Conflict Creativity Change • Break Free From Self-Limiting Facets of Life To Lead a Life Less Linear

By Richard Conner

'In any creative process, there is a level of pain, struggle, and momentary or long suffered limitation.

I love the struggle more when I like what I'm creating on multiple levels and less when I don't.

I have to be vigilant and pay close attention to my emotions when submerged in my creative process, no matter how short or drawn out it becomes.

I must quickly ascertain whether there is really something wrong with me and my life that I need to address or I just don't like an aspect of the project I'm absorbed in at the time and I'm merely projecting my discomfort onto an external situation or relationship (including the one with myself).

I'm prone to feel shitty in my mind and body about my life situation and very self-critical when I fall out of my creative flow for too long. Are these one and the same problem, co-existing at the same time?' Richard Conner

 

This curated collection of works by award-winning Author, Architect, and Artist Richard Conner explores the interrelated concepts of Conflict, Creativity, and Change.

Understanding these High Definition Life success components is critical if you are driven to establish meaning and purpose in your life, work, projects, and relationships.

 

The compilation includes:

 

Facets of Life • Dispel Inner And Outer Conflict • With The Seven Works Conscious Work-Life-Change Blueprint

 

Break Your Busy • Set Your Creativity Free • Enjoy Better Life and Time Management. Stop Procrastination, Be More Effective.

 

Transformerpreneured • Life Less Linear • Time To Give A Shift

 

This transformational mini-book collection concludes with the T•Types Transformerpreneur Profiles • Tendencies • Dependencies • Complementaries • Choose Allies Wisely personality quiz and exploratory guide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Transformerpreneur
• Release date: Mar 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201189822

Book preview

Conflict Creativity Change

Conflict Creativity Change

Break Free From Self-Limiting Facets of Life To Lead a Life Less Linear

Richard Conner

Transformerpreneur

‘I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.’

---

William Blake

Contents

Preface

Notes

Self

Introduction

Facets of Life

Introduction

I. Facets Of Life | Meet Your Master

1. The Master Works

2. Busy Work vs Real Work

3. Riding Work Edges

4. Redefining Work

II. The Seven Works | RIP Work-Life-Balance

1. The Seven Works

2. The Real Works

3. The Support Works

4. The Busy Works

III. Reconfiguring Works | That Feedback Feeling

1. Letting Go

2. Work Tagging

3. Balancing Act

4. Forced Feedback

Conclusion

Break Your Busy

Introduction

I. Breaking Your Busy

1. Busy Work vs Real Work

2. Riding Work Edges

3. Primal Necessity

4. Money, Work, and Time

5. The Seven Works

II. Making Clear Space

1. Reality Check

2. List Manipulation

3. Experiments In Reductionism

4. Work Vacuum Challenge

5. Expect Inefficiency

III. Getting Real Creatively

1. Ignore Creative Urges At Your Peril

2. Connecting To Your Creative Core

3. Journalistic Intention

4. Continual Idea Generation

5. Being Most Creative

Conclusion

Life Less Linear

What is a...?

Change To Changed

1. Conscious Change

2. Conscious Creativity

3. Conscious Communication

4. Conscious Connection

Finding Your Way

1. The Cave | Mine + Plato's

2. The High Definition Life + The Idyllic Illusion

3. Futopia 2096 | 20 Year Anniversary Edition

4. First Flow | In The Creative Loop

The Return Home

1. Ending The Search | Picking Up On Pieces

2. Making The Change | Picking Up On Pieces

3. Creative Loop | Unlocking Creativity As Work

4. Challenge Vacuum | Unlocking Time As Work

5. Work Your Why

6. Why Be Repurposeful

Because It’s Personal

T-Types Test

Discover Your T•Type

Typologies

Overview

Dreamer

Storyteller

Implementer

Analyzer

Deliverer

Comparisons

Tendencies

Inquiries

WIN $750+ Package

Support Systems

Your Money Future

T-Types Test

Reward Central

Feedback Loop

About The Author

Also By The Author

Copyright

Disclaimer

Contact

Glossary

Preface

Old Beginnings

I was the managing director of a successful, professional consultancy, headquartered in London. It was co-founded officially with two of my closest and longest-standing friends around the turn of the millennium. The business was born during a three to four-year incubation period while the partners worked their respective day jobs.

As co-leaders of an international creative agency, we had to navigate the extremes of relentless economic turmoil. We were forced keep pace with the fast moving, disruptive development of marketing communication technology and online content creation strategies and techniques.

Like many businesses leading into and out of the crash of 2008, it was hustle or die. We had to quickly and regularly identify, often pre-empt, but always implement significant change to restructure and reorganise to compete, survive and after much hard work eventually thrive and prosper.

Before this, and in parallel, I was also co-founder and co-director, with the same partners, of an award-winning architectural practice. Under the leadership of my former co-director since my departure during late 2009 it too matured into a successful focussed in-demand creative consultancy business.

---

Stark Contrast

In stark contrast to the relentless bustle of the agency’s London HQ in Shoreditch, its international studios, and my architect designed London Fields two bedroom apartment my life has taken a seemingly sudden and abrupt change.

Now, I live in a cave, my jungle home on a small island off mainland Thailand, surrounded by nature, in peace and calm. I have for the moment, a relative abundance of time, energy, focus, and space to work on what I want and feel passionately drawn to, when I want to. Including me, my self, and I.

In the past I might have used this space and freedom frantically working to get a new or long-forgotten project off the ground. Or, I’d scrabble around trying to launch a new business, all without skipping a beat, to secure an income and stay ahead of the game.

Typically this would all happen without a moment’s break or pause for real thought and feeling investigation into what I truly wanted to do with and become in my life.

Most importantly these seemingly wayward entrepreneurial endeavours were missing a deeply meaningful Why.

This time, at long last, my approach was intentionally different.

Notes

Overhwelm

Throughout the Work Life Wide Open series ‘overwhelm’ will be used in noun form. According to the Oxford English Dictionary it has been used as such since at least 1596.

It will be used, firstly, as shorthand for the life, work, and relationally overwhelming circumstances, situations and contexts we sometimes find ourselves immersed in.

And, secondly, to define the psychological and emotional impact we experience as a result of this ‘overwhelm’.

---

Overlap

To help ensure each book within the Work Life Wide Open Series is as accessible and useful as possible it is necessary to establish a conceptual base understanding for new readers.

As such, please assume there will be 5%-15% of overlapping content between books. This serves to reintroduce and remind the reader of key foundational concepts relevant to each book’s core content and message. I hope you welcome and accept this repetition in the spirit it is intended.

Self

To Self

Throughout this book I will use ‘your self’ and ‘our self’ to refer to that part of us that inherently knows, consciously or not, the most authentic truth behind what we really want and need in life.

For clarity, ‘yourself’ and ‘ourself’ will refer to the individual relative to an external factor, influence, or context.

For example, we may be too distracted to feel what we are experiencing at a physical and emotional level within our bodies. As a result, we often avoid, deny or delay the need to consider, take, and make life-changing decisions and actions.

We postpone finding and exploring what we genuinely want to do, be, and experience to a far-off future. We forget ‘our selves’.

Conversely, we may have to convince ‘ourselves’ that breaking a bad habit is good for us, i.e. ‘our selves’ and those around us.

Throughout the book consider working with ‘your self’ as an internally referenced experience and working for ‘yourself’ as a predominantly externally referenced experience.

Introduction

‘In any creative process, there is a level of pain, struggle, and momentary or long suffered limitation.

I love the struggle more when I like what I’m creating on multiple levels and less when I don’t.

I have to be vigilant and pay close attention to my emotions when submerged in my creative process, no matter how short or drawn out it becomes.

I must quickly ascertain whether there is really something wrong with me and my life that I need to address or I just don’t like an aspect of the project I’m absorbed in at the time and I’m merely projecting my discomfort onto an external situation or relationship (including the one with myself).

I’m prone to feel shitty in my mind and body about my life situation and very self-critical when I fall out of my creative flow for too long. Are these one and the same problem, co-existing at the same time?’

Richard Conner

This curated collection of works by award-winning Author, Architect, and Artist Richard Conner explores the interrelated concepts of Conflict, Creativity, and Change.

Understanding these High Definition Life success components is critical if you are driven to establish meaning and purpose in your life, work, projects, and relationships.

---

The compilation includes:

---

Facets of Life • Dispel Inner And Outer Conflict • With The Seven Works Conscious Work-Life-Change Blueprint

---

Break Your Busy • Set Your Creativity Free • Enjoy Better Life and Time Management. Stop Procrastination, Be More Effective.

---

Transformerpreneured • Life Less Linear • Time To Give A Shift

---

This transformational mini-book collection concludes with the T•Types Transformerpreneur Profiles • Tendencies • Dependencies • Complementaries • Choose Allies Wisely personality quiz and exploratory guide.

Facets of Life

Dispel Inner And Outer Conflict • With The Seven Works Conscious Work-Life-Change Blueprint

Introduction

High Definition Life

In a world of excessive overwhelm, increasing busyness and a lack of truth and integrity few would deny that many amongst us are disorientated and questioning our purpose in life. We agonise over the value we are giving, or not giving. We question our contribution to our partners, our families and the local and global community we are continually co-creating.

We are lost whether to spend more time on our work life to make ends meet and be of value to the world or to focus more on our personal life so that we have something of value to come home to after working so hard. We are in conflict, caught between a healthy desire to give more and an insecure need to get more.

We pursue more in a vain attempt to make us feel better about and cover up the disconnection we feel from our selves, our creativity and our most important and meaningful work. Our disconnected, often chaotic life experience reminds us daily that we are not getting what we want out of life from our relationships and the things we possess and obsess.

In the main, the things we do are merely ways to entertain ourselves until the next metaphorical ready meal swings by on the conveyor belt of distraction.

As easily as we can select something else from the menu if we’re not satisfied we can, and will, choose a new phone or a new car as readily as we will change jobs, careers or romantic interest.

The throw-away society that we have co-created is the perfect breeding ground for wanton distraction.

The underlying problem we refuse to see is that in these superficial changes we take ourselves with us.

We are the common denominator. 

At the deepest heartfelt level of our endless search for the next best, we yearn for connection, fulfilment, freedom, happiness, satisfaction, truth and meaning on a consistent basis.

This is true whether we recognise this in ourselves or not.

Yet in our never ending attempts to find and acquire these seemingly elusive qualities of the good life we blindly look not to ourselves but elsewhere, out there.

We focus our attention out there to try and get everything we think we need and want in here as fast as we can.

We work and play hard no matter the cost to our physical, mental and emotional wellbeing. As a result, the health of our immediate environment and the beloved planet we are privileged, for the moment to call home are in severe jeopardy.

We know we must make a stand and create meaningful change.

Yet still, we demand more life content and bigger and better things. All of this unnecessary stuff distracts us further from the truth we don’t want to see. We are lost, without a meaningful story to guide us. Take Hollywood by way of analogy.

We all know that regardless of the quality of the computer-generated (CG) effects in a movie, no matter how real it looks, if the story isn’t up to scratch we will be disappointed. We will feel like we wasted our time and money and so did the film studio that came up with the story and decided to produce it.

Now, consider this waste of resources on a grander scale and you have our current life context. This big glossy high budget production has plenty of action, disruption and catastrophe. This disaster movie can be so exciting and enthralling that we watch it day in and day out, on repeat. We wait for the story to take a substantial twist or turn, but it doesn’t.

The problem is not that the situations in our day to day lives or those played out on the world stage don’t ever change. It’s that they don’t change significantly.

They improve just enough to keep us in our seats or glued to our devices, watching and waiting, encouraging us to do little else but keep doing so we can keep getting.

We don’t get up off our behinds and work to create our own movie and live our own story. We keep watching the screen as if it’s the only channel and the only thing worth watching. We do the same with our lives. We don’t change the channel even if we wanted to because we don’t know what’s on the other side.

In the not knowing is fear. We continually let the belief system we have subscribed to, that we are not enough, and that we can’t make a real change and a big difference, rob us of our life passion, creativity, meaning, happiness and joy.

It has become so natural for us to look to technology and work of any and all kinds to fill this gaping hole that constant distraction and denial of our true feelings has left in our lives. Ironically, both work and technology promote themselves within our culture as the solution to their own problem.

You’re disconnected from everyone and everything so get more ‘connected’ to feel better and stay that way. Work harder and longer to earn your security and flexibility to do what you want when you want. Of course, this propaganda distracts us from our self still further. It puts the only ‘real’ solution firmly out there, out of reach. A little or a lot like religion in many ways, these solutions are touted as the external cure-all to an all internal dis-ease.

The High Definition Life represents the extremely fast changing technological and natural context we have all been and continue to be party to creating, using and abusing. We have allowed it for good or bad to pervade our lives and both our natural and artificial worlds. As a result, we suffer conflict and chaos, internally and externally, directly and indirectly.

This disorder arises out of the underlying disruption, turmoil, exploitation and manipulation of the natural world, ourselves included, from which the technology itself and consequently the work we so rely on for our livelihood and wellbeing spring forth.

The inherent chaos and disorder of the High Definition Life are undeniably created by our undisciplined pursuit of more. The resulting overwhelm we are experiencing is compounded by our incessant irrational need to keep doing more and more meaningless work to fuel this mindless pursuit.

This work, no matter what it is or whether or not it makes us truly happy, we tenaciously believe will get us where we want to go, irrespective of the cost to us and the planet we live on. 

Where do we want to go you cry?

To freedom of course, from the chaotic, overwhelming, stressful and disconnected High Definition Life that we created to solve our disconnection problem in the first place.

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The Whole Story

The High Definition Life is neither good nor bad in itself.

However, believing through ignorance or denial that it controls our lives and it is the only way to live is blindly abandoning your creative birthright and subscribing to an Idyllic Illusion. This ideal projection is perfectly tailored to pacify you, keeping you from living your life as creatively and fully as you want.

It’s not the whole story either. The High Definition Life (the Chaotic Ideal) coexists alongside the other primary influencers within our lives, the Cultural Ideal and the Custom Ideal. Each of these as they feature most prominently in your life is what I call in Work Life Wide Open parlance a Prevailing Ideal Component.

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The Projected Ideal

The Projected Ideal and The Prevailing Ideal Component Triad

All the Prevailing Ideal Components combine to form your Projected Ideal. This is your view and belief system that dictates how the world and your life should be. However, where this Projected Ideal doesn’t align with your reality and most authentic truth surrounding what you want to do and be in the world inner and outer conflict can and will most likely arise.

This conflict, if ignored or not dealt with fully, can lead to a stream of seemingly never ending Negative Ideal Outcomes (aka problems, knock-backs, missed opportunities and unwanted negative situations and experiences).

‘The Seven Works - Reconfiguring The Facets of Life’ is primarily focussed on the Chaotic Ideal facet of the Projected Ideal with the aim of arriving at a more ordered, balanced and consciously creative state of being and doing within the High Definition Life.

You can dig deeper into the High Definition Life, the Prevailing Ideals, your Projected Ideal, the Idyllic Illusion and how to navigate, steer, co-evolve, and co-create a better life for all with the help of simple transformational concepts and practical guidance throughout the rest of the Work Life Wide Open Series.

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Mutual Context

As we are all operating within the High Definition Life to varying degrees we must find a way to create an environment for change within this overall context. This is the case even if, in the extreme, we have to disengage from it completely for a period of time, at least to begin with.

This is often, but not always the best way to instigate a reconnection to our deepest wants, desires and aspirations and become aware of the hidden fears that would hold us back from activating and acting on them through our creativity.

To disengage is not so difficult to achieve as it might appear at first read. In essence and in practice it is a two-pronged affair. Firstly it is about removing your association with everything out there that isn’t serving you and the greater good.

Secondly, it is about turning inward consistently as a holistic practice to ensure every contact you make with the external world out there from this point forward is as authentic and meaningful as possible in the moment.

Both call for a new way of looking at What we do as individuals in the world and Why in the first instance. Resolving conflict and creating significant change where needed are key components of this alternative approach to giving what we want rather than taking and getting what we can.

The aim, and inevitable outcome of this process is finding, then living and breathing the meaningful work we truly want to do and be in the world for the benefit of all, ourselves included.

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Not All Blueprints Work

The old life blueprint includes the traditional way of defining and compartmentalising life into ‘personal life’ and ‘work life’. Perhaps unsurprisingly this leads to recurring internal and external conflict as one is played off against the other in an attempt to achieve a semblance of work-life-balance for ourselves and those we are in close and ongoing relationship with.

It’s obvious this outdated classification just doesn’t cut it any more, if it ever did. The eternal conflict we all feel is difficult if not impossible to unravel and resolve without a more flexible and holistic operating model. The status quo needs upgrading to meet, keep up with and lead us through and beyond any and all limiting aspects of the High Definition Life.

The reality is all of life is work. It is not reserved just for the hours of 9 to 5, for putting time in at the gym, or doing some hard graft building a shed in the garden. It is everywhere, inherent to all aspects of our life, especially and perhaps most importantly to the dislocated relationship with our self.

In short, we can deny the facts and facets of life as much as we want but life must be continually worked at.

We can pretend the expansive and pervasive nature of work isn’t real and delude ourselves that it is, or should remain confined to the outdated post industrial, information age operating system.

We can ignore the fact we are entering the age of the Internet of Things, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence but whether we like it or