Creativity strikes!

“When the creative urge seizes one – at least, such is my experience – one becomes creative in all directions at once.” Henry Miller, The Books in My Life

I must agree with Mr. Miller. For the past year or so, since summer 2018, I've been visited by the creativity genie, and it's been both exhilarating and all-consuming.

The urge started last July with writing a new book on how people can make reasonable steps toward finding the kind of work that will be enjoyable, fulfilling, and profitable. This is the heart of career development, a field that has defined my own professional life.

I've written and co-written (with my husband Jarda) 10 books dedicated to helping people find the jobs they can like and do best. My business, the International Leadership Institute (www.ili.cc) has, since 1990, helped those determined to build careers of excellence, integrity, and influence. I've held executive positions in two university career services offices and run hundreds of career choice workshops and programs through my business and in universities, churches, and public spaces in the US and Europe. Jarda;s latest book is all about leadership, with tips distilled from our decades of running the International Leadership Institute

https://www.amazon.com/Leaders-Follow-Leadership-Handbook-Century-ebook/dp/B07F27L5HQ/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1525894528&sr=1-6

Reinventing Your Future is based on more than 40 years of hands-on experience helping people make one of the biggest decisions of life: where to invest your talents, energy, ambitions, and imagination in a job that you can make your own.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0978633776?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860

I then turned my creativity to another book--my long-dreamed-of novel about life as a back-to-the-land hippie in the 1970s in upstate New York. As I wrote chapters for this book, I realized I needed to emotionally and mentally process those years.

This was the decade of my 20s--a time of upheaval in the US that was mirrored in my life by questioning the values, ideals, and myths of being an American. I rejected what I saw as consumerism, wasting of resources, and selfish chasing after money; I made a vow to myself to live a simple life, not caught up in the web of striving and accumulating.

This vow resulted in a life off the grid—in two different hand-built cabins with no piped-in water or electricity. For 7 years I lived this way in the tiny hamlet of Rossie, NY, finding it a soothing respite from city life (in Boston, Long Island, and Louisville). My first husband Bob and I had two kids and raised them, we hoped, to be decent humans who saw the value of hard work and who respected people’s differences and uniqueness.

The decades that followed those halcyon days were full of change, and I never got back to Rossie, but I tried to hold on to the principles of using just what I need and not thinking I’d find happiness in owning things. In the meantime, though, I had put my memories of being a hippie in cold storage—and writing the novel I wanted to write means opening the freezer!

I’m still working on the novel, which will be called Last Hippies in America (Jarda’s idea), and taking my time to think through what I was doing and why.

All this writing was only one facet of my creativity burst. I restarted my tutoring business, which has expanded to include writing and reading; I am working on a new workshop centered on creating memoirs; I started my third knitting business, Harmony Handknits.

So I agree with Mr. Miller—creativity in one area sparks creativity in many areas. I hope the genie visits you and that you find new outlets for all the inspiration, energy, and enthusiasm that live inside your heart and mind!