Welcome to this month’s instalment of The Creative Life interview series!
Each month shines a spotlight on how business owners incorporate their creativity across all aspects of their life, and gives some ‘behind the scenes’ insight into how they started and plan for their business.
This month I’d like to introduce you to Alli Price of Motivating Mum.
Alli Price runs Motivating Mum and is passionate about helping mums in business, or those starting out, achieve their business dreams. She offers inspiration and education through monthly Biz Mums Clubs, mentoring and affordable business services. Alli also runs an annual Awards and Conference and a charity event, Mummy Mentoring Festival.
It was so inspiring to speak to Alli about how much she loves her business and how creativity is such a fundamental part of running her business. She has a such a grounded down-to-earth attitude to it all, yet still manages to bring a sense of play and fun to everything she touches.
This interview is like having your own private biz mentoring session with Alli. So keep on reading to learn about:
So sit back and enjoy… Continue reading
Welcome to another instalment of The Creative Life interview series!
Each month shines a spotlight on how business owners incorporate their creativity across all aspects of their life, and give some ‘behind the scenes’ insight into how they started and plan for their business.
This month I’d like to introduce you to The Creative Life of Jacinta Cubis of Qbis: engagement & partnership specialists.
Jacinta Cubis connects people and facilitates partnerships for social impact. When not facilitating a workshop or drawing out the story of a partnership, she’ll be on her yoga mat, in her art studio or on the tango dance floor.
I really enjoyed talking to Jacinta. She is truly a Renaissance woman! She has so many creative interests in addition to her partnership brokering business. I love the enthusiasm that she brings to everything that she does.
In this interview you’ll learn about:
So read on to learn more about Jacinta and her Creative Life… Continue reading
People often ask me for the secret to being more creative, whether it’s for their life or in business. Unfortunately, there’s no one magic formula for creativity that’s going to work for everyone. However, there is a key we can use to filter out which creativity techniques are going to bring us each success.
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.
