Category: creativity

art, creativity, yoga

Step 101: The People’s Republic of Vinyasa

Christa Avampato

When I signed up for my yoga teacher training at Sonic, one of the requirements they told us about was a trance dance. I had no idea what this was. Johanna, one of my teachers, told us “you will love it.” I wasn’t sure about it – the description reminded me of a rave minus any of the substances normally associated with that kind of party. But hey, this training is all about getting out of our comfort zone and being open to new experiences so I decided to go along quietly.

Today I had the extreme pleasure of getting to practice and trance dance with Shiva Rea, the guru whom many of my teachers have practiced with for many years. Everyone within the sound of her voice feels her glow. Her only instruction for the trance dance was to “let it all go.” There’s no right way or wrong way to dance – we just had to let the music move through us spontaneously. No plans, no regrets, no patterns. “All our lives we struggle and struggle and struggle, when all we really need to do is let go,” Shiva said. And let go we did. All of us.

Being in the presence of over 100 people moving to their own rhythm, I got swept away in their current. In the process of being swept away, I was able to release and just be, in a way that I never have before. There we all were, twisting, turning, chanting, breathing. All on our own and all together, all at once. It felt like for a moment we weren’t on the lower east side of Manhattan. We had entered another realm where the energy we created could actually be held in the palms of our hands. That energy was a living, breathing entity that belonged to all of us. We were individuals, and yet we were all clearly citizens of the People’s Republic of Vinyasa. Born and raised.

books, creativity, design, hope

Step 89: Glimmer Moments

Christa Avampato

On Bruce Nussbaum‘s recommendation, I just started reading Glimmer: How Design Can Change Your Life and Maybe Even the World by Warren Berger. I’m only a few pages into the introduction and already my mind is reeling with ideas and inspiration. Thinking and learning about design gives me more energy than a gallon of coffee.

In the introduction, Berger defines ‘glimmer moments’ – the point when a life-changing idea crystallizes in the mind. I’ve been having a number of glimmer moments at work, in yoga teacher training, and in my sessions with Brian. Call it destiny, synergy, coincidence, Kismet, serendipity. Or prana. Or dharma. Glimmer moments are aha’s. Times in our lives when everything just falls perfectly in to place. So perfectly that we wonder why we didn’t see all along what now seems so obvious.

We talk a lot about timing in terms of relationships or jobs. In actuality it’s all in the timing, everything, every aspect of our lives. The stars align exactly when they are supposed to align, not when we want them to, not when we think that they should. Sometimes I imagine that up there somewhere there’s a great puppet master who’s arranging and re-arranging circumstances based upon the choices that human hands make in their attempt to control human destiny.

So let go. Do what gives you energy, what makes you whole and happy. Make a plan or a rule, but be prepared to do an about-face at any moment because you have new information today that you didn’t have yesterday. Life is like that – we change, the world changes, and we all have to keep plodding forward, doing the very best we can with what we’ve got. Recognize that the glimmer is always there; our only job is make sure we take the time to stop, look up, and recognize it.

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.

adventure, creativity

Step 68: Ways of Making Patterns

Christa Avampato

“Take your needle, my child, and work out your pattern. It will come out a rose by and by. Life is like that.” ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

My friend, Lon, sent me this quote today after reading my post from yesterday about making patterns instead of plans. It should be noted publicly that Lon is one of the people in my life who cheers me on no matter what and that I reciprocate that support. When I start a new project, when I end a project, when I’m just going about my life, Lon sends me positive messages that keep me going. This quote today was one of many that Lon has sent me over the time we’ve been friends, and I thought about it all day today.

While it’s easy to tell people “go make a plan”, “go make a pattern”, it helps to have some direction on how to do these things. I’m really great at making plans, though as I said yesterday, my life never follows them. My life unfolds in patterns. While I try to remain as open as possible to the universe presenting me with opportunities, I do seek out certain types of opportunities. Which begs the question, “how do I decide to find certain opportunities or patterns?” What gets me going in the directions I’m going in?

If you’re looking to create positive patterns in your life, I hope the following ideas help to get you started:

1.) As much as I may love a certain path I’m on, I’m never afraid to do an about-face and try something completely new.
2.) I got over the “I don’t think I can do that” dilemma a long time ago. Barring brain surgery, I don’t think there’s much I can’t do if I really put my mind to it.
3.) I’m a pretty relentless person in every sense. If I really want to go somewhere, try something, achieve something, it’s going to be tough to dissuade me. Developing positive patterns takes persistence. Don’t give up.
4.) I believe in the process of continuous improvement. (Somewhere my business school teachers are smiling wide at this statement.) As a child, I was obsessed with perfection until I’d been disappointed so many times that I realized perfection is rarely if ever attainable. And thank goodness! If perfection were consistently possible, think of all the fantastic, imperfect experiences we’d miss out on. My yoga teacher, Lauren, explained to us that our yoga would never be perfect – no one’s is – so we don’t have to worry. Learning is a life-long process so take your time and enjoy it, knowing that no matter how much we learn, there will always be more.
5.) Biographies and autobiographies help. A lot. I read them all the time. And from them I take little bits of learning from the lives of others, and follow the examples that I admire the most.

So go ahead and take up the needle, as Oliver Wendell Holmes counsels us to do. You cannot fail. This is your life, your pattern, to create. Just keep at it. You’ll be surprised what a beautiful masterpiece you can weave. And my deepest thanks to my pal, Lon, for just being marvelously you, because you inspire me to be me.

art, creative process, creativity, love

Step 41: Charting Eternal Mysteries

Christa Avampato

A few days ago I was shut inside my cozy apartment, working away, blocking out the cold. After an afternoon of intense work, I took a break and made some tea. Tazo Cucumber White Tea – a new flavor for me. I turned the box in my fingers and on the back found the steps to brewing a perfect cup of tea:

Step 1: Bring some fresh filtered water to a boil.

Step 2: For hot tea, place one Tazo filterbag in your cup, mug, or gourd.

Step 3: Pour 8 fl oz of water over the filterbag.

Step 4: Steep for 3 minutes while contemplating your favorite eternal mysteries.

I smiled when I read step 4 and started to walk away from the cup of steeping tea, back to my computer. And then I stopped, mid-step. “I have 3 minutes,” I thought. “What are my favorite eternal mysteries?” I jotted these down:

Why does love take it’s time to find some of us?

Why does the world work in mysterious ways?

Why does beauty take so many forms, and how come beauty is not always readily apparent to the eye?

How do we heal? And when and why?

Why are we able to forget that which hurts us while finding it nearly impossible to forget that which brings us joy?

And then I started imagining pieces of art like those of Brian Andreas: powerful, magical statements accompanied by an illustration that brings those statements to life. I’m not sure if there are any answers to eternal mysteries, but I am glad I took the 3 minutes to think about them, to jot them down. I don’t know if there are any answers to questions like these, but I do think they might make some beautiful art. I do think that they keep us reaching, and in the end, that’s what matters most.

The image above is not my own. I can be found here.

career, creativity, Fast Company, IDEO, work

Step 2: Working with Friends

Christa Avampato

Today I had lunch with Trevin and Blair, two of my friends whom I worked with a number of years ago. During our lunch, I was reminded of how good it feels to work with friends, to be such an integral part of their lives. I’ve heard some people say that it’s best to keep our personal and professional lives separate. I disagree. I’d always prefer to work with friends – it makes work feel like play.

Last year I wrote a blog post that referenced an article in Fast Company about David Kelley, the Founder of IDEO. He left a mediocre management job at an engineering firm to get his MBA at Stanford. Though he had job offers after graduation, he declined them to start his own company with his friends. That company became IDEO. In the article he describes that his one strong inclination for employment was to work with friends. Had he not taken the leap and followed his instinct, he probably would be toiling away in a grey cubicle doing less-than-inspiring work. Instead, he founded a company that is arguably the finest product design firm in the world. And he has fun everyday. Bet well-played, David.

What if we could all follow our gut with David Kelley’s creative confidence? What if we could turn down opportunities, as great as they seem, because they just don’t jive with how we’d like to live our lives? Perhaps there’s an IDEO for each of us, or at the very least a bit more happiness to be had in our careers. In 2010, I’d like to get back to a career of working with friends.

The photo above is not my own. It appears courtesy of IDEO.

art, books, children, creativity

My Year of Hopefulness – Everyone Can Draw

Christa Avampato

“If you think you can’t draw, too bad. Do it anyway.” ~ Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, in his book Change by Design

I’ve been lamenting for some time that I can’t draw. I’m a much better writer than visual artist, and this is exacerbated because I am an auditory learner, not a visual learner. Thank that’s weird? You’re right – auditory learners make up only 20% of the population. Add it up and it’s easy to understand why I don’t have any natural ability to draw, nor have I ever really had a desire to learn.
And then I read Tim Brown’s excellent book, Change by Design, that explains his philosophy on design-thinking and the future of the field. He talks about mind maps, schematics that illustrate ideas though visual depictions rather than through written briefs or powerpoint presentations. This is a kind of drawing I can get into. Think of them as multi-dimensional tree diagrams blending pictures and words to illustrate ideas. Rather than just working left to right and using the basic construct of option A or B to progress from problem to solution, a mind map starts with a question that takes the form of “How might we ( fill in the blank)?” for a specific population. For my program with Citizen Schools, I will be asking the kids I work with to solve this dilemma with a mind map “How might we build a public school curriculum for the graders to encourage creativity and entrepreneurship?”
As so often happens, as I was reading Tim’s book, I saw an interview with another Tim whom I greatly admire, Tim Burton. He was discussing his views on drawing and creativity and echoed Tim Brown’s sentiment. “Every child believes he or she can draw. Too many adults have found their creativity beaten out of them.” And this brings me back to my long-held belief that I have only just begun to fully articulate: it is much easier (and effective) to help children maintain their creativity through to adulthood than it is to repair the confidence of adults who believe they have no creativity at all.
The truth is that I’ve lost confidence in my ability to draw, believing that my creativity is relegated to writing and developing products and not at all to drawing. The Tims helped me realize that I am selling myself short. Somewhere inside me is a visual artist of some sort yearning for a paint brush (or crayon or chalk or colored pencil) and a canvas (or piece of paper or blank wall or empty piece of sidewalk).
So here I go with another resolution to live a more authentic life: even if it’s not good, I’m going to draw a little bit every week with the help of my mind maps. I’ll let you know, or better yet I’ll show you, how it goes by publishing the pieces to this blog. Stay tuned as I re-teach myself to draw.
The image above is not my own; I’m just starting to draw so my pictures aren’t this good – yet. It is the image created by Tim Brown for the table of content of his book Change by Design. It can be found here.
choices, creativity, decision-making, innovation

My Year of Hopefulness – Make Big Decisions Real

Christa Avampato

“A problem well defined is half solved.” ~ John Dewey

Just when you think you have it all figured out life does something very funny – it changes everything on us. We get thrown an option that we never even imagined as a possibility. This recently happened to me while I was in the middle of making a very big decision. I thought I just had to choose between A and B, A being far superior to B, so superior that it didn’t even seem like a choice at all. Enter choice C, a real choice. Houston, we now have a big decision to make and this one is not easy.

I’ve got several mechanisms for deciding between options. I’m a fan of the pro con lists. I like talking to lots of different people and getting their perspectives on what they’d do if they were me. I’ve also been known to just wait and see in silence until some helpful piece of info emerges. This latest decision is a bit more complicated. B and C are actually equally great options. I’d be lucky to have the opportunity to pursue either avenue. Now it looks like I’ll have the chance to choice, and they will lead me in wildly different, happy directions. This is the classic case of two roads diverged in a yellow wood.

For inspiration in my decision-making, I was reading through some of my books this weekend and came across a few books by ?WhatIf! Innovation. In How to Have Kick-Ass Ideas, Chris Baréz-Brown talks about the very personal decision-making he and his wife went through when they were deciding whether or not to have children. To make their choice, they decided to live their life for a week as if they had decided to not have kids. This helped them live their through the lens of that decision, sort of like a test-drive of a car. After that week they re-evaluated their choice to see if it felt right.

Chris’s method is vastly superior than my pro con lists and asking 100 different people what they would do. His method makes the choice more personal and lets us experience some of the consequences that hit us shortly after we make a choice. In truth, I’m a little scared of this process and I’m going for it anyway. I’ve recently noticed that one of my areas of personal improvement is to see the downside of a situation as clearly as I see the upside. Chris’s process will allow me to not only see the downside, but experience it. It brings a certain reality to the situation. If tough decisions need anything at all, it’s a healthy dose of reality. I’ll let you know what I find in a week!

If you’ve never read Chris’s book, I highly recommend it. It’s a perfect, inspiring read for anyone at a crossroads looking for guidance from one of the world’s leading creative minds. Get it here.

creativity, education, risk, school

My Year of Hopefulness – A Little Too Comfortable

Christa Avampato

My friend, Alex, is renowned for her cards. I’m not talking about holiday cards or birthday cards. I always have a beautiful envelope show up in my mailbox with her curly handwriting on it when I expect it least and need it most. A new job, a new apartment, a tough time as showcased on this blog. This week I got a card from her that I loved so much I hung it up at my desk at work. It makes me smile every time I look at it.

The quote on the front of the card says, “Friend, you are a divine mingle-mangle of guts and stardust. So hang in there!” It’s a quote from Frank Capra. He also famously said that “A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.” While on the surface, Alex’s card may just seem like a sweet gesture from a good friend, I also think there’s something else baked into it. She’s really telling me to just get on with it. It’s a message I need to hear, and if anyone can tell me that in a kind, supportive way, it’s Alex.

Tonight I had dinner with my friend, Katie, a fellow Pisces. She mentioned something about Saturn being in Pisces and causing all kinds of havoc. Apparently, the effect is cumulative and ends on October 31st. Essentially this means that universe has been whacking us around for a bit and decided to send Saturn out of our sign with a bang, explaining why just about everything in my life got flipped upside-down in the past month. Now, I’m not quite sure that I believe in astrology to this extent but goodness does it explain a lot!

I’ve also been feeling an increase in energy this last week and feeling the tides of change sweeping in. Before Saturn’s wallop, I was getting too comfy in my daily routine. Everything seemed to be “good enough”. And I’m not a person that can live with “good enough” for too long. I needed to be shaken awake and I have a hard head so it takes quite a bit of effort to change my mind.

To Alex’s point, I need to embrace my inner mingle-mangle of guts and stardust. I needed some new dreams and new drive to reach them. And that requires a little more risk than I’ve been taking lately. It requires a little more bravery than I’ve been exhibiting. Sometimes we need to be on a burning platform (please pardon this pun in light of my burned out apartment building) before we leap into the sea of possibility. So here I go – I hope those adult swimming lessons pay off.

On Tuesday, I’m attending an information session for a PhD program that I’ve been considering and re-considering for some time now. I’ve been putting it off for about a year. I’d sign up for info sessions and not go for one reason or another. One of my business school professors who I respect beyond measure has been encouraging this route since the middle of my second year at Darden. I always thought up a reason why I couldn’t do it. That leap was too scary. Me, a PhD candidate? No, I can’t possibly do that. I don’t have the money / time / attention-span.

Then I remembered a quote I read some time ago about time and the passing of it. “Don’t let the fear of the time it will take to accomplish something stand in the way of your doing it. The time will pass anyway; we might just as well put that passing time to the best possible use.” It’s from Earl Nightingale. My best possible use is in writing, speaking, teaching, traveling and growing social change initiatives. I can’t think of another way to be more productive. And all of these things are made infinitely easier by going the PhD route. Or at least I have a hunch that they are. My creativity is knocking at the door, and I at least need to open the door and give her the opportunity to plead her case. I at least need to hear her out.

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.

change, creativity, ideas, innovation

My Year of Hopefulness – Trying to get up that great big hill of hope

Christa Avampato

For a few weeks I’ve been going about my little routine called life. In one particular area, which shall remain nameless, I have been a little stuck. I was just going with the flow, or rather I was letting the waters stagnate. Sort of strolling along with my Bruce Hornsby attitude, telling myself “that’s just the way it is.” Truthfully, that’s the way it was because I let it be.

Fighting a battle, particularly one that’s uphill, is a tough activity to sign-up for. It’s exhausting. It’s painful. It’s frustrating. And a lot of times it doesn’t do any good at all. However, if we spend a lot of time on that battleground and we continually choose to stand at ease, then we get left behind, cleaning up what remains, which often isn’t a whole heck of a lot.

Today I decided I had stood around long enough. Yes, this is the way it is but it doesn’t have to be always be like this. And no one is going to fix it for me. Why should they? They have their own battles to worry about. I signed up for the gig, I took on the mission, and now I had to make sure I wasn’t wasting my time.

So away I went, crafting and planning and convincing that I could clearly perceive a better way forward, and am willing to put my time, energy, and talents into the new venture. I have no idea if it’s going to go anywhere. Tomorrow I could find myself still frittering away at the bottom of the hill. I do know that if I stand around twiddling my thumbs any longer, I’ll be at the bottom of that hill for a long time to come, and I’d have no one to blame for that except me. Might as well plant my stake in the ground and see who I can get to rally around it.

The image above can be found here.

creativity, dreams, friendship, imagination

My Year of Hopefulness – Imagination as reality

Christa Avampato

“Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.” ~ John Lennon

I read this quote from John Lennon on my friend, Col’s, blog. She’s in the midst of some tough circumstances in her life, and her beautiful, honest writing about it is courageous to say the least. I highly recommend it for a daily dose of inspiration.

Reality sometimes gets a bad rap. “You’ve got to be realistic.” “Come back down to reality.” “Wait until reality sets in.” Awful. Any time someone tells me I have to do something, that I need to go back down somewhere, or something is going to invade and set in, I shutter. Why can’t our lives be like we imagine them to be? Who decided my reality for me, without my consultation?

Without imagination, we get a reality we don’t want. We could take Lennon’s sentiment one step further and say our reality is actually defined by our imagination. What kind of job do we really want to go to everyday? What kind of relationships and friendships do we want? Where do we want to live, what do we want to do, and who do we want to be? It’s all possible.

I’ve been having so many conversations with friends recently about the shape they’d like their lives to take. The one common question that is the root for them all is “do you really think I can do this? Can I really make this happen?” And my response is always the same. A) of course you can and B) no one else is going to make your life happen the way you want it to happen. It’s a personal commitment to go out there and get everything in life you want. Our imagination is the only limitation.