The other day I was working with a coaching client. She’s an artist, writer, graphic designer, workshop leader, creativity coach, and I’m sure I’ve missed something. I’ve always been impressed by her—she’s very talented and accomplished in so many ways and somehow, she brings all these talents and passions together as one person. Her current [ Read more … ]
Teaching, Coaching & Facilitating
The Beauty of the Amateur
From the artist Corita Kent’s book, Learning by Heart: Teachings to Free the Creative Spirit: “A tremendously constricting force on our contemporary society is the concept of the professional or specialist, who deals for the most part with what has already been done and builds on his own limits. To the extent we can approach [ Read more … ]
Constructive Creativity
In his book On Becoming a Person, Carl Rogers wrote the following set of conditions for “constructive creativity” (rather than destructive creativity.) BTW, Carl Rogers is considered one of the founders of Humanistic Psychology… 1) Openness to experience, which he called “extensionality.” This is the opposite of psychological defensiveness and it implies a tolerance for [ Read more … ]
Our Work is Larger than We are
In No More Secondhand Art, Peter London wrote that artists were custodians of issues larger than themselves. This is also true for those of us working in diverse areas of social change: our tasks our larger than we are. Our work isn’t simply a matter of expressing ourselves properly, fixing what appears to be broken, [ Read more … ]
Approaching our work as amateurs
From the artist Corita Kent’s book, Learning by Heart: Teachings to Free the Creative Spirit: “A tremendously constricting force on our contemporary society is the concept of the professional or specialist, who deals for the most part with what has already been done and builds on his own limits. To the extent we can approach [ Read more … ]
