When you are on your Change Journey you may get to a place where you are stuck and unsure what to do next. The things you’ve tried aren’t working and that’s when you want to bring in Creative Cora to help you come up with all these amazing ideas of how you can get unstuck and back on your Change Journey.
So first of all, we acknowledge we have an issue, then bring in your Resilient Ramona to ensure you don’t stay in the negativity of the issues, then bring in your Creative Cora and come up with some really good ideas of how to move forward. And the easiest way for you to do this is to ask yourself some really open ended questions like:
· How can I?
· What can I?
· How may I?
These open ended allow your subconscious to bring in new and often not considered ideas.
I, in fact, used this technique whilst writing this article as I wanted to share some personal examples of Creative Cora and I couldn’t think of any. So I asked myself an open ended question: “when have I brought Creative Cora into my world” and then I went about my day and whilst I was preparing dinner, all these ideas just dropped in to my head and I realised there were many many examples I had to choose from. So the open ended questions are really important when you're dealing with Creative Cora as they allow you to bring in new ideas that you probably aren’t consciously aware of.
The easiest way to do it is, get your journal out, write the problem at the top of the page and then ask yourself an open ended question. Then just start journaling and allow your subconscious to flow with whatever's going to come out. Then, when you read back you'll see that there'll be little gems of ideas and things that you do to help you solve your problem.
Here’s a personal example of how I used Creative Cora in my world to help demonstrate how she works in real life.
When the boys were little and moving from house to house in our co-parenting post-divorce arrangement, my biggest frustration was that I would send them off to their dad’s house with all these clothes and they would come back with only half of them. It would be Monday morning and we’d be rushing out the door before anyone realised the school shoes were missing (or the lunch box, or the tie). You get the picture.
This used to be so frustrating for me as I would always have to end up going back to my ex-husband’s house to pick up left behind items. I tried a few trusted methods to rectify the situation but nothing worked. So I brought in my Creative Cora to think outside the box and come up with a solution that would work.
What I ended up doing was writing a checklist of all the things they needed to have in their suitcase before they came home. I even had a little tick boxes on the sheet of paper and then laminated it so they could tick them off each week. I stuck the checklist inside each suitcase as well as a whiteboard marker, and each boy was responsible for ensuring his list was ticked off before he came home. It worked a treat!!! They thought it was fun and I had slightly more relaxed Monday mornings.
So that's just one little example of how you can bring Creative Cora in and come up with, out of the box solutions that you may not have thought of before.
It is said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. If you've been living your life, doing the same thing over and over again and you're waiting for some miracle to come along and change that. Well, I had to tell you, it's not going to happen. So a big part of your Change Journey is to ask yourself “how can I do this differently?” “What can I do to make this different?” and “What can I change so that I can get a different result next time?”
It's really about enhancing your self-expression by using your creativity to come up with new solutions. It's really simple. Think outside the square.. if you're doing your brainstorming go really obscure, because they are the things that actually might just work (a laminated checklist inside a bag for an eight year old is pretty obscure).
When you're analysing your ideas, pick the ones that feel the best for you and feels doable, you'll be amazed at some of the solutions that you can come up with.