Welcome to Summer 2017

It matters a lot to be surrounded by success…opportunities, models, and encouragement.   Choose and shape your environment!  Linda

EXCEL

We are approaching June 20, the official date for the beginning of summer.  In most families, this signifies a re-set of schedules, routines, and plans.  It could be the coming of vacation, changed work hours, or summer educational programs for the kids.

I think that creative thinking means that reduce, reuse, recycle applies to ideas as well as things.   EXCEL is an idea that was born for me in a different time and context, but it has had continual meaning in changing ways.  I share it now because I hope it will be a useful acronym for you as well.

To excel is to do very well, to perform in an outstanding way.   To personally accomplish any goal in an excelling way, it is important to choose an environment where the behavior can flourish.   Make sure that the flower can really grow and bloom where it is planted!! 

Everyone can

Xtend

Creative

Environments for

Learning.

As you plan your summer family options, think about how important it is to create contexts and environments that invite success.   Open, happy, supportive, inviting people and opportunities provide the greatest potential for learning and growing.

Curiosity is the wick in the candle of learning.   William Arthur Ward

Genesis Creative Concepts

Promoting Natural Wonder

www.ltcarlson.com

Autumn is here...

Seeing is Believing

HIGH NOTES TRILLS

October 2015

Nothing will happen in your life that you do not inspire by your own initiative.   Creative vision is the power that inspires that personal initiative.     Napoleon Hill

                                                                                      

SEEING IS BELIEVING

When you see this phrase, some of you may think immediately of the colored leaves peeking through the green trees and the amazing recognition that it is fall!! 

True, but not totally what I think.   It does emphasize to me how so many of us rely on vision for our source of data or reality.  I would guess that the greatest marketing also uses this fact as a technique.   See the amazing new product then buy it!!

I think we can also use this principle to "buy in" to beliefs and attitudes that help us live the life of our dreams, creative and wholesome.  I have belief signs posted in strategic places all over my house and studio.  Seeing in print daily what I believe helps me buy in through action and actively live what I believe.

Some signs reflect Biblical beliefs and are favorite scriptures.

Some signs are originally sourced by literature or musical scholars…Shakespeare, Thoreau, Emerson.

Some signs are attitude encouragements from current thinkers, speakers, and writers.

You choose what fits best as favorite encouragements to you.   Print the phrases.   Post them on cupboard doors, bathroom mirrors, exit or entrance doors to your house or office.  Shift your life action choices to your beliefs, visually reminding yourself with posts!! 

Someone in my family has encouraged me to collect my posts.  Here is an important one…the phrase is surrounded by colored circles made in pencil track elaborations, like a kid would do:

GO FORWARD IN FAITH!!

Genesis Creative Concepts

Promoting Natural Wonder

www.ltcarlson.com

ltcarlson.com.creativity@blogger.com

Mindsets Matter

HIGH NOTES  

August 2015

I have a coffee friend who aptly declares that he is the smile distributor for the Upper Midwest!  Be like Wayne…brighten others' lives.  Linda

MINDSETS MATTER

Every once in a while we come across a book or a person who speaks bold wisdom to us.   A spirit filled friend recommended such a book to me!   Perhaps the author's inspiration will touch you as well.

Kelly McGonigal, PhD, has written The Upside of Stress.  I like that this author has balanced writing about concepts along with research data.  Her reference to "mindsets" is quite profound.  In particular, she describes mindset interventions, which are defined as experiences that open our minds to a new way of looking at life or the facts.  These intervention events are like seeds planted.   They always impact the person even though there is no prediction for sure about when  or how that will happen.

Our world is full of traumatic stress, however, not all stress is bad.  Challenge stress applies to people committed to goals that make life better.  It is hopeful to me in new ways that a light can impact forever for good even those people who have spent way too long in darkness.   Of course, I think first about kids…our future!

In a previous Genesis book , Claiming God's Power and Purpose With Creativity, this is what I recommended to anyone who has faced trauma.: "You will need to look in the mirror and say to yourself:  I am sorry that you were hurt. You are a wonderful person, and I love you."   I call this mindset intervention now!!

Recently, I described myself as an empowered optimist:) This book has added fuel to my fire!  I trust that this warmth of hope will rub off on you, too.

"You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore."

William Faulkner

GENESIS CREATIVE CONCEPTS

www.LTCarlson.com

ltcarlson.com.creativity@blogger.com

Promoting Natural Wonder

Photo by Melissa Capaul

In endless rolling fields

Crops are planted.

In only a few months

Every farmer's wish will be granted.

New life will reach up;

Growth happens, against the odds.

Most know they added their labor,

But the credit is God's.

Harvest Hope

Jiminy Crickets...It's June!

HIGH NOTES TRILLS

June 2015

           

"Many of life's failures are experienced by people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."   Thomas Edison

Someone on classical radio said a composer and a poet working together are like 1+1=3.  C'est moi:)  If you want world logic, you likely won't hear it from me.  Linda

WEDDINGS

A friend was recently talking to me about a 50^th Wedding Anniversary celebration in her family.  It reminded me of someone I knew who painted a wheelbarrow GOLD for her parents' 50^th Wedding Anniversary.  It took a lot of work to maintain a relationship that long, through good times and bad!  I think that all of the young couples hearing wedding bells this June or whenever need to spend time with someone who has made it 50 years.  Perhaps this task needs to go on the list proposed by the wedding planner, along with choosing the flowers and counting the dinner guests:)

SUMMER

I just heard that Memorial Day is the unofficial beginning of summer.   What does that mean to you?  For most kids it means no school.   It can be a time for renewal with hammocks, lemonade, baseball, movies, and picnics with friends and family. 

The focus for most people is on "doing" more than "being."  But as my friend, Callie, reminded me today…. we are human beings not human doings.  So draw in a deep breath and allow renewal to wash over you and fill you.  Allow time for play and activities that bring you peace.   Be fully with people you love.  It doesn't really matter what you do together.  

You HAVE heard this here: fill up, fill up, fill up, spill over!  Be intentional about filling up with and spilling over love.

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." 

Martin Luther King Jr.

GENESIS CREATIVE CONCEPTS

www.LTCarlson.com

ltcarlson.com.creativity@blogger.com

Promoting Natural Wonder