This guest post is contributed by Angelita Williams, who writes on the topics of online courses.  She welcomes your comments at her email Id: angelita.williams7 @gmail.com.

Great work in the creative industry, from advertising to graphic design, is fueled by powerful inspiration. And while workplaces in the creative industry make an effort to foster a dynamic environment from which employers can draw inspiration, they might have to look outside their workplace to get their creative juices flowing. Indeed, it should come as no surprise that places that actively try to inspire creativity do just the opposite by trying to control such a variable and personal process.

I have a suggestion if you’re feeling low on inspiration in your workplace (or in your life generally)—look around you. It may sound cliché, but you’ll find no dearth of inspiration in your community, regardless of your city’s size. Consider one of the following remedies for creative block.
Keep track of local art events

An easy way to discover local creatives is to keep up with the local art and music scenes in your community. Usually these will be community meeting places focused on nurturing a unique artistic identity for the city. You can find many of these hubs for right-brained people in locales off the beaten path, in independent coffee shops, music stores, art galleries, and even retailers. These local supporters of arts and music will serve as a great starting point if you’re searching for inspiration. The coffeeshops and music stores will likely have walls dedicated to flyers and posters advertising local art events, any of which would likely yield rich material to draw from in your work.
If you don’t want to hunt around for events, you can always look in your cities local publication, or peruse local art and music blogs that cover current events in your area. A simple Google search along the lines of “local art events in (your city)” would bring up more results than you’d expect.
Get involved in a community group of creatives

If you’re looking for collaborators or partners in a creative project, you won’t have to look further than your local community to find help. Just as I said that you could find art events by browsing the flyers at common meeting places, you can similarly find advertisements for photographers, writers, designers, and general artists looking either for work or for other creatives with whom to network. In fact, you can capitalize on such advertisements by putting up your own ad (in a coffeeshop or online) for a collaborative artist. Most local artists would probably be overjoyed at the prospect of work with a fellow local. Who knows, work with another artist could drum up some of your best work!

Draw inspiration from the city itself

If you’re not keen on networking among fellow artists, nor in joining any creative communities, you can at least search for inspiration in the raw geography of your city. Whether your aesthetic is more pastoral, seek out the less populated areas in your city, those not taken over by urban sprawl or fast food chains. Take the time to be among the natural environs of your city and use it as a lightning rod for your creative process. If you have a soft spot for urban landscapes, city architecture, and the angular beauty of human civilization, take a day to unabashedly explore your city. Walk around neighborhoods that you’ve never visited, travel to areas you’ve always meant to visit. Get acquainted with your surroundings, connect with it, and let the inspiration come to you.

Share your thoughts in the forum.

Mind Like Water

There is a section of Jonathan Fields’ new book, “Uncertainty“, that deals with the power of training your mind to pay attention and for using meditation practices to reduce stress and improve creativity.

On a conference call with Fields that I participated in he shared some amazing information on how to enhance your skills in these areas.

I have transcribed my notes in a new board on the forum here: Attentional Training, Meditation and Mindfulness

I would invite you to take a look, register, and participate in the conversation.

Do you take time to meditate each day?

What techniques and methods work for you?

What do you find most valuable about your meditation?

If you do not currently use some sort of meditation practice, why not? Or, what do you do in place of it?

There is a new post up at Phil Gerbyshak’s place (by yours truly), on how to boost your creativity at work.

Here is a sample:

A common complaint I hear from a lot of people is they don’t get to express their Creativity at work. Some cite being too busy, too confined or are just too afraid that they simply aren’t Creative with a capital-C. I am not on board with that.

With a little training and practice anyone can find the time and motivation to add some Creativity into their Work.

To get you started, here are five things I do to get the juices flowing and make something fun happen

Read the whole thing: 5 Ways to Kick-start Your Creativity at Work

Last week I wrote a piece for Michael at Remarkablogger about simple ways to increase your creativity at work.

One of the tips for enhancing your creativity was to exercise your imagination and think about how someone else would do your job:

How would your parents have done what you do? Or a fresh-faced kid right out of college? Someone with a different political/religious/philosophical background?

You can use this principle to help create a realistic and lifelike character for your story. Here is this week’s exercise:

Putting Yourself Into the Head of Your Character

• Jot down a short list of the things that you do as part of your job. These can be the tasks and activities that you do daily or weekly or whatever.
• Jot down how you feel when you do each of these things. Do they make you proud or do you dread them?
• What is one of your long-term goals?
• Now imagine that you are going to be turning your job over to someone else: Write down the answers to the following:
  • Who are they?
  • What kind of experience do you think they have?
  • What do you think that their goals will be?
• Write down how well you think this person will be able to perform each of the tasks you listed at the beginning. How will these duties make the new person feel?

Share the results of your character-creation exercise in the forum, or do it on your own and let us know what you think.

Neil Matthews had a guest post up at Remarkablogger recently that really resonated with me. For the first of October’s Topic of the Month posts I want to take a look at one of the ideas that triggered a series of thoughts about using my blog as a platform for creating “rough-drafts” of material that could become a product or service that I can sell.

Personally, I am getting back into regular blogging after taking a year off to run a restaurant, and this is just the inspiration that I needed to focus my thoughts on “what should I write about now??”

This paragraph especially resonates with me (Matthews writes):

“My projects will follow the freemium model I will be creating a lot of content for free as blog posts, but I will also be creating a deeper coaching or information product to accompany the project for people that want to go deeper.

This way I can focus on building multiple streams of income on a variety of subjects and I am not limiting myself to one niche.

The creation of information products and coaching services cause me a lot of “stuckness” I’m a procrastinator (well I think I am, I must look up the meaning of that word one of these days) and I think the momentum of a project will get me through the research and out the other side to build a saleable information product.”

One of the things that I enjoy the most about being a freelancer is the “free” part, that is, the freedom to work on the things that I want to work on. My old job was incredibly stifling with absolutely no room for creativity. Now I am busting with ideas and getting a chance to really work on them and fill them out.

One of my ideas is for a book about food and my experience in the hospitality industry. I have been working on it quite a bit and I am surprised by the direction that it is taking. It started out as one thing but has transformed into another, a very positive and exciting change.

Where Inspiration Comes From

While I was reading Matthews’ account of his intention to create Freemium content on his blog (that would later become part of a larger and more detailed product that would be for sale) I realized that he was talking about the very thing I had done with my book. I was writing short drafts and posting these drafts on my personal blog to solicit feedback. This was a fantastic reminder (and a bit of a prod) that I needed to get going with creating some new information products that reflect the needs of people today.

The inspirational part is that you can do this with any kind of project that you may have in mind. Break it down into its component parts then, rather than making a list, turn the to-dos into questions that you can answer with a short essay. Really dig down into the heart of each task. Go as far as you can, until you get to a task where you can’t write an answer, or perhaps your answers will take you in an unexpected direction.

Not a distraction, but an improvement. My own work on the book has shown me that my idea, while creative and (I think) fun to read, was not exactly what I wanted to put out there. Each time I sat down to work on the outline and come up with interesting new anecdotes it seemed to get harder to find any that were appropriate to what I was trying to accomplish. This led to thinking about what was appropriate, and which stories worked better than others. Which has taken the book in a completely new direction and has made it a better product.

Discuss the October Topic of the Month in the forum.

I have recently quit my (thankless, soul-crushing, all-consuming) job (see this post if you haven’t already Looking Into the Future ) and will be turning my own energies toward a project that I care very deeply about.

I am passionately committed to the idea of the Work.Life.Creativity community and would like to ask you to help me in making it grow into the lively and engaged community that it can be.

You can register for the forum here: [ Register ]

To that end I am putting together a new editorial calendar and a new feature on the blog: Interviews with people that are passionate about applying capital-C “Creativity” to their work and their lives.

I am looking to create a series of posts that can later become an ebook (free to current WLC members and available to new members upon registration) on maintaining balance, injecting more Creativity into work- and life-styles, and creating opportunities for growth and enrichment.

If you would like to take part in the survey/interview, click here [ Survey Link ]. Thank you in advance for your participation in this project.

Ali Luke, writing at Aliventures, has a writing course (not an affiliate link or anything like that):

You’ve got a big project which you’d love to get going. Maybe you started it once – months or even years ago – but it’s been stalled for a while.

* You registered a domain name, but you’ve never got round to starting your blog
* You’d love to write and sell an ebook, but you can’t find the time to begin
* You’ve got 10,000 words of a novel tucked away in your wardrobe – they’ve been there for a year

And you probably feel bad, or sad, about it. You know that if you could just get it done, you’d feel great. You wish you were more self-disciplined, more focused, more creative, more …

… well, more like a real writer.

I’m gonna let you into a secret here. You’re already a real writer. And the pros struggle just as much as you do. (Ever since I got back from Austin on March 18th, I’ve been meaning to start work on a new project. I only managed to begin yesterday.)

Ali lists four steps to launching yourself into your project:

#1: Pick Somewhere to Start

#2: Make a Writing Appointment

#3: Give Yourself a Warm-Up

#4: Use a Timer

Making appointments with yourself is an amazingly effective way to be productive. I am going to download the free introduction and write a review soon. Feel free to share your thoughts in the forum.

The Topic of the Month for April is Thinking Like Leonardo di Vinci.

Today we have a Guest Post from Mariana Ashley:

One of the reasons why we perceive Leonardo da Vinci to be a brilliant thinker is because he took such great care in meticulously writing down his every thought. He is famous for his notebooks, which is a huge surviving collection of his writings on everything from art and philosophy to anatomy and physics. In his notebooks, he sketched the famous Vitruvian Man, several designs for flying machines, and intricate anatomical sketches of muscles and skeletons. Clearly, keeping a journal was important to Leonardo da Vinci’s creative and intellectual activity.

So, I say, if it worked for da Vinci, then it could certainly work for you.

Of course, you don’t have to be a genius thinker to make proper use of good notebooks. You can use them for mundane tasks as well as for very creative ones. Here are a few ideas for useful ways to keep a journal that could be productive to your personal life, career, and creative projects. If you have other ideas, or have successfully used a journal in the past, feel free to share in the comments section!

Dream Journal

A great and interesting use for a journal is to create a dream journal. It’s very simple really: get a nice notebook and pen or pencil, whatever you prefer, and leave it on your bedside table. Keep yourself to a strict schedule of writing in your dream journal as soon as you wake up. You must write in the journal as soon as you wake up in order to tap into the subconscious impulses and emotions you might have felt as you dreamed that night. Write nonstop in the journal for five minutes, close it, and put it away. Do this for a week and then take a moment to reread all of your entries. See if you have any great ideas that could help you improve your life. Or see if any of your entries might give you insight into some of the worries you are having. In any case, you’ll find that writing each morning in a dream journal can really clear your mind and prepare you for your day.

Task Manager Notebook

You can also use a notebook or journal like a task manager or personal assistant. This might require some prep work, so pay attention. Get a nice leather bound notebook and split it into three sections. The first can be a section for writing down your goals. The second can be a section that you break into a calendar, one day per page. The third section can be to keep contact information and other personal information and notes related to your tasks. The act of filling out your daily schedule and making lists of goals and tasks will require you to further engage with your short term and long term life. You will become more perceptive in understanding how your responsibilities and priorities interact with one another, and you’ll find that you have gained control over your busy schedule.

Idea Book

For this kind of journal, use a very tiny notebook, like a small flipbook that a journalist might use to take notes. Keep it in your back pocket at all times. Whenever you come to an idea that seems interesting or important, write it down and note the date and time you thought up this idea. At the end of each day, review this list of ideas and transfer them to their appropriate projects. This kind of journal requires that you follow through on your ideas, otherwise you will simply be writing down ideas and not acting on them!

Self-Reflection Pool

Finally, you can create a journal that functions as a reflection pool on your life. At the end of each day, open your notebook and write down an entry that reflects upon the events of the day. Free write for five or so minutes about your day, noting down one good event and one troubling even that you experienced. Reflect on why these were good and troubling. Use the final sentence of your entry to give yourself one goal to think about for the next day. In this way, your journal becomes the link between the days of your life. Your days will seem less isolated and you will have a way to focus on the future, because you’ll be able to see how your past has worked out for you.

By-line:

Mariana Ashley is a freelance writer who particularly enjoys writing about online colleges. She loves receiving reader feedback, which can be directed to mariana.ashley031 @gmail.com.

In order to better serve this audience and community I would like to ask that you take a few minutes to complete a short survey. I have a lot of ideas and areas of focus that I would love to address, but I need your help in orienting ourselves in the right direction.

My intention for this blog is for it to be a channel for helping people learn about improving their Creative skills and practices in order to have a better life. Creativity in your work- and personal-lives and Personal Development go hand-in-hand and I want to make sure that I am offering the best return on the time that you invest here.

The survey is only 10 questions long, and your answers can help me make this site a better resource for you – the readers and participants.

Thank you so much for your investment of time!

Click here to take survey.

The March 2011 Newsletter is available in the Archives, you can down load it here [March 2011 Newsletter link].

This month we talk about using Kanban for creativity and productivity. I have been using Kanban boards in my home office and at my job for a while now and they are not only fun (for an OCD & right-brain person like me) but very effective.

Join the discussion in the forum – Using Kanban for creativity and productivity