Melissa Dinwiddie | Create the Impossible™ | Innovation Keynote Speaker & Consultant
Empower your team to innovate on demand. Melissa Dinwiddie helps tech leaders Create the Impossible™ through playful, interactive workshops and keynotes. Unlock breakthrough creativity today.
Favorite negative emotions?
Yep, I’m back at it with my Emotions I Hate to Love series. I started with envy, and now I’m tackling another lovely gem, resentment.
If someone’s holding a gun to your head, this video may not apply to you. Otherwise, it probably does. That’s my guess, anyway.
Watch, and let me know what you think. Does this explanation of resentment ring true for you?
If so, where can you change things up to let go of some of the resentment in your life?
By the time you read this, I’ll be on my way to California Coast Music Camp, a week-long retreat that is pretty much my idea of heaven.
Well, except for the bathrooms and the mosquitoes. In heaven there will be no mosquitoes, and there will be luxurious, private bathrooms with clean, heated floors and extra-large showers. And plush, cushy bath mats. And whirlpool tubs. And maybe saunas too. And fluffy robes.
But I digress.
While I’m at camp, I won’t be making art for my ArtSpark newsletter (though never fear – if you’re a subscriber, I’ve scheduled an ArtSpark for every weekday that I’m gone). I will still, however, be playing in the Creative Sandbox; I’ll just be using sound instead of color and line as my playthings.
Retreats like this, in which you can leave the world behind and immerse yourself in your creative thing, are an incredible gift.
In fact, I’ve discovered over the years that, rather than a (in this case, rather non-luxurious) luxury, they are actually essential to my well-being as a creative.
Joy Agcongay writes about retreating over at Adventures of Joy, where she sings the praises of what I’d refer to as “micro-retreats”:
…taking time to tend to the important details that support me.
Eating breakfast.
Napping with a kitty nearby.
Reading a book.
Journaling. Arting. Writing…
Yes, yes and yes!
My time in the Creative Sandbox is that kind of retreating.
And (as Joy also recommends) I also say yes to more “formal” retreats.
To disconnect from the online world for awhile. Communing in 3-D with other human beings. Sharing ourselves and our gifts. Learning from each other. Trying new things. Reveling in being a beginner. Or an intermediate. Or wherever you are on the path.
An interesting thing I’ve discovered about retreats like this is that people (including myself) go for the music (or art, in the case of my art retreats) but come back for the people.
Human beings are social creatures (even us introverts), and the true magic that happens at music camp isn’t just the glorious sounds that seduce our ears. At CCMC (and my other annual summer camp, Jazz Camp West), music is the heart that pumps the blood, but the community – the family – that develops around it is the body.
If we were stuck together on an island for a year, if we had to deal with day-to-day survival and politics, we’d probably get horribly sick of each other. But one week in the woods feels like utopia.
It’s utopia especially if you can surrender to the experience.
Last year I took on a partially-subsidized position at camp, and found myself just as stressed out as I was at home. So much for my “vacation”!
I was in resistance and resentful (foreshadowing: watch for a video on resentment on Wednesday), and until I surrendered to my camp experience being what it was, I couldn’t enjoy it.
One of my greatest gifts from that year was the realization that camp is for ME, and that it’s worth the extra money to not have to work a job that stresses me out.
On the other hand, although I’d planned to take a songwriting class, I ended up taking a ‘ukulele class instead, and embarked on my love affair with my ‘ukulele.
“Discovering” the ‘ukulele was my other great gift from that year.
One year, much to my surprise, though I hadn’t played my viola in decades, I took a fiddle class the entire week at camp, and even took some private lessons after I got home. Magical.
I’ve learned to mark up the brochure, but not to make any plans. Let the experience evolve as it will.
This year? Well, I confess I’d love to come home with a brand-new song, and I’m eyeing the songwriting class. But I’m making no plans, saddling myself with no expectations other than to enjoy and recharge.
I’ll give you a debrief when I get home.
PS – What’s your favorite retreat? What would your ideal creative retreat be like?
I knew going to Jazz Camp West for a week would re-energize the music side of my creative life. What I didn’t realize was that it would also illuminate a lie I’d been telling myself.
To be fair, I didn’t intentionally tell a lie. But still…
Busted!
Watch the video above for the full story, which references my artist friend Michele Theberge, who I met during an interview for the Thriving Artists Project, and which culminates in the song below.
Or if you don’t want any deep self-awareness stuff to push your creative life forward and just want to be entertained in Uke Diva fashion, go straight to the “music video.” I’ll never know.
PS – If you did watch the first video above, what lies have you busted yourself telling yourself? Inquiring minds want to know. Let’s inspire each other!
I was nervous when I stepped into yoga class on Friday. It was my first class in close to a month, thanks to an inflamed knee, followed by a week away at Jazz Camp West.
The last time I was in class, my knee was burning so much I had to stop half way through. You’d think that six months would be long enough to heal from surgery, but apparently not when drilling into bones and installing cadaver ligaments is involved.
I have to admit it had me pretty down, this oh-so-slow healing process.
But Friday’s yoga class surprised me. Not only did I make it through the entire class, but my knee actually seemed happier and more flexible – able to do more – than the last time I was in class!
The night before that yoga class, I had a singing gig with my friend Bill, at a summer street festival in my town.
I sang a handful of songs solo, with my ukulele, until Bill arrived with his guitar. Then we switched to jazz standards – Great American Songbook songs. The kind of stuff Ella and Carmen sang. The kind of stuff I woodshedded on for years… until I picked up the ukulele last summer and started gigging in earnest with my original material.
On Thursday evening, I realized I hadn’t sung an evening’s worth of standards since the corporate holiday party I sang for last December!
And not only that. Though I used to meet with my vocal coach every week, for the past two years I’ve been frugally abstaining from lessons.
Yet, to my surprise, despite forgotten lyrics here and there (thank god for charts and music stands!), my singing felt more fluid, comfortable and in control than it ever has.
How can it be that a long time away leads not to disintegration, but to improvement?
In truth, I’ve seen this happen before.
I started taking modern dance classes again almost twenty years after leaving the professional dance track I’d been on in my youth. My muscles had of course lost the strength and flexibility of my serious-dancer days, but what I lacked in strength I made up for in an expressiveness and lack of self-consciousness I would have killed for decades before.
After months and years of not practicing certain lettering styles, I pull out my calligraphy pens and find that not only does it not take long to get up to speed, but my lettering miraculously has a new-found freedom and fluidity.
This post is not intended as “permission” to avoid doing the creative thing you most want to do. If you’ve spent any time here at all you know that’s contrary to what I’m all about.
It is, however, intended to relieve a little pressure.
It turns out that learning is not the linear process we tend to think it is. Progress, particularly in a creative skill, or in physical healing, would not be graphed as a straight diagonal line.
Human beings are more complicated than that. It turns out that the process of integration is more mysterious and magical than we might have given it credit for.
Clearly, in those weeks, months or years away from whatever it was I was on a break from, my body and mind were still processing. The stew was still cooking somewhere on a back burner, even though I was consciously unaware of it.
All this is to say, do whatever you possibly can to do your creative thing. But if for some reason you truly cannot, don’t despair. All is not lost. You may be surprised at what is, in fact, gained, when you’re able to get back to it.
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What about you? I know I’m not the only one who’s had this experience. Do you have a story of taking a break, and being surprised at the ways you had actually improved when you came back? Share in the comments below. Let’s inspire each other!
How does a creative person manage to do the things that are most important? To follow your Bliss(es), rather than getting bogged down by other stuff?
One necessary tool is the ability to say no – not just to stuff you don’t want to do, but to good stuff too. That’s the hard part: you’ve got to learn to say no to the good, in favor of the great.
If you’re on my mailing list, watch for a little gift from me very soon, to help you clarify and pinpoint your Goods versus your Greats, and figure out what you can let go of to make way for what you really, really want. (And if you’re not on my mailing list, you can sign up to the right.)
PS – Did this video make you think of some “good-but-not-great” things you can let go of, to make more space for your Blis(es)? Let us know in the comments what you’re ready to give up to get more Great in your life!
