As a professional photographer or artist, you have a creative process that you use when you’re creating your best images. Whether you can articulate your creative process or not, you have a process. Most of us are missing a golden opportunity to apply our creative process to other areas of our lives, such as the management and operations of our business, and our home and relationship lives. Most of us never think of it. Most of us assume we wouldn’t know how.
Last night I had the pleasure of co-leading an experiential training for the Professional Photographers of Cape Cod on being the creative force in our lives at large. The training was meant to give participants an experience of feeling in their hearts and in their bones the power of imagining their dreams coming true, and also the experience of how powerful our assumptions are at controlling our feelings, thoughts, and actions—instantly, automatically, and without us being able to stop them.
The Four Questions That Drive the Creative Process
The training also focused on the four questions that form the structure of the creative process or creative operating system, and a simple but super effective tool for making one’s vision a reality. Here are the four questions:
1. What’s your currently reality (or situation), stated in the present tense?
You might answer something like, “My business is down 30%. I need to do something different but I don’t know what to do.”
2. What assumptions are keeping you stuck in your current reality? Your assumptions might be that if you send out enough promotional postcards that you’ll get enough work; that you must have a studio (or let go of your existing one); that the economy is killing your business; that you need coaching help but you can’t afford it right now; or that you must keep being a photographer.
3. What’s your vision (or, what do you want to create or change)? In other words, when it comes right down to it, what do you really want? You might want to say something like, “I want to make a good living doing something I really love,” or, “I want to stop feeling so stagnant, stuck, and bored in my work.”
4. What assumptions do you need to adopt to create your vision? You might need to adopt assumptions such as: the biggest risk you can take right now is to not adapt; trusting that the resources your need are available to you right now; or that you will discover or create a demand for your creative services by making your business so unique that there will be no competition.
I’ll be exploring these four questions more fully as future blog posts in the coming weeks.
In the mean time, if you want to learn more and make your vision a reality sooner, perhaps it’s time for you to invest in a free, confidential, no-obligation sample session with a coach. Beth Shapiro and I are available to help you explore what you want and see how coaching might help you. Please call us to get the process started. Coaching sessions are typically done by telephone.
Intentions are no good, after all, if there is no action. What will it take for you to take action?
Beth Shapiro: (617) 784-9687
Carol Lundeen: (617) 327-9254
(We’d include our email addresses, but spammers are too good at grabbing them off blogs).
