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Personal growth and the creative process March 9, 2014

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in The Creative Process.
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Some of us may have decided to include some sort of creative activity, such as writing or painting/drawing, to our program and concept of realizing our personal development potential.

If so, it is important to recognize a key principle of any creative activity if we are to avoid frustration, and then possibly giving up the idea because of a lack of progress.

We need to remind ourselves that the gateway  to enjoying any creative or artistic activity is to learn the basics first, the foundational elements.

Ian Roberts, in his book Creative Authenticity, emphasises the need for doing the groundwork in creative activities before we can expect to be truly creative in any discipline:

“I know art teachers that just want students to express themselves as if the talent and ability is inborn and if the students just gets out of the way, it will magically roll out onto the paper. But imagine having that attitude to a music lesson. If on your first class your violin teacher said, ‘now just express yourself’, you would think he or she was crazy.”

As Roberts stresses, “…if you want to express yourself, learning your craft is a good start.”

Personal development: Evaluating non-traditional leadership criteria March 8, 2014

Posted by Dennis Mellersh in Concept of personal development, Leadership.
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If developing the attribute or character trait of leadership capability or potential is part of your personal growth program, you may be pursuing that goal from an overly traditional viewpoint.

Particularly in a business setting, the requirement for demonstrating leadership capability may often be limited to a number of perhaps stereotyped and oversimplified traditional criteria.

Criteria that may be out of sync with the qualities of leadership required in today’s fast-evolving (even revolutionary) world of interpersonal relations.

In an article by Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times International Weekly edition, titled: “How to Get a Job at Google”, the author discusses Google’s hiring criteria. One of the criteria is leadership.

Friedman interviewed Laszlo Bock, the senior vice president of people operations for Google. Bock emphasized that Google is particularly interested in emergent leadership as opposed to “traditional” leadership:

“Traditional leadership is, were you president of the chess club? Were you vice president of sales? How quickly did you get there? We don’t care. What we care about is, when faced with a problem and you’re a member of a team, do you, at the appropriate time, step in and lead. And just as critically, do you step back and stop leading, do you let someone else? Because what’s critical to be an effective leader in this environment is you have to be willing to relinquish power,” Bock says.

Something to think about.