BRINGING INTUITIVE, CREATIVE SKILLS TO WORK ENVIRONMENTS
Niela Miller

ABSTRACT

Personal coaching, management styles and organizational consulting can be enhanced through the use of a spectrum of creative and expressive artistic media. This article details benefits that can accrue and objectives that can be achieved from the utilization of such media, and describes how such media can be integrated into an organizational consulting or business-enhancing process. Finally, it describes where the practitioner can find additional resources for the development of a "creative-intuitive" approach.

The face of business is gradually changing from patriarchal and hierarchical to a more horizontal model where everybody's input is valued and needed. But, alas, most training for business is exceedingly left-brained and only slowly is the business world recognizing the need to introduce non-analytic, non-linear emotional and creative intelligences as complementary to analytic processes in both work environments and training programs.

Of course, business leaders and visionaries have always been intuitive and able to make leaps in understanding and imagination, but haven't always known how to pass these visions and skills to others in their organizations.

External helping professionals are often afraid to make use of their more intuitive and expressive sides in business settings because they do not know how to overcome the resistance they imagine they will face. In my experience, this has not been a problem when I have focused on the needs and objectives of the organization and have built good relationships with the decision makers. I do not sell intuition, Rather, I sell my ability to meet the client¹s objectives. Once I am with the work group in a training or consulting context, I can be my whole self and model that possibility for others. It becomes apparent that I am having so much fun that it is catching! The challenge, however, is to have the self-confidence and fluidity it takes to make this approach seem easy and valuable.

My work in recent years has been to offer these possibilities and skills to people professionals wishing to enhance their clients' processes, whether organizational or individual. I offer a set of tools and methods not usually associated with business settings, and connect the joy of this serious play with the value it adds to the effective accomplishment of the organization's tasks. Whether I am working with an individual client, a trainee, a group or an organization. my approach integrates insights and techniques from my own background in the arts in which I've been involved since childhood, to Gestalt and many other human potential approaches such as Psychosynthesis and neo-Jungian process work.

In training coaches, therapists, trainers, leaders and others who work with business clients and various kinds of groups, I help them integrate what already exists in their background but is not being used as effectively as it might, as well as introducing them to new possibilities. They, in turn, can pass some of these tools on to their clients and organizational groups.

Examples of workplace objectives and benefits: Development of the kinds of intuitive and creative skills described here customarily lead to one or more of the following results.

• Improving work environments (morale, commitment, etc)
• Increasing communication abilities and flow
• Doing creative assessments, reviews and evaluations
• Making meetings more productive
• Building teams that go beyond what they thought they could do.
• Developing more effective planners and problem-solvers
• Improving decision making strategies
• Using innovative approaches to career development
• Focusing on the alignment of personal process with career choices

Working with multiple creative channels: The central aspect of the process described here is the development of multiple sensory channels in addressing a task. Most people tend to think and speak in terms of one particular representational system, which is visual for some people, auditory for others, and kinesthetic for still others. Opening up to systems other than those a person customarily uses can both enhance creativity and make tasks more interesting and engaging.

An extensive manual of tools and experiments, Being Alive! Creative and Emotional Intelligence Tools for People Professionals. is described on my website at http://www.peoplesystemspotential.com/publications.html and can be ordered by e-mailing me at creativist@peoplesystemspotential.com.

BIO
WBN member Niela Miller (BA Creative Arts, MS Education and Communications, LCSW, LMHC) has a business called PeopleSystems Potential in Acton, Massachusetts. She offers training and supervision groups for people professionals* with established practices and/or client organizations who want to learn how to use more intuitive creative processes in their work.

* People professionals are defined as those in any field whose main job is to provide coaching, training, supervision, consulting, or counseling to improve processes and performances of people in business, medical, non-profit and other organizational settings or in face-to-face work.