Tag: poetry

4 qualities of thought leaders and how to become one

by Maja Todorovic, posted in Business in Rhyme, Read, write, lead!

thoughtleadership

We all want to become more influential, persuasive in what we do. It’s of vital importance, being you a writer, small business owner or just an employee in the company. Getting our message across, being understood and perceived in the right way is how new, creative bonds are built in relationships – especially the business ones.

What being a thought leader is about anyway? Many people relate that term only to marketing and ways how to monetize “masterpiece” thinking, which opens the door to the new markets and new sources of income. That is the end-result of good directed and implemented thought leadership, but before that in order to become more influential you need to offer a sort of purposeful contribution that your audience and clients can actually benefit from. It’s a well developed internal strategy, wrapped in the perceptive cultural approach.

There are 4 qualities that are a common denominator among successful thought leaders:

1.They bring innovative thinking.

Especially entrepreneurs and people “zooming outside of the box” – they question everything and don’t take anything for granted. Sure, sometimes they don’t succeed at once –still, they move, shake, disrupt, and build paths through unexplored industrial jungles.

2.They are the brand.

Sharp and focused branding behind their persona is another ingredient in their leadership recipe. They are not afraid to begin, all over again – from zero, building something worthwhile, aligned with their personal values.

3.They are strategic thinkers and engaging storytellers.

Not only that they have well structured strategy around their message, they know how to convey it in a form of engaging and moving stories – stories that relate to our human side, experience and position in the world, which lead us to the final trait:

4.Thought leaders are empathetic.

Often, thought leaders draw their own life energy from struggles and suffering they went through themselves, which give them the opportunity to better understand the social needs. There, they see the chance to disperse their message and they are heartfelt, generous with their time, talents, money. Think of Richard Branson or Deepak Chopra for example.

In some of my previous posts I extensively wrote about the benefits of poetry in developing leadership qualities. It is that magic bond that allows of incomprehensible to be understood, unsaid to be heard, complex to be simplified to the tiniest pieces.

We are all thought leaders, once we decide to be.

It is not the Critic That Counts by Theodore Roosevelt

It’s not the critic who counts,

not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled,

or when the doer of deeds could have done better.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena;

whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly;

who errs and comes short again and again;

who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause;

who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement;

and who at the worst if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly,

so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid

souls who know neither victory or defeat.”

 

 

 

 

“Collage” your way to creativity: let the rebel out!

by Maja Todorovic, posted in Write, create, innovate: exercises

creativity

You know those days when you have, like a hundred ideas what you would like to do, to write, but somehow you are having hard time to convey and articulate your idea? It’s there, you almost have a breakthrough but your thoughts are fast racing and nothing is coming out. Maybe we should try another way of expressing it?

In the post Organize your own creativity workshop! I propose having an inspiration box, with collected items that we like, that are inspirational to us. We can go step further and by selecting different items that appeal to us, we can try to express our idea or come up with a new one, by rearranging items in a collage.

The idea here is that we challenge ourselves, as much as a situation, a question, a problem that we have.

In this essay I came across interesting fact.The author, Marjorie Perloff states:

In the spring of 1912, Picasso pasted a piece of oilcloth printed with a trompe l’oeil chair-caning pattern to the surface of a small, oval canvas representing a still life on a café table, and then “framed” the composition with a piece of coarse rope, he was challenging the fundamental principle of Western painting from the early Renaissance to the late nineteenth century–namely, that a picture is a window on reality, an imaginary transparency through which an illusion is discerned.   For collage typically juxtaposes “real” items–pages torn from newspapers, color illustrations taken from picture books, letters of the alphabet, numbers, nails–with painted or drawn images so as to create a curiously contradictory pictorial surface.  For each element in the collage has a kind of double function: it refers to an external reality even as its compositional thrust is to undercut the very referentiality it seems to assert.  And further: collage subverts all conventional figure-ground relationships, it generally being unclear whether item A is on top of item B or behind it or whether the two coexist in the shallow space which is the “picture.”

A collage as an art form was especially popular in dada movement. Many artists used this technique to provoke their unconscious  thinking and explore metaphysical origins of reality. For example Hans Arp was famous for making a series of collages based on chance; he would stand above a sheet of paper, let squares of contrasting colored paper fall on the larger sheet’s surface, and then he would glue the squares – in any position they took by falling. Arp was interested in I-Ching fortune telling (where coins fallen by chance we interpreted for future forecasting) and he was curios what kind of visceral reaction would his art produce.

1916-dada                        Arp-gold-squares-p

Raoul Hausmann                                                     Hans Arp

So how can you use technique of collaging to exercise your creativity?

The basic idea is for you to find small items, pictures, texts and letters from newspaper –anything that moves you and that you can rearrange into your own collage poem. By collaging your items, a new reality will start to form. Prune anything you find excess and look at new relations, surprises, metaphors, combinations. Your mind will try to justify any item by its origin, position, dimension. This is an excellent exercise for your creative rebel, to shout, to say, to sing, to whisper anything in particular you can’t. Let this collage poem be the messenger of your creativity. This exercise is a fun to do in groups also, as a team building game, an exercise in leadership skills, perhaps. Possibilities are endless – don’t restrain yourself – it’s good to rebel from time to time 🙂

After Experience Taught Me by Martin Buber

Take the first two fingers of this hand;
Fork them out—kind of a “V for Victory”—

Whether there might be something whose discovery
Would grant me supreme, unending happiness.

And jam them into the eyes of your enemy.
You have to do this hard. Very hard. Then press

No virtue can be thought to have priority
Over this endeavor to preserves one’s being.

 

A simple thing you can do to make your storytelling more engaging

by Maja Todorovic, posted in Business in Rhyme, Write, create, innovate!, Writer's creative bites

franBG

No matter are you a writer, a business owner or you just want to improve your presentation skills, effective storytelling is like having an ace in your sleeve that you can pull out just in time when you have to make your point or become more persuasive. In my previous posts about storytelling I discussed the power of narrative and today I shell go more deeply into how to harness that power to keep your audience active, engaged and responsive. Now, structuring your story, speech or even website content can be hard with distractions coming all over the place. In order to pass your ideas across and stuck to the memory of your audience you have to use all tricks and tools available to you. And avoid little mistakes along the way.

Here is what I mean:

Don’t begin with unattractive facts and figures (unless you are dealing with science and research, but even that kind of story we can make more compelling).

Frankly speaking, nobody cares about that! Stats are boring. We are addicted to stories, actions, emotions, adventures. Humans like a hero that’s on a journey, capable of mastering endless obstacles in order to fulfill his duty and purpose. So give your audience a hero, a story with purpose that delivers message, leaving them motivated and inspired.

One simple thing you can implement in your story telling is to incorporate the technique of a mythological narrative.

It’s a story structure that is found in many folk tales, myths, poems and religious texts from around the world.

In a mono-myth, the narrative goes like this: something happens that provokes our hero to leave his home; hero has (usually) a difficult journey ahead, where the destination and conditions are uncertain; after completing a series of challenges, hero returns with some kind of a reward, wisdom – some kind of benefit that he brings to his community.Think of Gilgamesh or Iliad. These were very long, epic and spoken word poems, that portrait the journey of a hero, all of his struggles, tragedies, misfortunes or little victories.

This is an excellent strategy when you want to accentuate the information you have and how that can benefit your audience. It also shows the pros and cons of taking risks and how we grow while learning something new.

In this article you will find three beautiful examples of using storytelling for small business purpose. The one I would like to share is about company Stio that introduced the outdoor apparel brand with a blog called The Town Hill Chronicles. The blog, by a team of professional writers, profiled people living in mountain communities across the U.S. In doing so, it helped Stio tell its brand story, how ordinary people experience outdoor life and activities (making them heroes of their brand), which eventually turned an audience into real a community that promotes and shares value of living in accordance with nature.

For the end I will leave with some thoughts by John M. Ford:

Against Entropy

The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days
Perhaps you will not miss them. That’s the joke.
The universe winds down. That’s how it’s made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you’ll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.