Creativity in Business

Myers as an artist and musician who had consulted with businesses through the Myers Institute for Creative Studies; Ray as a social psychologist and business professor who started bringing creativity into classes in the early sixties. We had each repeatedly observed that without the involvement of some very deep personal sources of creativity, idea-generating techniques used alone could produce confusion - or at best, short-term gains. As with the proverbial Chinese meal, an hour later and you’re hungry again.

Hal Leavitt, who is an old hand at getting points across to students, was temporarily frustrated in trying to describe the devastating effect of socialization on creativity. Then he just let loose:

The reason I’m having trouble describing it is that it is such a pervasive problem that you can’t stay to someone, “Don’t be socialized.” We are just socialized as hell.

All of us go through the same environment. And all of us may learn the same skills. But there is some kind of distribution curve and way out there you can find somebody who says “I got my Ph.D. in physics, but I still think it’s horse shit!” (Laughter) And them’s the good guys!

A second example of a great idea comes from Mary Lou Shockley, now chief financial officer of the Spectrum Services division of Pacific Telesis. She relates that she had presented to her company, at that time Pacific Telephone, an analysis of their poor performance in the timely installation of data services. She was flying back to Los Angeles with her boss, Doug Fagg, having an end-of-the-day drink, when:

It dawned on me that the responsibility for the installation of the service was in the hands of only fifteen people in a department of sixteen hundred. Why not set up a club that would meet every two weeks over lunch to discuss the roadblocks to service intervention?

First, your inner creative Essence provides the quality of intuition: a direct knowing without conscious reasoning. Intuition has always been a powerful mainstay of great business, but until fairly recently it has been denied as a business tool in the era of overdependence of analysis…

A second quality, will, begins to fill in the picture. It is the part of you that can take responsibility. It is the ground of your creative actions. People who are creative in business have a compelling vision or mission, and this exemplifies will…

The third quality of Essence is joy. This book could have been called The Joy of Business because, for all the work and frequent difficulty that creativity entails, it always brings a sense of joy. When you get a hint of your own creativity or potential, you always feel this bright, shimmering quality of joy. It is best related to the art quality of balance. When you have balance within yourself and between all parts of your life, you experience the joy of the flow of creativity.

We often talk about creativity in terms of breakthrough. And to break through a wall of fear and criticism that might stop you, you need a fourth quality, strength. Creative business people take appropriate risks. Their strength allows them to do that without even seeing risks as risky. This inner strength overcomes fear….

Finally, you can draw on a fifth quality of Essence, compassion, to completely bring your creativity into the world. This compassion isn’t the mushiness of do-gooders. Instead it is loving kindness, first for yourself and then for others. When you operate from this compassion you nurture your own ability, recognise your own creativity and that of others. It causes you to experience the ultimate Eureka! feeling of “I Am.” Creative business people can implement their creativity so well because they have that confidence in their own creativity and bring it out in others too. Compassion of this sort is best related to the art principle of harmony, and you can see how it creates harmony, not only among all the qualities of Essence but also in your business life.

Plato was speaking in his own context when he said there were three ways of knowing. The first two - through the physical senses and through reason - are familiar to each of us. The third way, divine madness, refers to a spiritual or divine way of knowing that seemed to rise uncontrollably in an individual. Today we find this idea discomforting. Divinity is something few people talk about at business lunches or on the commuter train or in the check-out line at the local supermarket. Divine madness (or Essence or God) is nonetheless an inner creative quality to which we would do well to surrender if we want to be creatively efficient in business.

Managerial psychologist Harold J. Leavitt has studied this kind of knowing. He talks about pathfinding. He describes three ways of defining your own life’s voice, or mission. You can be proactive - aggressively seek, air and pursue your problems and goals. You can be reactive - passively adjust to whatever life thrusts upon you. Or you can be enactive - work on a specific problem until you find the right path or solution, trusting that problem and solution constitute a personal dialogue, an exercise in communication between your inner and outer selves.

Leavitt talks about this by referring to a book, Creative Vision, by psychologist J. W. Getzels and Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi:

… The creative ones are apt to be changed, seventeen times in the process. If you ask the student if he’s through, he’s never through, and he’ll say, “Yeah, well, it’s better than it was before, but I’m not sure that I’m finished.” There’s a hell of a lot of shifting, changing, erasing, painting over, modifying, approaching some degree of satisfaction.

And this kind of muddling-through process - not knowing at the beginning what you’re going to be doing, not being able to say what you are doing, trying a variety of things and finding that some are closer to what you want than others - this is kind of what I’m trying to get at with enactive. That doesn’t mean it’s a random process. The fact that these kids are changing things, and modifying things, and doing things differently than they did five minutes before does not mean it’s random, or that they don’t know what the hell they are doing. It’s got to be, I think, that they are carrying around some kind of standards, but they can’t really verbalize them or even visualize them clearly enough to say what things ought to be.

Psychologist Albert Bandura has made a study of chance occurrences, finds them to be crucial in people’s lives, and mentions several turning points of his own. Of course, these “chance” occurrences aren’t really chance at all. They’re welling up of an internal self that is beyond rational thinking.

Strangely enough, the science they are trusting in is about three hundred years behind the times. If their science conforms with what their senses tell them, they are subscribing to Newtonian views developed during the seventeenth century. This mechanistic science leads us to view humans as machines that respond to internal and external stimuli, each living in a separate corner of a larger machine: the physical universe. Such a view leads us to believe that we are completely separate, self-animating beings. Our bodies house brains, but our thoughts are only side products of our physical machines; consciousness, free will, divine purpose, and Essence are superfluous at best. The mechanistic view has led us to try and predict and control nature rather than harmonize with it. We strive rather than surrender.

The revolutionary implication of Einstein’s simple equation, E=mc^2, is that there is no true distinction between energy and matter.

The new physicist’s picture of reality is very much like that of many Eastern mystics and Western sages. They now agree that each individual has the potential for performing the godlike functions found at the level of universal consciousness and in the minute world of quantum mechanics. They validate the inner creative potential that seems so incredible to everyday, nonscientific, nonspiritual thinking.

In 1964 physicist J. S. Bell proposed a mathematical theorem stating that two particles, originally united but eventually separated, could and would affect each other, immediately and from afar. His theorem was confirmed experimentally in 1972 and has been reconfirmed by a series of experiments since then.

Specifically this means: If you break up a molecule so that the electrons fly apart, and then change the spin of one electron, the spin of the other electrons originally joined to it will immediately correspond, no matter how far apart they now are.

As base, MacLean shows that creative ability lives not only in the right hemisphere of the neocortex but also in the lower parts of the brain. Other evidence indicates that we are maximally creative when there is an integration between right and left brain, the neocortex, as well as the two lower centers. Imagine the inner creative resource housed in this ancient remnant of this prehistoric lower brain: the feeling, motivation, and ancestral lore of the species.

The new physics gives scientific evidence of each person’s potential power and connections to the world. Split-brain research and the triune brain findings establish that everyone has an inner creative resource with great breadth and depth. Pribram and others provide an integrated scientific justification for believing in your own experience of creativity. If the world is a hologram, that means your perceptions form your world; that your thoughts (in the form of holograms) can have an effect on what you actually experience as the world; and that what lasts inside you is what is manifested as the entire world. If the universe is biographic, its concreteness is an illusion created by your own mental construction.

Biologist Rupert Sheldrake, in taking the ideas of physics into the biological and physiological realms, offers a strong case for considering seemingly random chance events as dependable energy manifestations.

The new physics indicates that tremendous energy resources lie within each of us and that we are united with energy patterns in the universe. Sheldrake proposes that there are morphogenic fields, or “invisible organizing structures that mold or shape things like crystals, plants, and animals, and [that] also have an organizing effect on behavior.” He posits that these fields contain influences from all of history and evolution. As such, they begin to explain the “lucky coincidences” that sometimes solve our problems.

Countless spiritual leaders make this clear in their writing and in the process agree with modern science. Swami Muktananda says:

Man goes to great trouble to acquire knowledge of the material world. He learns all branches of mundane science. He explores the earth, and even travels to the moon. But he never tries to find out what exists within himself. Because he is unaware of the enormous power hidden within him, he looks for support in the outer world. Because he does not know the boundless happiness that lies inside his heart, he looks for satisfaction in mundane activities and pleasures. Because he does not experience the inner love, he looks for love from others.

The truth is that the inner Self of every human being is supremely great and supremely loveable. Everything is contained in the Self. The creative power of this entire universe lies inside every one of us. The divine principle that creates and sustains this world pulsates within us as our own Self. it scintillates in the heart and shines through all our senses. If, instead of pursuing knowledge of the outer world, we were to pursue inner knowledge, we would discover that effulgence very soon.

Through our work at Stanford we have evolved four general pathways to surrendering: 1) Drop mental striving; 2) Apply yourself to a task; 3) Maintain a spirit of inquiry; and 4) Acknowledge that you don’t know how it’s going to turn out.

Lao Tsu in his Tao Te Ching shares an invaluable piece of wisdom: “The world is ruled by letting things take their course. It cannot be ruled by interfering.

The successful creative business leaders who speak to our classes don;t strive. They apply themselves to a task for the sheer joy of doing it. It is in this sort of effort that you, too, can experience your inner creativity.

In our Stanford classes, we recommend this: Get to work on something (almost anything) productive, with the simply (even foolish) confidence that the work that’s in front of you is part of your answer.

Our present theory is that devotion to a task at hand puts us in harmony with our creative source. We dedicate ourselves to work itself, not to a false personality.

”We asked our students to observe water as a way of understanding the power of surrendering. (See the water exercise later in this chapter.) One student described his experience in this way:

I begin to wonder what’s so captivating about water. I can sit for hours looking at the ocean, a creek, lake or fountain, and feel totally absorbed as well as soothed. I wonder why. A breeze comes up and fractures the lake’s placid surface into a wild pattern of dancing ripples. Several thoughts about water come to mind. Water is dynamic, always different and never the same; water is flexible with a fluid adaptability, yet it has a collective force that’s awesome; water is without color of its own - it reflects beautifully the color and lights of its surroundings; water is. Water is? Sure, it never pretends to be something else. This is the essence of its being, its natural intelligence.

Letting Go

To have an immediate experience of letting go you can always stand up and stretch as much as you can and then relax. You’ve done that thousands of times in your life, and it almost always provides an instant burst of good feeling, clarity, and energy. The following two exercises are expansions of the same idea. One of them emphasizes letting go physically, the other, mentally.

Physically. Sit in a chair with your hands on your legs. Tense your legs and keep them tense as you successively and steadily tense your pelvis, rib cage, shoulder, neck, and jaw. Hold all of that tense for a moment. Now relax. You have just let go. How did it feel? Observe.

Mentally. Imagine that something you mentally carry around with you - a strong opinion, belief, or thought that blocks your way - is actually represented by something you are wearing. It can be a shoe, watch, ring, bracelet, scarf or tie. Strongly imagine that this blocking mental set exists totally in the article you are wearing. Then: take it off!

How does it feel to let go in this way?

Remember that our students are often surprised when they write down their experiences with each chapter’s credo. You might try the same thing each week. The discipline of analyzing your experiences brings new light.

So let us begin the adventure of living with the chapter’s heuristic: “Destroy judgment, create curiosity.” The first step is to recognise the power of your own thoughts by exploring your inner terrain.

Move through time. Think back to approximately a year ago today. What were you thinking? What were you doing? How did you feel about your life? Bring back some of the details: the people, your routine, your clothes, your mood.

Move through space. Mentally go to your grandmother’s house. Then go to the place in the U.S. you like best. Move on to your favorite European city, whether you’ve been there or not. While your suitcase is packed, go to the planet of your choice, or to some star or other solar system. Revel in the details of each stopover. What do you wish you’d brought with you?

Experience colors. See red, then yellow, blue, green, orange, purple. Put them together in combinations, or move them around in swirls. What does each color say? How does each make you feel?

Materialize objects. Conjure up a fork, your telephone, your favorite childhood toy, the house you’d like to live in. Do something appropriate with each. Then do something inappropriate.

Feel sensations. Imagine you’re on a roller-coaster ride, grinding upwards then dashing down, looping, twisting, turning. Feel the wind on your face, and the grip of your muscles. See the skyline, then the people below. Where’s your stomach? Where’s your comb?

Taste things. Cut open a lemon. Squeeze a drop of it on your tongue. Roll it around. Then open your eyes and close them again. Bite into a piece of chocolate fudge. Let it slide across your tongue. If it’s studded with nuts or marshmallows, enjoy the texture contrast.

Hear sound. Listen to a wave lapping, a whisper, a motor starting, the growl of a dog, a snore, a thunderstorm, a scream, then - all the way through - the Star-Spangled Banner. Notice all the background noises too.

Feel emotions. Pre-live a great loss - the death of someone you love very much, or the dashing of an ideal. Then recall a happy surprise. Dwell on the details of the event, and on your own physical reaction.

Do the forbidden. Sass a parent, disobey a boss, throw your hand at a bridge partner - anything you’ve always wanted to do. Luxuriate in the emotional aftermath, then pick up the pieces.

Give birth to an idea. Remember an idea that’s come to you lately. Shoot it down with judgment and negative thoughts; resurrect it with cool, clear logic. Repeat the performance with a brand new idea.

There are four levels of the negative kind of judgment: self-judgment, judgment from others, collective judgment, and judgment judging the judgment.

No person is something called lazy. Laziness is a symptom that something is incomplete, unresolved, uncomfortable. That which is left incomplete and therefore uncomfortable signals a block - usually fear. Who’s afraid of a messy closet? The child within.

This kind of external judgment, as you see, gets its power from your confirming internal judgment. Less obviously, it also gets its original impetus from your own VOJ: You send out signals, and someone else packs them up and speaks them aloud as facts.

The third level of judgment is not one particular voice but a set of collective voices. Fashion establishes hemlines, nationality establishes food and beverage patterns, social class establishes decorative taste, etiquette establishes which fork to use. These invisible voices also operate in your life as a source of judgment; you are likely to conform to their dictates blindly or feel guilty if you don’t.

Your defense is not necessarily to ignore or disobey these voices. Many such “rules” offer handy guidance and eliminate constant fussing. But it is necessary to recognize each collective voice for exactly what it is: an external standard of behavior. It is also necessary to know that a collective voice is only a pretender to power. You still have the freedom to govern your own behavior.

That’s when the third level, collective judgment, zaps you: You’ve broken a social rule; you should always look happy and prosperous. Enter the fourth level. You feel bad. It’s bad to feel bad. You are bad. The judgment judges the judgment, and lays the blame of you.

Picasso put it this way: Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.

Pay Attention to Your Thoughts

The first step is to become aware of the VOJ. People who have lived with this chapter’s credo are amazed at the number of negative and judgmental statements they’ve made throughout the day. One student counted eighty-seven negative judgmental thoughts on a particular Saturday and a hundred on Sunday. Usually the ratio of negative to positive thoughts is quite high - four to one, even eight to one. Several of our students used the metaphor of rodents to describe these thoughts, calling them mice, rats, or weasels.

So start noticing that the judgment is present. Tally your judgmental thoughts when that is feasible: during meetings and conversations, while driving, or when you are part of an audience and not really participating. Be especially alert to the VOJ’s presence when you have difficulty, feel fear, or feel depressed. Look to your body for clues; it will tell you when judgment is lurking in the shadows waiting to pounce. You might feel a heaviness in your cheat or an overall body tension. You might develop an upset stomach or a headache. Or you might feel blue…

Attack the Judgment

Once you’ve identified what your VOJ is saying, turn to it and yell. Keep the message short. A classic one is “Get the hell out of my life!” At this point, if the VOJ feels threatened, it might come back with a rational-sounding statement such as, “Yes, but you do know that jobs are hard to find.” This is simply a more subtle form of judgment at work. It pretends to be reality; it’s judgment in disguise. Yell at it, too - out loud if necessary…

Make the Judgment Look Ridiculous

Some people find that it is effective to take an especially bothersome statement of judgment and blow it up like a balloon until it bursts.

To do this, shut your eyes and imagine that you can hear and see a VOJ statement - maybe, “People don’t like me” - in its normal tone. Then begin to intensify and enlarge it, making it more and more strident, perhaps flashing in brilliant neon lights. Then make the voice scream out in a tremendous echo chamber, with mile-high letters in view of thousands of people.

If this works for you, you will find your own creative ways to intensify, enlarge, amplify, and explode the judgment. And you are likely to laugh out loud as you realize how significant and puny the VOJ really is - or would be without your attention to support it.

Exercise to Remove Judgment

When you feel depressed, you are probably turning anger on yourself. Scientific research indicates that aerobic exercise, which accelerates the heart rate and breathing and increases oxygen levels in the blood, is helpful in fighting depression. In their article, “Influence of Aerobic Exercise on Depression,” I. Lisa McCann and David S. Holmes reported in the May 1984 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that “The subjects in the aerobic exercise condition evidenced reliably greater decreases in depression than did subjects in the placebo condition or subjects in the no-treatment condition.” Although the authors reviewed a number of other studies that showed that aerobic exercise decreased depression (and therefore in our opinion decreased inner judgment or VOJ), theirs is the first study that has full appropriate experimental control concerning the effects of strenuous exercise on depression.

It might take some probing to get eleven reasons, but it’s worth it. Each answer is likely to reveal deeper and more meaningful blocks to action. One of the reasons it is best to do this exercise with someone else is that it takes two to really probe and get at deep reasons. So probe.

Once you have written down the eleven reasons, give the sheet to your partner and ask him to look at it as if it came from someone other than himself. Ask him what he would say about that person. This is important in revealing what is really going on.

Once in a while, the test-taker discovers that his goal is not a true goal at all - just a grass-might-be-greener daydream external to his real desires. (And it doesn’t hurt to know that.)

If you pay attention at every moment, you form a new relationship to time. Your own absorption slows you down internally. That slowing down feeds your sense of deep appreciation and at the same time produces more energy. In some magical way, by slowing down you become more efficient, productive, and energetic, focusing without distraction directly on the task in front of you. Not only do you become immersed in that moment; you become that moment.

Creative high achievers practice a positive sensory orientation. If you ask them to explain to you their goals, their hopes, their aspirations, they would be able to do this in three-dimensional sensory detail. - Steve DeVore, “The Neuropsychology of Achievement

Shepard uses the term “resonance” to describe the pay-attention process. When you keep your eyes, ears, and other senses open, the external data resonates with your internal resources.

The following out-of-work period was difficult but gave him [DeVore] some real exercise in a new kind of resonance:

The unsuccessful job-hunting became very frustrating, and I became very depressed. So much so that I made myself susceptible to a virus that resulted in spinal meningitis. And I was laid down flat in bed for three months with no income coming in. Nothing coming in at all and a wife who was pregnant, mortgage payments that were overdue, and every time I started to stand up my head just throbbed and I couldn’t do anything. All I could do was read. And so I had my wife go to the library.

I said, “Get me every book you can on every great person, every person who has been successful.” In these three months I devoured about twenty-five autobiographies and biographies of great people. And every time I read these biographies or autobiographies I identified with these people. These people became models.

Organizational development specialist Don Prentice makes clear the link between listening and creativity:

The only thing that I can come up with is that the real source of creativity is truth. The truth is endlessly creative. The problem with that is I don’t know what the truth is. Even less do I know what your truth is. What’s creative? It’s that truth. So how do I put this idea of creativity into practice? All I know is you listen to what’s going on at the moment, and you follow the truth of what’s going on in that moment - that’s how you do it. The essence of creativity is to listen.

Among his [Douglas Harding] favorites were Zen koans, cryptic statements that challenge self-blinding concepts. See if your head can survive this one:

Find the face you had before you were born.

When you think about it, you realize that you have a head only when you consider yourself a separate, free-floating object; you are especially aware of your objective isolation when you see yourself in a mirror or photograph.

In our sense of unity with a masterpiece, we lose our heads, forget all the trivial mind chatter, meet our own Maker. As the Sufis say, “Painting and Painter are one.

Here is White’s simple exercise:

Select a photograph that you can look at for a long time with pleasure. Set aside some time, a half hour or so, that can pass without a single interruption. Set the picture in good light and yourself in a comfortable position. Look at the picture for at least ten minutes without moving even one small muscle or ‘giving in’ to even one tiny twitch. Keep your eyes and mind on the image, instead of following long chains of associations; keep coming back to the picture. You can expect that many things will be found in it, not previously noticed. After ten or fifteen minutes, turn away from the picture and recall what you have experienced, step by step. Make this as visual as possible; review the experience visually rather than with words. After the thirty minutes have elapsed, more or less, and the experience has become a kind of flavor, go about the day’s work, trying to recall the taste when you can.

Basically, a therapist tries to get at the patient’s viewpoint. The professional listener says: “I am totally listening to everything that you say. You are not totally committed, nor do you need to be, to listen to everything that I say. You might hear many things that I say, that you say, or you might hear little of both. But we are each engaged in arranging different things. You are in a process of rearranging and integrating your new perceptions and calling attention to new ones for you to arrange and integrate.

In his [Dr. David K. Reynolds] book Playing Ball on Running Water, he tells of his treatment of a patient named Tamura:

Mr. Tamura was instructed to make efforts to act with “a therapist’s heart.” That is, he was to utilize the expertise he had unwittingly gained through the years of therapy for the benefit of those around him. Rather than complain to his wife about his own troubles, he was to return home and ask her about her problems with housework and the children and ask how he could help. Had there been time, we would have done roleplaying with my acting as Mr. Tamura’s student.

Mr. Tamura was surprised to hear that within him was a latent therapist. He was also surprised to learn that patients “treat” therapists. That is, treating patients helps therapists with their own problems, creates confidence within the therapists themselves, and holds all sorts of additional benefits. Teachers need their students as least as much as the students need teachers.

You can also stimulate the hemispheres of your brain by simply paying attention to them. Psychologists Robert Masters and Jean Houston, at the Foundation for Mind Research in New York, have devised several exercises for doing this. These are described in their books, including Mind Games, Listening to the Body, The Possible Human, and Psychological Method Exercises.

(Adapted with permission from Robert Masters and Jean Houston, Listening to the Body, Delacorte Press)

To start with you might use a book such as Gayle Delaney’s Living Your Dreams, but the main thing is to pay attention and understand that you are the total creator of your dreams and that the message comes from yourself.

Psychologist Carl Jung, echoing both Stein and Tomlin, said, “The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me.” Sigmund Freud, in a lighter mood than usual, said, “The great question, which I have not been able to answer despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman really want?’” Socrates asked questions that continue to reverberate in mankind’s eternal quest; among them, “Which matters more, body or soul?

Instead of prematurely asking what you should do, try something new. Ask no questions rather than an action question. Try meditating, exercising, sensing your arms and legs, or any of the approaches we have suggested for putting you in touch with your inner creative ability. Then try answering any or all of the following questions:

• What is it I don’t yet understand? This question or ones like it can penetrate the mind for clarity and understanding.

• What is it that I’m really feeling? When there is a problem there are usually emotions - fear, anger, hurt, or sorrow - and this question can help you become aware of seeing them specifically.

• What is it that I’m not seeing? Problems usually come from not seeing clearly. By asking about what you are not seeing specifically, almost as if it consists of material objects, you heighten your perceptual ability.

• What voice is speaking? Is it your Voice of Judgment, your objective intelligence, your voice of childhood emotions or fears, or the voice of your Essence speaking inside of you? You can bet that if you have a problem, the objective intelligence and the Essence are relatively silent. But personifying and identifying the inner voices contributing to a problem sometimes is enough in itself to achieve the clarity needed for action.

This kind of exploratory questioning for clarity doesn’t take long, especially when preceded or followed by meditation.

The ruthless and relentless game. Carry around in your back pocket these dozen ruthless and relentless questions. Flourish them whenever you feel you are not getting to the heart of a personal or professional problem.

• At the moment, what is my aim? This question is about your deepest wish, not goals, for the next fiscal year. Put your key life purpose on the line at that moment, not in the past or the future.

• If the truth be known, what’s really going on? There is a certain magic in asking for the truth. Use this question to cut through to the basics in any situation so that you can act with efficiency.

• What is the VOJ saying? This question reminds you to be aware of and eliminate the negative effect of inner blame and criticism.

• Is this who I am, or who I’m attempting to be? The central contradiction of your life is between the Essence and ego. This question helps silence the ego.

• What is it that this person provokes in me? Instead of concentrating on questions such as: “What’s wrong with her?” “Why are they doing this to me?” focus on what you can do something about: your own actions, thoughts, feelings, and sensations.

• What is the objective reality? Appeal to your own objective intelligence with this one. Strip away all the rest: fears, judgments, chattering of the mind, ego, false personality. This question acts like a meditation: All that is extraneous slips away and you concentrate on what is real.

• What is the emotional truth? Four emotions - fear, anger, hurt, and sorrow - cloud your thinking. If anger, or any of the emotions, is getting in the way, you must acknowledge that truth first rather than blame other people.

• What pain am I avoiding? Over and over, our speakers, students, and clients point out that real learning and progress arise from pain and difficulty. This question teaches you to pay attention to the pain in order to gain insight.

• What stubbornness am I holding on to? You know intellectually that the only constant thing is change, but you might find it difficult to live this truth. Change isn’t the problem; holding on to stubbornness is. Acknowledge and understand that with this question.

• Is this choice the same as my real choice? Your real problems might be different from the apparent one.

• What is it that I don’t yet understand? Again, if you feel upset, there is something that you do not understand. If other questions fail to lead you to this understanding, you can just ask yourself directly.

• Who said that, my mother or my father? This question smokes out the VOJ.

The question-a-week program. You can use questions to take stock as well as to deal with ongoing problems. You will find that if you ask yourself a review question at the end of each week, you will gain much clarity about what is actually going on in your life.

Try asking one of these questions each week, and then go back in subsequent weeks to the ones that prove productive for you.

• This week who or what was my teacher?

• This week what did I learn?

• This week what did my VOJ say?

• This week what did I observe?

• This week what did I forget?

• This week how did I take care of myself?

• This week what was my relationship to time?

• This week what permission did I give myself regarding emotions?

• This week what did I notice about love?

• This week what truth did I find?

Introduction

Q. What would you like to get clear about today?

A. I’d like to get clear about my relationship to …

Q. What is it about … that isn’t clear?

The Questions

1.a) What is the GOAL you would like to achieve?

b) What solutions have been attempted so far?

c) What was it about these attempts that didn’t work?

1. What is your feeling regarding the situation? (Feeling means an emotional state - i.e. anger, hurt, fear, sorrow)

1. What is your attitude regarding the situation? (Attitude means a state of mind - i.e. contempt, judgment, criticism)

1. What benefits do you receive from having this situation?

1. What is the reality of the situation?

1. What would you like to see happen?

1. What else would you like to see happen?

1. What do you need to do at this time?

1. How would your life be different if this situation were changed?

1. What one thing are you willing to change to make this be what you would like it to be?

It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction” - Pablo Picasso

Each individual has a meant-to-be, a particular blending of talents and capacities that can guide him to achievement. Everyone you recognise as creative - not only our speakers but also such luminaries as Einstein, Picasso, Beethoven - has in common the amazing ability to express his own unique purpose here on earth. They have found that true creativity is being themselves. When Leonardo DaVinci was asked to name his greatest accomplishment, he answered, “Leonardo DaVinci.

Deikman recommends this rewarding meditative exercise as an immediate quitting tool:

Would you like to try quitting? You may have never done it before, never really taken time - any amount - just for you. You may never have said, “The next ten minutes are just for me” and stopped doing. Consider: ten full minutes in which to be aware, just for yourself, not doing anything, just being aware of your existence… Try it now. Realize that no matter what problems are facing you and no matter what work you have to do or what people need you or what your body wants, for ten minutes there is nothing you must do. That’s true. Realistically, no matter what your situation is right now, it can wait for ten minutes. The Big Bump may be coming, but the next ten minutes can be yours.

Make an EEE list

By making a list of the activities that you already find easy, effortless, and enjoyable, you will begin to look at yourself in a new way: through the things you like to do. Get a piece of paper - right now is as good a time as any - and write out as quickly as they come to mind all activities that you find EEE. Don’t worry about putting the activities into three separate categories; there is no contradiction between the three Es.

Take a Long View of Your Life

A key to discovering your purpose, your meant-to-be, is to look at yourself as though you had reached the far end of your life. Ask yourself leading questions based on the assumption that you have had broad experience and acquired great wisdom. Step back and examine yourself as though you were a stranger.

Marc Steuer of Syntex says that the following revealing exercise opens up the be segment of the Taoist cycle, and takes ten minutes or less.

Section off a couple of pieces of paper with decade headings: “Birth to 9”; “10 to 19”; and so forth. (We suggest that you take it to the outer limits - “90 to 99.”) Then do a Who’s Who description of each decade. Each entry can be as brief as “Born in New York, bored at school, got decent grades, enjoyed sports.”

If you do it right now, you will better appreciate some of the class results.

A student approached the master in his zendo, bowed and reverently asked, “Master, what is Zen?”

The master replied, “Zen is eating when you eat, working when you work, and resting when you rest.”

The student was astonished. “But master, that is so simple!”

“Yes,” said the master. “But so few people seem to be able to do it.

According to the science of mantra there is a spanda, sound vibration, at the base of the universe and at the root of your mind. Physics agrees, saying that the universe began with the Big Bang, and that the sound continues as a ceaseless vibration. The yogis say this basic sound is Om, pronounced “ohm.” To get in touch with this universal vibration is to get in touch with your Essence. In their book Rhythms of Life, scientists Edward S. Ayensu of the Smithsonian Institution and Philip Winfield of the University of London say that “Rhythms are the key to self-knowledge and to knowledge of our surroundings. They put all life into a timely perspective.

Scientific research sheds new light on the mental phenomenon of pulling out. In his book, The Bond of Power, Joseph Chilton Pearce tells of the research of psychologist Burton White of Harvard’s Child Development Center. After finding that about one child in thirty is brilliant and happy, White did a great deal of research to determine what demographic or psychological characteristics distinguished those children. But the children came from a wide variety of backgrounds - rich and poor, small families and large, broken and stable homes, poorly and well-educated parents - and from all parts of the U.S. Finally, through extensive questioning, he determined that the brights and happy children had only one thing in common: All of them spent noticeable amounts of time staring peacefully and wordlessly into space.

Intuition complements reason. Blaise Pascal, the great French philosopher, mathematician and physicist, says:

We know the truth, not only by reason but also by the heart.

Psychologist Carl Jung said:

The term [intuition] does not denote something contrary to reason, but something outside the providence of reason.

Jonas Salk, the discoverer of polio vaccine, has recently been investigating the roots of creativity. Salk told Time correspondent Peter Stoler in an interview in Psychology Today:

I’m saying that we should trust our intuition. I believe that the principles of universal evolution are revealed to us through our intuition. And I think that if we combine our intuition and our reason, we can respond in an evolutionary sound way to our problems…

Listening to intuition is not the act of concentrating on what you think you want. It is not hedonism, a move toward the most pleasurable short-term alternative. It is not giving vent to the inner emotional child left over from your infancy. It is simply paying clear attention, without mind chatter and emotions, to the most appropriate alternative that comes from the creative Essence.

Our speakers seem to tell us that intuition kicks in precisely when they move through the stress and the frustration to a calm, clear state beyond. At that moment, the appropriate action appears almost as a solid conviction: take the case of Robert Medearis. Instead of emotion, he prefers to talk about energy:

I think everybody has a certain amount of energy about them. And I think that one of the critically important things is to allow that energy to take place. Don’t be afraid of it, don’t try to channel it. Let it emerge. Because that energy is the source, it’s the food for the idea… Allow it to ferment, allow it to come out, allow it to bubble up if you will even though you might think that it’s somewhat negative in origin. Allow it to manifest.

Recognition, which literally means “to know again,” is probably as good a synonym as any for intuition. When you have worked diligently and built upon experience in any area of business, the right decision comes instantly as a sort of emotionless recognition.

If there is one characteristic that signals creativity in business, it might be follow-through. For instance, Nolan Bushnell is only one of the people who could be credited for fathering the video game, but he often gets the credit because he was the first to bring any to market in a big way. He says:

After the creative moment I thought, “Gee, anybody should be able to make a business out of it.” As it turned out, anybody could. I had twenty-seven competitors so fast! (Laughter)

When we asked Nolan Bushnell to tell us about a time when he lost a game in life, he mentioned his having to sell Atari to Warner for twenty-eight million dollars. It was a loss to him, because he couldn’t move his company into retail consumer sales fast enough. But he made the decision with reason and intuition and went on to build other companies. At the time he visited our class, video games and his old company Atari were riding high with billions in sales. But conditions have changed since then, and so has Bushnell. His name now comes up as a backer of successful new technology.

Decisions are conscious (“I want vanilla ice cream”) and unconscious (“I want to fail in my new job”). It’s the unconscious decisions that too often rule daily behavior. Bringing unconscious material to conscious knowledge is the primary movement in effective decision-making. The best way to do this is to flex the intuition muscle by consciously making many decisions into yes/no ones every day - starting with today.

How do you know whether you have enough information, enough experience? Advice on this varies widely. R. Buckminster Fuller said, “When in doubt, don’t.” Songwriter and pop recording star Harry Chapin said, “When in doubt, do something.” And former Belgian prime minister Achille Van Ackere used to say, “I act first, then I think about it.”

The answer is to develop your own style; only you know what is right for you in each situation. Each time you experience your own creative resource makes it easier to experience it again. The more you make decisions from Essence, the quieter your VOJ. And the quieter your VOJ, the sharper your observation; you begin to pay attention without worry or mind chatter, and you begin to build up the wisdom to make good decisions. And the more sharply you observe, the more profound your questions. Either you find the problem or it find you.

Replace frustration with simulation. As you pay attention to what happens with yes/no, you’ll increasingly see ways to get to your intuition quickly, without the long frustrating periods of beating your head against a wall. Meanwhile, you might want to try the following four-step simulation based on some remarks by Dean Arthur Hastings. We recommend that you approach it as a meditation; sit comfortably, with your eyes closed.

First, diffuse emotional desires. Allow yourself to accept whatever outcome your intuition gives you. Our students find that reminding themselves that there really is no right or wrong way to go - that “This isn’t for keeps,” that the decision isn’t really important in a cosmic sense or even in terms of their whole life - helps them to divest themselves of any emotional wishes or desires.

Second, clear and calm your mind. This usually means relaxing physically or using a meditation technique.

Third, put the question in your mind. Don’t try to work on it or strive for an answer. Have no expectations. See the question in your mind’s eye. Hear it inside. Wait for your answer.

Fourth, observe. What is the answer? What are your reactions to the answer? Imagine the outcome of the decision that comes.

Almost all men… have strange imaginings. The strongest of these is a belief that they can progress only by improvement. Those who understand will realize that we are much more in need of stripping off than adding on.” - Doris Lessing

The interesting thing is that each move off by itself is nothing exceptional. If any one move was done two feet off the ground, it would be no big deal.

The other relevant issue is that my motivations for soloing the Edge were not ego-driven, but instead were very personal and internal. In fact, I never told anyone I had done it. I simply reached the top, enjoyed the cool morning air, and hiked down the descent route. I think I went home and took a nap and read the afternoon paper. I don’t think anyone would have known about it had it not been for a few climbers in the canyon who saw me top out. - Jim Collins

Through a series of seeming coincidences, Bilich was presented with exactly that type of job with F.A. Hoyt. And once he got to Hoyt, a leaser of garbage collection equipment, he was able to triple pretax earning in four years - by applying what he had learned during his monastic period about being himself about being himself, about having compassion for himself and others.

I had come to love myself, not in a selfish way, but just to recognize who I am, that I am a person of value, and I have that value to give to my fellow-man. And in giving to that fellow-man I will get something in return for it, but the real joy is giving, not receiving. Once I discovered that, and learned that I could love myself, then I realized that I could truly love others because I knew how it felt.

She [Martha] said, “I’ve got it.” I said, “Got what?” She said, “The shipment, I’ve got the cases you loaded on the S.S. America in Hamburg.” I said, “That’s impossible.” She said, “They’re in the station wagon.”

I went out and looked at the cases, and I said, “How in God’s name did you do that?” She said, “I had Lisa by the hand and Karen in my arms and went up to the stevedores and said, ‘These two kids can’t eat unless you get me those four cases off the boat.”” (Laughter)

Well, she’s really the founder of Dansk. (Laughter) Give credit where it’s due. If she hadn’t got those cases I wouldn’t be here talking to you today. - Ted Nierenberg

This led to an invitation for Peter and his colleagues to give about two-hundred seventy-five speeches on the McKinsey “Eight Basics of Putting Excellence into Management.

The same can be true for you. If you are having difficulty knowing yourself, try reviewing your background and the contributions made to your beliefs and qualities by your parents in particular. Note both the negative and the positive aspects, and consider how they have affected you thus far. Try writing them down and studying them. Recall critical incidents in your childhood, reexperiencing them as vividly as possible. Appreciate the richness of your heritage.

You aren’t doomed to follow your parents’ negative traits and failures, nor are you entitled to their successes. But by examining and questioning your background, you give yourself a degree of self-knowledge that allows you to make choices.

Of course you don’t have to meditate to consider what would happen if your desires came true. In class we ask our students to write down what they would do if they received tax-free inheritances of various amounts: ten thousand dollars; fifty thousand; two hundred fifty thousand; seven hundred fifty thousand; a million and a half; five million.you might try writing down your own answers before reading about our class findings. Just section off some paper with the various levels of inheritance and write briefly about what you’d do with each windfall. Start with the smallest.

Clustering. This is a word and visual game that engages your inner mind in the discovery of yourself. The technique is used by writers to get unstuck about a topic and gain new insights. Play some relaxing music and get comfortable so that you can concentrate and become absorbed in concentration.

In the middle of a piece of paper write a key or nucleus word or phrase - such as “money” or “being ordinary” or “myself” - and draw a heavy circle around it. Then free associate another word that comes off the first word. Write it down, circle it, and draw a line between the two circles. Let your mind go free on the topic and continue to write words, circling, and connecting, stimulated by either the nucleus word or any of the others.

Work quickly and easily, almost impulsively. Don’t let your analytical mind get too involved. If you get stuck, try doodling; connect the circles with lines; draw in arrowheads; touch up or go over your circles. Then see if there is anything more coming out.

Be playful. Just let it flow at random. Be ordinary. Allow the words and connections to happen. Have faith that they are within you and you are merely allowing to come out.

Wouldn’t it be more valuable to your company, and more fun for you, if you considered your working world a celebrity arena rather than a bloody one? Almost automatically, such an approach accomplishes several things:

It stimulates the best of your analytic skills. Like a dancer or a quarterback, you fit your movements into an overall plan, with fluidity, precision, accuracy, and grace.

It deepens your intuition. Like an actor, a shortstop, or a golfer, you listen with interest and respect to your own inner voice as well as to your director or coach.

It eliminates destructive competition. The string section of an orchestra knows that the goal is not to kill off the percussion section. The goal is to establish synchronization and to make harmonic contributions to an intricate whole.

It develops skills serially and painlessly. Professional athletes, musicians, and actors consider each performance a rehearsal for the next one, knowing that perfection comes only with persistent practice. As Lama Sogyal Rinpoche said in our class, “Slowly, slowly - is fast.”

It develops concentration, efficiency,accuracy, and humor. Painters, writers, skiers, cooks - artists of every kind - discover early that good things move in when fear moves out.

The classic reference to the Taoist approach is Lao Tsu’s sixth-century-B.C. work, Tao Te Ching. It gives directions for achieving the Taoist state of being. Here’s one from Chapter Sixty-six:

Why is the sea king of a hundred streams?

Because it lies below them.

Therefore it is the king of a hundred streams.

If the sage would guide the people, he must serve with humility.

If he would lead them, he must follow behind.

In this way when the sage rules, the people will not feel oppressed:

When he stands before them, they will not be harmed.

The whole world will support him and will not tire of him.

Because he does not compete,

He does not meet competition.