“We call ourselves creators and we just copy.” ~ Lauryn Hill
You are not alone if you copy what you see, feel and hear. Most of us fall short and prevent ourselves from being a creator.
So how about creating something new — whether for your yourself, your lifestyle or even for the rest of the world?
The topic arose yesterday morning when I got together over coffee with a fellow creative who is both photographer and magazine editor.
The conversation was animated and energized. We shared lifetimes of background experience plus a few moments of grief. We marveled at each other’s aha! moments and times of personal awakening. We also discovered our common threads of love, beauty and creativity. It was a gift for me to to connect with someone else whose heart forges the motives behind how she lives and what she does in the world.
As creatives finding pleasure in outside-the-box conversation, place, time and perspective constantly changed around our bistro table as bold energies and subtle ideas passed between us.
One idea we discussed is how frequently people adopt common thought and consider it their own. We discussed the power of peer pressure, the need to follow and how the familiar fear of being rejected from a larger group eclipses the confines of our middle school and adolescent years. Powerful connections to popular thought are imbued into the human emotional psyche. Left untapped, they can last for a lifetime.
Most of us go along to get along. We refrain from expressing our creative side. We bottle up unique inclinations and, in our worst sense, stifle our personal development from achieving full expression.
So what does all of this have to do with my latest podcast? Just about everything.
You Can Be a Creator in the World
My inspired conversation with a fellow creative kept me in a positively charged atmosphere until we parted. Preparing to leave the restaurant, I approached the bistro bar and discovered my reverie broken by several arresting news images displayed on a TV screen.
All of them involved fear, uncertainty and upsetting imagery. The news reports featured two U.S. cities and a foreign capitol where people protested, some engaged in violence and law enforcement entities were brought into the mix.
There it is, I mused: Social dissatisfaction, disruption and unrest. Again, it was being fomented and fueled among socially splintered identities, affinities and ideologies.
This news imagery and verbal reporting presented the latest “opportunity” for myself and others to react emotionally, viscerally, verbally — and perhaps even physically. It was the latest social invitation to react rather than create, to follow, fracture and fight rather than influence and lead for something better, higher and more unified.
We can continue to fight against all we don’t agree with in this world. We can continue to wage war against a number of issues — even as we profess peace. From a different perspective, we can detect a note of continuing, collective insanity.
But is there anything else we can do?
I hope you find my latest podcast entitled Reactor or Creator to provide you with an alternate way of thinking. We can keep following and finding fault, or we can adopt a new way of being.
With a nod to Mahatma Gandhi’s advice to “Be the change you wish to see in the world,” tune in for an empowered sense of living in a world that truly needs to see the change it claims to desire.
Click here or on the link below for Podcast 114: Are You a Reactor or Creator?
Want More?
Musical inspiration: Whether you’re creating for yourself, a loved one or even for the rest of the world, click here for Aretha Franklin’s 1968 hit, I Say a Little Prayer for You
Reading Inspiration: For more inspiration on becoming a creator rather than a reactor, check out my Influence book, updated with lots of new content for 2017.
Newsletter Access: To gain access to my upcoming newsletter and a free copy of my Favorite Happiness quotes, click here.
Maura is an International Speaker on Influence, Leadership and Emotional Intelligence.
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