Coping Creatively With Change
6 Tools for Moving On
By Vranna Sue Hinck
Whether somebody "moved your cheese" or you actually choose to create changes in your life, the ever-present phenomena of change presents definite challenges in our lives. My husband and I recently chose to modify our lives significantly by moving after living in the same house for 26 years. I have worked at home for 10 years, so our move entailed vital alterations in both my professional and personal lives. The literal and metaphorical chaos created by this revolution upended everything. My routines and material goods, my accustomed patterns of thinking and my office and studio were all rendered temporarily inaccessible while we moved to our new location. The interruption, while discomforting, produced a fertile gap in my life allowing me to make the fresh connections which are the subject of this article.
Our new home, while still in town, sits on a dirt road between two fields that run north and south. The fields create an opening that provides us with a spectacular view of the mountains that ring this valley. I am acutely aware each day of how different this picture is from the scene which greeted us in the many years we lived on the old, tree-lined street in the university district. Here, the long and wide vista from my windows beckons me to rest in its beauty as I arise each morning and I see that starting my day in the tranquility of that long view restores my center. Just as not being rattled too early by the minutiae of life that needs my attention, my energy is revived by the detail-free peacefulness of that distant panorama.
Taken metaphorically, the openness of this place and its expansive observation point nudge me to spend time stretching my thinking, to make my thinking qualitatively different. So, I imagine the new class I might like to teach instead of planning it, I play with ideas for a new sculpture; I envision multiple solutions for the challenges I face rather than rushing to their resolution with the first idea that comes to mind. Among my many morning ruminations that have been subjected to elongated review since our move here, not surprisingly, the idea of change and how to deal with it rides the high winds of my thoughts this spring.
As I tinkered with ideas about what makes us able to cope with the changes in our lives, I decided to use the word itself as an acronym that would help me to define it and to articulate my thoughts about it. I believe we can experience the shifts that life brings us as palatable at minimum, perhaps even empowering if we have tools to deal with the attendant difficulties. Change can then be a contribution to our lives even when we are tempted to resist it or, "to set our face against it," as my thesaurus puts it. The following 6 guidelines are a way to outfit and thus empower ourselves for the revisions that life presents to us, welcome or not! I suggest that Curiosity, Habit, Attitude, Nourishment, Grace and Ease can be fruitful areas to examine with the objective of making change rewarding.
Curiosity: What if I really don't know what this change will bring? Can I wonder about its effects? Can change actually be wonder ful? When I am able to be curious instead of insisting that I already know what will happen, everything shifts for me. The fog lifts and I am able to see whatever comes up clearly. The truth is that none of us can know what lies ahead--even in the next moment. Not only that, when we think we can predict the future, we miss the possibilities that arise and more importantly, we become immediately at odds with the profoundly inventive world we live in.
We have countless instances in this world to suggest that we live in a fundamentally improvisational world. Look, for example, at the way coyote populations shift within a single season to match environmental changes--and how animals such as the dinosaur that are unable to adjust to alterations in their environment, fail to survive. It behooves us to match the creative vigor of the universe by staying elastic rather than rigid. When I am flexible, my energy in resonance with the dynamism of the constantly creating world, I am at my best. I am also astonished at how vital and productive I am able to be when I am able to wonder rather than resist!
Habits: Many of us are convinced that habits are extremely difficult to change. It actually takes very few repetitions of a new habit to shift the neural pathways that control our patterned ways of doing things. But there might be more productive ways of accomplishing this neural shift than just gritting our teeth for the required number of times.
My husband and I recently decided to give up our morning cup of coffee. We replaced it with a cup of hot lemon water and that satisfied me. Since he usually made the coffee, however, it was not enough. He still longed for that cuppa custom. I suggested that he look into what else it was that he missed. Together we figured out that part of it was the ritual of actually preparing the coffee. He also loved checking out the day at the window by the coffee maker while he waited and then bringing the steaming cup to me. As we look at all of the aspects of this change instead of just gritting our teeth to make it, we can create some replacement satisfactions for the parts of the change that he really misses. Then changing the habit can be both more gentle and more successful.
Attitude: How do you embody and convey it? Did you know that at least 65% of your communication is in body language? That means you are wearing your attitude on your sleeve whether you mean to or not. People joke about being able to read minds but in fact, we all do that all the time. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we read other people through our continual attention to body language.
What does your body language tell your co workers and/or your family and friends about your attitude? Are you full of resistance, sure you are right and defending a particular position or are you relaxed, aware that you cannot know what lies ahead? Are you maintaining curiosity? While resistance is really an electrical term, my thesaurus puts forth the idea that the body plays a significant part in an attitude of resistance. It suggests that to resist is to set one's face against or to turn one's back upon.
This suggests that when a change comes up for you, one of the places you might start to deal with it effectively is to ask yourself at the outset what you are feeling in your body in response to the new idea. Your body can then become a useful instrument in shifting from resistance to curiosity. One of the best ways to begin attitudinal changes is to get out of your mind talk and into your body. Re member, literally. Relax your body, and then provide it with gentle care in the face of the temptation to be rigid and/or defensive. While you really cannot know what is going to happen next, you can open up your attitude with your body as your assistant rather than your opponent.
Nourish: Rigid or defensive responses to change usually arise out of perceived vulnerability. When we feel vulnerable, contrary to what we may have been taught, getting tough is likely to exile rather than invite our potential for plasticity. Its antithesis, nourishing ourselves, is one of the best ways to give up unproductive reactivity in the face of change.
For many of us, the trick to nurturing ourselves in times of vulnerability is knowing ahead of time just what would restore us because, very often, we can't think of those things when we most need them. I have found it helpful to make a list of things that feed me --and I don't mean food! so that I am ready for those moments when I am feeling least flexible. I may need to take a walk or call one of my "champions" or go into my studio for creative time. I know people who use their lunch hour for reading at the library or walking or sitting by a nearby stream. Simple things. And, it never fails when I do workshops that I hear more than a few people bemoaning the fact that they don't even take a lunch neither eating nor rejuvenating their spirits. It is essential to take a lunch and to take it away from our workplace but so many of us just slowly drift into not nurturing ourselves in just this elemental way. On the other hand, sometimes I just need to take a deep breath and knowing that ahead sure helps
Grace. I have a beautiful granddaughter named Grace. Her birth a few years ago added a new dimension to the phrase having Grace in my life. I cannot even think of that phrase without conjuring up her beautiful big blue eyes, angelic blond curls and her sweet voice saying, "I wuv you, Amma." I feel intense gratitude and tears sometimes even well up as I think about the beauty of Gracie. My voice wants to skip when I talk about it. The tears remind me that it makes a huge difference in my day when I take time to notice the grace in my life and remember to be grateful. The physical shift gratitude creates not only nourishes me, it creates an ease in me which allows me to re cognize the fact that grace is always present in my life. I know that I don't have to go it alone and grace and gratitude help me to hold that in my mind and heart.
And finally, Ease. Since my coaches' training with Maria Nemeth, the author of The Energy of Money, I have become increasingly committed to the idea that things can be easier; it's my choice. I used to subscribe to the idea of "no pain, no gain" or that the only things worth striving for were destined to be a struggle. I now ask myself each day, and even more often in single moments, how I can make things happen "with ease." Asking that question has affected the way I schedule things more than anything else. It has caused me to take things off my schedule, to schedule less in the first place and to schedule in nourishing things as well as challenges. When I have a change coming up, I know that to make it enjoyable, to keep myself in joy with it, less is definitely more!
There is a small footpath crossing the field in front of our house. It connects two subdivisions, the old one to the east of us and the new one to the west of us. It reminds me that a small sweet path can link the old and the new if we are willing to step out onto it and watch for markers. The signposts along the path that makes change stimulating and wonderful point to being willing to be curious, to honestly examine our habits and attitudes and the ways we embody them, to nourish ourselves, to see the grace in our lives and to create ease when change is upon us. Being willing is our greatest asset. When we are willing and we have the tools, we can look forward to the challenge and the joy of whatever is next!
©2003 Vranna Sue Hinck
Vranna Sue does speaking, workshops, coaching and classes. Contact her at:
Vranna Sue Hinck
Bazingo! © Coaching and Consulting
A subsidiary of Spanish Peaks Enterprises
2605 West Villard
Bozeman, MT 59718
406-586-3238
fax 406-586-1994
vrannasue@msn.com
www.vranna.net
|
Picking Rocks: Ruminations on Sustaining Inventiveness
By Vranna Sue Hinck
I recently moved to a home on a large lot almost entirely unworried by landscaping. The blank canvas appealed to the artist in me though I anticipated that it might also be overwhelming at times.
Last week picking rock in service of my planned yard transformations, I ruminated about what it takes to keep up a creative outlook in the face of "big piles of rock" that need moving. I believe two fundamental mind-sets are key to maintaining inventiveness when it matters. I borrow both from "chaos theory," a fairly recent form of scientific description which suggests, among other things, that small actions can and do create disproportionately large effects, a concept known as the "butterfly effect," and secondly, that we live in an essentially improvisational universe. It is my contention that we are most innovative and productive when our actions resonate with these two notions of how the world works.
Julia Cameron, author of The Artist's Way, the text I use in my Creative Independence classes, calls the idea of picking up one rock at a time filling the form. She suggests that we change our lives (or our landscapes) by the accrual of small actions and that it is good to keep them tiny. My own experiences as an artist and creativity coach confirm this idea and I believe that it works at least in part because when we focus on very small steps in service of our goals we don't scare ourselves or become overwhelmed with the fabulous enormity of our ideas.
Not less important than taking small steps in service of our dreams is the willingness to stay curious and be improvisational as we strive to make our ideas concrete. Since we can never really entirely predict the consequences of our actions anyway, our creativity is well served by curiosity and a readiness to let even our precious ideas change as they evolve. My artistic practice verifies this. Every good piece of work that I have ever produced arose out of my curiosity and my willingness to improvise in the face of a faltering idea. Check out Artifacts Gallery in Bozeman to see some of these improvisations!
I am suggesting that sustaining creativity can be more effortless than we imagine even in the face of challenges when we start with one small rock, do one small thing, see what happens and then let that suggest our next move.
©2003 Vranna Sue Hinck
Vranna Sue does speaking, workshops, coaching and classes. Contact her at:
Vranna Sue Hinck
Bazingo! © Coaching and Consulting
A subsidiary of Spanish Peaks Enterprises
2605 West Villard
Bozeman, MT 59718
406-586-3238
fax 406-586-1994
vrannasue@msn.com
www.vranna.net |
