Creative Success Now (eBook)

How Creatives Can Thrive in the 21st Century

Astrid Baumgardner (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2019 | 1. Auflage
200 Seiten
Indie Books International (Verlag)
978-1-947480-75-9 (ISBN)

Infos

Creativity is a highly valued skill set that drives a significant portion of the global economy. It does not depend on a random stroke of genius, but instead on inspired hard work that creatives dive into, fueled by a sense of purpose and meaning with the potential for well-being and happiness-and a job that pays. This book lays out a three-part Creative Success Now Methodology consisting of the mindset, authenticity set, and skill sets that can empower you to pursue the creative life-both for your personal journey toward success and because the world needs your ideas. Ultimately, this book will help you to solve the many problems you encounter as a creative person so that you can live as a successful creative in the twenty-first century.

Textauszug

CHAPTER TWO

Your Creative Success Road Map

This book is here to guide you to creative success with a methodology that is grounded in the principles of positive psychology. To give you a sense of how positive psychology relates to your creative success, here’s one tantalizing truth revealed by research:

Happiness breeds success.

That’s right.

Perhaps you believe that you will only be happy when you achieve your milestone goal of getting tenure at a prestigious university, publishing a bestseller, or making a million dollars. The research shows otherwise. When you are happy and optimistic and experience positive emotions, you are able to cultivate the kind of mindset and engage in behaviors that give rise to greater success and fulfillment. In other words, success flows from happiness.1

The Advantages Of Being Happy

There are well-documented advantages to being happy and experiencing positive emotions.

Positive emotions make it possible to be more creative, thoughtful, and open to new ideas. When we feel positive, our brains are flooded with feel-good chemicals like dopamine and serotonin, which in turn help us to work more effectively, organize and retrieve information more quickly, and become more skilled at complex analysis and problem-solving.

People who experience positive emotions are less stressed and physically healthier. In the workplace, people who experience positive emotions are more productive, make more effective leaders, and enjoy higher performance ratings, higher salaries, and greater job security.

Moreover, 40 percent of your capacity to be happy is within your control and depends on your own behavior.2 The Creative Success Now Methodology provides you with many tools and strategies that help to change your mindset and behavior and lead you to experience greater happiness—and success.

The Creative Success Now Methodology

With these principles in mind, here is the Creative Success Now methodology in a nutshell.

PART I

The Creative Success Now Mindset

• Persevere with the Growth Mindset. The journey to success starts by adopting the Creative Success Now mindset. The first aspect of this mindset is perseverance: the drive to build on your talent and intelligence by taking risks, persisting, and bouncing back in the face of challenge and setbacks and learning from your mistakes.

• Get in the Flow with Positivity and Proactivity. You will continue to build the Creative Success Now mindset by embracing positivity to find your flow and proactivity by taking the initiative and creating your own opportunities.

PART II

The Creative Success Now Authenticity Set

• Play to Your Passions and Strengths. Next, you will delve into defining your authentic self, starting with passion and strengths. You will learn how to tap into the power of your passions—the energy that inspires creativity—and to play to your strengths—the natural gifts that you proactively apply to maximize your talents.

• Align with Your Values and Your Purpose. You will continue to define your authentic self by finding and aligning with your values—the principles that run your life—and your life purpose—how you create meaning and put your talents and passions to work to make the world a better place.

PART III

The Creative Success Now Skill Sets

• Commit to Creative Goal Achievement. The next step is to build key skill sets for achieving creative success. First, you will learn how to make your dreams come to pass by creating inspiring goals, breaking down your goals into manageable steps, and making a realistic action plan.

• Overcome the Creativity Killers. To help you when you hit a wall and feel that working toward that big dream seems impossible, you will learn how to overcome the three top obstacles to creative success: perfectionism, fear, and compare-and-despair.

• Master the Principles of Creative Time Management. To help you manage the many different balls that you juggle as a creative, you will discover a system for focusing on your important work and setting your priorities accordingly, along with a host of tools for managing your time and your energy.

• Create Your Personal Brand. Now it’s time to connect with the greater world. You will learn how to stand out from the crowd and connect with the people you are meant to help by creating your personal brand.

• Engage in Effective and Effortless Networking. You will learn the secrets of effective and effortless networking to build your mutually supportive circle of professional friends.

• Sustain Your Creative Success. To sustain your creative success, learn the three principles of financial management and create your support team.

BONUS: To continue on your creative success journey, Appendices D and E lay out an ongoing system to help you keep track of your progress and recharge your creative life with strategies of innovation.

To assess where you currently are in your creative journey, download the Creative Success Roadmap from my website at creativesuccessnow.com/CreativeSuccessRoadmap.

My Creative Journey

My journey started twelve years ago when I almost died. I would never have predicted the outcome.

On March 5, 2007, I had a small outpatient procedure. Just thirty-six hours later, I was lying on the floor of the emergency room at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Hospital with sepsis—a rampant infection with an over 50 percent mortality rate.

For five days, my life hung in the balance. I had four major surgeries and was in a coma for ten days. Then, on my birthday, March 16, I woke up from the coma. I was a true mess: I couldn’t walk, talk, eat, or use my hands—but I knew that I had come back for a reason.

Before that, I felt I was cruising along. I had been a successful partner in two law firms, the former deputy executive director of the French Institute Alliance Française of New York City, and a partner in a start-up. I was consulting to nonprofit arts boards and studying at Juilliard, not to mention embracing being the mother of two great kids with a wonderful husband and friends, a daily exercise routine, and an active cultural life.

After I recovered from sepsis and was discharged from my month-long hospital stay, my productive life was transformed into one of rehab, physical therapy, and another major surgery.

In October 2007, as I was lying on my couch recovering from surgery number five, I heard a voice that said, “Astrid, you need to get up from that couch and help people with their difficult life transitions.”

That’s how I discovered life coaching: a way to share positivity and courage and help people transition to a better life. I decided to dedicate my life to coaching creatives because what they do matters to making our world a better place.

Just thirty-six hours after a small outpatient procedure, I was lying on the floor of the emergency room at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Hospital with sepsis—a rampant infection with an over 50 percent mortality rate.

Within a month of discovering life coaching, I signed up for coaching school, and six months later, started my coaching business, working with creative lawyers and early-stage professional musicians. I also discovered my passion for teaching. Soon, I was doing career workshops at Juilliard. Whatever I didn’t know, I researched and studied. I solicited feedback, information, and guidance from friends and colleagues. I experimented with different teaching techniques and workshop ideas, and I practiced coaching and teaching on pretty much anyone who would listen. Along the way, not only did I develop a great business, but I also discovered that I, too, was a creative.

In 2010, I was invited to guest lecture at the Yale School of Music, a graduate school within Yale University, and a year later, I joined the faculty and administrative staff to create our school’s Office of Career Strategies. I’ve been there ever since, teaching and coaching the next generation of brilliant musicians and passionate cultural leaders. My business has extended to guest lecturing at leading music conservatories and arts leadership training programs, as well as to career transition programs. And I continue to work with individual musicians, arts leaders, and creative professionals to help them achieve their visions of success.

Creating your success builds on what you as a creative already know how to do: work hard to solve a problem in a new way. You have the inner gifts to ride the wave of transition and confusion that characterize our world. This book will show you that you can succeed in the twenty-first century as a creative by tapping into your inner gifts and following this book’s methodology to empower yourself to success.

I am privileged to teach and coach world-class professional and pre-professional musicians, brilliant arts leaders, entrepreneurs, and creative business professionals. When my students and clients incorporate the principles...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.12.2019
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Beruf / Finanzen / Recht / Wirtschaft ► Bewerbung / Karriere
• ISBN-10: 1-947480-75-8 / 1947480758
• ISBN-13: 978-1-947480-75-9 / 9781947480759