Page 44 - 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

related this story to me.) Impulsively, Margie picked up the marker and marked

her own nose, and then handed the marker to another classmate and said, “I like
my nose this way. What about you?”

In a few moments, the entire class had black marks on their noses, and the
shy girl who was once crying was laughing. At recess, Margie’s class all went
out on the playground with marked noses, and they were the envy of the school
—obviously into something unusual and “cool.”

This story is interesting to me because of how Margie used her creativity and
her mind instead of her emotions to solve a problem. She elevated herself up into
her mind, where something clever could be done. If she had used her feelings to
think with, she might have expressed anger at the class for laughing at the girl,
or sadness and depression.

Any time you take a relationship problem up into the mind, you have
unlimited opportunities to get creative. Conversely, when you send a relationship
problem down the elevator into the lower half of the heart, you risk staying stuck
in the problem forever.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t feel anything. Feel everything! Notice
your feelings. Just don’t think with them. When there’s a relationship problem to
be solved, travel up your ladder to the most creative you. You’ll soon realize that
we create the relationships we have in our lives; they don’t just happen.

“We are each of us angels with only one wing,” said the Italian artist
Luciano de Crescenzo, “and we can only fly embracing each other.”

28. Try interactive listening

The principle of using interactivity as a creativity-builder is not restricted to
computer games or chat rooms. Once we become fully conscious of this
principle, we can find ways to become more interactive everywhere. We can
even make conversations with our family and friends more interactive than they
once were.

We all have certain business associates or family members who, as they
speak to us, we have a feeling that we already know what they’re going to say.
This lowers our own consciousness level, and a form of mental laziness sets in.
Whereas in the past we might have just passively suffered through other people’s