Satisfy Your Group’s Interests at Your Convenience

If your writer’s group, creativity support group or professional association has six or more people, I’d be delighted to design a presentation, workshop or retreat just for you.

Your contact person and I will discuss what creativity problems your group wants to solve, what creativity strengths your group wants to enhance and what topics interest you.

Common reasons to meet with me include, but are not limited to:

• Your group wants time away to relax, play and explore creativity in a new way or at a deeper level.
• Someone in your group has read Dancing in the Dragon’s Den and wants to work through the chapters and exercises as a group.
• Your group has already worked through The Artist’s Way and is ready to go to a deeper level of creative exploration and support.
• People in your group struggle with resistance and you want to learn how to help each other recognize and respond effectively to the subtle variations of resistance.
• You want to learn to motivate each other and yourselves.
• Your group is tired of saying “That’s okay” to each other’s excuses. You want to challenge yourselves as individuals and allies to be and do your best.
• Your group has lost focus and you’ve become more of a social gathering than a creativity support group. You want to clarify your group’s mission and goals and set up systems to keep you all accountable and on task.
• Members of your group want to clarify their own individual creative purposes.
• Your group is in a difficult transition and you recognize now would be an excellent time to have common understanding about what shadow is and how to respond to it.

Click here to see what other groups say about working with me.

Presentations

I’d be delighted to be your speaker at one of your meetings! For more information about how I can tailor a one or two-hour presentation for your group, click here.

Workshops and Group Classes

The Deepen Your Creativity workshops are designed to help your group take your individual and group creativity to the next level. You can offer these workshops as a comprehensive series or select individual stand-alone workshops. They are all interactive and use a variety of techniques like guided imagery, brainstorming, partner processes, freewriting, discussion, etc. Workshops can be designed for 2 to 4 hours, depending on your group’s agenda and needs. Click the links below for more information about the individual workshops in this series.
 

Your group can also offer on-going classes ranging in duration from 4 to 12 weeks (usually 2 hours per weekly session). The Dancing in the Dragon’s Den class and the Deeper into the Dragon’s Den class are available in this format.
 
Contact me to discuss how we can tailor a workshop or class especially for your group.

Retreats

Weekend retreats can incorporate material from any of the workshops and classes or they can be designed exclusively for your group. Contact me to discuss availability and options.

Deepen Your Creativity: Clarify Creative Purpose and Vision

Do you have a crystal clear sense of what you’re called to do with your creative talents and desires? You will after completing this workshop! We’ll use guided imagery, process drawing, freewriting, discussion and Appreciative Inquiry with a partner to:

• Discover or refine your creative purpose
• Recognize what works best for you
• Energize your creativity
• Animate your commitment
• Draft a vision statement of your creative life
• Draft a mission statement for a specific project

Contact me to discuss dates, location and cost.

Deepen Your Creativity: Move through Resistance

Stop wasting time and energy beating yourself up about feeling resistance. Use that energy to move through the resistance and make the creative changes you really want. This workshop will give you the tools and support you need to:

• Find out what’s going on in your brain that causes feelings of resistance
• Identify which of the 6 common forms of resistance you tend to experience (and what to do about that)
• Learn and apply the 4 Step Method to move through resistance
• Learn how to reduce the frequency, intensity and duration of the “amygdala hijackings” that give rise to resistance
• Identify and commit to simple practices that will keep you moving through resistance to achieve the results you want!

Contact me to discuss dates, location and cost.

Deepen Your Creativity: Motivate Yourself

With all the demands on your time and attention, it’s all too easy to lose touch with the creative dreams you yearn to fulfill. Are you really ready, willing and able to move forward with your creative dreams? Don’t make the mistake of thinking you have to be completely ready, totally willing and unquestionably able. We’ll use Motivational Interviewing, Appreciative Inquiry, milestone maps, brainstorming, freewriting and other techniques to:

• Recognize and reinforce what has prepared you to take the next step
• Translate awareness into motivation and motivation into action
• Build on your current strengths and past successes
• Recognize the significance of rewarding yourself and identify rewards that excite you
• Give you just enough restraint to reaffirm your desire to move forward
• Jazz you up and focus your energy!

Contact me to discuss dates, location and cost.

Deepen Your Creativity: Beyond Excuses, Illusions and Obstacles

You have rehearsed your excuses so often, you may have stopped noticing them. It’s only when you look back over the months that have passed since you last did what you really want that you see how dangerous those excuses are. When you peel back the excuses, you come to the illusions, the less-than-conscious, underlying beliefs that support the justifications and undermine your satisfaction and success.

When you get beyond the excuses and illusions to the obstacles that really do stand between you and your dreams, you see that compared to excuses and illusions, obstacles are easy. We’ll use brainstorming, discussion, two-person processes, role play, freewriting and guided imagery to:

• Discern the differences between excuses, illusions and real obstacles
• Identify common excuses and how you’ve personalized and used them in the past
• Recognize illusions that inhibit creativity
• Muzzle excuses and illusions
• Develop strategies to eliminate obstacles

 Contact me to discuss dates, location and cost.

Deepen Your Creativity: Please Don’t Feed the Saboteur

You know the Saboteur – it’s that nasty inner critic that is never satisfied with your creative efforts and does all it can to keep you from enjoying and expressing your full creative power. It’s the inner voice that tells you to stop rocking the boat, to give up your silly and feeble attempts to write or paint or perform or create, to stop embarrassing yourself, to maintain the comfortable status quo. You don’t have to let the Saboteur run (and ruin) your life. We’ll use freewriting, brainstorming, discussion, intentional and playful destruction and a variety of other techniques to:

• Recognize your Saboteur
• Recognize and respect the connection between creation and destruction
• Identify the 5 hallmarks of the Saboteur
• Prepare a mug shot, rap sheet and APB for your Saboteur
• Respond appropriately to the Saboteur
• Tear into and tear up the Saboteur for a change
• Develop strategies to feed appropriate destruction and starve the Saboteur

Contact me to discuss dates, location and cost.

Deepen Your Creativity: Resolve Unsolvable Problems

There are some habits we just can’t seem to break, some patterns we just can’t change, no matter how hard we try. We try harder and when that doesn’t work, we decide there must be something wrong with us. What’s wrong is our perspective. If a problem seems unsolvable, it’s often because it isn’t really a problem; it’s a polarity. Creative people face multiple polarities: Structure vs. Spontaneity, Self vs. Other, Inspiration vs. Perspiration, Play vs. Persistence. We’ll use discussion, brainstorming, polarity mapping, freewriting and other techniques to:

• Distinguish the difference between a problem to solve and a polarity to manage
• Identify the polarities that often inhibit creativity
• Create and walk your own personalized Polarity Map
• Identify the “red flags” that reveal when a polarity is unbalanced
• Gain insights that transform your perspective
• Apply new perspective and effectively manage the polarities in your life

 Contact me to discuss dates, location and cost.

Dancing in the Dragon’s Den group class

When we explore our creativity, we enter the Dragon’s Den of our own unconscious. We find treasure hidden there - tremendous energy and amazing creative potential. We also encounter the dragon - our shadow, the denied and repressed parts of ourselves. If the members of your group want to:

• Explore the connections between creativity and shadow
• Deepen your creative journey
• Tap the power in taboo topics
• Stop censoring yourself
• Restore your creative energy 
• Balance being a good artist with being a good friend/family member

Dancing in the Dragon’s Den is the class for you!

This class will guide you on the creative journey to discover your True Self. We’ll work through each chapter of Dancing in the Dragon’s Den and use a variety of techniques including exercises from the book, guided imagery, process drawing, two-person sharing, brainstorming and collage-making.

Contact me to discuss dates, location and cost.

Deeper into the Dragon’s Den group class

Once you’ve seen how vital shadow is to expressing the full depth of your creativity, (through your personal experience, reading my book, or taking one of my shadow classes) and if you’re ready to dive deeper to claim more of the creative treasure that waits for you in your shadow, this is the class for you!

After a brief review of the basic concepts like ego, shadow, True Self, Creative Center, we’ll seek a deeper understanding and appreciation of the shadow and how to use it to expand your creativity. We’ll use a variety of techniques like two-person sharing, brainstorming, Polarity Management, self-directed humor at the ego’s foibles, guided imagery, process drawing, and creating symbols of our journey to give you opportunities to:

• Develop a working relationship with the shadow
• Identify and resolve the discrepancy between your ego’s demands, your shadow impulses and your True Self’s creative and spiritual desires
• Accept the shadow’s Saving Grace –  those gifts you need to keep growing and creating that only shadow can give
• Use the energy of the Inner Destroyer to keep your creativity flowing
• Develop the willingness and ability to surrender your ego when that’s appropriate
• Experience intense joy and creative bliss!

Contact me to discuss dates, location and cost.