How I developed a methodology to bring creativity into the flow [»Be Water my Friend«]

ARTICLE

THE DEEPER THE ROOTS, THE HIGHER THE WINGS CARRY YOU

After leaving an agency I had co-founded and led for seven years, I embarked on a new path to advance my personal and professional development.

I found myself facing a series of questions I had never deeply considered before: »Where are you in your development?«, »What possibilities do your skills offer, or what skills do you actually have?«, and »What are the limits of your creativity?«

The first answer was straightforward: »I am at the beginning of a new phase in life.« The answer to the second question was also easy at the time — today I realize I answered it only superficially: »I am creative and offer design services to companies.«

However, I had no answer to the third question. While I had a sense of where the limits of creativity might lie, I was aware that this sense was no more valuable than a guess. I wasn’t certain at all.

Even though I was heavily focused on getting the new studio up and running, the question of the limits of creativity wouldn’t go away. I began to take notes in my sketchbook to visualize my thoughts. Because even if one perceives connections as coherent in their imagination, it doesn’t necessarily mean that these theories hold true in practice. This allowed me to test whether certain ideas were not fully thought out and inadvertently discovered a new layer in my sketches: the visual layer. A layer where I could view, compare, combine and reflect on the connections I was trying to understand in new ways.

After about three years, I have finally found an infographic that showed me I was on the right track. I had reached a point where I could start testing which of the loosely scattered mosaic pieces of the image — that I wanted to draw from the structures and functionalities of creativity — fit together and belonged together. An image I refined further until I published the results of my research with the Slanted Publishers in a book.

Years have passed since then. I now conduct workshops on the »Be Water my Friend« methodology, demonstrating to others how they can use a graphic interface to explore the boundaries of their individual creativity, develop rituals and routines that dissolve mental blocks, channel creativity and generate new ideas.

LINKS

. »Be Water my Friend« Book
. »Be Water my Friend« Workshops