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Creating Your Future
An interview with Split Rock Arts Program's acclaimed teacher Gerald Allan
by Tim Miejan
For nearly two decades, Twin Cities architect Gerald E. Allan has been part of the
renowned faculty of artists and writers who present the Split Rock Arts Program,
University of Minnesota College of Continuing Education's annual series of summer
workshops in creative writing, visual art, design, and creativity enhancement. Split
Rock organizers call Allan's "Creating Your Future" workshop one of the
summer program's most comprehensive, popular, and personally challenging offerings.
Allan, who is known throughout the United States and Canada for his counseling on
creativity, problem solving, futures, creative management and visual thinking, helps
participants develop a plan for happiness and fulfillment by applying concepts typically
used in the creative process.
"If you know what you want in the future, you will know how to act in the present,"
Allan says.
He spoke briefly with Edge Life about his "Creating Your Life" workshop
and his life mission.
How does the workshop challenge participants?
Gerald Allan: We have a society that has tools of urgency. Everybody has a cell
phone, and we have clocks and watches and faxes and computers. All of those tools
want immediate responses. Those are all tools of urgency that we've all learned to
use.
What I do is give people a tool of importance, which they don't know how to use.
In fact, they feel great anxiety. I come from a teaching strategy that if you don't
have a question, you don't need an answer. People have come to this workshop because
they have a particular question, and so the week is divided up into a series of questions.
The first is the question, "What do you want?" The next one is the hard
question, "Why?"
It isn't what you should do, it's what you will do. That's what makes this very different
than any other course or anything that you would do even in a corporate environment,
where you have different sorts of forces that involve people who are starting, doing
and finishing -- taking what they would call the vision statement into action.
In people's own lives, it doesn't work quite that way, because their core values
must align with their daily actions. Until that's organized, it's all pretend. After
that, it's the starting, doing, and finishing strategy, and then most importantly,
the barriers. It isn't about what you want, but the barriers that are going to prevent
you from getting there. What's the creative strategy you have for overcoming that?
As participants progress through the week, they also have to make an object that
takes it out of the realm of just writing things down. Each day we switch back and
forth between our left brain and our right brain, so we fully engage our senses.
They also spend time on working on these things in their real-time environment, so
that when they leave the workshop, it has already been tested in the real workplace
and the daily busyness that people have of trying to evolve the things they want
in their lives.
So the project they're there to work on is one that they really want to work on
in their lives?
Allan: Exactly. We have strategies for identifying that, and that progresses
throughout the week. It has to be something real. It's not an academic type of situation
whatsoever.
I find years later, in dedications in books, notes from participants thanking me
for making this happen for them, and I get phone calls back and all kinds of different
kinds of stories that have been collected. The thing is, it's in their desire to
do this and it's my job to help them accomplish that.
What do you feel like you have received from the workshop?
Allan: A number of years ago we decided that we wanted to have an event that
was truly our own for our own family, and so we decided that we would take that Pagan
holiday that people don't really know how to celebrate, New Year's. We asked the
children that if Christmas was the time that you gave and received gifts, then New
Year's would ask you the question, "What are the gifts you'd want to give yourself
over the next year?"
And they say, "Oh, Dad always asks questions like that." But, they knew
it was serious when I wrote it in my notebook.
What we were interested in was the children becoming the cause in their life. By
writing these things down, we would assist each other over the year in achieving
these sorts of things. And now it's a big deal. My four children are in their late
teens and twenties.
And they begin to ask, "Well, what are you going to ask for this year?"
Because they know they can make this thing happen.
And then I thought, "Well, what do I want over the next 10 years?" And
I sat down and I didn't know. And then I said, "Well, I should write a book
on this." So, I wrote maybe a hundred pages and thought, "This is really
dry. There are no stories."
We teach the things we need to learn ourselves. With this workshop that I've taught
for 15, 18 or 20 years, I've just got hundreds of stories now. So some day in the
future, near future, I'm going to go back and finish this book on the Voyage to Your
Future.
What separates people who consider themselves creative from those who do not?
Allan: If you take Leonardo Da Vinci's definition of the word "creativity,"
it's the ability to see common, ordinary, everyday things in a different way. How
simple. How hard. On the other hand, if you take the four minds that human beings
have, the first one is the ability to perceive. We gain 90 percent of our information
that way. Animals can do that. The next characteristic is retention. We remember
what we saw. Animals, to a degree, can do that also.
The crowning glory, the third one of humankind, is the ability to reason, but I'd
argue that if we only had those three, we'd still be sitting around the fire if,
in fact, we have control of the fire, because the fourth mind is the ability to visualize,
that what you see doesn't exist, and all human beings have that. That is the creative
mind. Because it's built into us, how do we apply it? I don't teach a course on creativity,
I teach a course on enhancing creativity.
If you ask the question, can you actually teach creativity, people would say, "Well,
no."
I said, "Then can you inhibit it?"
"Oh, yeah."
If you can inhibit it, then you can enhance it. So, that's the strategy that we use.
And then to what degree do people want to overcoming the barriers they have to their
levels of application. It's a building project, just like architecture.
Are there some common barriers to enhancing creativity?
Allan: Oh, sure. One is practice. Creativity is not like IQ. IQ is what you get.
Creativity, on the other hand, is like a muscle. The more you exercise it, the more
it grows. It just needs to be practiced.
The second one has to do with your own fear of failure, or fear of judgment. Interestingly
enough, everybody comes up with ideas on things that they want to do, but they don't
act upon them. One side of your brain is always generating options, but it doesn't
do the work. The other side does the work, but doesn't trust the creative side, and
you have to make a marriage between those two. That's the communication line, which
is what I call open-mindedness between the conversation above.
Fundamentally, creativity breaks down to this: trust versus risk. The higher the
trust, the more risk people will take. The lower the trust, there'll be no risk.
That exists in the workplace, but most importantly, it's also internal.
So building trust is part of the whole process.
Allan: It's very key. Some people have it built in because of their family structure,
and other people don't. What we try to do is create strategy to help people with
beginning steps that they can absolutely win at, because people will continue doing
things they have success at and stop doing things they don't have success at. Usually
when people discover what they want to do, they set this huge goal for themselves,
which is almost guaranteed to fail. Because of that, they'll move right back to the
beginning. We teach you a strategy of creating steps that almost seems trivial to
begin to get you on that path.
Thoreau said, "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life
you have imagined." What he's really saying is to move constantly in the direction
of your dreams. That's the process, and as long as you remain on that path, it isn't
guaranteed that you will get there, but that you will have rewards far beyond what
you would have imagined.
And that takes the courage part. That's the trust part.
How would you describe your life mission?
Allan: Helping people build creative environments -- both in terms of the physical
ones people live in, but also the personal ones that people create. So it has both
a tangible and an intangible quality. I guess that's my mission: building creative
environments.
Tim Miejan is editor of Edge Life magazine. Contact him at (651) 578-8969, toll-free
1 (888) 776-5687 or e-mail editor@edgelife.net
Copyright © 2005 Tim Miejan. All rights reserved. |
| May 2005 |
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