In This Issue: January 25, 2007

• Never Have a New Idea Again. This article was first published in Girlphyte, a new online magazine for women seeking an authentic life. (Check Girlphyte out here).
• How to Set Yourself on Fire. Steve Errey, my first guest author has a neat twist in this article, looking at which comes first: happiness or success.
• Ready? And Willing? My second guest author, leading weight loss coach Kathrine Brown, shares some key insights about setting yourself up for success with your resolutions for 2007.
• Got It Going On: Australia. Mumbai. Prague. Cyber Space. Some places I'm showing up to speak over the next few months.
• The Five Unspeakable Truths About Coaching: Many of you know have written asking about what happened with our controversial workshop at the ICF Conference, The Five Unspeakable Truths About Coaching that None Dare Utter. Here's the low down.
• Market Place Products of the Month:
  • Michael Neill's Solutions Cafe
  • 6 days left to download your own Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun screensaver for free

Know anyone who's looking for a good idea or two? Please forward Outside the Lines (in its entirety please) to anyone you think might be interested. This community grows with your help.

Like to reprint any of my articles? Please do - details on how to go about it are at the end of the newsletter.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Principal, Box of Crayons

Never Have a New Idea Again!

Creativity is a buzz word.

It has been for years. We want our kids, our work, our peers, our homes, our social life, our inner life, our outer life - everything! - to be infused with creativity.

And most of us - adults all - sweat it.

Because let's face it. Most of us are pretty sure that we're not that creative.

And even if we might have been creative once, whatever was there has now all pretty much got up and left the building.

So here's the good news.

You don't need to have another original idea in your life.

Originality, as someone once said, is just undetected plagiarism.

So - should you have a challenge in mind, something you're feeling a little stuck on -steal someone else's great idea.

And (just between the two of us of course), here are four great ideas from which you can "liberate" your next great breakthrough...

1. (Red)

December 1st was World AIDS Day, and it coincided with a push for the organization (Red).

Fronted by Bono, (Red) is "not a charity but a business model" - a way of using our power as consumers to stop the ravages of AIDS in Africa. (You can check it out at www.joinred.com.)

They're planning on changing the world. And here are the ideas you can surreptitiously adapt:

• Find three awesome partners to help you out. (Red) is partnered with Gap, Motorola and American Express.
• Enhance the design. From the choice of the bold colour/brand, to the funky typography, (Red) realizes that design is one thing that cuts through the clutter. So what if you enhanced the design?

2. iPod

When you hop onto public transport or walk the streets it seems like at least half the population are plugged into little white headphones.

Apple has well over 50% of the music download market and have done what five years ago seemed impossible - made people willing to pay for downloaded music.

And have you noticed that they're making mp3 players both cheaper (the new "shuffle" model) and more expensive (the high end "video" model)?

Here are some possibilities you can borrow from Steve Jobs and his gang

• Make it really accessible. Make it really exclusive. What changes then?
• Focus on one person. What if you gave them the perfect experience? What would that be?
• Dance a little. If you want to change the way you're thinking, change your physicality. I reckon it's impossible not to have a great idea after 10 minutes of shaking your booty.

3. The Wizard

The legend goes that Frank Baum was making up a new story for his children.

As they sat around and listened, he told of a young girl and her dog, swept up by a hurricane and plonked down in a new land.

What, asked one of the children, was the name of this new land?

Baum looked around, needing inspiration. He noticed a filing cabinet, and on it a drawer with the files stored alphabetically, O-Z.

And thus the land of Oz was born.

Pull back the curtain and see what you can take from Frank Baum

• What do you notice around you that's already there?
• What if you combined two random things together? What might that give you?
  

4. The Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun

I created The Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun about a year ago. It's a short and funky internet movie designed to stir things up and encourage people to turn up the volume in their lives.

You can see The Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun at www.EightPrinciples.com.

And even better, here are three ways to pickpocket what worked for me:

• Give it away. The movie's free. And as a result, it's been seen by hundreds of thousands of people in at least 134 countries around the world.
• Make it a challenge, make it provocative. If you're trying to please everyone, you're going to be sitting safely in Blandsville.
• Keep the time short. Stop fretting about it. Think of a challenge, and spend no more than 6 minutes on dealing with it - and then move on.

So here's the bottom line.

Most of us are out of shape, namby pamby wimps when it comes to working out in the creativity gym.

The good news is that it's easy to start getting back into shape.

When you've got a challenge, stop trying to reinvent the wheel.

Look around you. See who's doing something well. And ask yourself: what can I borrow, adapt, liberate, steal and/or make your very own from this?

Comments? Feedback?
michael@boxofcrayons.biz

Market Place Products of the Month

1. The Solutions Cafe

Michael Neill writes one of the best self-help newsletters around. He's got a genius for sharing powerful models, explaining how to use them and adding a bunch of useful resources in succinct, clear prose. You can sign up for his newsletter here.

I also love his Solutions Café, of which I'm a member. Membership gives you access to a bunch of cool stuff:

• The Seven Myths of Success (an audio series)
• Success Made Fun, a year-long on-line program
• Great interviews on "bringing your genius to life" with such folk Paul McKenna, Barbara Sher, and Gay Hendricks.
• Access to ten years of great tips, fully searchable (this alone is worth the price of admission).

You can find out more about the Solutions Café here.

At the very least, check out Michael's new book, You Can Have What You Want, which you can find on my virtual bookshelf.

PS - I know Michael and I'm an affiliate for his products. And I'm happy to tell you that, because I stand behind him, just as I do every resource that I mention in my newsletters and my websites.

2. Six days left to download your own Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun screensaver

We'll be removing the free screensaver download of the first of the Eight Principles at the end of the January.

It's there for PCs and Macs - so grab it now!

You can find the download here.

"Set Yourself on Fire" by Steve Errey

Do you know who Fred Shero is? Well, until the last few days I'd never heard of him as I'm not a big sports fan. He was a hugely successful Canadian NHL player and coach with a string of many hundreds of wins and numerous awards and accolades to his name. Not bad going for doing something you love.

But I recently stumbled across something he once said, and it stopped me dead in my tracks.

Read the rest of Steven's article here.

Steve Errey is a UK coach who escaped a career in High Tech and now works primarily with "30 somethings" to craft a bigger, better life. You can sign up for his excellent newsletter Being More at SteveErrey.com.

Got It Going On

I love the opportunity to talk to people within organizations and at conferences. Here's some that are coming up soon.

I'm coming to Australia in March to see family and friends and to meet old and new clients. I'll also run some workshops for the local coaching chapters where I'll be talking about "Be Different - or Be Dead: 12 levers to differentiate your practice." Save these dates:

• Melbourne: March 13
• Canberra: Date to be confirmed (the week of March 19th)
• Sydney: March 28

... and I'll let you know as soon as I have further information.

The next open and free Get Unstuck & Get Going teleforum is on Wednesday, February 21 at 2pm EST. I'll be speaking on how to get smarter and clearer about any challenge you're taking on. Sign up here.

As you read this, I'll be in Mumbai getting ready to speak at the Asia-Pacific HRM conference on February 3. Details here.

Curious how I might be able to liven up your team, conference or organization? Check out some of my most popular speaking topics in this PDF.

"The Proverbial Resolution of Weight Loss' by Kathrine Brown

What is it about New Year's resolutions that make grown men fidget and women sigh? Is it about feeling pressure to change on the stroke of midnight? Or is it about feeling frustrated year after year with not being able to create the change we want? I'm thinking it's a bit of both.

In casually surveying people for this article, I was hard-pressed to find anyone who enthusiastically supported the idea of New Year's resolutions, let alone admit to making a few themselves. Seems our dubious track records in this area have made us quite adept at skirting the issue or changing the subject altogether.

Yet somewhere between the lines of conversation, I sensed in many people a...

Read the rest of Kathrine's article here.

Kathrine Brown is the founder of Conscious Weight Loss program. While her article touches on weight loss, at its heart are two key insights about what a successful plan to shift your life requires. You can sign up for her newsletter, Wisdom Connoisseur at consciousweightloss.com.

The Five Unspeakable Truths About Coaching

Molly Gordon, Jen Louden and I ran a workshop on The Five Unspeakable Truths About Coaching that None Dare Acknowledge in early November at the International Coach Federation's conference.

We set out to be provocative and get conversations happening, and we seem to have done that.

The ICF still haven't made public the recording of the workshop. They continue to be reviewing it to see if we were unethical - although no-one's explained what we might have done or said that would warrant such an accusation. We've been promised they'll make a decision in a couple of weeks (It has after all been nearly three months since the workshop).

Look for an article to be published soon telling all - what we set out to do, and exactly what ARE these five unspeakable truths.

Michael Bungay Stanier is the Principal of Box of Crayons, a company that works with organizations, teams and individuals to help do less Good Work and more Great Work.

He is the author of Get Unstuck & Get Going ...on the stuff that matters, a coaching program and tool endorsed by leaders in the coaching and training professions, and creator of The Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun, a movie that's taken the internet by storm.

Michael is a popular keynote speaker and was the 2006 Canadian Coach of the Year and a Rhodes Scholar. You can find out more at www.boxofcrayons.biz or you can contact him directly at Michael@boxofcrayons.biz or +1 (416) 532-1322.

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©Box of Crayons 2007. Box of Crayons is a registered trading name of Maida CC Inc.

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