The Artist's Way at Work: Riding the Dragon - Softcover

Bryan, Mark; Cameron, Julia; Allen, Catherine A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0688166350 ISBN 13: 9780688166359

Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks, 1999

Synopsis

After the publication of the bestselling book The Artists' Way, Julia Cameron and Mark Bryan, co-creators of the country's most successful course on creativity, were often told that their techniques helped people achieve their business goals. This spurred them to refine the methods to help people perform more creatively and effectively at work. The program is revealed in The Artists' Way at Work: a twelve-week encounter with your own ingenuity, struggles, strengths and dreams -- as well as the political guidance to enable you to get things done.

Through powerful self-assessment exercises with intriguing titles such as "Power Inside vs. Power Outside," "Developing Creative Continuity," and "Finding Your Truth," readers learn to release their creative spirit at work and tap reserves of energy, vision, and passion. The Artists' Way at Work will help you excel in your job, launch the business of your dreams, or find the career you love. Best of all, you will learn to "live in the paradox" -- to develop a personal philosophy of excellence that sustains you, whatever the future holds.

The processes in this book are rooted in cutting-edge principles of human development, organizational behavior, and the arts. They have been rigorously tested among business audiences and will unleash a degree of satisfaction at work (and in life) you may never have believed possible. For every one of us who works, The Artists' Way at Work reveals a completely new way to thrive.

About this title

Review:

Adapting their techniques for fostering creativity as a means to spiritual fulfillment for the workplace, the authors of The Artist's Way at Work have shown that people can thrive at their jobs when they take time to nurture their spirit and listen to their thoughts. The book features psychological guidance, anecdotes, and exercises to assist the reader in sorting out the multitude of happenings, commitments, and choices in one's life. Again, these authors of the enormously successful The Artist's Way recommend their fundamental technique of "morning pages"--a kind of free-form journaling--to unravel thoughts and feelings, focus energy, and direct action. The beautiful surprise of this deceivingly simple exercise is that it actually works! It's making the time to do morning pages that's the real battle. But, if you, like so many others, feel swept up by the tidal wave of our fast-paced, noisy culture, then the authors' slow and steady steps toward reclaiming the spiritual self are invaluable. Some of the suggestions and exercises are a bit out of touch with the complex, and often emotionally-charged, political maneuverings of corporate culture, but the aim of cultivating an individual's ingenuity and resourcefulness is effective and expertly structured. Overall, the authors' philosophy boils down to change that begins with a constantly emerging self. With this book's help, you'll not only find how that new self spawns clarity and grace, but how widely their effects can reverberate throughout the workplace. --Karen Karleski

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

This week we begin working in the swirling mists of our history. For this reason, our initial bedrock tools concern communication of the self to the self. We call these tools the Radio Kit. They allow us both to determine and to broadcast our creative and emotional bearings. They are simple, workable, and mandatory.(If you have already worked with the Artist's Way, then some of the first few tools will be familiar to you. However, we will be using them in new and unexpected ways that we think you will find illuminating and exciting. As the weeks progress, you will discover many new concepts and exercises that will expand your use of these classic tools and will reward you for your faith in this work. For now, the drill as you know it.)

Our primary tool -- the morning pages -- is three pages of daily longhand morning writing. You will be using this tool first to contact your inner self and later to discover your patterns in groups.

We all suffer ambivalence about our simultaneous desires to be a part of, and apart from, groups, and many of our new tools are designed to explore this ambivalence. We have found that morning pages show us both our connectedness and our individuality.

As you will soon discover, the inner self has a variety of voices. In doing morning pages, you will experience some of them. You will also learn to discern which voices of this "self" are best heeded and which best disputed. You will discover many positive forces that might have become silenced over the years, including one we call the Inner Mentor.

This Inner Mentor, which some of us characterize as an older sage, is not unlike the eldest dragon of Chen Rong's painting or Star Wars Obi-Wan Kenobi in our popular mythology. Knowledge of this and similar voices will eventually evolve into a guidance system you can depend on. But first you will meet a host of other voices, the voices most of us think of as "myself."

About this edition

• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0688166350
• ISBN 13: 9780688166359
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 312