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Personal growth: Jumping off the cliff of self-actualization October 5, 2017

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Overcoming Fear.
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In discussing the many challenges in creative writing, Ray Bradbury gave some excellent advice which applies to the large-scale project of living life itself creatively and the more focussed innovative efforts we try to make in our self-development work.

Namely, that in all matters requiring creativity, we need to put aside our fears, jump off the cliff, and then build our wings on the way down.

We can gradually master the skills required in whatever project we are working on and can be assured of varying levels of success in learning those skills.

But in making the big leap into an entire philosophy of self-improvement, while realizing that it might not work takes a lot of courage.

And if we think about it too much, we will probably not be willing to gamble on making the required investment in time, commitment and effort.

But, for sure, if we don’t jump, we  won’t be making our wings, or soaring creatively.

— Dennis Mellersh

 

Personal growth concept: “Big ears” and idea generation September 18, 2017

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Personal Development and Creativity.
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Part of the path to success in personal development can be through utilizing and adapting the ideas of others to stimulate creativity within our own custom self-actualization program.

In the musical world, if you can effectively listen to the ideas of others and improvise, building on those ideas, you are considered to have “big ears.”

Musician Jason Ricci explores this concept and other approaches to creativity in free instructional videos he posts on YouTube.

In an improvisational setting, Ricci says, it doesn’t matter if your skill level (“chops”) is not as high as you would like it to be. By utilizing the big ears approach you can work at recognizing good ideas from others and react to them, first with imitation, and then by developing them further or improvising upon those ideas.

With big ears, you’ll never run out of ideas to work with.

Ricci suggests that when we are on the learning curve of creativity, we may frequently need to imitate before we innovate.

He notes that doing this also helps us get out of the loop of our own “self” and ego.

Note: The Jason Ricci video I based this post on, is focused on the album Hooker ‘N Heat in which Ricci is analyzing the harmonica playing of Alan (Blind Owl) Wilson of the band Canned Heat in a jam session with blues legend John Lee Hooker.

Jason, who is an exceptional blues harmonica player, takes about a minute and a half in the video to get to the point where he explains the creative concepts, but stick with him – he has great creative insights, which can be applied to many other disciplines besides music, such as personal development.

Here  is the video link, if you are interested in exploring this further:

Hope you enjoy it – Dennis Mellersh