The power of indirectness
In today’s blog, we’re talking about the power of indirectness and working with the element of surprise.
As someone who likes to charge directly at problems with the full force of my being, this is possibly the biggest creativity lesson I have learned, and continue to learn!
New ideas are a surprise
It’s hard to will new ideas into being. Instead, the best ideas are usually accidents or arrive out of the blue while we’re doing something else. They appear in the shower, on a walk, after we’ve given up or failed spectacularly – really anywhere except where we would expect or like them to be.
By definition we can’t know when the next surprise will strike. But we can work on our receptivity to surprise. Creating room for it, feeling more comfortable with it, and spotting surprises/new ideas when they arrive. It’s like getting our eye in – and the more we do it, the better we get.
the power of coming at things sideways
There’s a lot of cultural pressure, especially at work, to optimise and streamline and get from A to B as fast as possible.
But as we all know, most of life doesn’t work like that. It’s messier, more complex and mysterious.
Rather than charging straight at a problem, indirectness has a different energy. It’s softer, more playful, and in lots of ways more exciting and expansive. It can also be a quicker way through in the long run when we’re working with hard problems that require our creativity.
Now as I mentioned, I’ve charged directly at my fair share of messy, complex, intractable problems. And so the power of indirectness has been a revelation.
I remember when I was a lawyer back in 2016 and first started painting. I thought I was doing something entirely unrelated to my work – but was surprised to discover that painting quickly became the best CPD I was doing in my law practice. My brain was changing, I felt like a creative person again, and as a result I began to relax and think about legal problems differently.
And more recently I’ve been surprised to discover that starting a mid-life punk band has actually been inadvertently preparing me to launch a leadership coaching business. It turns out that making a music video in a marble hot-pants onesie really roots out any lingering fear of putting yourself out there!
It’s like new ideas prefer to live in our peripheral vision – and we’re only really able to spot them while we’re looking at something else.
Practising indirectness and welcoming surprise
Here are two practices I return to when I want to tap into the power of indirectness and welcome in surprise:
First, we can practice looking away from the problems we’re trying to solve. Turning our attention elsewhere creates space in our brains and gives our best ideas the opportunity to appear in our peripheral vision.
Like most things that are good for us – looking away is simple but not easy. We need to peel ourselves from our work and create time and space for other things. Schedule appointments with yourself, leave your phone behind, observe the clouds, explore your interests, let your brain be idle, seek out variety.
If this feels frivolous or trivial, remember the power of indirectness. You are in fact working on the most important things in your life — you’re just doing it indirectly, inviting in the element of surprise.
Second, we can practice turning toward surprises when they appear and channelling our curiosity.
I like working on this through dedicated low-stakes curiosity practices: safe, fun activities where we can experiment, follow our hunches, and make mistakes. We let ourselves be led by our curiosity – "I wonder what might happen", and when something unexpected occurs, we channel our curiosity – “Now that’s interesting”. The words "I wonder" and “that’s interesting” tap straight into our curiosity and set the scene for surprise.
The better we get at channelling our curiosity in low-stakes environments, the easier it becomes when the stakes feel higher.
That’s it for now. I hope you’re feeling more prepared and excited for your next surprise! Let me know how it goes at hello@kateyesberg.com.
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Studio Life
This week my exhibition Fortune II is packing up and moving to Auckland for the summer. It’ll be on show at {Suite} on Ponsonby Rd over December – January.
Otherwise it’s been a relatively quiet creative time in doodling / sketching / learning / reset mode. After almost every show I spend a bit of time experimenting with squiggly lines and pouring paint around. Here’s a little shot of the state of things.
Creative power to you.
Kate x