At the beginning of the year, there were hundreds of articles all over the place about Chris Martin, very often in those articles referred to as “Gwyneth Paltrow’s husband” — the lead singer of Coldplay — using hypnosis to enhance his creativity and help him to get Coldplay’s latest album completed.
Apparently, he has found the song-writing process stressful.
Naturally, there is a lot of pressure to produce a high level of quality from within the creative process, and Chris Martin is quoted as saying to Q magazine:
“We feel like we have so much to prove and so many ideas that we’d like to try — sometimes you need a hypnotist to give you the bravery to do it,” and he added, “It was fun and interesting and we wrote some nice things as a result of it.”
Often the creative process is hindered by a lack of fun and so I am pleased the word fun is used here.
When the Beatles stopped having fun with a vision of just creating good music, we all saw what happened to them.
Pressure, seriousness, regular thinking along with the herd is where creativity is stunted, so I am delighted that hypnosis is shown to be allowing people to think for themselves — which is contrary to what many people think it is about. Hypnosis helps people amplify their inner workings and not actually just turn people into animated zombies as the media tends to portray.
I hope Coldplays new album is hypnotic and does well and shines as a result of him delving into this.
Sooooo, I thought I’d briefly mention something akin to Chris Martin’s early woes.
I wonder if his hypnotist mentioned the Disney creativity strategy; highlighted in the field of NLP is used for developing your dreams and giving them the best possible chance of becoming reality. It is named after Walt Disney, who often took on three different roles when his team was developing an idea; the dreamer, the realist and the critic. Robert Dilts, an NLP pioneer, modelled and developed this strategy as an NLP tools.
The strategy separates out these three vital roles involved in the process of translating creative ideas into reality so that they can be explored separately for maximum clarity and effect.
Many companies have specialists in each of the three fields and I have done consultancy work with companies myself whereby I have asked different team members to take on one of the roles. You can also play all three roles yourself as I often do in coaching or consultancy, with your own wants, needs and goals. And especially when looking for inspiration and clarity of thought.
The usual way to use it is to allocate three roles to different people (realist, dreamer and critic) to assess plans or tasks. Ask someone to act as the dreamer and tell you all the possibilities of the idea. Ask someone else to examine exactly what would be involved in putting it into practice (realist), and someone to take a hard look at it and really evaluate its strengths and weaknesses (critic). You may want to rotate the roles. If doing it on your own, be sure to keep the roles very separate and write them down. I do this with lots of my own ideas and with changes I want to make in my life.
You can even use this in a meeting broken down into three stages; Each role as a separate stage. Get everyone brainstorming and being creative first; then get them thinking about what would actually have to happen in practical terms; then get them critically evaluating the possibilities.
I suggest that you have some fun being creative and doing things differently to generate more creativity. It feels wonderful and if you have found that your progress to success or the outcomes you desire has been blocked or gone stagnant, then think about being more creative in how and what you are doing.
And if you are unsure about hypnosis, go and listen to the free audio session I giveaway here at this website.
