn’t quite sure that I’d be able to colour the same mandala colouring page in 30 different ways. But I dived in to see where the adventure would take me. I ended up finishing with so many ideas still left inside of me. Who knows? I might have been able to create another 30 mandalas, or even more?
This unexpected flow of ideas has got me thinking about how we sometimes impose limits on our creativity through scarcity thinking. We can falsely hold onto our ideas, worried that if we use them (or share them) that there’ll be nothing left.
But our first ideas might not even be the best ones. In InGenius, Tina Seelig writes that people often fall into the trap of going with the first solution they find, rather than taking the time to work a little harder to come up with a more innovative response. (She refers to Tim Hurson’s ‘3rd third’ concept from Think Better to explain this further.) It’s as if our ideas come in waves or sets. The first set of ideas are pretty obvious (and if you want a quick fix then this might be fine). However, if you dig a bit deeper then you get a more interesting set of ideas. As you continue to push the boundaries and test the limits of your assumptions and what’s possible, then you’ll get progressively more innovative sets or waves of ideas (which may result in a more effective and/or far-reaching solution). For this reason, Seelig asks participants in brainstorming sessions to share their worst ideas up front. This way participants turn off their judgment and open their minds to lots more possibilities than if they only shared their initial, and most likely to be obvious, response to the issue.
You can see how this concept of idea waves plays out over the 30 days of my Mandala Play Adventure. For instance, I couldn’t have created the 3D lotus mandala from Day 12 on the first day.
As I wrote in my previous blog about inspiration, our ideas are not created in isolation from one another. So I prefer to think that by using or creating something from our one idea that we plant a seed for another idea to follow.
