To me using your creativity adds color and texture to your life. It can also help you overcome problems. That’s why I’m happy to have master floral designer, Kevin Joel Kelly, as my guest today. Kevin is also the author of Conscious Creativity and the Power of Yes Below he shares and excerpt from his book, with an interesting perspective about how creativity can be used.

Conscious Creativity
Excerpted from Conscious Creativity and the Power of Yes
By Kevin Joel Kelly

Conscious creativity empowers a person to create reality from inner vision. Every flower arrangement, painting, musical composition, recipe, mathematical theorem, scientific discovery and piece of furniture, begins with vision. In this book I call vision the idea. In our hands, this idea takes shape and becomes something new in the outer world as we take raw materials and create. The lessons we learn from our individual acts of creation are the building blocks to an empowered life. If you look at a bundle of reeds and then create a basket or if you search the chaos of a refrigerator and make a meal or if you see a bunch of random flowers and design an arrangement all from your ideas you are practicing creativity. As you continue to grow more proficient and successful you come to know that your ideas have merit and what you learned while engaged in acts of creation can be used in daily life.  You begin to trust your ability to make ideas reality.

To live the empowered yes of conscious creativity you move from the lessons of artful projects to the needs of your life, your communities and the world. In your projects, you learn the process of creation. There is an old adage that life is art.  You live a life empowered with conscious creativity when you see that your circumstances are filled with raw materials and use them for creation.

Early in my career as a professional floral designer I decided it was time to open my own flower shop. I knew the kind of shop I wanted to have and I knew exactly where I wanted it.  One day I was driving through the neighborhood of choice and there was a store front for rent. In an unusually intrepid moment for my shy self I called the realtor who turned out to be the landlord and discussed the rent and the qualifications for tenancy. I met with him and looked over the storefront. It was small and ideal for the little neighborhood flower shop I dreamt. It would be the kind of flower shop
I had been enthralled with from the time I was a little boy.

The only problem was I had neither money nor any financial backers. If the truth be known, I was so naïve I really didn’t know I particularly needed much of either. I began to read about establishing a flower shop. I also began to talk with some professionals who could give me a bit of guidance. My naiveté was jolted. Both informed me that I would need around $100,000 at that time to begin a floral business. That was an impossible sum to me.

I continued undaunted. I put together my own game plan. I borrowed $5,000 from my parents and looked into leasing a small floral cooler. I took my plan to the building landlord and told him that I wanted to lease his space. He told me that I was seriously undercapitalized and that I should return when I had more money and if the space had not been leased we could talk. However, he said, that he had a number of lookers. That was believable since this was a location in a lovely neighborhood near Country Club Plaza, a prime Kansas City area.  I could not be discouraged.

I thought about it for a few days and called him back. We met at the building and I told him I still wanted to lease it. He agreed. As we signed the lease at his office a number of days later he told me that he had no idea why he was leasing to me. He said that he knew I could not make it through the first six months because of my serious undercapitalization. However, he said he felt he was supposed to let me have the building. A few short weeks later I hung my sign, moved in a few necessities and I was up and running. I was his tenant for several years and then moved to a larger space for the remainder of the decade that I maintained the flower shop. The flower shop was one of the great creative escapades of my life.

Every creative act has its season, and after nearly a decade, it was time to move on. Even though I had not yet formatted my thoughts about conscious creativity into the formula I speak of in these pages, it was one of the first experiences where I took the principles I had learned in making a simple flower arrangement and created something of consequence in my life. Even though I did not have the term “conscious creativity,” I had the experience and I was moving with the power of yes.

As we live the empowered life of conscious creativity we look at both the challenges and the dreams of our lives as opportunities to create. We see the solutions with the inner vision of an artist, which provides us with an idea. Then we look at everything and everyone around us. These are now the raw materials of our new creative endeavor and as a painter with his paints begins to draw on a blank canvas or as a director directing actors on a stage, we begin to assemble all into a creative ensemble. As we trust our acts of creation and pursue the fulfillment of our vision we will know to either proceed or to stop. But most of the time we will proceed and we know this by the cooperation that life provides.
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Tap into your own crativity! Check out Conscious Creativity and the Power of Yes.Conscious Creativity and the Power of Yes
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