Time With Courage, Time For The Extraordinary

Not all of us feel comfortable in a perfectly structured life, in which there is little room for improvisation. You may wonder, what do I do then? Am I tidy or not? Do I put aside the agenda that tells me what to do or do I stick to the commitments and obligations set? Well, as always, it is a question of balancing the scales.

Discipline is not the opposite of creativity, but both help and enhance each other. Being focused is what you need to do any type of work, especially the creative one. When you are designing a new strategy, you are outlining a project or you are carrying out a budget, you need to abstract yourself from what is happening around you. That does not mean that you forget everything else, but that you pay attention to achieve a brilliant result.

That vital moment in which concentration helps you to continue with your tasks is the one that, perhaps, you should learn to cultivate. The focus should be on that task, and nothing else. At least during the set-up. There is an area, according to the psychologist Mihaily Csikszentmihalyi, where ideas arise automatically, they do not require additional effort to come to light, as if they were a slope on a mountain. He has called this the “flow zone”.

How can you make the most of that state of absolute creativity? You have to give yourself 100% to the task you are doing. You may not like it too much, but remember that there is always something good in everything you do. And in the small details is where the magic is, where you will be surprised by what you have achieved or discovered. Imagine for a moment that you are in the office, your boss has asked you to write a report for a meeting. Surely you think “Could there be something more boring?”. Well, if you remove the monotonous or routine of that activity, you can begin to see it with different eyes.

To start, a good idea is to focus and concentrate only on her. Thus, you will move to a higher state, of “flow” and you will be able to reach the maximum of your creative performance. You will put all your potential in that report, you will offer everything that is hidden inside you and that until now, you had not realized that it existed.

Interruptions that come to you from all directions, such as a phone call, social media, a chat between two colleagues at your desk, can blur you. Try to keep looking forward, at least until your work is done. It is very common in adults today to attend to several issues at the same time, because otherwise, they think they are wasting their time. But that is not so, not at all.

Have you ever thought about how you could be more effective at what you do? In what way do you consider that you are trying by any means to “take advantage” of all the available minutes of your life? Who has made us believe that we cannot be unemployed for a while a day? Apparently, it is not permissible for us to take fifteen minutes for lunch, for example. Or can you put aside your mobile when you are eating, for example, or not think about anything other than how delicious what is on your plate is?

If you have the feeling that you never have time for anything, that the hours pass very quickly, but the list of pending tasks does not descend; If you think that you do not have any free minutes to do what you like the most, then maybe you should start thinking about what you occupy your days. If you are too structured and you hardly get out of bed in the morning, instead of a brain it seems that you have a computer because you are calculating the time for everything, you are not really living.

It’s time to start recognizing extraordinary events, what you don’t plan and what happens, what inspires you to continue, what allows you to get out of your comfort zone or what simply takes you out of the routine. From looking at the stars to a flower while walking down the street, to knowing in what circumstances it is worth putting all the mental effort and then releasing yourself from the pressure and enjoying a certain “freedom”.

If your motivation seems to be dormant lately, ask yourself , when was the last time I did something extraordinary, off the agenda, and loved it?