So, I’ve got a couple of workshops coming up, each exploring aspects of creativity for different audiences and with different ends.  The first I’ll be doing for an organisation supporting artists to develop effective businesses, and happens in Yorkshire.

I was asked to do a session on networking, but the way I view it the more important stuff is getting mind and body primed before embarking on the whole networking thing, and that’s what I’ll be covering in my session with LOCA this Thursday morning.  Never let it be said that I failed for want of ambition.

The idea here is to explore the prerequisites to networking, which primarily include attitude.  And the way I see it, the most useful attitude for expanding one’s network is one of curiosity and playfulness.  There’s nothing worse than a grim faced franchiser determined to enlist you in their operation: I’m all about supporting people to forge connections based on mutual interest and shared outlook, heading in a general direction together rather than sharing a specific goal.

Exactly how we do this is what I’m working on at the moment.  But it will include exercises from impro comedy designed to increase flexibility of communication, anecdotes gleaned from years of hustling with greater or lesser success and specifically including a lifechanging story from visionary performer Ken Campbell, all threaded together using learnings I’ve acquired through NLP training.

The following week, I deliver a full day training concerning creativity and problem solving in Norwich for the region’s screen agency.  I’m looking forward to that day in a big way, and have been mulling over possible approaches to it since I was given the gig some months ago.  Again, it promises to be an eclectic event, though with a focus on filmmaking as the event is designed for up and coming filmmakers.

There’ll be a novel approach to goalsetting featured in the Norwich event, a variation of a process I was introduced to by NLP trainer Michael Breen that I (and others) found very powerful.  The whole business of pointing yourself in a direction and achieving whatever has been covered in myriad ways by various worthies, and many of them make this core lifeskill as enthralling as a particularly onerous homework exercise.  The approach I take is radically different, and like much of what I do in trainings is a whole body experience and not just some intellectual exercise.

There is an undeniably magical element to an effective training.  What’s going on is a group experience that leads people from their comfort zones, where homeostatic processes keep things just so, into liminal territory.  And that’s where the exciting stuff happens, when you’re led somewhere you’ve not been before, and encounter new ways of understanding, perceiving and doing that you can make part of your repertoire on your return.

That description of learning will make little sense to those who associate it only with poor experiences in the world of formal education or dubious workplace seminars.  But if you cast your net wider, to the life lessons you’ve learned in all aspects, you’ll have a greater appreciation for where I’m coming from.  Art and relationships have the capacity to change who you are, or at least how you approach life, and it’s by understanding the processes involved in those transitions that it’s possible to utilise them within a workshop setting.  So, that’s my aspiration at least — and I can guarantee that I’ll accomplish it without recourse to roleplay or beanbag cushions, twin scourges of the conventional training…