Cultural Creativity

The Power of Curiosity

May 15, 2017 3:22 PM

This article was written by guest authors Rachel Hentsch & Sally Coldrick from InfinityFoundry.

What is the innermost power that drives us to explore, discover and learn? We are all born with it, yet early on we are often taught to restrain, or even stifle it. Its name is Curiosity, and it is the birth gift of every child and newborn living creature.

Young children are naturally inclined to investigate and experiment— before their experience is tainted by reprimand, negative outcomes, and ultimately, compounded prejudice. As an entrepreneur, being curious and asking a thousand questions will naturally make you more open to change, growth and expansion. Entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, and really anyone in business needs to rediscover the roots of their inner curiosity to keep asking, tirelessly, in order to stay tuned to what really matters, and build with a view to creating relevant impact.

So how can curiosity be rediscovered and cultivated? You need to make a conscious effort to recognise the signs of your curiosity when they arise, and then be brave and make a deliberate choice to act upon your spontaneous impulse, before it gets smothered by the acquired habit of removal. When was the last time you wanted to ask a question, but didn’t feel comfortable doing so, or got distracted? What did you miss out by not asking? What opportunities may have slipped by, out of apprehension, embarrassment, or possibly sheer laziness?

Leaning into your curiosity takes courage. Making a choice to act on your curiosity when it arises means getting brave and stepping out of your normal and “safe” pattern of behaviour. Brené Brown, in her book “Rising Strong”, writes: “choosing to be curious is choosing to be vulnerable, because it requires us to surrender to uncertainty.”

Once you reawaken your appetite for curiosity, you will never stop learning, and you will rediscover the joy of expanding your knowledge and reach over the world. Curiosity has the power to make us reach far beyond our perceived limits. Run, don’t walk out of your comfort zone!

Curiosity took Sally from Australia and Rachel from Italy, and “collided” them in South Korea at the MIT Global Entrepreneurship Bootcamp. It further took them to Boston to attend the Teacher’s Bootcamp in the same program. Then curiosity led them to build a business and create online courses to share their discoveries with the world. Take their free mini course The Curiosity Challenge if you feel ready to unleash the limitless power of your own curiosity.

photo credit: Gabby Orcutt

The Power of Relationships

May 4, 2017 5:38 PM

Every relationship you develop, from the most casual to the most intimate, serves to help you become more conscious.

You are taught to honour others, yet often this is one of the most difficult acts you can perform. For not only does it require you, first and foremost, to honour yourself, it also requires you to come to know yourself. In a larger sense, your relationships are spiritual messengers, they bring into your life revelations about your own strengths and weaknesses.

Some of your relationships may be particularly painful (and necessarily so) as they’re here to help you to learn about yourself and your limitations. You may not be so enthusiastic to explore these “less attractive” aspects of self, yet recognizing your power to make choices and how they affect your world is the power of relationships. Your painful relationships help you to understand that every choice you make contributes to what you create. Choice is the process of creation itself.

Every choice you make is a creative act of spiritual power for which you are held responsible. Managing this power of choice, with all its spiritual and creative implications, is the essence of human experience. Yet you can’t know the full outcome of any choice you make, and so you may find yourself trying to control your life, and the life of others. Disappointment inevitably ensues since, try as you might, the physical world (and the people you are in relationship with) cannot be controlled. Your desires and whims are not for life to serve you on a silver platter.

Which returns you to the place where the greatest power you have is how you choose to behave in your relationships. Your relationships (especially the painful ones) help you to master your inner responses to the external world. They teach that you get to choose your thoughts and emotions.

The power and challenge of your relationships is to learn what motivates you to make the choices you do. In learning about what motivates you, you learn about the essence of your Self. Sex, power, and money are the currencies of relationships and your fear and/or faith is the energy you put behind this currency. This dynamic of choice, of fear and faith, guarantees you cannot run away from yourself or your decisions. For every outcome in some extent reflects this faith and/or fear.

To discover your personal motivations and your “false gods,” how you use and misuse the currencies of the physical world, you need relationships. So much of the way you respond to external challenges is how you respond to yourself. To guide you in developing a healthy and loving relationship with yourself, you have your relationships as a mirror. They are awakening you to your true personal power.

photo credit: Toa Heftiba

Tara Joyce

Hello! I’m Tara, a wizard of less obvious things. I love hearing from you, so please feel free to connect with me.

I deeply appreciate your support of my work—through allowing it to grow in your imagination, through sharing it with others, and through your financial support.

http://elasticmind.ca

Resolving Our Past

March 10, 2017 4:00 PM

We need to resolve our past, so we can expose our truth and move forward with our lives. We are drowning in our unresolved emotions. Unrecognized, they weigh us down. Depressed by them, we unknowingly hide and mask them.

So often we think our uncomfortable emotions away, doing everything we can not to feel the truth of them. Our rationalizations become what is real to us, and what we feel. What is not comfortable we do not acknowledge.

Disconnected from the truth of our emotions, we become unaware of what we truly value and love, and we find ourselves investing in things that are not right for us. Not acknowledging what we feel, we look to others to validate how we ‘should’ feel, using them to rationalize what we want to feel into ‘reality’.

We need to resolve our past and what is uncomfortable to us, so we can fully live our lives. To do this, we need to be vulnerable with ourselves and with others. This begins with accepting our fear of vulnerability, of intimacy, of our defenses being breached. It’s okay it feels more safe to feel in control and to remain hidden, it’s okay to believe then scary things won’t happen that we can’t handle.

While it is nice to feel we can make predictable our feelings and their magnitude, we simply cannot. At some point, we must surrender to our lack of control. We must hand over the tightly held and relinquish the guarded. Despite what we fear, our hearts will not break, we will not be in mortal danger. We can peer deeply in. We can feel our hurt and survive. We don’t need to protect ourselves from the truth of our feelings. What we need is to drop the mask and to reclaim our vulnerability.

When we don’t explore the emotions we find so uncomfortable, we create conditions that support others in avoiding theirs. Yet when we face our past and our truth, we make it easier for others to the same. There are always reasons why not to feel something, why not to be something, why not to do something. In helping our self take the risk of vulnerability, we release our self from our past and allow our self to move forward with our life. Being what we truly are, we support others in being the same.

Tara Joyce

Hello! I’m Tara, a wizard of less obvious things. I love hearing from you, so please feel free to connect with me.

I deeply appreciate your support of my work—through allowing it to grow in your imagination, through sharing it with others, and through your financial support.

http://elasticmind.ca

Criticize, Condemn, and Complain

February 6, 2017 8:47 AM

No matter what you do or don’t do, I always have a choice in how I communicate with you. You can’t make me do or feel anything.

If I choose to not consciously communicate, I am choosing to give away my power. Whether I am attempting to feel small or big in front of you, my unconscious words are reducing me to less than I am.

If you can stay steady in you, I can’t claim your power. Despite my anger-filled desire, my words can’t possibly do this. Nothing external can.

Only you can allow something external to reduce or deflate you. Even my careless words.

If I am not being anything but respectful and loving towards you, know it’s not about you, it’s about me. It just happens to appear to be directed at you.

It’s an optical illusion I like to perform. It helps the weight of my responsibility to magically disappear for a moment and appear on you.

photo credit: Chris Devers

Tara Joyce

Hello! I’m Tara, a wizard of less obvious things. I love hearing from you, so please feel free to connect with me.

I deeply appreciate your support of my work—through allowing it to grow in your imagination, through sharing it with others, and through your financial support.

http://elasticmind.ca

Standing For Accountability

January 31, 2017 5:28 PM

It seems we are being challenged at this very moment to stand for what we know is true and right. Whether we are being called to empower ourselves as we face political bullies, companies that abuse their power, and/or other entities that prey on our natural weaknesses, this is a time of great transformation and opportunity. It is a time for us to stand and to use our voices.

In my own world, I’ve been challenged over and over in the past weeks by broken systems that attempt to dehumanize our experience in an attempt to streamline their own operations. I’ve been asked by bigger businesses than myself to not be an individual, and to instead accept a one-size-fits-all solution, policy, and/or way of doing things. None of these approaches work for me. I am not willing to fit in, to go along, nor to be quiet, so as to make another more comfortable, more at ease, and more lax in their work and way of being. I am an individual and I demand to be treated that way. When I see that I am not, I understand I have a choice to continue investing my time, energy, and money in that system/business/entity or to not to. I never have to stay quiet and take it.

A paradigm is rising across our planet, made up of people like you and me who stand for love, inclusion, and integrity, and who believe we have a responsibility to stand for our rights and for the rights of others. We are awakening and coming together in unexpected ways and in unprecedented numbers to use our voices and to wield our personal power to break down old, corrupt structures. There is still much work to be done, and as we continue to integrate and heal the deep pangs of division we all feel, I find solace in how we are united in our quest. It is a moment when the enormous bully or perpetrator says, “Yeah, I did it. So what are YOU going to do about it?”

This is our moment. This is our opportunity. I believe in your personal power and in mine. I believe this is the moment where our ability to stand tall for who and what we are, and represent it as best we know how is most crucial. Please take good care of yourself so you can stay strong and bring your best self. We will make the difference.

photo credit: Scott Lum

Tara Joyce

Hello! I’m Tara, a wizard of less obvious things. I love hearing from you, so please feel free to connect with me.

I deeply appreciate your support of my work—through allowing it to grow in your imagination, through sharing it with others, and through your financial support.

http://elasticmind.ca