How to Make a Meaningful Day - Dr Eric Maisel

The paradox of choice - Barry Schwartz

Any creative act starts with a set of choices. You must choose TO create, you must choose WHAT to create, and then you must choose from the many options that are available for bringing that creation to life. In the following video Barry Schwartz casts some interesting light on this pivotal subject of choice.

Looking at the World in Interesting Ways

by Gopal Ramasammy-Cook (Career-Creative Coach, ZestWare)

I believe that an important part of having a Creative Personal Philosophy, is simply cultivating the ability to look at our ordinary world in interesting and unusual ways. This can be a fun and enriching experience. I'm sure you will agree that the following videos provide an interesting take on life and our world.


Life in Reverse





Happiness Factory





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Metaphors and Models in a Middle-World Mind

by Gopal Ramasammy-Cook (Career-Creative Coach, ZestWare)

Our experience of "reality" is mediated by the models and metaphors our brains construct. In the following video clip, Richard Dawkins describes how having evolved in the middle-world, that is the world mid-way between that of the atoms and that of the planets, determines the kinds of mental models we create. He also compares our model-making endeavors with that of other animals such as dogs, bats and swallows.





Richard Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist, ethologist (animal behavior researcher), and author of popular science books such as The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The Extended Phenotype, and The God Delusion.

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Creating More by Doing Less

by Gopal Ramasammy-Cook (Career-Creative Coach, ZestWare)

For the title of this blog post, I've slightly adapted the title of the following video clip, featuring Marc Lesser, founder and former CEO of a publishing company, Zen teacher, and author of Z.B.A. Zen of Business Administration

Besides providing valuable questions, structures, and practices for enhancing your personal, business, and creative life, Marc also uses creative tools such as stories, metaphors, and mental pictures with clarity, awareness, and insight. I trust you will find his perspectives edifying and enhancing to your own life.

Watch Accomplishing More By Doing Less and enjoy:





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Creative Metaphors: The Pain Body

by Gopal Ramasammy-Cook (Career-Creative Coach, ZestWare)

When I saw Eckhart Tolle in Flowering of Human Consciousness, I found myself considering the usefulness of his metaphor in which certain emotions such as aggression, and deep unhappiness are identified with an entity he refers to as a pain body. On reflection, I believe the main benefit of this metaphor is that it gives the individual some distance from the emotion. This lowered sense of attachment to the emotion then provides the perspective one gains from an observer status, allowing the person some space to create a different emotional landscape.

In the following video fragment, Tolle describes some of the facets of the pain body in his own inimitable way:





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Enriching Our Inner Maps

by Gopal Ramasammy-Cook (Career-Creative Coach, ZestWare)

A metaphor that has significantly influenced my thinking about the value of a creative personal philosophy is the notion of an inner map. I'm not exactly sure where I first encountered it, but I have come to value the perspective it brings.

The idea is based on the now commonly understood notion that our inner subjective reality does not exactly mirror an "objective" reality. The reason I put the word "objective" in quotes, is that I believe it to be a somewhat slippery and fuzzy term. Don't misunderstand me - I'm not one of those extreme virtual-illusionists who believe that there is no real world out there, and that the entire thing is a Matrix-style fabrication of the blob of gray matter between our ears.

But having said that, I also do not believe that we have "direct access" to that "objective" outer world. All we can experience is the world of our experiences. OK, so duh. But I still find it quite fascinating that our senses filter incoming information in a specific way, and that this information is further filtered by our brains and then combined with memories, beliefs, emotional states, prejudices, media propaganda, and probably a whole bunch of other stuff to create the pictures, stories, metaphors, and symbols we fondly refer to as "objective reality". Objective? Methinks not.

So all we have access to is a map, not the territory itself. Now I used to think of this state of affairs as a great deficiency. But a bit of reflection reveals the tremendous potential here. If the reality we have access to is largely subjective, this leaves great room for creatively crafting that reality. The realization that what we perceive and believe might have more to do with how our senses, brains, and nervous systems have evolved than anything objective is nothing short of a breakthrough in creative personal philosophy.

We might, for example, reflect on the possibility that the brain has a natural tendency to be fearfully overprotective (it still believes there are saber-tooth tigers waiting outside the cave ready to pounce), and resistant to change (at least what we did yesterday got us through the day in one piece). We might consider the possibility that it colors all our experiences and paints our inner maps with a brush dipped in this black-and-white of fear and inertia, until the map resembles a bad fax of a bad photocopy of a faded original that was inaccurate to start with.

This awareness might just slowly, over time, and with the right kind of coaching and teaching help us to repaint our maps with a richer palate - one of potential and possibility, of energy, and inspiration, and zest.

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