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Practical creativity: how you create and experience your world

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Your brain is a meaning-making machine. At all times, your imagination and creativity are actively creating scenarios and potential outcomes in your head. How you experience your world is mostly a creation of your perspective and beliefs.

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While situations create emotions, our thoughts and beliefs about a problem often run the show. I previously shared the cybernetic loop in a blog post about how stress and anxiety block decision-making.

Practical creativity recognises your mind’s role in how you experience your world: what do you want to create? 

You can awfulise and catastrophe: allowing your inner critic to judge and tell you all that is wrong with you. Your anxiety and stress limits can be pushed by imagining the worst-case scenario. Your relationships can be strained by thinking the worst.

You might go the other way and dissociate into fantasy, creating in your mind an idyllic scenario where everything is perfect. Do nothing. And nothing changes.

Or you stay present and look at yourself and others through the eyes of compassion, practising the self-awareness of emotional intelligence and creating opportunities to change the situation and your relationships for the better. Continue reading Practical creativity: how you create and experience your world

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How stress, fear and anxiety rob us of the ability to make good decisions

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While the news media is only partly to blame, making a killing of FUDGE (fear, uncertainty, doubt, greed, and envy), they are not the sole culprits. We live in a world where fear, stress, and anxiety are normalised. Each one of us chooses, on some level, to play this game. Or at least, we pretend that we have no other choices.

But, how do we make good decisions from a state of fear, stress and anxiety? In many ways, we’re hampered by tunnel vision, unable to see options broader than the scope of escaping the immediate threats that we perceive. We move towards safety rather than seeing the broader opportunities available to us. Continue reading How stress, fear and anxiety rob us of the ability to make good decisions