Amabile, Teresa M. Creativity in Context. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996.
“Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity, but extrinsic motivation is detrimental. The most crucial social psychological factors in creativity may be those that either lead people to concentrate on the intrinsically interesting aspects of a task or lead them to concentrate on some extrinsic goal”
Amabile, Teresa M. and Hennessey, Beth A. “The Conditions of Creativity.” In R.J. Sternberg (Ed.) The Nature of Creativity (pp 11-37). New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
“People will be most creative when they feel motivated primarily by the interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself – not by external pressures.”
Anderson, H.H. (Ed.), Creativity and its Cultivation. New York: Harper & Row, 1959.
“Creativity, the emergence of originals and of individuality, is found in every living cell. Creativity is in each one of us. “
Campbell, Joseph F. The Power of Myth: with Bill Moyers. New York: Doubleday, 1988.
“We have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own experience. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world.”
Costa, Arthur L. and Kallick, Bena, Editors. Discovering and Exploring Habits of Mind. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2000.
“Educational outcomes in traditional settings focus on how many answers a student knows. When we teach for the habits of mind, we are interested in how students behave when they don’t know the answer….We are interested in enhancing the way students produce knowledge rather than how they merely reproduce it. We want students to learn how to develop a critical stance with their work: editing, thinking flexibly and learning from another person’s perspective. The critical attribute of intelligent human beings is not only having information but knowing how to act on it.”
Csikszentmihalyi, M. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: HarperCollins, 1996
“If I had to express in one word what makes the creative personality different from others, it would be complexity. Like the color white that includes all the hues in the spectrum, they tend to bring together the entire range of human possibilities within themselves.”
Dispenza, Joe. Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House Publishers, 2012.
“True empowerment comes when we start to look deeply at our beliefs. We may find their roots in the conditioning of religion, culture, society, education, family, the media and even our genes (the latter being imprinted by our sensory experiences of our current lives as well as untold generations) Then we weight those old ideas against some new paradigms that may serve us better.”
Edwards, Betty. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.
“In drawing, you will delve deeply into a part of your mind too often obscured by endless details of daily life. From this experience you will develop your ability to perceive things freshly in their totality, to see underlying patterns and possibilities for new combinations. Creative solutions to problems, whether personal or professional, will be accessible through new modes of thinking and new ways of using the power of your whole brain.”
Finding Joe. Dir. Patrick Takaya Solomon. Balcony Releasing, 2011. Film.
“To follow your bliss, you’ve got to really find out who you are and learn deep inside yourself the core power and fire in your belly, what is your passion, what is something so important to you, you have no choice but to follow it and that’s the bliss….It takes time for you to find it but you must believe that what you need to do. –Chungliang Al Huang, Tai Chi Master”
Fox, Matthew. Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts For the Peoples of the Earth. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991.
“In creativity, we take in the 19 billion year history of blessing that the Universe has bestowed on us and give it out again in new forms, in ways that have passed through our unique imaginations, and times, our unique hands and heads, hearts and voices. As (Meister)Eckhart put it, “ What is truthful cannot come from outside in; it must come from inside out and pass through the inner form.” All artists know this and all persons need to learn it.”
Fox, Matthew. Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet. New York: Jeremy Tarcher/Penguin, 2002.
“Creativity is a choice. Creativity is not a particular gift given to certain people only. It is a personal choice and a cultural choice. An individual choice and a family, professional, and a societal choice, and at this time in history it is a species choice. We choose whether to let creativity flow or not—in our educational systems, our media, our politics our economics, our religion, our very psyches.”
Fromm, Erich. The Essential Fromm: Life Between Having and Being. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1993.
“The condition of creativeness is the willingness to be born every day. We are always torn between the wish to regress to the womb and the wish to be fully born. Every act of birth requires the courage to let go of something, to let go of the womb, to let go of the lap, to let go of the hand, to let go eventually of all certainties, and to rely upon one thing only: one’s own power to be aware and to respond; that is, one’s own creativity.”
Fromm, Erich “The Creative Attitude.” In H.H. Anderson (Ed.), Creativity and its Cultivation (pp. 44-54). New York: Harper & Row, 1959.
“To see creatively, means to see objectively. Only when one has reached a degree of inner maturity, which reduces projection and distortion to a minimum, can one experience creatively.”
Greene, Maxine “Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts And Social Change.” San Francisco: Jossey-Bass-A Wiley Company, 1995.
“To tap into the imagination is to become able to break with what is supposedly fixed and finished, objectively and independently real. It is to see beyond what the imaginer has called normal or “common-sensible” and to carve out new orders of experience. Doing so, a person may become freed to glimpse what might be, to form notions of what should be and what is not yet.”
Hanson, Rick, PhD. The Practical Neuroscience of Buddha’s Brain. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, 2009.
“Only we humans worry about the future, regret the past, and blame ourselves for the present. We get frustrated when we can’t have what we want, and disappointed when what we like ends. We suffer that we suffer. We get upset about being in pain, angry about dying, sad about waking up sad yet another day. This kind of suffering–which encompasses most of our unhappiness and dissatisfaction–is constructed by the brain. It is made up. Which is ironic, poignant–and supremely hopeful.”
Heifetz, Ronald, Grashow, Alexander and Linsky, Marty. The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organizations and The World. Boston, MA: Cambridge Leadership Associates, 2009.
“Looking forward, human beings have the ability to realize ancient dreams of civility, curiosity and care as we tackle the pressing issues that surround us. These times call for the new ways of doing the business of our daily lives, as we take on these purposes with new, more adaptive solutions.”
Hollis, James, PhD. Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts that Run Our Lives. Asheville, NC: Chiron Publications, 2013.
“One of the ways we are betrayed by the past, driven by our haunting, is by not acknowledging how much we are owned by our wounding—not only betrayal but the myriad other internalized messages to which we cling….As Carl Jung once observed, we don’t solve our wounds but we can outgrow them. The flight from doing so is the real betrayal. What choice then does history, not having been addressed and worked through, have but to haunt us?”
Hollis, James, PhD. The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other. Toronto, Canada: Inner City Books, 1998.
“If there is a single idea that permeates this essay, it is that the quality of all of our relationships is a direct function of our relationship to ourselves. Since much of our relationship to ourselves operates at an unconscious level, most of the drama and dynamics of our relationship to others and to the transcendent is expressive of our own personal psychology. The best thing we can do for our relationship with others, and with the transcendent, then, is to render our relationship to ourselves more conscious.”
Hollis, James, PhD. Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves. New York, NY: Pengiun Group, 2007.
“The human psyche is not a single, unitary or unified thing, as the ego wants to believe. It is diverse, multiplicitous and divided….It is the delusion of the ego, sometimes a necessary delusion, that this aggregate of splinter selves is under our control, contained within the purview of consciousness, or even knowable at all. These splinter selves, these darker presences, are fractal energy systems, and therefore have the capacity to act independently of our conscious intention. In fact, they are quite active, at almost all moments, and have power to overthrow consciousness, usurp freedom, and enact their own programs, whether we know it or not. If we look at this idea humorously, we would have to say that certain parts of ourselves have never been introduced to other parts, and if they had, might not get along very well. ”
Johnston, Charles M., M.D. The Creative Imperative: Human Growth and Planetary Evolution. Berkley, CA: Celestial Arts, 1984.
“The creative can be thought of as quite specifically a description of the relationship between essence and the material: the mysterious, subjective, and undefinable is the reality of the source and soil of the creative impulse; the world of objective materiality that of the most manifest stages of creation.”
Jung, Carl G. Man and His Symbols. New York, NY: Dell Publishing, 1964.
“It would be much more to the point for us to make a serious attempt to recognize our own shadow and its nefarious doings. If we could see our shadow (the dark side of our nature), we should be immune to any moral or mental infection and insinuation. As matters now stand, we lay ourselves open to every infection, because we are really doing practically the same thing as they (the other). Only we have the additional disadvantage that we neither see nor want to understand what we ourselves are doing, under the cover of good manners.”
Laloux, Frederic. Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness. Brussels, Belgium: Nelson Parker, 2014.
“Whatever fundamental assumptions you hold about human nature, it will be validated by the response your behavior will evoke from the people around you….Many of us hold deeply ingrained assumptions about people and work that are based on fear, assumptions that call for hierarchy and control. Only by shining the light on these fear-based beliefs can we decide to choose a different set of assumptions.”
Lawlor, Robert. Voices of the First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, Ltd., 1991.
“Ritual creates a space in society for the full play of the Dreamtime: dark and light, cruel and beautiful, grandiose and impoverished. Developing those destructive and constructive potentials in ritual does not spill them out into the external world, to exhaust themselves and the earth in endless cycles of actualization.”
Lehrer, Jonah. Imagine: How Creativity Works. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2012.
“Creativity shouldn’t be seen as something otherworldly. It shouldn’t be thought of as a process reserved for artists and inventors and other “creative types.” The human mind, after all, has the creative impulse built into its most essential programming code. At any given moment, the brain is automatically forming new associations, continually connecting an everyday x to an unexpected y.”
Lipton, Bruce Ph.D. The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, Inc, 2005.
“The fact that the cell membrane and a computer chip are homologues means that it is both appropriate and instructive to better fathom the workings of the cell by comparing it to a personal computer. The first big-deal insight that comes from such an exercise is that computers and cells are programmable. The second corollary insight is that the programer lives outside the computer/cell. Biological behavior and gene activity are dynamically linked to information from the environment, which is downloaded into the cell.”
MacKinnon, Donald W. In Search of Human Effectiveness: Identifying and Developing Creativity. The Creative Education Foundation, Inc., 1978.
“The most salient mark of a creative person is courage. It is not physical courage of the type that might be rewarded by the Congressional Medal of Honor. Rather it is personal courage, courage of the mind and spirit, psychological or spiritual courage that is the radix of a creative person: the courage to question what is generally accepted; the courage to be destructive in order that something better can be constructed; the courage to think thoughts unlike anyone else’s; the courage to be open to experience both from within and from without; the courage to follow one’s intuition rather than logic; the courage to imagine the impossible and try to achieve it; the courage to stand aside from the collectivity and be in conflict with it if necessary; the courage to become and to be oneself.”
Maslow, Abraham H. The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. New York: The Viking Press, 1971.
“…what I’m talking about is the job of trying to make ourselves into people who don’t need to staticize the world, who don’t need to freeze it and to make it stable, who don’t need to do what their daddies did, who are able confidently to face tomorrow not knowing what’s going to come, not knowing what will happen, with confidence enough in ourselves that we will be able to improvise in that situation which has never existed before.”
May, Rollo. The Courage to Create. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Limited, 1975.
“The creative process must be explored as representing the highest degree of emotional health, as the expression of normal people in the act of actualizing themselves. Creativity must be seen in the work of the scientist as well as in that of the artist, in the thinker as well as the aesthetician; and one must not rule out the extent to which it is present in captains of modern technology as well as in a mother’s normal relationship with her child. Creativity, as Webster’s rightly indicates, is basically the process of making, of bringing into being.”
McGilchrist, Iain. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.
“If the detached, highly focused attention of the left hemisphere is brought to bear on living things, and later not resolved into the whole picture by right-hemisphere action, which yields depth and context, it is destructive. We become like insects.”
Medina, John. The Brain Rules. Seattle, WA: Pear Press, 2008.
“The brain is a sequential processor, unable to pay attention to two things at the same time. Businesses and schools praise multitasking, but research clearly shows that it reduces productivity and increases mistakes. Try creating an interruption-free zone during the day–turn off your email, phone, IM program or Blackberry–and see whether you get more done.”
Mlodinov, Leonard. Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior. New York: Patheon Books, 2012.
“To gain a true understanding of human experience, we must understand both our conscious and unconscious selves, and how they interact. Our subliminal brain is invisible to us, yet it influences our conscious experience of the world in the most fundamental of ways: how we view ourselves and others, the meanings we attach to the everyday events of our lives, our ability to make the quick judgment calls and decisions that can sometimes mean the difference between life and death, and the actions we engage in as a result of all this instinctual experiences.”
Rogers, C. “Toward a Theory of Creativity.” In H.H. Anderson (Ed.) Creativity and its Cultivation (pp. 69-82). New York: Harper & Row, 1959.
“The mainspring of creativity seems to be man’s tendency to actualize himself, to become his potentialities. It exits in every individual and awaits only the proper conditions to be released and expressed.”
Rosenberg, Marshall B, Ph.D. Non-Violent Communication: A Language of Life. Encinitas, CA: Puddledancer Press, 2003.
“As non-violent communication replaces our patterns of defending, withdrawing, or attacking in the face of judgment or criticism, we come to perceive ourselves and others, as well as our intentions and relationships, in a new light. In any exchange, we come to hear our own deeper needs and those of others.”
Rudd, Richard. The Gene Keys: Unlocking the Higher Purpose Hidden in Your DNA. London: Watkins Publishing, 2009.
“Regardless of outer circumstances, every single human being has something beautiful hidden inside them. The sole purpose of the Gene Keys is to bring that beauty forth — to unveil your incandescence, the eternal spark of genius that sets you apart from everyone else. Recent breakthroughs in biology point towards an amazing truth — your DNA, the coiled code that has made you who you are today, is not in control of your destiny. Rather, it is your general attitude to life that tells your DNA what kind of person you want to become.”
Samuels, Mike and Nancy. Seeing with the Mind’s Eye. New York, NY: Random House/Book Works, 1977.
“When people’s eyes are open, they see landscapes in the outer world. When people’s eyes are closed, they see landscapes with their mind’s eye. People spend hours looking at outer landscapes, but there is just as much to see in the inner landscapes. The landscapes are different but they are equally valid.”
Schultz, Kathryn. Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2010.
“All of us outgrow some of our beliefs. All of us hatch theories in one moment only to find that we must abandon them in the next. Our tricky senses, our limited intellects, our fickle memories, the veil of emotions, the tug of allegiances, the complexity of the world around us: all of this conspires to ensure that we get things wrong again and again…..The philosopher and theologian (and eventual saint) Augustine wrote “fallor ergo sum”: I err, therefore I am. In this formulation, the capacity to get things wrong is not only part of being alive, but in some sense proof of it. For Augustine, being wrong is not just what we do. In some deep sense, it is who we are.”
Senge, Peter, Scharmer, C. Otto, Jaworksi, Joseph, Flowers, Better Sue. Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of Poential. New York: Currency Doubleday, 2004.
“1) Creativity is essential for health, happiness and success in all areas of life, including business; 2) Creativity is within everyone; and 3) Even though it’s within everyone it’s covered over by the ‘Voice of Judgment’ as presented in Michael Ray’s popular course in creativity at the Stanford Business School. ”
Siegel, Daniel J., M.D. Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation. New York: Bantam Books, 2010.
“How do we actually develop the ability to perceive a thought–not just have one–and to know it as an activity of our minds so that we are not taken over by it? How can we be receptive to the mind’s riches and not just reactive to its reflexes? How can we direct our thoughts and feelings rather than be driven by them? And how can we know the minds of others, so that we can truly understand “where they are coming from” and can respond more effectively and compassionately?….To be able to help my patients, I coined the term mindsight so that together we could discuss the important ability that allows us to see and shape the inner workings of our own minds. ”
Sinnott, Edmund W. “The Creativeness of Life.” In H.H. Anderson (Ed.) Creativity and its Cultivation (pp. 12-29). New York: Harper & Row, 1959.
“Life itself is the creative process by virtue of its organizing, pattern-forming, questing quality, its most distinctive character.”
Sternberg, Robert J., Editor. Handbook of Creativity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
“Essentially all people of normal intelligence have the potential to be creative to some degree. Few people realize anything close to their potential in this regard. Creative expression is desirable because it usually contributes positively to the quality of life of the individual who engages in it and often enriches the lives of others as well.”
Stockton, Eugene. The Aboriginal Gift: Spirituality for a Nation. Alexandria, Australia: Millenium Books, 1995.
“Aboriginal law is based on the concept that the whole cosmos is a closed, self-reproducing, self-regulating system of life which seeks a steady state, in which all life is maintained at optimal levels of productivity, knowledge and so on. It is a living system in which all the parts are likewise alive, conscious (that is, capable of knowing and acting) and related to each other. Each part is a moral agent. Each has its own law and is responsible for maintaining and enhancing itself and the whole, while respecting the other parts that do likewise.”
Tharp, Twyla. The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003.
“I believe we all have strands of creative code hard-wired into our imaginations. These strands are as solidly imprinted in us as the genetic code that determines our height and eye color, except they govern our creative impulses. They determine the forms we work in, the stories we tell, and how we tell them.”
Torrance, E.P. “The Nature of Creativity as Manifest in its Testing.” In R.J. Sternberg (Ed.) The Nature of Creativity (pp 11-37). New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
“The essence of creativity is being in love with what one is doing and this makes possible all the other characteristics of the creative person: courage, independence of thought and judgment, honesty, perseverance, curiosity, and willingness to take risks.”
Trungpa, Chogyam. Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior. Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 1984.
“The key to warriorship and the first principle of Shambhala vision is not being afraid of who you are. Ultimately, that is the definition of bravery: not being afraid of yourself.”
Watts, Alan W. The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety. New York, NY: Random House, 1951.
“If, then, we are to be fully human and fully alive and aware, it seems that we must be willing to suffer our pleasures. Without such willingness there can be no growth in the intensity of consciousness. Yet, generally speaking, we are not willing, and it may be thought strange to suppose that we can be. For ‘nature in us’ so rebels against pain that the very notion of ‘willingness’ to put up with it beyond a certain point may appear impossible and meaningless. Under these circumstances, the life we live is a contradiction and a conflict. Because consciousness must involve both pleasure and pain., to strive for pleasure to the exclusion of pain is, in effect, to strive for the loss of consciousness. Because such a loss is in principle the same as death, this means that the more we struggle for life (as pleasure), the more we are actually killing what we love.”
Williams, Heather C. Drawing as a Sacred Activity. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2002.
“Is right good and left bad? No. You want to use the attributes of both sides on your brain….When your right brain becomes too dominant, your drawing (and your life) takes on a vague aimless look. Drawings (and life) are exciting when right and left brain work together, back and forth creating depth and movement on paper and in life.”
Zweig, Connie, Ph.D and Wolf, Steve, Ph.D. Romancing the Shadow: A Guide to Soul Work for a Vital, Authentic Life. New York, NY: Ballantine Publishing Group, 1997.
“Meeting the shadow in ourselves is disquieting because it tears holes in our masks. It causes us to act irrationally and feel ashamed, embarrassed, unacceptable, regretful–and to quickly deny responsibility for what we did or said….But when shadow work is attended to, the soul feels round, full, sated. When shadow work is invited into a life, the soul feels welcomed, alive in the gardens, aroused in passion, awake in the sacred things.”
Zander, Rosamund Stone and Zander, Benjamin. The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2000.
“Our premise is that many of the circumstances that seem to block us in our daily lives may only appear to do so based on a framework of assumptions we carry with us. Draw a different frame around the same set of circumstances and new pathways will come into view.”
Presentations and Publications by Lisa Fitzhugh
Pecha Kucha for FUTURE : FORWARD : CITY, May 2012 (6 mins)
Bellevue Breakfast Rotary Club, March 2011 (30 mins)
TEDxTacoma: Creativity+Authenticity+Seduction=Global Transformation, April, 2010 (18 mins)
Let’s do this thing. I-100 Launch Party, Seattle WA, February 2009 (6 mins)
Keynote: Integrating the Best of Us. Connecting Schools and Communities Conference, June, 2008. Melbourne, Australia
Keynote: Signs of Hope: Steeping up to an Activist’s Consciousness, Sustainable Communities Conference, March 2007. Seattle, WA
Community Presentation: The Value of Introspection. Seattle Foundation’s 60th Anniversay, May, 2006. Seattle, WA
Commencement Address: Walking in the World. March 2006, Arts Institute of Seattle
Keynote: Creativity = Self-actualization. Islandwood Arts in Education Conference. August 2005. Bainbridge Island, WA
Arts in Community: A Powerful Catalyst. Americans for the Arts Annual Conference. 2004. Washington, DC
Keynote: Bringing a Complex Idea to Fruition. Arts: The Essential Education Conference, November 2004, Johnson City, TN
The folly of building a new Seattle jail. April 10, 2009. Crosscut.com
Embracing the human factor. February 11, 2009. Real Change News
Stop Planning for Prisons and Start Betting on Schools, January 19, 2009. Seattle Times
Sculpture Park? Museum? We are not done yet Seattle. May 30, 2007. Seattle Times
Imagine What Could be if…… March 22, 2007. Seattle Post-Intelligencer
The Story of Arts Corps. August 2005. New Horizons for Learning