Influencing #tactics fall into 3 categories: logical, emotional, or cooperative.

Influence is the power and the ability to personally affect others’ actions, decisions, opinions, or thinking.

Ultimately, influence allows you to get things done and achieve desired outcomes.

At a basic level, influence is about compliance — getting someone to do what you want them to do (or at least not to undermine it). But genuine commitment from other people is often required for you to accomplish key goals and tasks.

Early in your career, or in individual contributor roles, influence is about working effectively with people over whom you have no authority. It requires the ability to present logical and compelling arguments and engaging in give-and-take. In senior-level or executive roles, influence is focused more on steering long-range objectives, inspiration, and motivation.

We’ve found that influencing tactics fall into 3 categories: logical, emotional, or cooperative. We call this influencing with head, heart, and hands.

1. Logical appeals tap into people’s rational and intellectual positions. You present an argument for the best choice of action based on organizational benefits, personal benefits, or both.
2. Emotional appeals connect your message, goal, or project to individual goals and values. An idea that promotes a person’s feelings of well-being, service, or sense of belonging has a good chance of gaining support.
3. Cooperative appeals involve collaboration (what will you do together?), consultation (what ideas do other people have?), and alliances (who already supports you or has the credibility you need?). Working together to accomplish a mutually important goal extends a hand to others in the organization and is an extremely effective way of influencing.

To maximize your personal influence, you’ll want to become skilled in all 3 styles. Decide which tactics will reap the most support for a specific task or strategy and employ one or more approaches. To understand which tactics might work best, consider the following:

• Assess the situation. Why are you involved in this work? Why do you need this person’s support? What outcomes are you trying to achieve by influencing this person? Be clear about whom you need to influence and what you want to accomplish.
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• Know your audience. Identify and understand your stakeholders. Each will have special concerns and issues, as well as their own agenda, perspectives, and priorities. Various groups and individuals will require different approaches for influencing. Tailor your influencing strategy for the particular person — considering individual personalities, goals, and objectives — as well as organizational roles and responsibilities.
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• Review your ability. What tactics do you use most often? Which seem to be most effective? What new tactics could you try in this situation? Draw on others for advice or coaching, too. For example, if you always focus on the logical appeals, have a co-worker who is a strong collaborator help you think through your collaboration tactics and arguments.
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• Brainstorm your approach. What tactics would work best? Which logical appeals will be most effective? How could you make an emotional or cooperative appeal? What specifically could you say and do to use each type of tactic? Anticipate possible responses and prepare your reply. What counterarguments could you use? What additional influencing tactics would be helpful?

At first, you might want to try out new influencing tactics in low-risk situations, practicing these skills 1-on-1. As you become more versatile, you’ll gain confidence in your ability to influence teams and larger groups, and to persuade others in higher-stakes situations.

But also consider changing tactics right away if you have a pressing issue that has stalled due to lack of buy-in or support. Would a more logical, emotional, or collaborative approach make a difference? If so, go ahead and try out a new angle — you might be more influential that you realized.


Influence is one of the key skills taught in our flagship Leadership Development Program and can help you dramatically improve your effectiveness at work.

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#Businesses looking for perceptive thinkers are looking for #philosophy majors

Last month, a philosophy major from the University of Dallas carried his diploma straight from academia to a job in investment banking. He got this job not despite his degree, but because of it. A firm that manages trillions of dollars in assets contacted UD's career office seeking a liberal arts major.

During the Republican presidential debates in 2015, Marco Rubio told America that "we need more welders and less philosophers." But if that's so, why would a major investment bank view a degree in the liberal arts, and in philosophy in particular, as an asset rather than a liability? 

One explanation comes from Wall Street investor Bill Miller, who in January gave $75 million to the philosophy department at his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University. "Philosophy," Miller said, "involves critical thinking and reasoning about highly complex issues. At its best it is rigorous and analytical. These skills are exactly what are required to think through and understand capital markets and the analysis of businesses. However good one is at this, philosophical training will make you better."

In a similar vein, the American Association of University Professors and the Association of American Colleges and Universities recently issued a joint statement observing that "liberal arts majors make great tech-sector workers precisely because they are trained to think critically and creatively, and to adapt to unforeseen circumstances."

It is true that philosophy and the liberal arts give graduates a competitive advantage in the workplace by fostering critical thinking. But we believe that these disciplines cultivate an even more powerful skill: perceptive thinking.

In April, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told an audience at Southern Methodist University that he does not let his executives use PowerPoint, or even bullet points. Instead, they must craft a six-page narrative memo for each meeting. The first half-hour of the meeting involves silent reading of the text, followed by an engaging discussion. What skill makes for an outstanding narrative presentation at an Amazon executive meeting?

Perceptive thinking is the ability not only to take apart, but to see together, to grasp the whole, to register the first premises at work in an argument. Philosophy is, most profoundly, an ability to think perceptively. It is the art of distinguishing one thing from another, of getting inside what something is, of assessing the web of relations that constitute a thing.

In an interview in February, Mark Cuban said: "I personally think there's going to be a greater demand in 10 years for liberal arts majors than there were for programming majors and maybe even engineering, because when the data is all being spit out for you, options are being spit out for you, you need a different perspective in order to have a different view of the data."

Taking a view of the data — an insightful view, a view that moves a conversation forward — is perceptive thinking.

Philosophy values and teaches perceptive thinking, above all in contexts where careful discussion, spoken or written, is our best way of getting a better handle on the matter at hand. Discussion is the proper context of perceptive thinking.

The ability to talk meaningfully about Plato's articulation of justice in The Republic, or Kant's distinction between empirical and pure intuitions, enables the philosophy major to make sense of just about anything. Navigating Shakespeare or Euclid produces similar results.

Focusing on big questions — questions about the whole of reality, and about our own place within it — turns out to have practical benefits. It delivers to the workforce graduates who can think not just critically, but also perceptively. It even has something in common with welding, for it is a mode of thinking that unites one thing to another, forging the whole together.


Chad Engelland and Chris Mirus are associate professors of philosophy at the University of Dallas. 

Email: 
cengelland@udallas.edu and mirus@udallas.edu

• Editor's Note: 
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• There are grave concerns under any circumstances to leave absolute power in the hands of the few, as there is no way to possibly calibrate the merits of their so-called special wisdom. In fact, it is impossible to objectively or scientifically measure deterministic wisdom and in many situations "random wisdom" could prove to have greater merit and value. Such could be the case for hundreds of years. Why? Because that's the way the universe works and it cares little for the hopes, beliefs and aspirations of any species.

How to keep your brain fit for agile #leadership ?

If you have to lead agile teams, you need agile leaders that possess important qualities, such as the ability to innovate and view issues from multiple angles, be able to take good risks, outperform through challenges and reflect and learn from experiences.
What does neuroscience learn us, especially when it comes to training our “agile leadership brain”?


The following seven neuro-cognitive activities are taken from The Healthy Mind Platter, published by David Rock in the Neuroleadership Journal, in 2012. Seven activities that will help you to keep your brain fit for the challenges of agile leadership.

‍
1. Take enough time to sleep. 


As important as sleep is for the body, evidence suggests that it may be even more critical for the brain. Sleep stimulates critical brain functions, such as memory, creative processing, and emotion regulation. How much sleep should you get? Although there is room for individual variation, on average we need 8 hours sleep per day.


2. Time to play

Playfulness enhances the capacity to innovate, adapt, and master changing circumstances. It is not just an escape. Often, it can show us a way out of our problems. Playing helps us to train our brain for the unexpected.

‍Time to play

 

 

3. Downtime

With downtime the investigators refer to a very specific type of “activity”: inactivity, or doing absolutely nothing that has a predefined goal. Hanging out, being spontaneous, as you might do on a lazy Sunday morning with no plans stimulates unconscious thought and produces better decisions. 

‍Did you know that smart time management is mainly about a fit brain?

 

 

4. Time-in

This is about reflection, attunement, meditation. It is about training the brain towards an intentional self-regulation of attention. Mindfulness is one of the ways to achieve stronger attention and emotion regulation.


5. Connecting time

Social connection is a basic human need, very much like water, food and shelter. Our connections to others provide a source of feeling seen, safe, and secure. The perception that others provide assistance and emotional support, buffers the negative effects of stress on your health.


6. Physical time

Physical activity has a significant positive and global impact on mental functioning. Exercise has the capacity to enhance learning and memory capacity under a variety of conditions. It can help to increase your brain’s health and plasticity throughout life.


7. Focus time

Focus time enables you to avoid the sense of being overwhelmed that so often is the result of trying to multitask. Isolate yourself now and than from the rest of the people and make sure you can concentrate and finish your task. There is a direct relationship between stress, focus and the health of your brain.


If you care for a fit brain, a healthy mind diet is necessary. It will enable you to keep focus and overview, do the right things and enhance engagement of your team members. This will give you great results.

Marianne Slotboom

Marianne is a strategic partner and practical developer of human behavior that helps leaders, teams and organizations become more focused and effective, elevating their value to customers. In 2015, Marianne founded Yellow Training to answer the call for more inspirational and creative leadership in the modern workplace.

More about the author

The Connection Between Creative Writing and Living a Fulfilled, Meaningful l#Life

A magical land at the back of an old wardrobe; a dystopian future where all humans are bred in test tubes and assigned a rigid place in society; an orphaned teenager who is repeatedly saved from death because his parents’ love cast a protective spell over him as a baby.
Sometimes you really do have to stop and marvel at the incredible power of human imagination expressed in fiction.

So, what sets creative writing apart from other forms of creativity — even from other forms of writing, such as non-fiction, memoir and poetry? I believe that it strengthens three muscles each and every one of us needs to live a fulfilled and meaningful life.

You don’t have to be an aspiring novelist to experience the unique power of creative writing, either; just pick up a pen or your laptop and let your imagination take over for an hour or so. Even if you never show anyone what you’ve written, you might discover something new about yourself and the world around you.

Image via Madeline Heising

 

EMPATHY

 

Writing in any form is always rooted in our own experience, and requires us to be alive to the world and individuals around us so that we can observe and then record what we see, hear, smell, think and feel.

Creative writing demands that we go even deeper than this, though; if we’re going to build an engaging fictional world and craft compelling stories, we have to populate them with believable, unique characters. Every time we tell a story, we have to step outside of ourselves and engage in different perspectives from our own. We have to imagine what it would be like to be someone else, someone with a different childhood, a different temperament, different strengths, flaws, gifts, passions and biases. We have to use radical empathy to imagine motivations, reactions and fears that aren’t our own.

Writing stories can help us to learn to live peacefully within the tangled question of human difference and uniqueness; to borrow words from the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke, writing encourages you to learn to “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart,” teaching you “to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.”

Every time we tell a story, we have to step outside of ourselves and engage in different perspectives from our own.

IMAGINATION

 

No matter how much you enjoy writing, or how good you become at it, there’s no getting away from the fact that it’s hard work. It takes a huge amount of discipline, and there’s a reason people talk so much about “writer’s block.” When you sit down and try to force yourself to be creative and use your imagination, it can initially feel like you just don’t have what it takes. Nope, no new or interesting ideas in this brain today — sorry!

But, with practice, discipline and the patience to push through the initial self-doubt (and yes, boredom), you’ll learn that imagination is a muscle that can be strengthened with enough practice and awareness.

In her book, “Bored and Brilliant: How Time Spent Doing Nothing Changes Everything”, science journalist Manoush Zomorodi shares that recent studies on the neuroscience of day-dreaming and mind-wandering suggest a whole host of benefits, including enhanced problem-solving, creative thinking, empathy, self-awareness and moral judgement.

Jonathan Smallwood, a neuroscientist who has devoted his work to studying daydreaming, says that spacing out (and using our imagination) “could be at the crux of what makes humans different from less complicated animals.”

Meanwhile, the benefits of make-believe and play in many different contexts have become widely recognized in recent years. Studies show that play helps us to cope with stress better; it’s therapeutic, and can increase our productivity.

Creative writing, of course, is just one way of many to unwind, play and use your imagination, but it’s a very powerful one. Letting our imaginations run wild within the safe space of a story, we’re freed to explore ideas and experiences that we might otherwise shy away from putting into words in any other situation.

Image via Madeline Heising

HUMILITY

 

C.S. Lewis wrote that true humility involves a kind of self-forgetting: “[the truly humble person] will not be thinking about himself at all.” The act of creative writing can leave us feeling vulnerable, child-like and even silly at times; it humbles us by taking us out of ourselves and requiring us to forget ourselves for a while. It encourages us to be open to unfamiliar ideas and perspectives, and in the process we can return to a child-like state of imaginative exploration, if we’re lucky.

This kind of humility can have hugely positive, knock-on effects on our ability to relate to those around us, which is especially valuable in this age of global connection and conflict. And, if you’re willing to put aside your pride and risk feeling a little foolish by writing a story, you’ll likely be blessed with a renewed sense of child-like wonder for the world around you.

Most #CEOs Read A Book A Week. This Is How You Can Too (According To This Renowned Brain Coach)

People say that nobody reads anymore.

Honestly, that couldn't be farther from the truth.

Most CEOs and executives read 4-5 books per month. These are the leaders, the gamechangers, the ones that end up shaking the ground, rebuilding industries, providing jobs, and inventing some of our most beloved everyday products. If they're reading that much, then clearly there is still some value in picking up a book.

According to brain fitness expert and speed-reading coach, Jim Kwik, there is an art to reading--specifically reading fast. Kwik is an international speaker and brain coach to some of the biggest companies in the world, including Virgin, Nike, Zappos, and handfuls of CEOs, entrepreneurs, and leadership teams. Kwik is also the founder of Kwik Learning, an online platform that provides memory and speed-reading training for busy people who want to achieve more in a minimal amount of time.

How Kwik became "the brain coach" is an interesting story. He suffered a traumatic brain injury when he was 5 years old that made learning a challenge for his formative years. But, like most successful entrepreneurs, he turned that obstacle into a path to help others. Today, he speaks all over the world on the importance of brain training, and the many effects it can have on a person's life--everything from improving habits, to increasing rapid-fire memory recall, and more.

Kwik is also the host of a popular podcast called Kwik Brain, which is designed to teach listeners something actionable in a short amount of time, with the intention of improving brain fitness. In one of his recent episodes, he talked about how to read a book a week (that's 52 books per year).

"Do you know how many books the average person reads per year?" he said. "Literally two or three, for the entire year. And yet, the average CEO is reading four or five books per month. That's a drastic difference."

He went on to explain how he breaks down the habit of reading for people, so that it can be a more actionable process.

"I went to Amazon and looked at the medium average number of words per book, and it came out to about 64,000 words. So let's say the average person reads 200 words per minute. We're talking about 320 minutes to get through a book, which is about 45 minutes a day, to read a book per week. That makes it a little more realistic," he said.

He added that 45 minutes spent reading in a day is practically nothing. That's a lunch break, a little bit at night, maybe reading a bit on the train on the way to work, etc. And that's without any speed-reading techniques.

Also, audiobooks become an option when you don't have the ability to read, like when you're on-the-go, or on the stairmaster.

"I like to listen to audiobooks when I'm on the treadmill because it actually helps me absorb the material better. It's been proven that when you are releasing certain hormones when you're working out, you are actually able to learn faster. And then I just put the audiobook on 1.5x or 2x the speed, so I can move more quickly through the material," he said.

And if you really want to crank through book after book, you can utilize certain speed-reading techniques, one of which Kwik refers to as removing "sub-vocalization."

"Sub-vocalization is the act of saying the words to yourself as you read, in your head. This is what slows a lot of people down. Your reading speed is your talking speed, not your thinking speed. That's why you can listen to audiobooks at 1.5x or 2x speed because you can think faster than people could talk. So the problem is that when people go too slow, that's when their comprehension goes down.


They lose focus," said Kwik.

Here's why speed-reading is such a crucial skill, and one worth mastering: if somebody has decades of experiences in marketing, for example, and they put all that info into a book, and you can sit down and get through the entire thing in a few days, you've just downloaded decades of insight in a very short amount of time. 


There's no greater advantage in the workplace than to be able to do that.

For more brain hacks, I highly suggest checking out Kwik's podcast, Kwik Brain, here.

Physical Fitness Level and Lower #Aortic Stiffness Slow #Aging of the Brain

Posted by Sherry Christiansen |

Memory loss is a common symptom that occurs as the brain ages. But, just what causes the accelerated rate of memory decline in older adults? Is there any way to slow down memory loss due to aging of the brain?

A new study, published in the Journal Alzheimer’s disease, discovered that the rate of memory decline and brain aging was related to physical fitness level, as well as the stiffness of the central arteries (the aorta).

What is Arterial Stiffness?

Arterial stiffness occurs from biological aging and atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries). Inflammation plays a major role in the development of atherosclerosis, and consequently, has a huge impact on stiffening of central arteries (major blood vessels that carry oxygenated blood to the heart). Arterial stiffness leads to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. What’s good for the heart is good for the brain, so, subsequently, stiffness of the aorta impacts brain health. This occurs primarily due to the brain’s high need for oxygen. When oxygen rich blood is not circulating as it should, the brain does not receive as much oxygen and nutrients.

According to the researchers from Swinburne’s Centre for Human Psychopharmacology the rate of memory decline in certain types of memory (such as long term or short term), may be linked to the stiffness of central arteries, combined with a person’s physical fitness level.

 

The Study

A new study, which will be published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, examined the underlying cause of cognitive deficits in older people living alone. Greg Kennedy, PhD., candidate, and lead study author, explained that “From early adulthood, memory and other aspects of cognition slowly decline, with an increasing risk of developing into dementia in later life.”

“Exactly why this occurs is unclear, but research indicates that exercise and physical fitness are protective,” Kennedy says. “A healthier, more elastic aorta is also theorized to protect cognitive function, by reducing the negative effects of excessive blood pressure on the brain.”

The study evaluated people to find out if a healthier aorta (central blood vessel) was linked to better cognitive function. In the study, 102 women and men, ages 60 to 90, who lived independently in elder care communities, were evaluated in Melbourne, Australia.

Study Findings

The study participants’ fitness levels were evaluated as they were asked to engage in the Six-Minute Walk test. This test involves walking back and forth between 2 markers, 30 feet apart, for 6 minutes.

Those who completed the fitness test were the only people included in the study results, which entailed an assessment of the level of stiffness in the aorta, and subsequent cognitive performance.

“People generally are less fit and have stiffer arteries as they age, which seems to explain the difference in memory ability that is usually attributed to ‘getting older’,” Kennedy says.
In the study, physical fitness had no impact on the stiffness of the arteries, but, Kennedy says this may be since long term fitness (which is a better predictor than current fitness level) was NOT evaluated in the study.

 

“The results of this study indicate that remaining as physically fit as possible, and monitoring central arterial health, may well be an important, cost effective way to maintain our memory and other brain functions in older age,” says Kennedy.

Make Creative Writing a Part of Your #Yoga Practice

by Christina von Jakubowski

For me, yoga is the secret to unlocking creativity. (One day, I imagine it may even help me write a best-selling novel!) As a writer, it has always seemed natural to set a creative intention before the start of my practice. I often place a notepad and pen right next to my mat, just in case life-changing metaphors reveal themselves in pigeon pose. From time to time, I have even experienced this kind of creative explosion on the mat, and it always feels like magic.

Yoga is the secret to unlocking creativity.

I have felt that this magic must be explored deeply, and I've wanted to uncover the secret behind it. But when I started researching at a University in Germany (where I am from), I discovered that very little has been written about yoga and writing. Through further exploration, I also found that the situation in the United States is comparable. "Why aren't there huge academic studies devoted to this subject?" I wondered. So, I decided to take another route to answer my yoga and writing questions: I turned to yogic scripture itself. And what I found is that the timeless philosophy behind this practice offered solutions for many of the challenges that I've encountered as a writer. 

We all experience "writer's block" every now and then, but imagine if we were to use the tools Patañjali offers in the Yoga Sutra to re-ignite our creative energy? Perhaps words would flow out of us like never before! I find the way Patañjali explains overcoming the nine obstacles (antaraya) through developing a one-pointed mind (sutra 1:32) and regulating the breath (sutra 1:34) to be especially powerful. Even as I began writing this article, the obstacle of doubt (samsaya) that I felt (particularly as to whether or not I would translate each word perfectly from German to English) was soothed when I applied the above methods.

Bearing this in mind, I started offering workshops at the university I was attending and at a yoga studio where I teach, and I began to do some research of my own. I developed questionnaires for the participants based on a research project conducted by Harvard Medical School entitled, "Effects of a Yoga Lifestyle Intervention on Performance-Related Characteristics of Musicians: A Preliminary Study."

I asked participants to respond to these questionnaires before and after practicing yoga and writing. To make it easier for those who don't write on a regular basis, I gave everyone two simple creative writing exercises to try after the yoga session. Rather than creating a set structure (like outlining chapters and key plots for a best-selling novel), the writing strategies were based on spontaneity and getting into the subconscious mind.

The idea is to keep your pen moving the whole time, even if you don't know what to write.

One exercise consisted of five minutes of "automatic writing" (writing from the subconscious) which I used as the "writing warm-up." In this method, the writer has to write everything down that comes to mind, without censoring grammar, punctuation, or ideas. The idea is to keep your pen moving the whole time, even if you don't know what to write, or if your thoughts seem too fast for your hands; you just keep writing. (This technique is inspired by the écriture automatique of surrealism.)

The other writing exercise was based on Susan Perry´s Clustering Method. During their yoga practice, participants were asked to write down upcoming ideas, inspiring words, or significant thoughts. For the Clustering Method practice, they chose one of these words as the center of a "mind-map." Then they had about three minutes to write related words in a cluster around the center word. Then comes the third step (what I find to be the most interesting part of this exercise): Perry states that by performing word association and then observing the cluster, a so-called “felt-shift” happens, and writers simply feel, see, or know what their piece will be about. 

And the results? What I read in the questionnaires amazed me far more than I anticipated. Even participants with little writing experience said they felt inspired into a state of creative flow when they wrote after yoga. It seemed that the yoga practice itself might be a key to unlocking the ease and confidence required for writing! (An interesting aside: I also got several paragraphs on pigeon pose. One practitioner wrote a particularly impassioned essay on how much they hated the pose. As their teacher, I made a mental note to give that pose a break for a while!)

Not only was everyone able to write something, but 71% of the practitioners surveyed stated that the writing helped them to clarify their thoughts. And this is why I recommend that every yogi place a notepad next to their mat. 

By taking time to write down some of our observations on our own physical and spiritual development, we can gain greater self-knowledge and clarity.

As yoga practitioners, the phases we go through and the themes that arise during our asana and meditation practices often remain abstract and can quickly become forgotten. By taking time to write down some of our observations on our own physical and spiritual development, we can gain greater self-knowledge and clarity. For instance, my notes revealed to me that whenever I get too ambitious about mastering any kind of asana, my spirit feels weaker, ultimately making it even more difficult for my body to open up.

And for writers, the movements, asana names, yogic stories, and relaxations can often create the perfect atmosphere for creativity to arise. Especially during the times that I've felt blocked or "stuck," yoga helped to reignite my creativity. In fact, some of my best ideas have come up while lying in shavasana.

A Few Things to Consider 

For yoga teachers who want to try these methods with their students, there are some risks of writing and yoga that are worth noting. It's my understanding that writing exercises that focus on flow, and automatic writing in particular, can reveal both "light" and "dark" aspects of the subconscious. In fact, free-writing methods are often used as part of gestalt psychotherapy, and they can be very powerful for anyone experiencing emotional disturbances. I suggest teachers inform their students of this before teaching these practices. 

Furthermore, a writing practice is definitely different from a tranquil morning yoga practice, and it may increase mental activity rather than subdue it. Take this into account and find what works best for you. Do you prefer writing during practice or afterward? Do you prefer setting a creative intention before practice, or letting your intention come to you during the process? 

And finally, as with every practice, this one will be most effective when it's done regularly!

THE #PSYCHOLOGY OF CREATIVE WRITING

Photo Credit: DeeAshley via Compfight cc

We laymen have always been curious to know…from what source that strange being, the creative writer, draws his material, and how he manages to make such impression on us with it

—Freud, 1908.

The Psychology of Creative Writing is a highly recommended book for those who want to learn how the magic wand of storytellers work. A compilation of essays discussing the personalities of writers, the evolution of creative writing, the creative process, the development of both the creative writer and creative writing, and so on.

‘Creative adults achieve effectiveness partially by force of personality. Talented adults who achieve success posses many of the attributes listed below’, by Jane Pirto

Creative people are those who do creative acts. The creativity occurs in the becoming, the making.

Many studies have emphasized that successful creators in all domains have certain personality attributes in common.

These attributes make up the base of the model and rest on the foundation of genes. Among these are the following: androgyny, creativity, imagination, insight, intuition, introversion, naiveté or openness to experience, overexcitabilities, motivation or passion for work in a domain, perceptiveness, preference for complexity, resilience, risk taking, self-discipline, self-efficacy, tolerance for ambiguity, and volition or will.

‘The more I write, the better I write, and the better I feel about myself’ by Adèle Kohanyi

Creativity also affects mood and, in the case of writing, mostly positively. Indeed, a wide variety of participants writing about a wide variety of topics have demonstrated that writing has a positive effect on mood.

This is not to say that any type of writing is beneficial. What appears to be important is that the topic triggers an emotional reaction, positive or negative.

‘Who are those guys?’—Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy  [Eminent screenwriters] by Steven R. Pritzker and David Jung McGarva

Donald Ogden Stewart said in 1982 that a formal dinners one was seated according to important at the box office. Writers, if invited at all, sat at the bottom of the table, below the heads of publicity but above the hairdressers.

We identified seven paths to becoming a screenwriter—journalism, play writing, novel writing, television writing, film school and screenwriting as the only profession, other show business occupations, and unrelated careers. The fact that screenwriters come to the field from so many different types of work is significant because, as Billy Wilder suggested, there may be a unique ability to construct a screenplay that is impossible to predict based on the ability to do other forms of writing.

‘The literary Genius of William Shakespeare’ by Dean Keith Simonton

His contemporary Ben Johnson said that Shakespeare was not of an age, but for all time

He stood (and still stand) at the apex of the top segment of the spiritual triangle

Writers do not create in a bubble insulated from their personal lives or from the rest of the world. If anything, writers are actually more open than nonwriters to experiences and circumstances—events that often provide the content of their work. This event—content relationship is amply demontrated in the 37 plays attributed to William Shakespeare.

‘In search of the Writer’s Creative Process,’ by Todd Lubart

A particularly important aspect of text generation, according to Sharples, is the primary generator, or guiding idea from which the rest of the text will be developed. As William Faulkner put it, “With me a story usually begins with a single idea or memory or mental picture. The writing of the story is simply a matter of working up to that moment, to explain why it happened or what caused it to follow

There is probably no single ‘creative process’ that one can follow like a recipe to be sure to produce a creative product. Indeed, probably a multitude of paths can lead to a creative story (and an even greater number of paths can lead to a noncreative production). It may be possible, however, to identify the optimal process for a specific person to generate creative work given that individual’s background and cognitive and personality profile, and taking into account that person’s environment.