A Creativity course led by an art teacher makes us think about drawing and painting and pottery types of creativity, but in its broadest sense, creativity is about creating anything, including one’s life – as my new Mastery Club Trainee Facilitator, Joan Marie, recently reminded me! (Which is kind of funny, since one of The Mastery Club characters is the art teacher, Ms Mackie, who directly draws the link between sculpting and creating one’s dream life…)
Joan is an accomplished artist and an art teacher in Missouri, USA. We’ve been in touch via email over the last few years since our paths crossed due to the Next Top Author competition and Joan wrote to me expressing her delight over The Mastery Club and her desire to teach it. Well, having conceived of her Creativity Course, she figured this was the perfect match – and then brought me up to speed!
And a Creativity Course really is a brilliant context for The Mastery Club. After all, the principles being taught in The Mastery Club™ 10 Lessons Program are about this core, fundamental creativity: the creativity involved in consciously deciding how one wants one’s life to go, in creating one’s reality.
Anyone can draw, but the artist applies skill and artistic principles to achieve an impactful and inspiring result. Likewise, anyone who is alive can have a life, but the person who understands the principles of masterful living will create a life that is a masterpiece rather than a life that is a mess or just ‘happens to them’.
Creating a masterful life is both the most fundamental and supreme form of Creativity that exists. It calls for vast imagination and creative freedom to envisage a magnificent life, for an attitude of responsibility and accountability over one’s ‘work’, (to say nothing of courage, resilience, patience, perseverance, etc.) to achieve it, and for skill.
The kind of skill required to paint, draw, sculpt? I’ll leave that to the artists to define! The kind of skill required to live a masterful life?
In my Creative Writing classes I teach that the quality of genius requires an attitude of playfulness and the willingness to take risks, to chart new territory, to be a pioneer, and these are all relevant traits to creating a masteful life since first we must have a sense of freedom and spaciousness. We don’t create compelling visions when our expectations of life are cramped – we must be enlivened by a sense of outrageous possibility! (The first Session of The Mastery Club™ Program generates a vast sense of possilbility, and future sessions drive that home.)
Then we need a goal to focus on (Session #2, Goal-Setting), and the ability to visualise it exactly as we want it (Sessions #3 and #4 – Visualisation and Treasure Mapping).
To create the life (or artwork) we want to create, we must be prepared for obstacles and delays and have the flexibility and resourcefulness to deal with them (Session #5: First Force, Second Force, Third Force).
The broader our understanding of life, if we can see overarching patterns, from the micro to the macro, we free up our creative power enormously (Session #6: The Law of Polarity).
Understanding our own patterns, the strategies we have formed for empowering and disempowering ourselves, is critical to the creative process. (Session #7, The Law of Resonance and Vibration, teaches us how to be in charge of our emotional state so that we can realise our dream, and Session #8, You Have to Become a New Person, drives home this requirement for continual growth.)
If there is one truly essential task in becoming a great artist or a great master, it is the ability to learn from others, from the masters; to have mentors, teachers, inspiration (Session #9 introduces a Guest Speaker who shares his/her own story of goal-achievement/life mastery as an example to the students).
And just as every completed work of art deserves to be celebrated, our life achievements need to be regularly acknowledged, and we need reminders to be patient with the big goals that are still developing roots and shoots.
I’m inspired by Joan and grateful to her for drawing this connection so powerfully – to say nothing of being our first Facilitator in America!
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