Fostering Creativity

Some of my very best conversations with customers are when I am wrapping a gift for them. There is just an ease about the moment when I think folks feel comfortable asking me a question. Plus, my mind works better when I am doing something, so chatting and wrapping seem to go hand and hand while I am being a shopkeeper. The question posed the other day to me was why I decided to make my blog posts daily? The lovely woman has been a WK customer for years, reads the blog quite frequently, and for lack of a better term, she gets me. Her asking the question seemed spot on and I thought it was a good one. Here is my response, as well as a few other thoughts around creativity to get the Sunday morning rolling. I chose to write something each day to challenge myself. I knew if I had to come up with a post every day, it would keep me on my toes and really focusing in on singular moments that occur during the day–fostering creativity. I am always looking for ways to live creatively, and creating tasks to stretch me a bit has always been on the list. Creativity creates more creativity. As our conversation wound down, as her stack of purchases were almost completely wrapped, she asked how I thought she could be more creative. My suggestions were: host a dinner and set a festive table different from one she had ever created, start a journal of things that stirred her visually through the course of the day, take a day trip to a place she had never been. To me, fostering creativity is about getting the mind moving, pushing your comfort level a tad, and just trying new things.