What’s new with you? Well what’s new with me is that I discovered a side effect to changing my diet which has now been going on for two or three months I think is here to stay. Now over the last three or four years I’ve been playing with diets, my energy levels were going down as I was becoming bigger. And I need a lot of energy for what I do. I’ve got five kids and I’m on the second generation, I’ve got a grandchild. I’m nearly 50 now so I wanted to keep my energy up.

So, I’ve been tweaking and playing with diet. And a recent change I made has a surprising side effect. Which is, I’ve been getting up earlier and earlier in the morning. So first off, it was about 6 am, then about 5:30 am and now I hover between 5 am and 5:30 am. Now, I’ve not set out to do this. I do not use alarm clocks. I naturally wake up, get up and ready for the day. Which has been great because you never what changes you make to your life, how they are going to impact and lead you to new areas.

Which leads us on to the topic of the day, creativity. Creativity matters in all walks of life. Now it makes sense for the arts. Music, writing, creative writing, poetry, painting, sculpting, all those wonderful things. But if you want to be an entrepreneur, creativity is key to that. If you work within any business setting, you’re coming up with challenges and problems constantly. And if you always do the same thing, you’ll get the same results, which is the definition of madness which I believe is from Einstein. So, we need to do something different in those situations to get a different outcome. And also, if you have children, or if you have parents. So, creativity when dealing with people can really make the difference.

So, what stops us as humans from becoming creative? Live the same day over and over again. So, what do I mean by that? Well, if you watch the same TV programs. If you do the same walks with the dog every day, read the same books, if you go to the cinema once a week, if you do the same things day in and day out, week in week out, year in year out, life passes you by. Creativity gives us spice of life. If you always go on holiday in the same place, so what I’m saying is your life becomes a rut. Creativity reduces down and the reason that is because you got no new input. Creativity relies on new information.

A clue to this was when I came across a friend of mine, Mark Fox.

Mark Fox was one of the youngest engineers at NASA. He worked on the Challenger. It wasn’t his fault it exploded. One of the ways that he keeps himself creative, he will read books on topics he knows nothing about. So, maybe it’s a book on knitting, maybe putting on make-up, fishing, trains, and then he’ll go to workshops. And the workshops could be on any subject, how to do screenwriting for example. Not because he wants to become a screenwriter, it’s just something he hasn’t done before.

Then maybe going to the theatre and seeing shows you wouldn’t normally see, going to the cinema and seeing films you wouldn’t normally see, watching documentaries or TV programs you wouldn’t normally see. So even if it is the Jeremy Carl Show, I know, it’s all new input. So, when you put new information in your unconscious mind has new information to act upon. And you never quite know what difference it’s going to be.

So, if you truly want to live an outrageous week, you probably need to expose yourself to some new information. Do something different. If you’ve never taken a full NLP Practitioner, go ahead and take it. If you haven’t done a hypnotherapy course, go ahead and take it. And if you haven’t done an ILM Coaching Level 5 course, does this sound like a sales pitch? It probably is. But as you know, we’ve got some courses coming up and it would be great to see you there because they’re new ways of approaching life. So, have an outrageous week until next time. I’ll see you soon.

John “Creativity” Cassidy-Rice and the NLP Excellence Team