FOR MORE BREAKTHROUGHS, BREAK SOME HABITS

           Copyright 1994 Marcia Yudkin.  You may reproduce this
           entire electronic disk and pass it on as shareware.  All
           other rights reserved.  Excerpted from THE CREATIVE GLOW: 
           HOW TO BE MORE ORIGINAL, INSPIRED & PRODUCTIVE IN YOUR
           WORK, Volume I, #1.

               Habits stabilize our behavior. They allow us to act
           efficiently and concentrate on the tasks we choose to focus
           on. If you had to ponder which slipper to put on first when
           you got out of bed, then how to brush your teeth, hold your
           comb and so on, you probably wouldn't have time to do much
           of anything else.
 
              But habits also often box us in. Face to face with an
           obstacle, your mind may fill with the strategies you always
           try -- and only those. Used to merely exchanging
           pleasantries with your doorman, you may never discover he
           grew up in Bora Bora, a marvelous new destination for your
           adventure travel business. Stuck in the notion that food is
           for eating, you miss the chance to notice that the chef's
           arrangement of food on your plate point the way toward a
           better design of your company brochure.

               Fresh winds begin to blow through your life when you
           start to separate the habits that are merely well-
           entrenched from those that serve you. In Block: Getting Out
           of Your Own Way, Abigail Lipson and David Perkins write
           about an army officer who wondered not long ago why the
           protocol for firing an artillery rounds required two
           soldiers to stand behind the gun and to the left. Tracing
           the custom back, he learned that these two once had had a
           function -- holding the horses. To make sure that you're
           not wasting energy on horses when there are no horses to
           hold, try the following:

           1. VARY YOUR DAILY ROUTINE. 
               Take a different route to work. Sit in a different
           chair when meeting with visitors. Use a fountain pen to
           sign letters. Have curry or felafel for lunch instead of
           soup and a sandwich. "Making even the smallest changes
           builds flexibility that allows you to roll with the punches
           more easily," says Jeanne Hillson, president of Applied
           Imagination in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "It makes new
           ideas less frightening, helps you be more open to other
           people's suggestions and enhances teamwork."

           2. CHALLENGE ACCEPTED WAYS OF THINKING.
               "Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible
           things before breakfast," declared the White Queen to Alice
           in Through the Looking Glass, and she was certainly
           original, wasn't she? MindLink, a creativity software
           program, invites users to list solutions to their problem
           that are impractical, illegal or impossible, then find a
           workable variation of the absurd idea. I tried this out on
           the question of how I can book more creativity workshops;
           the dubious suggestion "bribe sponsors" evolved into
           something much more practical -- have someone market
           workshops for me on commission.

           3. PRACTICE PAYING ATTENTION.
               How often do you drive past your intended turnoff
           because your mind is on automatic pilot? When habits rule,
           we tune out potentially stimulating aspects of our
           environment. Pursuing what the Buddhists call "mindfulness"
           helps us cultivate creativity as well as inner peace. In
           Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh's native tradition, people
           stop what they are doing whenever they hear temple bells
           and just enjoy their breathing: "Every time we get back in
           touch with ourselves, the conditions become favorable for
           us to encounter life in the present moment." People in the
           West can use the telephone's ring or a car's seat-belt
           buzzer as reminders to wake up to themselves in their
           surroundings, he says.

           4. PARTICIPATE IN AN ACTIVITY THAT IS UNCHARACTERISTIC OF
           YOU.
               Creative people frequently say that inspiration hits
           when they are doing something else. To the extent that your
           "else" is limited, so are the odds of a stunning insight.
           Repeated encounters with an alien realm of experience open
           you up to provocative new viewpoints. In my first
           involvement with a tactile art since childhood, I joined a
           sculpture class. "Turn it around and stand back," my
           teacher advised after I had finished shaping my mound of
           clay on a swivel tray. Boing! The idea of looking at
           something from all sides was so unfamiliar to me that I
           began to wonder how I failed to do that in my usual way of
           living and working.