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CREATIVITY

Creativity is fundamentally about expanding and enhancing our lives – it’s about tapping into our wealth.

 

At the core of this is a need to acknowledge the challenges we face and embrace our collective creativity to move beyond them.

 

This requires us to tap into our ability to develop cross cultural relationships, to eat, move and think healthily AND to live with our natural heritage in ways that are not polluting or prevent good living for others now or in the future. 

 

I can work with you to develop imaginative, original and insightful responses that result in genuine improvements.  I can provide you with the techniques and tools to help demystify and unearth the processes that lie beneath creativity. 

These tools also draw on psychology, neurobiology, anthropology and ecology. They can:

 

  • unblock your creativity

  • help you to develop lifelong creative habits

  • improve your creative fitness

  • encourage you to read, listen, analyse and respond innovatively to a range of situations including business, planning, design, health and sustainability

  • help you to tell stories

  • help you to imagine, visualise and make ideas happen.

USING CREATIVITY

I have been on mission to revitalise the significance of creativity for over two decades. My experience is genuinely interdisciplinary, with both practical and scholarly expertise in the arts as well 15 years’ experience lecturing, writing and speaking across university and the public and private sectors.  These diverse strands have been bought together through PhD research dedicated to enhancing our understanding of creativity.

 

Through a rich mix of influences – from working with leading film, TV, music and arts professionals, to front-runners in sustainability and health policy and planning as well as global watch dogs like the World Health Organisation – I have initiated projects such as hand building sustainable buildings, numerous photographic and installation artworks, costume and event designs, while publishing and presenting at national conferences.

 

Creativity is more than brainstorming and a kind of mental activity. I use practical tools based on mounting scientific evidence that shows we have bypassed the skill of listening with our hands, our bodies and our senses – our limited sensory intelligence has impacted the way we pay attention, explore, solve problems and build from day to day.

 

To meet this challenge, I use creative tools to help you recognise and include the qualities that come from creativity to enrich everything you do.

It’s from this mix of the arts, business, community, research and learning that I weave together  an understanding of how creativity and innovation can help us do things better.

 

  • But what is creativity?

  • How do we harness creativity? 

  • How can creativity solve problems?

  • How can creativity help us innovate and do better?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Photographic artworks by Barbara Doran

DID YOU KNOW?

Improvisation stimulates new ideas - new kinds of associations. Recent research mapping brain activity in jazz and rap artists have shown this in action.

 

Creative activities are uniquely linked to our memories and curiosity. More and more, we are finding evidence that the processes and practices of the arts   - be it visual, dance, music, film or writing  - causes us to think and link to one another (and our bodies) differently. 

 

In working with you I will help you to use your own unique, creative processes that attract and ignite
your passions. At the same time, I’ll work with you
to enhance your awareness of how and what your
are doing.

 

 

Working with your hands helps us bond and counter balances stress.  Neuropsychiatrists and evolutionary anthropologists have discovered that a variety of artistic practices help produce oxytocin – the bonding hormone that also helps neutralise cortisol, the stress hormone. 

 

Psychological studies in embodied cognition have found that moving our bodies helps stimulate new ideas. Drama helps generate ‘glimpses of insight’ and builds motivation. Even our posture regulates what kind of emotion we draw on: an assertive posture increases adrenaline and a downward movement stimulates depressed memories. Dancers and actors use this awareness to tell their stories.

 

We also know our imaginations rely on memory and our memories are ignited by using different kinds of materials and play. Intuitively we might know there's a difference between using pens, paints and charcoal but we can actively and playfully use them to stimulate our memories and imaginations

* See the library links for inspiring talks, books and links.

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