3 Keys to Innovation, Creativity and Transformation (spoiler alert: it’s not in what you do)
As a coach I learned that if I wanted to ensure long-term, measurable, and meaningful change for my clients, I had to provide experiential processes and opportunities for them. These processes allow for the body to kinesthetically process the cognitive understandings that are arising and translate them into neurological shifts. That is when behaviors change and where new possibilities emerge.
Over the years I’ve found that it is not in the ‘doing’ part of the experiential processes that the magic happens. It’s in the ‘being’ part. To oversimplify—when properly facilitated, the being informs the doing, and the doing informs the nervous system.
But why is the secret sauce in the beingness? Much has been written and researched about accessing collective intelligence through presence and beingness—from Peter Senge to Joseph Jaworski to Johann Goethe. Many visionaries, from entrepreneurs, to scientists, to spiritual practitioners, speak about dropping into presence to become what George Bernard Shaw calls “a force of nature” —a field through which we drop our conventional and often reactive way of thinking, and immerse ourselves in something larger that is intricately connected to all life.
Beingness opens the door to greater intelligence. Regardless of if it is made explicit or implicit, when experiential processes deliberately bring beingness into the mix, they deliver transformative results. Similarly, when we deliberately bring beingness into our daily lives, we operate from a more optimal creative and transformative place.
So how do we do that? It is not as simple as just sitting down cross legged in meditation for 10 minutes a day. While that may make you more “beingness prone” throughout the day, beingness needs to be cultivated and invited. Here are three ways to support yourself (and your team) to be more innovative and creative.
Silence - silence is not an absence of noise, it is a presence. Think about a time in your life when the silence was so powerful that it stopped you in your tracks. Maybe you were in a snow field, a mountain top, or up early before the kids. Or maybe like me, it pounced on you in the middle of utter chaos, because miraculously your habit to react to the noise had ceased. Silence is the emptiness of our usual way of being, seeing, thinking, and reacting. Sometimes we enable it, sometimes it grabs us from behind, sometimes we stop and notice it.
Silence—the outbreath before the inbreath, the pause between notes, the whitespace of a painting, the momentary hover over a flower, the fullness of emptiness—is everywhere and always available. Hence, find opportunities throughout your day to pause and be in silence, or pause and notice the silence that is already there. Find micro-moments in an empty elevator on your way to work, at a stop light, as you walk out to get the paper early in the morning, to pause and take in the presence of silence. It will drop you in to receptive states of being that will inform every other part of your day.
Kairos - The ancient Greeks used two words for time: chronos and kairos. The former refers to chronological or sequential time, and the latter signifies a time lapse—a moment of indeterminate time in which everything happens. Kairos embodies the notion that there’s a right time to embark on something or that some things take time to evolve. While chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative, permanent nature. Chronos is a stopwatch, i.e. “you have 15 minutes to complete that task”. Kairos is a calendar, i.e. “this project will take the time it takes to evolve and fully reveal its success”.
The time it takes for an apple to ripen, happens in kairos. The arc of time to build a relationship, happens in kairos.
“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven,” Ecclesiastes assures us. In other words: relax, it’s taken care of. We don’t have to be the person at the control panel every second of the day. We can pause, we can let the Greater Mechanism at work handle things. Kairos, meaning “the right or opportune moment” (i.e., the supreme moment), begs the question—right for whom? Therein lies the key, for the rightness is governed by something more universal than any individual idea of a deadline. That “something” is the collective intelligence of all life.
Modern life provokes us to move frantically in chronos all day long. Find ways to lean back and trust kairos. Let events unfold sometimes without meddling and micro-managing. If mired in a project that keeps you creatively hemmed in, push away from the desk and take a walk. Let kairos drive for a while. In that spaciousness and ease a more creative and inspired intelligence will avail itself to you.
The Space In Between - if you look at nature, you’ll see it not only uses form to manifest itself, but it uses space as well. The right space between trees determines a forest’s wellbeing. Animals of prey will space themselves in the herd so that if they must take off together to escape a lion, they can do so without crashing into one another. In nature, space is a connector, enabling thriving, not necessarily a distancer. Much information is communicated across space––whether it be the call and response of two ravens, or the way we are inspired by the stars in a night sky. Whether it be physical space, or emotional, mental or psychic space, deliberately taking space and working with space allows you to access a greater field of information only made available in ‘the absence of form’.
Give more space between projects. If designing a workshop, give more space between events or exercises. Give your kids more space. Give yourself a break and give yourself space from your constant pushing and prodding. De-clutter your home. Give yourself more time to run errands or walk down the hall in your office between meetings. Have entire days without technology or a to-do list and just let the day unfold, navigating only by what delights you.
A Cautionary Note
All of this sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? So here is my cautionary note. All things innovative and creative encounter resistance. It’s just the physics of creation. And Resistance smells silence, kairos and space a mile away. It stays up all night and works all day to trace where beingness might be brewing. When you start orienting your life towards more beingness, know that you will start to push against some comfort zones. This is because you are changing your neurological habit patterns. Be confident that resistance will come to sabotage you in your weakest moments. And it will sound like this: “I don’t have the time”, “I don’t like how hot it is outside”, “My partner is so annoying”, “I don’t have enough money”, “I’m not good enough”… It will not show up as obvious resistance to beingness…no, no, that would be way too apparent. It will be a parade of seemingly reasonable and rational judgement calls, ideas, and plans designed specifically to derail you. The trick is that you need some form of beingness to be aware of this scam otherwise you’ll just believe the thoughts and react accordingly. Slow down, turn your attention towards your inner landscape and notice what’s going on in there. If you notice a flurry of “rational” mental ruminations, it could be time to hang out with some silence, kairos or space.
Kelly Wendorf is an executive coach, spiritual mentor, facilitator, horse-woman, writer, poet, mother of two astonishing people, and courageous life explorer.To inquire about coaching, spiritual mentoring, or private retreats with Kelly, email her.October 24th, 2022