Tag Archives: Creativity

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Stay positive and keep smiling

Positive

We’re living through strange and unprecedented times. Many of us are worrying about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our loved ones, our own health, our employment and our finances. And with the lockdown in many parts of the world many of us can’t see family and friends for the foreseeable future. Not surprisingly, we might be feeling a bit blue…

What can we do to cheers up ourselves and others around you?

Here are a few ideas for staying positive during this unsettling time:

  1. Join the Teddy Bear Hunt in your neighbourhood. Prop a teddy bear from a window of your home (or car), visible from the road so little kids (and not-so-little adults)could play teddy bear spotting when they go for walks with their families around the neighbourhood
    🧸
  2. Don’t have a teddy bear at home? Make rainbows or display any other colourful drawings and positive messages on your windows.
    🌈
  3. Tune your singing voice, polish your dancing moves and join the #QuarantineChallenge2K20 with your nearest and dearest.
    💃🏽🎙🎤🕺
  4. Do a workout with your children, pets or flatmates.
    🏋🏻
  5. Stay crafty and creative
    😃😃😃

Fly

Any other ideas?
Add them in comments to this post
and
Stay positive and keep smiling

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Be like a child…

“Be like a child – clear, loving, spontaneous, infinitely flexible and ready each moment to wonder and accept a miracle.”

Mother Meera

grayscale photo of toddler smiling

Photo by Jessica Lewis on Pexels.com

“Just because we’re adults, that doesn’t mean we have to make life all about work. Learn how play can benefit your relationships, job, and mood.

In our hectic, modern lives, many of us focus so heavily on work and family commitments that we never seem to have time for pure fun. Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, we stopped playing… But play is not just essential for kids; it can be an important source of relaxation and stimulation for adults as well.

Playing with your romantic partner, friends, co-workers, pets, and children is a sure (and fun) way to fuel your imagination, creativity, problem-solving abilities, and emotional well-being. Adult play is a time to forget about work and commitments, and to be social in an unstructured, creative way.

Play could be simply goofing off with friends, sharing jokes with a coworker, throwing a Frisbee on the beach, dressing up on Halloween with your kids, building a snowman in the yard, playing fetch with a dog, acting out charades at a party, or going for a bike ride with your spouse with no destination in mind. There doesn’t need to be any point to the activity beyond having fun and enjoying yourself. By giving yourself permission to play with the joyful abandon of childhood, you can reap oodles of health benefits throughout life.

Fun

The benefits of play

While play is crucial for a child’s development, it is also beneficial for people of all ages…

Play helps:

  • Relieve stress.
  • Improve brain function, prevent memory problems and ward off depression.
  • Stimulate the mind and boost creativity.
  • Improve relationships and your connection to others. Sharing laughter and fun can foster empathy, compassion, trust, and intimacy with others.
  • Keep you feeling young and energetic.

Play

Play and relationships

Play is one of the most effective tools for keeping relationships fresh and exciting. Playing together brings joy, vitality, and resilience to relationships. Play can also heal resentments, disagreements, and hurts. Through regular play, we learn to trust one another and feel safe.

Trust enables us to work together, open ourselves to intimacy, and try new things. By making a conscious effort to incorporate more humor and play into your daily interactions, you can improve the quality of your love relationships—as well as your connections with co-workers, family members, and friends.

  • Play helps develop and improve social skills.
  • Play teaches cooperation with others and is a powerful catalyst for positive socialization.
  • Play can heal emotional wounds.

healing

How to play more

Incorporating more fun and play into your daily life can improve the quality of your relationships, as well as your mood and outlook. Even in the most difficult of times, taking time away from your troubles to play or laugh can go a long way toward making you feel better.

It’s true what they say: laughter really is the best medicine. Laughter makes you feel good. And the positive feeling that comes from laughter and having fun remains with you even after the giggles subside. Play and laughter help you retain a positive, optimistic outlook through difficult situations, disappointments, and loss.

Laugh

Develop your playful side

It’s never too late to develop your playful, humorous side. If you find yourself limiting your playfulness, it’s possible that you’re self-conscious and concerned about how you’ll look and sound to others when attempting to be lighthearted.

Fearing rejection, embarrassment or ridicule when trying to be playful is understandable. Adults often worry that being playful will get them labeled as childish. But what is so wrong with that? Children are incredibly creative, inventive and are constantly learning. Wouldn’t you want to be childish if that is the definition? Remember that as a child, you were naturally playful; you didn’t worry about the reactions of other people. You can reclaim your inner child… The more you play, joke, and laugh—the easier it becomes….”

From The Benefits of Play for Adults

Fresh

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Leverage Diversity for Greater Success

From http://thefutureleadershipinitiative.wordpress.com

As Adam Vaccaro points out, diverse workplace might ultimately create better results, as some new studies suggest.

“The study, detailed by NPR, looks at the work of scientific researchers and finds that papers written by multicultural teams were cited in other research more often than those written by homogenous groups. In the world of research, citations are seen as a metric of quality.

Ethnic diversity wasn’t the only harbinger of success. The same study also found that groups with members from geographic areas-perhaps three cities in the same country-also created better papers than those with members from the same place.

“It’s a matter of looking at individual teams and making sure they’re different perspectives, different points of view, different backgrounds,” NPR’s David Greene says.

The principle isn’t an entirely new one. The idea that different perspectives result in better work has been explored from a more macro-economic perspective, as research shows that diverse cities experience more economic growth. The idea is also at play in research showing that companies with females on their boards financially outperform those that don’t (have females on their boards).”

From http://www.meritor.com

People tend to think of diversity as simply demographic, a matter of color, gender, or age. However, groups can be disparate in many ways. Diversity is also based on informational differences, reflecting a person’s education and experience, as well as on values or goals that can influence what one perceives to be the mission of something as small as a single meeting or as large as a whole company.

Diversity among employees can create better performance when it comes to out-of-the-ordinary creative tasks such as product development or cracking new markets… The researchers found that informational diversity stirred constructive conflict, or debate, around the task at hand. That is, people deliberate about the best course of action.

Diversity is the crucial element for group creativity. Innovation teams tasked with creating new products or technologies or iterating existing ones need tension to produce breakthroughs, and tension comes from diverse points of view. This is the opposite of groupthink, the creativity-killing phenomenon of too much agreement and too similar perspectives that often paralyzes otherwise great teams.

From http://www.nissan-global.com

 According to McKinsey Quarterly, between 2008 and 2010, companies with more diverse top teams were also top financial performers. That’s probably no coincidence. There are many reasons companies with more diverse executive teams should outperform their peers: fielding a team of top executives with varied cultural backgrounds and life experiences can broaden a company’s strategic perspective, for example. And relentless competition for the best people should reward organizations that cast their nets beyond traditional talent pools for leadership.

Leverage Diversity for Greater Success

😉

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Blogging for authenticity in the world of fake smiles

From https://psyport.files.wordpress.com

We long for acceptance, love, and connection. But often we don’t know how to create it in the world full of fake smiles and empty greetings. In the world of sweet dreams where everybody’s looking for something…


I think this longing for authentic communication is what drives people to blogging, both as bloggers and as readers.

In the blogosphere, we do not know each other personally, so we don’t get distracted with the usual ‘surface’ features like age, gender, social-economic status, ethnicity and therefore don’t get blinded by the usual stereotypes and prejudices. We can take off the mask and be more real and genuine without fear of repercussions.

From http://www.tribal-truth.com

 The creative side of blogging also gives us plenty of room for exploration. Like writers, getting in the ‘skin’ of different characters in their books, we can explore how we might have felt if…, or what we might have done if… We can move away from the logic of the everyday routine life and let our imagination roam free.

From http://lawofattractionatoz.com

 What is so special for you in writing blogs?

Or why do you keep reading?

 

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Clock this: One can do good in any field of endeavor

“One can do good in any field of endeavor.”

( from ‘A writer’s Diary’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1876 )

Trevor Baylis OBE - Supporter of The Climate Change Challenge
From http://www.climatechangechallenge.org/

Clock this: My life as an inventor
by Trevor Baylis

(excerpts)

“Our factory in Cape Town opened in 1995… The words BayGeb Power Manufacturing blared out from a white board in bright-blue lettering three feet high. BayGen is short for Baylis Generators and it was the first time I’d had my name emblazoned on anything…

I had been party to all the plans and knew we were setting up a multi-racial factory employing people of different abilities. But none of our discussions had prepared me for the emotion of seeing our grand plan in action. On the same production line were people of all colours and talents. It was a totally integrated workplace – black, white, brown, male, female, English, Afrikaans, Xhosa… The limbless working next to the blind, deaf people in partnership with the able-bodied, wheelchairs and crutches among the benches, the feeble co-operating with the strong…

It was very humbling. The girl smiling at me there is blind. The bloke sitting at the bench – deaf. Those two guys pushing the heavy trolley have only got two legs between them…

All of them worked with rhythmic precision, chatting and laughing. A few singing along to a Freeplay radio (the name we gave to clockwork radio)…

The factory is partly owned by Disability Employment Concerns, an agency sponsored by the Liberty Life Foundation. They are responsible for training the 35% of the workforce who have handicaps. All the workers – able-bodied and disabled – earn the same and their rates compare well with other factories…

As I walked along the line and chatted to the people making the radios I was overwhelmed by their warmth towards me. “This is the first job I’ve had since I lost my arm,” said one young man clasping my hand in his. “I can go one better,” said the blind girl sitting next to him. “This is the first time anyone ever employed me”…

Walking around the plant was like a tonic. People in Africa have a wonderful capacity for laughter and enjoyment, whatever they are doing. In Britain, we may be better off, but our lives seem harsher and more embittered by comparison. There was more undistilled delight there that morning than I’d met in a long time, and for me it was a reawakening.”

From http://ashleaturner.blogspot.co.nz/

The Clockwork Radio
created by Trevor Baylis

This extremely clever ‘wind-up radio’ was developed by the British inventor ‘Trevor Baylis’ for Third World countries where affordable energy is scarce or non-exsistent. This radio uses no batteries and does not need any electricity to run it. It is powered by an internal clockwork generator, which when fully wound up provides enough electricity for long periods.

The clockwork product is not a new invention. The Victorians used this mechanical system quite extensively. Their clockwork toys incorporated this mechanism. What is innovative is the way in which ‘Baylis’ has used this simple but effective means of creating electricity to both help the people of the Third World and to develop a product which is selling extensively in Western Europe.

The radio has been personally endorsed by Nelson Mandella.

Photo courtesy of Freeplay FoundationFrom http://cuso-vso.netfirms.com

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