Greetings!

Hope our Northern Hemisphere friends are keeping cool in the "dog days" of what has been the hottest summer on record in a number of places. On a good note, August is "What Will Be Your Legacy Month."  I'm not making that up.  It's an actual holiday (created by a publisher). Well, we're always glad to find any public forum addressing the subject of making this world a better place in a way that lasts! Our shared world could use a whole lot more of that! 

Toward that end, August is also National Inventor's Month. So we include a legacy story about an amazing client who, in seeking what she wanted and needed from coaching for what has become her legacy project, also helped us with design and innovation. Much of the work with her ultimately resulted in the structure and content for the 7 Steps to Creating Your Legacy program.  Gotta love those synergistic and collaborative effects of working together! And to know that in taking the right steps in the right order, results like hers are reproducible.

You, too, can do it!

If you balk at describing yourself as creative, our feature article this month may give you a boost. For many, us included at times, the thought of being personally creative or innovative enough to make much of a significant difference might seem like the kind of confusion represented by this photo. It was taken during our driving trip around the SE US in June, just outside Athens, GA.  But with maps and a little intuition, patience and persistence, we did get where we were going (which was here - the beautiful Sandy Creek Nature Center and the start of the North Oconee River Greenway for our day's bicycle adventure). I guess another way to look at this sign is "Stop worrying! No matter which way you turn, you are where you're going!"   

What we know is that you are a creative spirit, and you, too, can make a significant positive difference in our world. We'd love to explore those possibilities with you!

Cheers, Dolly

Unleashing Your Creative Spirit

What is it about super creative or innovative people that often leave us speechless? Have you ever felt they are so special, possessing many gifts and talents? Have you thought or believed that you missed the boat when it came to creativity and talent? Many of us have! Well, what we know is that creativity is more about psychology than intellect — there is nothing magical about being creative. In fact, we all are creative — it’s how we’re designed. 

Feeling stuck or stalled, yet yearning to unleash our own creativity, is merely a block. It is the mind at work, hijacking you, taking over everything else. Your mind comes up with all manner of self-imposed constraints, limiting beliefs and inhibitions and big assumptions. We can remove these assumptions just by noticing them in the moment — then, stop thinking and start doing.

What sets apart highly innovative and creative people is that they get in motion — it is their action that deeply inspires us. Innovation involves more than just great ideas. We need faith, hard work, and a laser sharp focus for the end result to persist in pursuing dreams and vision in the face of naysayers and roadblocks. The end result of a creative idea is awe inspiring, but what we don’t see are the actions, hard work and persistence behind the scene to make the vision a reality. As Thomas Edison said, “Invention is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration”.

It’s important to get free from the spell of inhibition, where limitations thrive. Let go of those mind-created constraints by removing assumptions and restrictions. This is “thinking outside the box”. Be open to new ideas and solutions without restriction or setting limiting beliefs. But how?

Innovation feels like risky business! Yet, calculated risks can be handled with small steps, taken consistently. Be willing to make mistakes — they are just information, and learning can take you in important new directions! The fear of failure can create self-imposed inhibition, but the learning— and innovation — process includes ideas that will likely fail. That’s why inventors start with prototypes, building several models to test with people, gather feedback, and make those small, but important changes. Think of them as experiments rather than failures, and instead of punishing yourself. Reinvent and find the best solution with your newfound knowledge. Strive toward your goal of finding and producing the best result, but understand you might hit many bumps in the road along the way.

Our environment can and does affect how we feel about our own creative process. Our flowing creativity takes place when we are relaxed. Each of us has different ways to access our creative energy. Ideas sometimes come to us in the shower, while we’re alone or in a space of deep calm. Some creative souls and many great thinkers take very long walks to help them solve problems. Find what works for you — and a way to record your ideas.

Writing or journaling is a time tested way that many use to capture ideas and thoughts. There’s no perfect method for this either. Some keep a sketch book, scrap book, post-it notes or even loose paper. Create your own method to capture your thoughts and ideas, and keep them together in a place you can easily access. Review your compiled ideas to drop limiting thoughts and beliefs and jump start the creative process. Remember Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous notebook? It was purchased by Bill Gates for $30.8 Million.

Ideas come from other ideas or combinations of them. Thomas Edison wasn’t the first one who came up with the invention of the light bulb. What he did was build the first workable carbon filament inside a glass bulb, that made light bulbs last longer. Increase your exposure to new ideas, look for patterns and see how you can combine ideas to improve upon existing solutions. That’s innovation!

Get curious, be curious, stay curious! Innovations come from curious people who are just downright inquisitive and like to solve problems or envision alternative solutions. Practice looking at things differently — you just never know what you’ll see differently!  Ask yourself what might be other ways of doing things ... challenge routine or existing approaches. Simply driving down a different street on your way through town, or taking public transportation may give you new perspective that stimulates creative thinking.

Here are a few things you can start with to enhance your creativity ... how innovative will you become?
1.    Keep a journal
2.    Look at an opposite problem
3.    Find or design your own creative environment
4.    Do something fun
5.    Work with a partner
6.    Commit to have learning experiences, rather than failure
7.    Talk to someone you consider creative about your dream or vision
8.    Plan for stumbling blocks, if not complete roadblocks — having to find detours could open up a whole new set of possibilities ...

Perhaps your own fascinating legacy project is just under the surface ready to emerge in the just right creative environment you design! We’re  here to help you too! 

 (EBC)
 

Knowing What's Wanted and Needed

One of the foundational keys to creating your legacy is having a vision for what you want to do. Creating a legacy that is truly beneficial and adds value to others suggests that your vision include a focus on what’s wanted and needed in the world. Since our 7 Steps program includes a business-like approach to building your vision into a legacy project (whether large or small and whatever structure you may choose) we encourage doing some “market research” to find that out.

Having the idea is the easy part — and many great business or philanthropic ideas have fallen apart after great investments of resources, time, money, heart, energy — because the business principle of doing market research was omitted. That principle says: the best way to bring a product to market is to first find out what that market wants ... and then give it to them! There’s the great idea.

From Market Research to Vision to Idea

That’s how Sharon Conley started with what’s become her life’s legacy project. Her story is particularly special, because working with her helped shape the concepts behind Creating Legacy and the programs and products we’re developing. That is, she helped us find out what was wanted and needed by successful mid-career women professionals who want to make a big impact and positive difference in the world!

Sharon came to coaching with an idea for a patient care device that she wanted to bring to market. A medical doctor, with a PhD in biochemistry, she had pursued her primary profession for a couple of decades in a successful clinical practice as a medical oncologist, as well as directing the transplant program in her hospital and conducting clinical research trials.  From that work, she had a real vision, which when fully articulated became “Improving Patient Care at the Bedside.”

In our view, she was truly a “rocket scientist,” and yet she was concerned about whether bringing this all to life was something she could actually master. Knowing what skills, experience and personal resources she brought to the project, it was clear that learning a business-like approach to developing her device would be something she could easily do.  It was also clear it would take some time and effort to accomplish ...

But Sharon had the time, the interest and the will to make the transition from full-time practicing doctor to physician executive to pursue what she wanted to create. And the willingness to devote her resources to it, and to develop or find the ones she lacked. She was ready to do something bigger to benefit the world, knowing that having mastered her profession now was the time to do it — and she knew she wanted to engage in something that would bring her even greater satisfaction.

She had incredible transferable business skills to contribute that at first she was unaware of, but Sharon also had one other very important thing — she’d spent years in her primary professional work conducting the market research that led her to come up with the idea in the first place.

Want to know the idea?  Here it is:

Have you or anyone you know ever been in the hospital, in pain, having to wait until a nurse could bring the next dose of pain medicine? If yes, you know exactly what her ultimate legacy beneficiaries wanted and needed. In business terms, her “target market” of patients wanted to be able to access that pain medicine and take it on their own if they could without having to call the nurse ... and wait. Such a product would be most beneficial if it could serve others, as well, like the nurses who would be relieved of having to run up and down a hospital hallway to see and assess the patient’s level of pain, and then deliver one dose of medication at a time, and then record it in the medical record ... Another interested beneficiary was the hospital itself, which would experience cost-savings and improvement in patient care quality, since more patients would be comfortable and the professional nurse would be freed up to do more direct patient care activities.

After observing these issues for years, Sharon figured out a way to address them and give all these parties what they wanted and needed. See here in a one-minute video, the device she called the MOD®, short for “Medication on Demand,” and how it allows hospital patients the ability to self-administer their own pain medications instead of having to call already too-busy nurses to have each dose delivered.

From Idea to Reality

From the market research to the idea, to designing and bringing the MOD to fruition, it took time to develop a fully established enterprise. That includes a team of additional individuals committed to moving it in the right direction, the right structure for operations, funding to build the organization and the systems needed to get the device in the marketplace. Following a process that was incorporated into our 7 Steps to Creating Your Legacy program, Sharon found a way, one step at a time, to close her medical practice and leave her physician partnership, while finishing the patent for her device and exploring the world of business. She happily discovered that was not the mystery it first appeared, and her venture AVANCEN — from the French word meaning ‘to advance’ and ‘to lead’ — was born.

Since then she, along with an amazing team brought in to do what they do best — something she knew how to arrange from working in a health care setting — Sharon has indeed advanced in the business world. She mastered making presentations to venture capital groups and submitting funding grants to move forward with the business of improving patient care at the bedside. This has resulted in successfully raising needed capital for continued growth and development, as well as allowing her to step into the role that best suits her in the organization (one of the steps in the legacy development process.) She started out as chief cook and bottle washer, Founder and CEO. She is now Founder and Chief Medical Officer in charge of Product Development — the arenas she loves the most.

And she has lots of other good ideas ... which she’ll get to play out as AVANCEN develops, until she is ready to step away and let the enterprise fly on its own and continue to benefit patients.

“One of the wonderful benefits of coaching,” Sharon says, “is the ability to have somebody to talk to on a regular basis who can help you reflect and discover what your your real talents and passions are all about. Then your coach can help you find the courage and patience within yourself to develop those dreams into reality so you can live life to its fullest.”

We couldn’t agree more, or be more grateful for the opportunity to further develop our work around what great women like her want and need — to make a positive difference that will indeed last for generations to come.

(DMG)
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Send us an e-mail about someone you know who is living or building a legacy. We’d love to feature their story. Maybe it’s you?!

 

The Myths of Innovation

In this fun little book, Scott Berkun uses myths to help explain how innovation happens. He delves into why these myths are popular, and provides insights on how to approach innovation without falling prey to these myths. If you believe innovation is only open to lone geniuses or you are waiting for the proverbial apple of a good idea to fall on your head, then you'll want to read this book immediately!

Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques

Thinkertoys provides step-by-step guidance for linear, lateral, and more intuitive thinking ideas, techniques and strategies to stimulate your own creative process. The techniques are organized for all learning styles: if you are left-brained or if creativity means "make the thing BETTER", you will like the techniques at the front of the book. If you are more naturally "right-brained" and it means "make it DIFFERENT", look toward the back of the book. There are also great business examples in this book, to illustrate creating value in business and relevance of creativity in the workplace.

Become a Blogging Maniac with Bea Fields
Dates: September 13, 2010 to Nov 29, 2010 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM EST

It's back! We love Bea and highly recommend this program — it's truly the best deal going if you want to learn how to have a great web presence and control the experience yourself!

Become a Blogging Maniac is an intensive 12-week program designed for people who are ready to get a blog up and running quickly. The course includes 24 hours of training and one hour of private coaching with Bea Fields. Get all the details or to sign up for the program here.

CREATING LEGACY STUDIO

• In The Studio we explore the concepts of legacy in life, work and business... on how to take practical action toward a full life and fulfilling work, to give your best gifts — and make a significant positive difference in an enduring way that brings you great joy!
  
• Catch the live show online, download past shows in mp3 format, or click on our RSS feed and shows will be delivered to your iTunes program!
• See more info about the Studio on the Creating Legacy Network website, where we post the updated schedule and call in information.
• Tune in, turn on and take part! (Come on, you know you want to change the world ...)

OVERCOMING UNDEREARNING® & ACHIEVING FINANCIAL MASTERY

A 5 Step Plan To A Richer Life!

Mark your calendar — this program is starting up again in October!  It's our fabulous course based on Barbara Stanny's amazing book, which we've been personally certified by her to deliver.

Are you an Underearner: "someone who makes less than she needs or desires despite efforts to do otherwise"?

Financial Mastery is what leads to Financial Independence — where you can separate your ‘business’ from your ‘profession,’ and do work you love whether or not it provides you an income. And self-mastery is key ...

During this 5 week teleseminar you will:

• Learn how to dig deeper to uncover the blocks & barriers that are keeping you from reaching your goals
• Engage in intimate and eye-opening discussions with plenty of time for questions
• Come away with a personal action plan for earning the money you deserve
• Have a lot more fun in the process than you ever imagined
• Leave with new resources to support you in creating real wealth — after all, that’s what also allows you to make a greater contribution in the world ...