Finding Inspiration

If you are in a  "production-centric" church, it is easy to become creatively dry. After all, when you are assembling a new production every seven days, there isn't much time for much else. And if your field of focus gets narrowed to the seven-day-deadline, you can find yourself recycling the same stuff over and over.  Internal provisions can run low.  (For the record, this isn't only true of churches. It happens in business, academia, art...)  Without fuel, the creative spark dims.

David Wahlstedt of Crosspointe Community Church in Carrollton, TX  introduced me to a great quote by Theodore Zeldin...“Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet they don’t just exchange facts; They transform them, reshape them, draw different conclusions from them, engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn’t just reshuffle the cards, it creates new cards.”

We all need new cards from time to time, and they aren't actually that difficult to generate. It is often simply about being exposed to something outside of your normal circle.  That exposure creates a richer, deeper, more interesting well to draw from with regard to creativity.  Luckily, the digital world makes for an easy delivery system straight to your desktop (or headphones).  Here is a short, easy list to try if you find yourself creatively running low:

1) Download unlikely MP3's.  Though music is primarily the domain of the right side of your brain, some types of music access both right (creative) and left (logical) sides of the brain. There has been a lot of study in early childhood circles of the affects of music that has 60 beats per minute--such as Mozart-- on memory and thinking.  Simply changing genres of music can help you think in new ways.  So, explore urban, country, showtunes or zydego--whatever you don't currently have in your playlist.

2) Load up your RSS Feed Reader. Professional graphic designers typically subscribe to publications such as Communication Arts for visual inspiration. And you already probably have Church Production on your desktop which gives a great window into what is happening across the country.  There are a number of sites that provide daily  feeds. Smashing Magazine (which offers a ton of free downloads) , Better Living Through Design (creative products--interesting both in enginering and aesthetics), Typographica (all type...all the time) and Make are just a few. Do some surfing and see what you discover.

3) Expand your circle of friends.  Do something you don't normally do to meet people you wouldn't normally meet.  If you are interested in learning to paint, play harmonica, cook, paraglide--or any other activity on your "someday when I have time" list--do a Google search and find the group in your area that does that. A group of hobbyists centered around an activity is your quickest entry point to something new--even if it is just via an online forum.  Having an interesting activity outside of your normal circle of friends can actually feed inspiration back into that circle.  And if you do wind up getting away from your computer and into an activity--bring a family member along so they can share the joy too.

Bonus tip...Sometimes the best way to gear shift through a creative dry spell is to...spend some time in a beautiful place all by yourself doing nothing.  Unplugging is a very healthy way to recharge. Even just 20 minutes where you are not in charge of anything--not producing anything--can be amazingly effective both physically and spiritually. Just sitting in the grass with the sun on your face and letting yourself breathe can make even the most Type A creative more productive when they re-engage.

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Update:  Just after posting this, Karen Mrvich in Acoustic Dimensions' San Diego office gave me a book called Caffeine for the Creative Mind: 250 Exercises to Wake up Your Brain by Stefan Mumaw and Wendy Lee Oldfield.  The book is a lot of fun and though the exercises are simple (and in some cases seemingly pointless) engaging in random creative challenges turns out to be surprisingly effective.  The goal of the book is to improve your ability to generate ideas, and hey....they generated 250 of them.

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