Maintaining Focused Creativity: Future Ready Now

In 2000, I returned to the USA after spending 14 months abroad conducting research in Egypt, Ecuador, Thailand and New Zealand. While I was away, cell phone adoption amongst my peers hit an exponential curve and suddenly everyone had a phone. The impact on culture and social norms was evident. In San Francisco, there was a new level of unpredictability around planning. Everyone suddenly expected to be able to coordinate at the last minute and each move had to be coordinated with an extensive social group that moved around the city like a pack.

I not only was lacking a tool that everyone else was using, I had different expectations of scheduling and commitment. I remember organizing a dinner party and finding it hard to get an idea of how many people were actually coming. Cultural norms around calendaring have normalized and as event organizers, we all have our special algorithm for predicting attendance, but

at the time I felt like Rumpelstiltskin — old, cranky, and in the wrong century.

I realized that I could choose to be rigid and resistant, or I could adapt.

Since then, my future ready practices focus on maintaining flexibility, creativity, and focus. I find my personal challenges to the new pace of change are incorporating new technologies, maintaining creativity in a world of action, and staying focused in sea of distractions. I have developed a set of routines that support me in staying current in a world that is constantly moving on.

Incorporating New Technologies

In spite of being in the innovation field, I do not love incorporating new technologies. To stay abreast of trending tools, I am friends with early adopters. I talk to people who pre-order the next big thing on kickstarter, I am curious about tools my geeky friends are using now. I ask questions and I set aside time every week to try something new. I do not expect to be a trendsetter in the area of tech tools, but I find it wise to be in relationship with people whose houses are scattered with the current equivalents of betamax players — new, sometimes superior technology that for whatever reason failed the user adoption challenge.

Maintaining Creativity

I am in motion whenever possible. Maintaining a flexible body supports me in maintaining a flexible mind. I use a number of techniques including foam rollers, massage balls, myofascial release and exfoliation to keep my fascia and connective tissue pliant. This may sound like a practice unrelated to being future ready, but if your knees are old and stiff, you are old and stiff. Old and stiff does not incorporate new information or flexibly adapt to new realities. The term you cannot teach an old dog new tricks, refers to our tendency to travel down well worn neural grooves. When we move our body in new ways, we build new neural pathways and provide our nervous system more options for response. When I sit and do nothing to counteract the sitting, I am less creative and more likely to shut out new information.

New information is the feedstock of inspiration, when I allow myself to be affected.

If new information is the feedstock then gratitude is the inventory. I have built gratitude moments into my day. There is a particular spot I walk by on my way home from the gym where I stop to appreciate that I am not only living in San Francisco, but in an exceptional location in San Francisco. I allow that moment of gratitude to expand to the rest of my life. When I am living from gratitude, I notice more of what I have available to me. When I come from lack I am not valuing what I have and I am not bringing all of my capacity to the current moment. I am not present ready let alone future ready.

Staying Focused

I like to get up in the 4 o’clock hour before the day gets moving. I live in Duboce Triangle right on the J Church Line. Its a busy place, I am a mother and getting up early gives me a minute of total solitude.

I use a sound and light machine to for meditation. It helps me process information rapidly, relax or fall asleep quickly. I have been using it in the morning to set a meditation habit. I think there is no substitute for a straight breath practice, but the sound and light machine is helping me lay the neural grooves and habit for morning meditation.

My days are most effective when I complete a detailed plan of the day. I use David Seah’s emergent task planner to physically write out my day. My days rarely look exactly as planned, but having a written plan helps me be predictive, proactive and clear. The plan is where I anchor my long term goals to the present day. Without an anchor it is so easy to be lost in a sea of busy-ness.

Being future ready is a choice. It is a willingness to look at the world from a fresh perspective each day, to allow myself to be affected by new information, to be vulnerable and willing to be wrong. I believe that we are living in times that both enable and demand that we utilize our full potential. I am delighted to be on this journey with all of you.

Stay tuned for our first Future Ready Now event in Los Angeles the third week of August.