Creative Edge Focusing:

Core Creativity Cultura De Creatividad

• Every individual is born with a unique blueprint. Personal growth is the unfolding of this blueprint
• Every problem holds within itself the exact next steps needed for solution
• The site of new insights and creative solutions is at the edge of what is already known. This edge, The Creative Edge, holds implicit within it all past and future knowing about the problem, more than could ever be put into words in a linear way
• The Creative Edge is a right-brain phenomenon and is physically experienced as the murky, intuitive “feel” of the whole issue

Intuitive Focusing

• Creating at the Edge involves a back-and-forth nonlinear process between left-brain “symbolizations” and right brain “felt experiencing”
• The  Intuitive Focusing skill teaches specific steps which make problem-solving at The Creative Edge  and  “Ah, hah!” insights a predictable process
• Central to Intuitive Focusing is learning to silently “sit with” the murky, intuitive, preverbal “felt sense” underlying an issue before attempting to find words, gestures, or images as “symbolizations

Focused Listening

• The Focused Listening skill is a powerful tool for helping another person to create symbolizations out of The Creative Edge and especially in finding the “intuitive feel” for each person in interpersonal situations, turning conflict into creativity
• Focused Listening also allows for empathic understanding of the Other and the possibility for conflict resolution which comes from empathic understanding.

Creative Edge Focusing Organizations

• The Creative Edge Organization Method ensures maximum creativity and motivation at every level by encouraging Intuitive Focusing by individuals and Coordinated Collaboration in groups and teams
• Maximum motivation arises when people are encouraged to create their lives and solutions to problems from their own Creative Edge.
• Individuals are motivated when they are engaged at their Creative Edge. When organizational structures lose touch with The Creative Edge of individuals, apathy is created.
• True change, at any level, from personal to global, can only happen by engaging The Creative Edge of individual human beings. There is no lasting way to impose change from the outside. Lasting change is empowered from the individual entering into collaborative action with other individuals.

Focusing Paradigm Shifts

• Paradigms are fixed perceptual schemata, or Gestalts,  which determine beliefs, emotional reactions, and behaviors
• Paradigm shifts are the source of true creativity, innovation,  and change
• Intuitive Focusing results in shifts at the level of paradigms. The kaleidoscope turns, a new Gestalt is created,  and new thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are able to arise
• Paradigm shifts at The Creative Edge release blocked energy as well as creating new solutions

Focusing Self-Organizing Tendency

• Organisms have a tendency to organize themselves in the direction of maximal fulfillment of their essential nature
• If this natural direction of growth has been thwarted or blocked, providing facilitative conditions can catalyze self-reorganization , the organism “righting” itself
• Such catalyzing of self-organizing from within the organism provides longer term change than the imposition of change from outside
• In the human being, self-reorganizing is stimulated by Intuitive Focusing, sitting with the murky, intuitive “feel” and allowing new symbolizations to arise from that “felt sense” of the whole Gestalt

Focusing “Green Shoots”

• The “green shoots” of new creative problem solving and motivational energy are at The Creative Edge, the murky, preverbal “feel” of the whole Gestalt
• Structures must be created to protect and nurture “green shoots” as they attempt to arise
• The Intuitive Focusing Skill and Focused Listening Skill guarantee such protection of The Creative Edge at the level of individual problem-solving
• The Collaborative Edge Focusing Decision Making Method, with the Shared Leadership, Coordinated Collaboration, and Creative Edge Impasse Resolution components,  protects thinking at The Creative Edge during group or team-level problem-solving

Benefits of Listening/Focusing Collaboration

• Problem-solving in groups and teams increases the quality of decisions by making decisions more inclusive
• Collaborating as equals in problem solving  increases “ownership” of decisions and therefore motivation to actually carry them out
• Collaborative work toward a common goal increases sense of community and commitment to that community
• The Coordinated Collaboration component allows the benefits of collaboration within hierarchical and democratic models of organization

Listening/Focusing Community

• Sharing from The Creative Edge creates feelings of empathy, a deep understanding of the validity of the other person’s unique point of view
• Sharing from The Creative Edge also creates feelings of connection, a deep understanding that, underneath our uniqueness, we share a common humanity
• The Focusing Partnership method creates a sense of community and shared humanity similar to the Greek concept of the love called Agape, the Christian love of The Christ Within each person, and the compassion of the Buddha for the Universal Oneness underlying everything
• This Agape is the glue which binds us into a human community, providing the motivation for overcoming conflict at all levels in society
• This creation of Agape, creation of love, can happen when the Focusing Partnership method is used for the purpose of building Focusing Groups/Teams  or Focusing Communities, or it can arise in Creative Edge Organizations as groups or teams do problem-solving work toward a common goal
• Call it “buy-in,” “commitment,” “loyalty,” “full engagement,” but an essential by-product of shared creativity and collaboration is a sense of being deeply connected to other people and working toward a common goal
• The creation of Community has benefits for conflict resolution within interpersonal relationships but also within organizations and at the national and  international level

Listening/Focusing Culture of Creativity

• A Culture of Creativity is inspired through the mutual exchange of Listening/Focusing turns in Focusing Partnerships
• This Culture of Creativity depends upon conditions which provide safety for the level of personal sharing possible in Focusing Partnerships
• Confidentiality: whatever is shared in a CE Focusing Partnership turn stays confidential between the participants except for agreed upon sharing with others; whatever is shared in CE Focusing Group or Team meeting stays confidential within the participants except for agreed upon sharing with others.
• Crediting: Participants are encouraged to “brand” their creative ideas and products, creating unique names for them. Others are required to give appropriate “credit” when referring to or using the “branded creations” of others, stating the “ownership” of the idea or product
• Collaboration: Open collaboration and sharing of unique, creative ideas becomes possible when Confidentiality and Crediting are in place. New ideas will be properly credited to their inventors. Privately shared information will not be used for gossip, one-upmanship,  backbiting or competitive advantage
• Conflict Resolution: Everyone in the organization will have learned basic Interpersonal Focusing skills and the norm that interpersonal conflicts will be dealt with in an open, Listening/Focusing way with the assumption that conflicts harbor within them seeds of creativity.
• Community: With Confidentiality, Crediting, Collaboration, and Conflict Resolution, feelings of abundance, warmth, commitment and loyalty will replace individualism, competition, apathy, negativity, and stress.

The philosophy of Creative Edge Focusing™ has been deeply influenced by the work of Carl Rogers (On Becoming A Person, Houghton Mifflin, 1961) on the self-actualizing tendency and the power of empathic relationship and of Eugene Gendlin / and his description of the Focusing Skill (Focusing, Bantam, 1981), “Theory of Personality Change,” Philosophy of the Implicit, and Process Model (www.focusing.org)

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