Weaving The Dream

I went to a women’s networking meeting two days ago and the guest speaker was a local news celebrity who has won several awards for her reporting.  Her topic for the evening was stress.

As I listened to her speak—with much enthusiasm, humor, and energy—I realized that almost all the information on stress she presented I had either heard before or read somewhere.  I didn’t learn any new information but I was certainly reminded about something that is as true for speaking as it is for creating.

It is not the what but the how that makes the difference.

I could have listened to a presentation of that same information and been asleep at the table from boredom or constantly glancing at my watch frustrated with the waste of my time.  Instead, the speaker kept our interest by interjecting personal anecdotes, using examples particular to entrepreneurial women, and helping her audience focus on the point she was trying to make with pertinent questions.  And, for a bit of fun, when someone gave the answer she was looking for, she came down into the audience to place a star sticker on that woman’s shoulder.

As I grow my own speaking career, one of my biggest worries is about coming up with original information and an original approach to offer to potential clients.  But as I watched the gathering of women applaud the speaker enthusiastically, I realized I had been demanding more of myself than was necessary.  Indeed, I was burdening myself with unrealistic expectations.

Of course, unrealistic expectations is one of the ways we block our creativity.  We worry that what we have to say, paint, write, sing, play—whatever—is not important enough, original enough, new enough.  And then the canvas stays blank, that cursor continues to blink at us from an empty screen, and those empty bars of musical notation stretch unendingly before us.

Enough already!  How many times has the essential story of Romeo and Juliet been done?  How many photographs or paintings of sunsets have you seen?  How many love songs are there in the world?  And yet, we can always enjoy another movie about star-crossed lovers, or listen to another song about the headiness of love, or gaze with rapture at a colorful photograph of a sunset.

We don’t have to work to be original—we are.  All we have to do is express our shared experience through our unique perspectives with our form of creativity.

For some of us that expression may mean using a lot of humor, for others drama, and for some color, texture, form, shadow, light, gesture, excitement, sorrow, memory, hope, gentleness, or fiery passion.  As long as we do it with honesty and passion, from our own personal experience and knowing, “behold all things become new again.”

So that means even old ideas can be fair game for creative exploration and expression.

Now, have I told you anything new?  No, I just told it my way.  So where is my star sticker?

This entry was posted on Friday, February 23rd, 2007 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Creativity, Creative Process, Speaking and Teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.