Michelle James – Creative Emergence

Foreign.

Something really new emerges. It's met with resistance. Just look throughout history, all new inventions, all new paradigms, all new ways of seeing something. Looking at the earth is initially met with a lot of resistance. That happens in us a lot of times the way it would happen in a human. It could be. So you're going for a run and have all these great ideas, and. And then by the time you get home, you're like, well, they'll never buy that. I can't do this because I can't see. Your own inner resistance will often talk you out of it, because one part wants this new birth, the other part wants to maintain the status quo. The most important piece of it is to acknowledge it, to not just assume the resistance, not deflect from it. If it's somebody else, like, well, they're just being resistant, or. Or they'll never go for this. Or if it's in yourself, it's to say, wait a second, is what I'm saying true? Or could this be my natural resistance?

Welcome to the mindtrax podcast with breakthrough ideas to live your best life possible and how to make it happen. I'm Paul Shealy, and today we'll be joined by Michelle James. Michelle James is a creativity catalyst. She's a pioneering coach and facilitator known for creating original, dynamic, and imaginative learning environments. Michelle helps people shift from focusing on what's wrong to focusing on what's alive and what's next in their communities, corporations, nonprofits, or government agencies. Michelle is the founder of the center for Creative Emergence and author of Pattern Breaks, A Facilitator's Guide to Cultivating Creativity.

Hello, Michelle. So good to be with you again. Thanks for being a part of the podcast here.

Thank you so much for having me, Paul. I'm very excited to be here with you.

I love your work. I always have. We've known each other for decades, and you've come out with a new book called Pattern Breaks. I can see it over your shoulder there. And the idea of creativity is so important to you and to me, and you've done such a beautiful work of representing that in the world. And I'll also say that your work is so much more than that. And I would like you, if you would, to just speak for a moment of why creativity is important to all of us.

Oh, gosh. All right, so I'll try to encapsulate your life path into a few minute moments. Well, the reason. So, first of all, I would start with, I believe it is the way nature creates. I Believe it is the way the universe creates it is life generating life. We have an animated, animating, creative life force within us. And so that, you know, it's the force that makes a flower bloom, a tree branch, you know, the. And their cycles, the tides, the ocean. So we live in a inherently creative universe. Nature is inherently creative and we are creative beings. So I, I see it as. It's already embedded naturally in who we are. And sometimes we've been socialized, educated, or traumatized or programmed out of it. But if you look at kids or any kind of animals, when they're born, you know, they're in their natural creativity, creative exploratory mode. So I believe it's important because I believe it's the essence of being human.

I love that. And I've always sensed that your work aligns us with that creative essence. If we can connect with it, we're literally connecting with that life force energy. And you use the word emergence. We'll get into that. I'd like to talk for a moment before we do about this important zone that we want people to be in in order to align with, with the true life force energy. And it's a place that, that's between the stable and the known and the chaotic emergence. That is something that most of us are trying to avoid. It's an unknown and it's. It's scary. So there's this place called the comfort or creative zone. Would you talk about that?

Right, the. So the creative zone, which actually is each person kind of has their unique creative zone because we each have a different relationship to how much stability or how much chaos or how much dynamic tension between those we can navigate. But the creative zone is that place between stability. Everything's familiar, everything's going, you know, same old, same old, which there is comfort in that. There is something to be said for, for something reliable. And then chaos is, you know, just complete upheaval, uproot. And in both cases, if there's too much stability or too much chaos, we are not at our highest creative aliveness. And they've done a lot of research. So the place between that is called the creative zone. And they've done a lot of research that at the. It is at the edge of chaos, not in chaos, but at the edge of it, that we are our highest, at our highest, most creative alive. Think of it like riding a wave. You know, when, if you are on a stable lake, there's no momentum. If you are under the wave and you crashed under it, you're not going to Be riding it. But it's on the wave while you're riding it that you have access to. We be able to turn and flow and do everything creative. So part of my work, and I, I know yours too, in your ways are, is to help people get to that edge of chaos where they are not in the chaos but with their, in their highest creative potential. They're in this.

Neat. Yeah. And I've always talked about the tsunami, the waves of change that are hitting humanity over and over and over again. And it's, it's not going to be calm water at the end of this wave. It's going to be the next wave. So it's a really good idea to hone our skills of catching that energy. Potential, because that's potential energy that we can turn into motion, movement, kinetic energy to get us where we want to go. Right. So let's celebrate the chaos when it comes.

Yeah, absolutely. It's sort of like instead of expecting at the end of a wave, the ocean is suddenly calm forever out it's learn how to surf, you know, develop the skills to navigate the waves, to ride them, to be able to have choices within them. You know, mastery level isn't just being able to ride something or be resilient with it, although that's part of it. It's also being able to intentionally navigate it. And so when you become, when you don't expect that no waves will come, but you develop the tools and techniques and skills to, to be able to navigate them, then your whole mindset begins to shift as a wave being something potentially more fun, exciting and creative versus only a threat.

Yeah. And that's why when someone says, gee, I really have this problem, I always go, yay. You just identified a place where we can tap. That's, that's really helpful. Right?

Yeah.

And, and we have two built in tools. One is left hemisphere that is really good at convergent thinking. And we have a right hemisphere which is really good at diverging and seeing possibility. Could you talk about the importance of both of those capacities and why we need to leverage both?

Sure. I think it also speaks to the essence of creativity is always this dynamic balance between sort of two opposing energies or forces. And that's where most creativity emerges. So every creative process has both the divergent energy where there's an opening and exploring, a staying open and imagining different possibilities, and a convergent process where you're starting to ground it and you know, make it in the list, write things down. And a lot of times, unfortunately in our efficiency era, people Will skip over the divergent. And so when they go right into meetings or go right into their life and they just wake up and immediately start doing lists. And it's from what they already know. The importance of the divergent part first is it takes us into explore the unknown. It takes us into explore new possibilities and new potentials. Then we ground it, we structure it, we make it real through more dive convergence. It's important not to skip the diverging.

Excellent. Well, you use the term unknown. And this has always been such a key piece of your work and a reason that I always harmonize with what you do. So I want to talk about our relation to the unknown. You talk about we can have a focus on problems, we can have a focus on outcomes and we can have a focus on emergence. And each of those ways of thinking about our thinking has a different relationship to the unknown. Could you speak to those a bit?

Right when. And, and each of those has a place too. So there's a definite, you know, sometimes in, in a situation we focus on the problem and that leads us to something or we focus on the outcome and then we. But emergent being emergence focused, it contains the other two is how, how I see it. And I see when we're only problem focused, only then the unknown is always a threat.

When we become more outcome focused, the unknown, you know, has more potential and possibility. But when we're emergence focused, it's like the unknown is filled with.

A new paradigms, new way of being, new new gifts. And so I think our relationship to how do we see the unknown, what metaphors we use to how we see the unknown will completely change how we navigate what we don't know and how we navigate the creative process. Is it a threat to be feared? Is it something to be navigated? Is it something to, you know, indulge? Is, is it a gift? Like an ongoing gift?

Yeah, I love that. The idea that we could be loss averse. And if a fear is associated with the unknown, our mindset is avoidant. And the other one that you and I are really encouraging is to move to creative.

Yeah.

Because this field of unknown and in quantum physics they talk about it is this is the essential place from which all creation emerges. And our highest state is to be able to connect to that. Especially when we don't know what's next. So could you talk about creative versus avoidant?

Right. Well, those are two very different relationships to the unknown. So we're a lot of the ways we. Because we're very.

Supported in what we know in our culture, which is great. We. We don't tend to give. We don't tend to recognize people when they're just like, well, I'm not sure yet. I don't know yet. And so there is a social pressure to know. And so if it happens that we are stumbled across something we don't know, depending who we are, we may want to avoid that. That may seem like a threat. It may for any kind of reason, from anywhere, from saving face or feeling ashamed or feeling just terrified. But if we embrace the unknown as something that is creative or an invitation to create, just like we do in improv, you know, just like there's so many places where the unknown is an invitation to create. If you embrace it as an invitation to create, then suddenly you're more empowered in it. You have more autonomy, you have a more of a voice. You're not just a victim of the unknown, you're actually a participant in using it. So the unknown, because I believe creativity happens where the known and the unknown meet. And so you're actually now bringing those together to create something new, and that is emergent.

Well, and I'm thinking of oil and water. And there's this meniscus. There's this threshold point. And if we can be at those threshold moments in our lives and just breathe for a moment and let it be okay to not know. I mean, that's how all learning starts in our lives. But there is so much pressure when we go to school. What? You don't know the answer to this? Oh, you're going to fail. And one of the things I always loved about doing improvisation with you is this invitation to embrace failure. That failure is fun. Mistakes are. Okay, Say a bit about that.

Sure. And just to say you said such an important part, that I think would be really helpful for people to know that it's also holding space, not rushing to fill it, because we want to avoid it. Allowing ourselves to be in the ambiguity for a little while, allowing ourselves to be in that not knowing and seeing it as, you know, an incubation, you know, a way, a place where of discovery. So to talk about failure. Well, in improv, you actually don't have time to process something as failure.

One thing now our listener might not know what improv is. So just say just a moment about that improv.

So I was talking about improvisational theater. I spent many years doing improvisational theater, and then now I do a lot of applied improv in my work. You know, how do you apply the principles and practices of improv in the real world, like in corporations and organizations and educational and so when I'm saying improv, I'm talking about improv theater based activities or learning.

Because a lot of people know it as improv comedy. Like they'll go to a comedy show or they'll see a show on TV that has improvisation. Here's an idea. Run with it.

Yeah, so that is improv performance. Absolutely. And that came from improv theater. And then there's applied improv where your goal isn't to entertain or perform, but your goal is to more, you know, think on your feet, think more creatively, bond more as teams, be more resilient and adaptive yourself. And so what I'm, I'm actually talking more about applied improv, but it stems from principles and practices learned in improv theater. And when you do enough improv theater, you, or when you just are okay with improvising, you have a different relationship to failure or mistakes because you mess up some. So many things don't work out the way you plan and you're doing it in a low stakes, low risk environment. So there's no, nothing horrible happen. But you practice enough in a low risk, low stakes environment that you become more resilient, adaptive, improvisational and creative. And a high risk, high stakes. So when you do enough improv things constantly, you're constantly faced with the unexpected. That is the nature of it. Even if you are super controlling by immersing yourself in there long enough, you have to eventually let it go in order to do improv. So it trains you out of it. And so then when something doesn't work out one way, you kind of go into a new choice or do this something else or do you're, you're automatic into exploring, trying to solve the problem or fix something in a new way. You don't spend time in oh, I'm such a failure. Oh, that failed. Because it takes away from the play, it takes away from what can emerge. And so you do that enough in low stake, low risk environment, you begin to embody that. And beautiful failure doesn't even have the same heaviness.

Excellent. So it might be helpful to talk a bit about safety because there are three big fears that we all face. I talk about the fear at the level of the gut, the fear at the level of the heart, fear of the level of the mind. In your work, you talk about fear of being unworthy of what's coming, fear of getting kicked to the curb or being thrown out and being alone because people didn't support you in the idea and the other is just fear of your physical safety. So how do you help people really get that they have safety even when those three big fears show up?

Right. So there's emotional safety, psychological safety, physical safety, and then there's. People are also very afraid of the unknown. They're afraid of failing and they're afraid of making mistakes. And that comes sort of fits in all, all of those. I think there's no one right way to do it. But the general principle for that is allowing doing this yourself or if you're with a group, allowing people to explore together in low risk, low stakes environment and also allowing things. So when.

People do make a mistake or they are wrong, it's so accepted in that on environment that it becomes less charged. It becomes it's not something to be afraid of. And also if you're just doing it yourself, allow yourself to try things that you're new at and you're not an expert at and you know, you'll probably make mistakes or not be great out of, out of the bat. Allow yourself to put yourself consciously in situations where you're not the one who's necessarily going to automatically look great right away. And by doing that little bits at a time, those little steps, it adds, it builds an inner resilience that you can just put yourself in higher risk situations and not be so worried.

Okay, so resilience, I've heard a couple of times in our session, is maybe the gold standard that gets us or allows us to hold space, especially when there seems to be a negative consequence of failure and mistakes at least perceived by us. And I also want to say that there is always a starting point for us in venturing into the unknown and that's resistance. So let's talk about our relationship to resist resistance and some of the ways in which you have helped people move from that into resilience.

Yes, I love, you know, I happen to love talking about resistance. It's one of my favorite things because it shows up almost in every emergence process at some point along the way.

Oh yeah. I mean, I'm a guitar player and somebody said, why don't you come play with my band? I said, sure. So they're at a bar, it's, you know, 7 o' clock on a Sunday night. There's a few people, they're not a big deal. I bring my guitar and I said, I am here ready to play. And then they say after the break, you'll, you'll play. And I'm figuring I'm going to play lead guitar along with the band. And all of a sudden they say, okay, Paul, you got the mic. Go for. I'm thinking, wait, what? So now I'm, you know, and I was thinking, that's why I'm here. I'm here to play. Let's find out what happens. And then I got invited back. So I said, I must not have done too bad. But that initial shock was like, yeah, sing What? Where? Right?

100%, yeah. There's so many. God, there's so many layers in that. And just that little story. I love it. But we'll stick with the resistance and say, yeah. So I look at it as, well. I started noticing in myself and in everyone I was coaching or working with, that resistance would show up somewhere along the way. And there were certain patterns that were similar, and then there were certain things that were individual. But one thing I started also thinking a lot about, you know, is resistance is embedded in all of nature. You know, when any new birth, think about the chick and the egg, you know, the chick, the, the chick wants to hatch.

The.

There's a resistance of the shell trying to keep it until the creative life force, energy bursts through. And then it happens. Human birth, there's. It's laborious. There's.

Well, and I'll say about the chick is if you help it, it doesn't develop the neck muscles that will allow it to survive.

Yeah, right, right. And like the butterfly, like, you don't want to easily, too easily help something out to make it comfortable because they don't. It doesn't develop that resilience and that strength and, you know, the, the flower bud, you know, holds the flower until you're ready to create. Human birth, it's laborious. There's. One part wants to maintain the status quo and another part wants to move forward with the creative energy. So that's true in all of nature. So every individual, every team, every system will be met when something really new emerges. It's met with resistance. Just look throughout history, all new inventions, all new paradigms, all new ways of seeing. Seeing something, looking at the earth is initially met with a lot of resistance that happens in us a lot of times the way it would happen in a human, it could be. So you're going for a run and have all these great ideas and. And then by the time you get home, you're like, well, they'll never buy that. I can't do this, because I can't. So your own inner resistance will often talk you out of it. Because one part wants this new birth, the other Part wants to maintain the status quo, the most important piece of it. There are several ways to navigate it. And. And they can get more complex. But the most important piece is to acknowledge it, to not just assume the resistance, not deflect from it. If it's somebody else, like, well, they're just being resistant, or they'll never go for this. Or if it's in yourself, it's to say, wait a second, is what I'm saying true? Or could this be my natural resistance? Could this be a part of me that really is trying to maintain the status quo, that's actually trying to work for me? And so by acknowledging it, pausing, giving it space, you can talk it, journal it, think about it, but you get to know more. Is this. This naysayer, Is that just resistance? And often the acknowledgment of it. And then. And just like in. In any kind of birth, if the birth is going to happen, it doesn't matter if you feel the resistance or not, that birth is going to happen. It works better when you say, all right, there's some contraction here, there's some whole pushback, and I'm going to give birth anyway. You know, similar with your creative ideas. Okay, there's some resistance here. It's okay. And I am going to create this anyway. Like, in a birth, there might be some resistance, and it might not be comfortable, but the creative energy will emerge as long as it's acknowledged. That's the first and most important part.

I love this because I read a book by Steven Pressfield called the War of Art, where he's talking all about resistance. And your book Pattern Break is so wonderful because it really details out so many different ways in which resistance shows and then how we can also move through it. The important thing is we don't immediately turn on ourselves and attack ourselves. I'm sabotaging. Why is my mind against me? No.

Yeah.

If you have in one hand the part of you that's resisting and the other hand the part of you that's trying to help you succeed by creating new, realize they're both trying to help you.

Yes.

And if we can get an internal dialogue and as you say, an inquiry. I just love that you do such a great job of suggesting so many awesome questions in that inquiry. You have a template which I absolutely love. And if you recognize that resistance is going to be a natural part of every new idea that shows up, your relationship to it is absolutely going to change. And just embrace is coming to pass, not to stay.

Yeah. And it's different for different people, depending where they are in the creative process. So sometimes you'll see somebody or, or how the, or how you create with somebody. So for a visual thinker, they might have more resistance around some sort of kinesthetic or movement based way of creating, whereas a more left brain dominant kind of thinker might have. Not feel, might feel more resistance around visual thinking. But all of us are designed for all types of creating and creative expression. And it is okay if you, sometimes you have resistance because it's not familiar. Sometimes it's really not as alive for you. But just even knowing that a part of you is trying to resist something. Not everyone resists everything in the creative process all the time, but eventually does come up when it's something new. And so sometimes someone won't resist anything with their creative art. You know, if they're an artist, they may not have any resistance around that, but there might be a resistance around how do you frame it and package it to make money, you know, and somebody else might not have that, but they have so much resistance to a blank canvas.

Yeah, excellent. So this idea of.

Trust is also really important. When a mother is ready to give birth, they have to go and trust that process that things are going to work out. And a lot of times when the fear starts to emerge, there's a lot of shutting down. And in, in that in all creative process, there is this yin and yang that's involved. And when you first showed me your model about Yin and Yang in the creative, I absolutely resonated with it really well. Now there's a beautiful chart in your book and I would love to have our listener get a sense about the, the two parts, the yin and the Yang. When we're in balance, why it's so important that we recognize these two forces are both essential for the life that our ideas are going to bring to the world, Right?

Yes. So at one level, yin and yang are really just sort of two. They seem like they're opposing energies, but they really are part of a dynamic whole. It's sort of a dance. You need different energies to be creative. And so, for example, structure and flow. You know, left brain, right brain, you know, whole, whole brain. That's why people say whole brain. There are so many different energies that you need to create your being and doing, reflecting, you know, and then carrying out. And so where we get into trouble is when we're get into more either or thinking. Because either or thinking, if it's too polarized to one side, then you don't have access to all the creative potential. So you want to think about the dynamic dance or the dynamic balance between two seemingly opposite forces. And one quick way to do that is to try to change an either or into a both and, or a yes and. And sometimes it seems impossible to do at some level. And you have to level up your way of thinking. You actually have to start with questions like how might they. How can I create a larger narrative? How can I create a larger story for these two to fit in and both be true? You know, it's like paradoxical thinking. So one level, it's sort of paradox on one level, makes sense at the, at another level, you know, because both are true. But it is when. When we're in balance and we kind of are, you know, balanced between, like, movement and stillness, or you could just pick any kind of creative forces there that every dance has, that every create, every creative unfolding has some sort of balance between a structure and flow. For example, part of it is the creative energy flow, part of it's the structure. If you're too out of balance, then you go in, you experience the sort of shadow side of.

The part that's out of balance. You don't experience the, The. The benefits of it. So, for example, structure. If you're too out of balance and structure and there's not enough flow, you can become very rigid. And if you're too out of balance in flow and there's no container, you know, then. Then it's hard to do anything. It's hard to ground it, it's hard to form it and shape it and make it into something. So a lot in the book, I list a lot of opposites and then how that I find are common in most creative processes. And then how do you keep them more in balance? And a lot of it is just being aware that.

It doesn't matter always if it's comfortable, because some things are not going to be as comfortable. But how do we bring more of the opposite in to help it. Help our creative project have a life? Yeah.

Excellent. You know, I love starting my workshops with one of the exercises, and it's great also on zoom, and it's called the Discovery Walk exercise. Could you say a little bit about how that works?

Yes, that is when I created that one many, many years ago. And I still use it a lot because it is.

It's about embodying distinction.

Yeah, it helps people embody the distinction. So the first. Your first will. And you could do this yourself. You don't have to facilitate like I. You can do this yourself. You get up and just truly walk as if from the known. Like, walk like you're the expert or you have knowledge and you're known. See how, observe how you walk around the room. Do that for a minute or so and then go into walking from the unknown. You don't know. You do not. You are in the unknown. Well, what you see as you observe, most people, they stop, they look down, they, you know, the movement stops. And then the third piece, which we can do, you can do this physically and you could do this mentally. Then you change the unknown. You're still in the unknown, but now it becomes you're in discovery. So you change. You don't know, you still don't have all knowledge. You're not the expert, but now you change it into discovery. So with every step, you're discovering a little more. And what you see is people will go from kind of frozen to, you know, open. And now they're more in divergent space, open, looking around, exploring and discovering. And then sometimes I'll even have them go and home, which is a very divergent activity. And then sometimes I have them go into, into then fascination and hone in on something and become fascinated by it and try to hone in on something in the room that you might not otherwise notice. And everybody always brings back something that no one else noticed. And they kind of became the expert in by going into fascination. So it's the key piece there really for our purposes here, is going from changing the unknown, the, the fight, flight, or freeze of being in the unknown into you can literally say to yourself, how do I. I'm in the unknown, I'm uncomfortable, whatever it is, your truth. How do I. What can I start discovering? What can I start discovering? Just that question will open. And then if you want to practice walking it, doing the discovery walk, go from known to unknown to discovery. You will start to embody the. How do I embody? Like, oh, let me get into the discovery stance. What can I start discovering? And it might even be just something online. It might be something in your life or something to start writing, but.

Takes the unknown as a threatening, uncomfortable thing and makes it into, oh, something new can emerge.

Yeah, I've always loved this idea that perhaps the best thing anyone gets from any of my workshops is the ability to tolerate ambiguity and also to embrace paradox. Because so much of life is this paradoxical arrangement of opposites. And your work has always been to enfold all of that as an opportunity for us to be creative. So really want to thank you for your life of work and the impact that's had on all of mine as well.

And likewise, thank you for your life of work and the amazing impact it had on mine.

Thanks so much. Well, we'll have just a mutual admiration society forever. Okay. And I. I know we need to kind of wrap it up here. I'd like to have you talk just a little bit about what's on the surface and what's under in the ground in terms of how we show up in the world and where it is going. From our podcast here out into your world. What might you consider.

Sure.

So.

There are many ways to enter that question. That's such a rich, beautiful question. I would say. What's on the surface in our conscious mind? What we're conscious of is a certain little section. Like if you think of an iceberg or a mountain, you know, it's just a top.

And then this is who I am. This is how I show up.

This is who I am. This is how I think. I'm this. I'm not this. Oh, I'm not creative in this way. I am creative in this way. Oh, no, my brother's that kind of creative. I'm the, you know, whatever. It's all the stories that we carry with us all the time. And then underneath that there's the creative unconscious. It has all these options and possibilities. It's sort of where people get the aha moments or an intuitive hits or the glimpses. And that's the. That comes from the below the surface, you know, below our everyday conscious awareness. It comes from a deeper part. And that's the part that off sometimes are resist. It'll bump up against our conscious awareness, our resistance. And so we'll have this amazing vision of wouldn't it be great to do this? Or. Or your deeper level. Even though the larger level of your creative source, like your soul's wish and hope and dream and something so alive in you wants to surface up and it shows you a vision or an impulse or an idea of what's possible. And if we listen to only the conscious level story, this is who I am. This is how I am. This is what you know, this is not what I am. We might go, oh, oh, yeah, that'd be nice. But that's not me. Or that'd be so and so instead of indulging it. So there's. There's sort of the creative unconscious and then there's almost this super conscious part that's even goes deeper that I would feel for people that, you know, it's it's the idea of if you feel like you're called to something or you have a calling or you have a mission or a purpose, it. Because once you access your purpose, and I work with people in their purpose all the time, and I can say all of them are creative in some way or another. Once you access your purpose, that feeds into all the possibilities in your creative unconscious. And then if you're open for your conscious mind and open that up, then all of a sudden you can be conscious of so many more potentials and possibilities to form and shape out into the world.

Beautiful. That's. I would almost want to just drop the mic at that and head off the stage. Curtain drop. But, But I, I would like to say just a shout out to your book on pattern break. You make a beautiful statement right up front. It says disrupt. Disrupt the norm in some form. Then something new and different emerges. So could you just give perhaps a final thought as we wrap today?

Yeah, well, that was sort of how I located, you know, the, the, the name pattern breaks because I thought what's common into every creative process, at some level, it's like something's one way, something shifts. Whether we do it consciously, we disrupt the norm or the norm gets disrupted.

Yeah, big. That's. That is such an important realization. We can do it by choice or it's going to happen anyway.

Exactly. Life is going to dis. Patterns. Life is going to break our patterns for sure. If we become conscious pattern breakers, conscious norm disruptors, and we make it, we can even decide to approach it more like a fun game, you know, more like. And then we become that. It. It's like we become more adaptive again, resilient. You know, we become more.

Embodied as a pattern breaker or norm disruptor. Then when life's norms, that life presents us with disruptions, it's easier for us to navigate it. One part of the book is an invitation to consciously break your patterns as, you know, an individual, a coach, a facilitator, a teacher, whatever you do. If. And you can start very small, just, you know, oh, I normally do this this way. What if I tried it another way? What if I took a class or learned something or. Or just watched a YouTube video that isn't in my norm. What if I watch something that even isn't in my normal value system, like just to hear, just to break the pattern of how I think people think or others think? You know, what if I try something that is so not me? And again, you can try it so little and you might discover you know. Yeah, I didn't like it. It's not me or but you become more.

Adept at responding to life's pattern breaking. And more importantly, through the pattern breaking.

Openings and ideas and options and possibilities that you could not have imagined in the old pattern will show up and that can shift your life.

Yes. And so for everyone's life, shifting toward the full expression of their life purpose. Thank you so much Michelle. It's always great to be with you.

Likewise. Thank you so much for having me.

Bye for now.

Foreign.

I hope you enjoyed our conversation with Michelle James. You can learn more about michelle@creativeemergence.com that's C R E A T I V E M E R G e n c e.com and now in the second part of the podcast, it's just you and me. I'll tell you how to use the paraliminal sessions in the MindTrax app to easily handle obstacles and move toward the success you want, especially as it relates to Michelle's message. If you're new to the relaxing paralyminal audio sessions, they use breakthrough technologies to activate your whole mind in only 20 minutes to help improve any area of your life. Let's get going.

Welcome to the follow up to my conversation with Michelle James and the work that she's into in creativity, problem solving and creative emergence.

So many great ideas that can help us to really live more fully aligned with that vital life force energy that's expressing through us and helps us to actually overcome the problems that we face, capture the energy of change that's coming in and help us get to the further expression of our true nature which is inherently creative. We are naturally born learners and we can solve problems no matter how gnarly those problems may be. As I was thinking about what paralyminals might go well with the dialogue that I had with Michelle, I thought of five different areas. One is the area of creativity and emergence. The second is the concept of creating safety for us so that we can be at that threshold between creativity or creative zone and chaos. And that's where all the action is. Right? The third is the idea of confronting resistance and actually finding a deeper trust in ourselves because trust in ourselves but also trust in the creative unknown. Right? Because that's going to be a natural part of any change that comes to us. We're going to first have and natural resistance to something shifting. The fourth area is the idea of stepping into the creative unknown and finally is developing a creative practice, something that is nurturing beneath the surface for that expression of ourselves above the surface. So the first area was the idea of creativity and emergence. And I do have a paralympical called creativity Supercharger. So anytime that you have a particularly interesting project that requires some creative energy, this one really focuses your minds, the left brain and the right brain, your whole mind, on the creative activity and being able to move from very convergent thinking to very divergent thinking, very holistic thinking, very helpful. Use our whole mind when connecting with that creative source within us and also getting to the real outcomes that we need. Second area is the area of creating safety. Because if we're not feeling safe physically, emotionally or psychologically, naturally we're going to be shutting down and it's going to be essential. Especially the more important the change work needs to be, the more significant the tsunami that's coming in that's perhaps disrupting your life as you know it, the more essential it's going to be that you move through that those natural fear responses that could emerge. So for me, the best one to get into would be the fearlessness Paralimal creates. Safety puts you on track to let's get going and let's move into that creative zone, that creativity zone that's available to us.

The third area is the area of confronting resistance and finding trust within. And.

When resistance comes up, as it naturally will, it's usually because of one or of two major reasons. One is we don't think we're up to it. We don't have the necessary resources to be able to handle the situation that's coming or we're just blowing it out of proportion. That's way more than we might have imagined. And generally people have a tendency to awful eyes. Soon as a problem comes up, soon as it's important for us to make a shift, we move to awfulizing. And then yeah, it's a bigger thing than it needs to be. So the parallel that helps so much with this is called get around to it. And there are two sessions to it. One is to really focus on a specific task. The other is our general pattern of self sabotage which causes us to avoid when we move to avoidance instead of moving into creation, that's when resistance wins, right? So we want to recognize resistance, use get around to it. It's super at the beginning of any project that you might be heading into and certainly anytime where you see, keep backing away from it instead of leaning into it. Get around to it. Super powerful. The fourth area I want to talk about was stepping into the creative unknown. Our relationship with the unknown is an important piece of the Dialogue that I got into with Michelle. I have always loved her work from that standpoint. She didn't refer to it in this dialogue, but I've heard her talk about the unknown as being a fertile unknown instead of a foreboding and dangerous unknown, instead of the unknown being a void. It's really a place of profound possibility and resourcefulness. And stepping into it requires that we have the courage to do so. And I have found in coaching people through decades of this kind of work, it's important that people have a sense of their own self esteem as learners, as.

Creators, to be able to take this important next step for them. And this is where the personal genius parallel is so helpful. Anytime we're at that threshold of the unknown and it requires that we step up our game, personal genius really helps you to know you've got this, you can do this, it's going to work out.

The final area is the idea of developing a creative process. At the end of our dialogue, Michelle and I talked about what's above the surface and how we refer to how we see ourselves, what's our narrative, what's our story about who we are and what we can do. And then below the surface is all of those subconscious programs about how we imagine ourselves and how our relationship with possibility. And there are two parallel that I'd recommend here. One is called finding Treasure, which gets you to actively sort for, look for, seek out and notice those little things in your environment that can be the treasures, the breakthroughs, the insights, they'll help you get to the next step and where you want to go. And the other parallel is called youthful vitality. Youthful vitality? Why would that have anything to do with creativity? Well, hang on just a moment. It's based on a science called neoteny, which is retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood. And one of the things that we started out with in our dialogue is the idea that children naturally, they don't have the boundaries, animals of every species, that they're playful, right? They just naturally go and explore their worlds. And some of those more childlike, not childish, but childlike characteristics are still within us. They're still available to us to be more playful, to be connected to that youthfulness, that vital way of approaching our lives and our world. And again, tolerating, tolerating ambiguity, embracing the paradox of this doesn't make any sense to me. I'm just gonna go get curious and start exploring. And it's making your life a discovery walk as we had talked about it. So developing a creative process would include finding treasure and youthful vitality. I hope all that helps. Go ahead and listen to them. They're a part of your MindTrax app. Enjoy and break through the next creative limitation that you might see in your life. All the best.

Thank you for joining me today. I applaud your willingness to maximize your potential. You can easily use the paraliminal audio sessions in the MindTrax app to stimulate your non conscious mind, I.e. your inner mind, to reduce any resistance in your life and to propel you toward the success you want. Go to www.mindtracks.com go. That's www.mindtrx.com go.

These amazing audio tools have helped millions and I encourage you to bring them into your world today. Be sure to be back for more episodes of the mindtrax podcast. You'll find insightful conversations with authors, experts and thought leaders all devoted to improving your life's experience. Thank you again for being here on our MindTrax podcast.

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