'Everything in the universe has a rhythm, everything dances," noted the American poet Maya Angelou. How about you? Do you follow a rhythm? Do you, so to say, dance?
Today, I want to share with you why, as a creative leader, you should strive to establish a harmonious daily rhythm to allow you to perform and create at peak performance levels. But getting into a rhythm, and keeping up with it, is easier said than done.
Genius Journey is the method I created to help aspiring creative leaders reconnect to their inner genius and gain access to higher states of creative consciousness. At each of its 10 destination stops, they learn about one mindset that stops them, limits their potential and creativity, and keeps them thinking inside the box.
I also reveal the corresponding empowering mindset that frees their mind, unboxes their thinking, and reconnects them to their innate genius potential.
What stops you at Destination Stop 10 is your "busyness" -- being mindlessly busy doing, doing, doing something all the time. Correspondingly, what gets you started is to harmoniously balance focused doing with relaxed being, and to establish a rhythm between focused action and unfocused relaxation.
Rhythm can be defined as a strong, regular, repeated pattern of movement or sound. But in our context, it can also mean a regularly recurring sequence of events, actions or processes.
In his book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, Mason Currey investigated the daily routines of creative top achievers from the sciences and the arts. These creative domain leaders averaged 8.5 hours of work a day (including 6.5 hours in their main creative work), almost 8 hours for leisure and exercise (play) and 7.5 hours for sleep.
Naturally, there were individual differences in the daily schedules. Still, Currey's data suggest that following a rhythm involving daily (creative) work, play and sleep allows these people to produce outstanding creative output and remain productive on an ongoing basis.
Just like these top achievers, you should make sure that with various work and play activities, you oscillate between regular periods of focused application and unfocused relaxation.
GETTING IN THE ZONE
Why is this helpful for creativity? When you establish and practise a balanced, harmonious rhythm between creative work, play and sleep on most days of the week over a longer period, you make it easier and more likely to regularly experience flow (also known as the "state of optimal experience" or "being in the zone").
When you're "in the zone," you're performing at your best while practising a challenging but not overwhelming activity. Moreover, you are more likely to get ideas from your subconscious mind or the collective unconscious while being in flow.
How can you find your ideal creative rhythm?
In these frantic times, identifying and honing an ideal daily creative rhythm and following it whenever possible is easier said than done. So here is a recipe for you to try:
1. For one typical work week, keep track of your daily activities and how much time you dedicate to each one. Classify them as follows:
WORK: a) Creative work b) Secondary work/day job/admin work
PLAY: a) Exercise b) Leisure c) Personal duties & "life necessities"
SLEEP.
2. After one week of activity tracking, map out your daily activities over the 24-hour timeline of each day. Then, analyse the patterns to identify your typical daily rhythm.
3. Using the average genius rhythm mentioned above as a baseline, design the ideal daily rhythm that, from now on, you desire to follow as often as possible.
4. Develop action ideas on how to change existing routines and establish new ways to move your daily rhythm from the current state towards your desired state.
5. Finally, implement your best ideas one by one into your weekly schedule, openly experimenting with what works and feels good for you.
IN AND OUT OF SYNC
Since the pandemic outbreak in 2020 and the subsequent delayed economic recovery, there have been regular periods where the harsh necessities of life and work forced me to follow a rhythm that deviates from my ideal daily rhythm.
And guess what? Whenever this happens for too long, I feel out of flow, disconnected from my peak creativity, and start feeling agitated and unhappy. However, whenever I can follow my ideal daily rhythm on most days of my work week, I can produce creative outputs on a high-quality level. Then, I am in harmony with the natural flow that connects me to my intuitive mind and the spiritual mind of the universe. I feel productive, creative, energised, achieving and happy during these periods.
As the American Trappist monk, theologian and writer Thomas Merton noted correctly in this context: "Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony."
Dr Detlef Reis is the founding director and chief ideator of Thinkergy Limited (www.Thinkergy.com), the Creative Transformation Company in Asia. He is also an adjunct associate professor at the Hong Kong Baptist University, and an innovation adviser at the Institute for Knowledge & Innovation South-East Asia, Bangkok University. He can be reached at dr.d@thinkergy.com
