Outgrowing your clothes - outgrowing your ideas?

Well, it's the week after Christmas and time for me to set my intentions for 2006. One of them will most certainly be to get to the gym regularly as I am really starting to outgrow my clothes (it happens to the best of us over time, so I'm told).

An easy excuse ... "it happens to the best of us." I'm sure I could dig up lots of reasons why it's OK and acceptable and even understandable that as I get older it's easier to stay further from the gym. And it would be "OK" to outgrow a pair of jeans here and there, right?

Well, why isn't it OK for us to outgrow our old ideas? We give ourselves leeway to gain a pound here and there, but we tend to hold ourselves hostage to "the way we've always done it." We're afraid - of what others will think, of what we might look like, of being wrong, of making a mistake. We apparently don't yet know that the only way to get beyond the way we've done things in the past is to make mistakes - and to learn from them.

I gave a presentation just before Christmas for the Fargo-Moorhead Advertising Federation called "It Takes Courage to be Creative" (I wrote about that topic several months ago on this blog). One thing that I re-discovered in preparing for that presentation was that it takes not only courage, but also destruction in order to be the most creative.

I first heard about that concept when I heard Rosanne Bane speak in September of 2004. She is the author of "Dancing in the Dragon's Den" (see her website here). From Rosanne I learned that in order to be the most creative, we have to destroy the old - the old thought patterns, the old ideas, the old ways of being. She talked about Jungian philosophy and the shadow side and lots of really neat concepts in a way that I really understood them, and have learned to incorporate them into my own life.

My friend Sheila Sornsin also figured this out when she launched her new company called "Big Break Amusing Mosaics." She and her business partner Ann apparently understand that to create a beautiful mosaic, you first have to destroy china or ceramic or other "whole" pieces. Although I haven't experienced the Big Break yet, I'm planning to celebrate my birthday there next week to see, firsthand, how therapeutic it can be to actually demonstrate this concept in action. I'll let you know how it goes!