Life Ops: The 5 compasses of your creative life

The 5 compasses of your creative life are:

1. Narratives
2. Workflows
3. Inquiry & Practices
4. Playgrounds
5. Human dynamics & System thinking

Narratives

Do you have a map of the narratives that shape your everyday decisions?

Each of us has a narrative compass, a story that has guided our lifework. See it as an internal narrative that captivates many thoughts & long-held beliefs on life that we quite often are unaware of until they’re challenged.

How do we develop our inner narratives?

We develop our inner narrative through the lens of our family background, childhood experiences, cultural background, core beliefs & moral compass.

Then as we sojourn through life, various circumstances that we experience will either confirm or challenge our inner narratives.

Our inner narratives may not always be true though, we can have false narratives as our inner truths.

Workflows

Try to remember the most difficult things you had to process and accept that happened to you, that shaped your life in this world, and perhaps made you bitter. Now try finding the Yin and the Yang of those things.

Try to figure out if there was anything that you’ve learned from those experiences? What are the valuable lessons you’ve drawn from them?

Have any workflows, project envisioning, or task planning skills/habits emerged from it?

Now try to figure out how these experiences have shaped your identity, but this time,?focus on the sequence of work that you have adopted to gain clarity on the situation. What are the strengths, opportunities, lessons, or traits that you’ve acquired throughout the struggle and how did you re-organize how you process the signals that lead you to action?

In other words, the Workflow compass is about looking at how you do the gardening of your creativity (aka: spark/start, organize, synthesize, prioritize and sequence your ideation work so that your ideas can grow into concepts and prototypes that are easier to communicate).

Inquiry & Practices

What is an autotelic person ?

/???t?(?)?t?l?k/

adjective

• (of an activity or a creative work) having an end or purpose in itself.

Inquiry and Practices are one the two most crucial skills of the Investigative mind to master in life: Asking questions, asking fearless questions, learning and applying knowledge gained to ask more questions, good questions, important questions, critical questions, calm questions, and urgent questions.

The Betterment of Questions crafting represents the pivotal compass that allows the mind to stop creating strategies and tactics for the sake of producing and manifesting itself. The mind can also formulate Adhoc questions to actively affect the impressions we have from living in reality.

Do we need an example here?

When using that compass you will start asking new questions, dangerously complex questions, political questions, you will learn framing questions .

Framing is about the choices we make in what we say, how we say it, what we emphasize, and what we leave unsaid, and how these choices shape how people think, feel, and act.

Framing plays a major role in social change. As Walter Lippman, a founder of public opinion research, observed in 1921:?“The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what people will do.”.        

Ask good questions, keep asking, explore your career and practices as areas of investigation full of amazing opportunities to ask new/different questions in each. With practice, this art of inquiring reality(ies) will facilitate your access to the brain Flow experience and these experiences of Flow will temporarily / possibly permanently transform you into an Autotelic person.

As an autotelic person, it's your natural state to ask questions as an action on/in the world.

Autotelic is derived from the Greek words “auto,” meaning self, and “telos,” meaning goal. It is the belief that any action has its own meaning and purpose within itself.

An autotelic person is not going to be driven by external world rewards, such as money or recognition, they are much more motivated by?internal rewards from creativity and natural experiences.

Open yourself to challenges

• Find those tasks where you fall into a state of intense concentration

Once started on a task, the autotelic can go into?a state of intense?concentration , stopping their brain from thinking about anything but the task at hand.

Trust your incredible intuition

Honing into your intuition is incredibly important to developing intellect and comprehensive decision-making and question-framing skills.

The key is to?listen to your thoughts and?“feelings”?when making important decisions and most importantly when asking questions about something.

Your intuition isn’t going to be loud and will more than likely be drowned out by your rational (irrational) thoughts, but that’s where good questions and mindfulness come into play.

What you need to understand is that the rational mind works in a different part of the brain, specifically parts of the brain that?deal with language .

Thus, the reason you can quite literally “talk” yourself out of just about anything if you really choose to. Whereas your intuition primarily?works in your limbic system where your language is not processed; thus the reason your intuitions will always be felt rather than openly spoken in your head.

The art of inquiry (asking good/constant questions) is allowing to connect your gut feelings to your life narratives.

The art of inquiry *asking good questions is allowing you to connect your gut feelings to your life narratives.

You may not be able to turn the volume down immediately, but with practice and mindfulness, you can learn to listen to the?wise whispers of your unconscious mind. They’re there, but only if you pay attention and simply listen. A good way to use this creative compass is to learn to receive answers rather than asking questions ...sometimes :)

PLAYGROUNDS

With this compass, you will learn the art of making excellent mistakes, trusting your instincts, and following your intuition. You will develop your ability to go further than the flow state and find new ways to bring ideas AND/OR concepts into fictive/usable prototypes.

In?philosophy ,?poiesis?(from?Ancient Greek :?πο?ησι?) is "the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before."[1]

Poiesis?is etymologically derived from the ancient Greek term?ποιε?ν , which means "to make".

In other words, asking questions brings something into being that did not exist before, it is the life and blood of the Inquiry & Practices compass.

It is what gives shape to how an idea is attracted to a place or manifests itself when a human starts playing with an idea by asking questions about it. The idea that is questioned will rapidly become a concept and then a prototype that when used will alter your perception and expand your notion of what was/is/could be possible to invent. It's what connects your intuition to your guts.

Good questions will help you kill bad projects and save the most important ones. It covers the matters & affairs of the appreciation of Arts as well as of the Feeling of the Heart.

This compass will help you access the Beginner's Mindstate in any situation. It's one of my favorite compasses since it's allowing us to free our mind from any narratives and connect our workflows experiences with our inquiry & practices.

If you use the PLAYGROUNDS compass correctly you normally start having fun going out of your comfort zone. As you dive into the multitude of perspectives on life that playful explorations of ideas, concepts, and prototypes bring you will need a human counterpart to audit/share the results of it if you want to improve your human dynamics and your understanding of the systems in which you play.

Human Dynamics & Systems Thinking

This compass is about the observation of life and our place in it.

It is by nature a very old compass and some of you could even refer to it as a mythological or teleological tool. Most of us probably would classify this compass as a sociological, political, or psychological tool since its covers the matters & affairs of Education, Behavioral Sciences, and Biological Sciences.

This compass is always evolving and I haven't been able (yet) to visually map my entire understanding of the Human Dynamics spectrum. What I know for now for sure is that it's a very vast ensemble of ecosystems interconnected by all sorts of narratives, workflows, inquiry & practices endangered/protected by a few playgrounds here and here.

The Human dynamics and system thinking Compass is a Timing & Body Maps Compass. It's a compass that helps you refine your timing and your body's preparedness for change be it expected or inevitable. It's about understanding that actionability is directly linked to intentionality. It's about understanding that when you lead creatively you will get Get Stuck and then Unstuck - It is part of the same process.

People are naturally able to understand stories, not facts. The interest in human dynamics and attempt at mastering relational arts will help you find purpose and autonomy in uncertain times and stay prolific when luck doesn't come fast.

From my life experience, Humans are slow beings and yet their imagination isn't. It is important to understand that Healing can be a creative process and thus getting hurt in life is in some sort of a creative process too. The exploration of this compass will activate old emotions and allow you to reach a state of fearlessness when envisioning your creative life.

I haven't come up yet with the visual metaphor to use to evoke the depth of this compass but the truth it will help reveal is of utmost importance if we want our mind to produce questions and actions that bring forth preferable futures to humanity in those weird times.

What? Ok, let's come back on this one later. I really hope you all get it already :) Let's wait and see a few weeks before writing more about it and introducing the notion of Body Maps, Social Cognition, Dream Networks, Spatial Theory, Design Fiction, and ...well...cosmology.

Closing Remarks

Those 5 compasses are elements of a Design Ops framework called CALM MAGIC that I have defined over the last 25 years of my Creative Life. The very idea of using compasses to identify the organizational & interactive poetics of your life is to envision learning experiences as magic and not view them as nested catastrophes.?Compasses can be used in many ways to:

• Avoid using negative inner narratives
• Reduce inefficient workflows setup that alters the quality of your work
• Develop inquiry skills to ask better questions and improve your practices
• Identify the creative playgrounds that attract the ideas that can transform your life
• Nurture the human dynamics that help you think about the systems you live in

Compass also can be used to remind you to never abandon self-kindness along the way.?It’s important to remember… being kind to others isn’t enough. We have to be kind to ourselves to stay prolific and not exhaust our creative juices.?It's beyond self-care, it's about learning about the language of our brains.

The Language of our Brains?

Human dynamics and Systems are perceived and explained differently depending on which brain language you are using. You may have said some of these yourself or heard someone say the following which are neuro-linguistic examples from common language:

Heart Brain Language

(peace)[hope]?(despair)(joy)(trust/honesty)(connection)[appreciation/gratitude]?(compassion)[love][emotional truth/wisdom](passion/dreams/values)(trust/honesty)

“She spoke from the heart” (trust/honesty)

Gut-Brain Language

[hunger/compulsion][disgust][action/gut motivation][will-power](courage)?[well-being]?[gut intuition/wisdom][nervousness/fear][courage]

“I had a calm feeling in my gut” [relaxed/calm]?

Head Brain Language

[logic/cognition][creativity][meta cognition]?[flow]?[balanced perspective]?[curiosity][generative learning]

“I need to wrap my head around it” [meta cognition]?

“I was lost in my imagination” [flow]?

“I looked at it from both sides” [balanced perspective]?

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Calm Magic: A Design Ops framework to lead your Creative Life

CALM + LOVE = MAGIC

Discover the methodological framework

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