http://lightfieldmedia.us/idea-development-ebook/

In the book, I take a look at the most common excuses I’ve made and heard over almost 25 years of developing and producing ideas and offer solutions to help you break through what’s stopping you.  I realized that underneath it all, it really is love that carries us through the rough times.  It is the gasoline that keeps me going so that I can harness the tools, skills and resources necessary to make it happen. Good luck and let me know what’s helping you make your idea happen.

Having a great idea is like falling in love.  There’s the exhilaration, the expansiveness, all the big hopes for the future.  And like any relationship, there can be bumps in the road too.  Things don’t always go as expected, planned, or wanted.  In honor of those times, I’ve recently published my new e-book, Clearing Your Inner Path to Success, to help navigate those choppy waters.   It’s idea development from the inside out because from my experience, I’ve seen how those internal walls can often manifest as external ones.  As Joseph Campbell would say, the monster is inside us.

http://lightfieldmedia.us/idea-development-ebook/

In the book, I take a look at the most common excuses I’ve made and heard over almost 25 years of developing and producing ideas and offer solutions to help you break through what’s stopping you.  I realized that underneath it all, it really is love that carries us through the rough times.  It is the gasoline that keeps me going so that I can harness the tools, skills and resources necessary to make it happen. Good luck and let me know what’s helping you make your idea happen.

Last week, I was lucky enough to be invited to be a delegate to the UN Conference on Women by the NGO, Pathways for Peace.  From around the world, women gathered to tell their stories, share their struggles and offer solutions.  The focus this year was Rural Women.  At one panel, the moderator, Nyaradzai Gumbonzvanda, the Chair from the NGO/Committee for the Status of Women from Geneva as well as the Secretary General of the World Young Women’s Christian Association (World YWCA), told her story.  

Although she was a highly trained human rights lawyer, she still considered herself a rural woman.  When she was born, her family had one blanket.  The poignancy of this struck me when I was at Whole Foods during the lunch break, surrounded by shelves with hundreds of varieties of everything from lotions to juices to jellies.  The point was brought home even more later that day when I went to my friend’s apartment where I was staying.  When I opened the cupboard door to find a towel, the shelves were filled to brimming with sheets, blankets, towels.

Nyaradzai went on to say that when she grew up, because her family was so poor, her older sister had to marry a man with resources so that Nyaradzai could go to school and own a pair of decent pants.  

In America, for most of us reading this, it boggles the mind.  I have gone through times in my life when I struggled financially and couldn’t pay my bills but my situation never matched the plight of the rural women around the world.

You may be wondering why I would share a story like this in an idea column.  Well, this woman who began life crawling towards the fire at night because her family only had one blanket, got an education and went on to become a world leader in the fight for human rights and women’s issues.  

How many of you out here have complained about the fact that you can’t accomplish your goals, that you don’t have enough of something to change your life? 

I will never forget this woman.  She reminds me to be careful of the stories I tell myself.  They are powerful.  Replace all the limiting ones with this woman’s story and remember how capable you really are, how unbelievably malleable life truly is.  Don’t give up.  Get educated, continue to strive to be your best, never make excuses, and appreciate all the blankets, pants, lotions, jellies that you have.

When I work with people and their ideas, this is always where it breaks down. They call me because they are not sure what needs to be done and/or they don’t know how to do it. What did this movie’s main character tap into that enabled him to accomplish his goals so easily?

First, he could see solutions. In other words, he wasn’t trapped by his own confusion or fear. There’s a scene where the bad guy is trying to kill his girlfriend. She’s momentarily safe in a hiding place in Central Park, NY. She is freaking out because this mobster with a large knife is looking for her. She’s so afraid that she’s paralyzed and completely unsure what to do. Her boyfriend tells her to take one of the pills, just take it and you will be able to think yourself out of this. You will see a solution, he tells her, a path through what seems impossible. She takes one of the clear pills and swallows it and within 30 seconds, her face changes. She scans the situation coolly and then decisively acts, using all the available resources around her, knocking out the bad guy and escaping.

We see with our brains, not our eyes. The scene in front of you – the newspaper if you’re reading this in print or your monitor if you’re reading this on-line is seen inside your brain, not outside of you. And our visual processing system is very connected to our emotions. What we see is colored by our feelings. This is why the girlfriend in the movie, when she was scared, looked around her and couldn’t see her way out. But when she shifted into a different state – via a pill in the film’s case – she saw opportunities in what had seconds before looked impossible.

If you feel unbelievably, agonizingly, impossibly stuck, I’m not recommending drugs but rather the recognition that what you see as impossible is a fiction. There are solutions and opportunities all around you right now. No matter what your idea is or your question about your idea, there is a solution at hand. The problem that you are focusing on is not the issue. Rather, it’s your perception of the situation that is the issue.

What is your process for opening your eyes to solutions? Some people go for a walk, some people meditate. I believe it was Alexander Graham Bell who sat in a comfortable chair with metal balls in his hands. He knew that the state right before sleep was where he got his answers. He didn’t know the name at the time, but he was trying to get into and stay in the theta frequency. He would close his eyes and drift off and when he fell asleep, he would drop the balls and wake up, knowing he had gone too far. And he did it again and again until he could hold that state just before sleep without actually nodding off. Success with your idea is not about having all the answers but about knowing yourself so well that you know the secret to shifting your own state, and therefore your perceptions. How do you do this?

Good luck!

My daughter recently came home with a perfect score on her spelling test. She was so proud and so was I. Her success in spelling is meaningful because last year, her 1^st grade teacher recommended holding her back a year because she couldn’t spell. She insisted that my daughter and I work harder to get the spelling right. But in my heart, I knew that struggling was not the way. We played with words, we spelled in the car but I refused to push her. I knew she just wasn’t there developmentally.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned as a parent is that when the child is ready, learning is easy so if it’s hard, give it some time. I had friends who decided when their child should be potty trained and it was painful to watch. There were accidents, crying, fighting and worst of all, the child felt bad about herself. I didn’t potty train this way. I waited until my child showed me she was ready. Potty training in our home was one of the easiest things because my kids were ready. The same is true of spelling.

We changed schools and now in 2^nd grade, something has clicked in my daughter’s brain and she can spell! I knew she would get there. And she didn’t have to pick up the belief that learning is a struggle in the process.

As adults, when we are not ready for something, the issue is usually not developmental the way it is for children. Typically, it’s because we are stuck – in a fear, in the past, in a belief, etc. With children, it’s patience and allowing them to become ready. As adults, we have developed an entire industry called self-help, which really is at its core a collection of ideas and tools designed to accelerate people’s progress, to get them unstuck.

Where is your idea not ready to move on?  I think our ideas are like children in that they have their own developmental path and sometimes we need to wait for them to catch up to what we want them to be.  But as the creator, where we get stuck impacts our idea’s psychology.  

Just like children, if you push before the time is right, there will be struggle, stress, difficulty between you and your idea.

When you get activated today or frustrated with where your idea is, try something new. It can be challenging because stress limits the brain. We see fewer choices and revert to old patterns. We bang our  heads against the wall. But you have free will. You are conscious. Maybe tie a string around your finger to remind you. Or breathe to take the edge off the stress. Force a smile. I believe it must be a physical act to shift your physiology, which will shift your psychology. And then, voila, you will see solutions instead of walls. Good luck.

Yesterday, I was taking the train from NYC to Rhinecliff, NY.  My two small children and I got on the crowded train and I began scanning the car looking for one of those few sets of end seats where 4 seats face each other and my children and I could sit together.

An older woman was sitting in one of these 4-somes all alone and I asked her if she would mind if we sat there.  From the look on her face, she clearly would mind and mumbled some excuse about how there wasn’t much leg room and blah blah blah.  I could feel my blood pressure rising.

I began judging her in my mind.  If I were sitting in a 4-some, I would absolutely have gotten up so that a mother and her two children could sit in it and I thought she should too.  We had to stand there next to her for a few more minutes as my son was using the bathroom and my irritation was growing.  I can’t believe she’s not getting up, I thought to myself.  The woman in the next row caught my eye and we both rolled our eyes.

When my son came out of the bathroom, I gathered up our bags and as we walked past her, I said with a judgmental stare, “I hope you enjoy your 4 seats.”

My children walked down the aisle and it was a full train.  I couldn’t even see two seats together let alone three.  We kept walking.

Then, we entered the cafe car and found a free table.  My kids and I jumped into it.  This is great, I thought.  We had a table top so my daughter could color.  And this made it much easier for me to lay out all the snacks that I had brought for the ride.  This table seat was perfect, much better than a 4-some of seats.

I began talking to the woman sitting at the table across the aisle.  She was going to a 5-day silent retreat with Adyashanti at the Omega Institute.  He is an American-born spiritual teacher who has devoted his life to the awakening of others.

She shared his book, The End of Your World, with me and I realized that although I wasn’t attending this spiritual retreat, I was already taking the class.  Thank goodness that grouchy woman hadn’t moved so that I could sit at this wonderful table next to this new friend.

When the door was closed, I had a choice to embrace reality and keep moving until I found an open door.  My thoughts that the woman should move for us only caused me suffering and didn’t change anything.

When the doors are closed around you, move forward gladly, knowing full well that an open door is only a few footsteps ahead.

Years ago, I created an after-school program to teach 9th graders the basics of documentary filmmaking. As a producer, I know how powerful it is to tell the stories that matter to you so I knew it would be empowering for kids to make their own shorts.

We began the class by looking at scenes from a variety of films. The kids were breathtakingly savvy when it came to things like composition, story, and character. They’d grown up watching media after all. Then, everyone had to pick a subject. The students chose everything from profiling a favorite teacher or friend, documenting a favorite sport or subject, and one student even wanted to make a film about his own alter-ego.

This is where it gets interesting. It’s so easy to talk about what other people do. Critics abound. And it’s even easy to come up with a really interesting or even great idea. But, then what? Can you execute it? Where do people get stuck?

The students broke down into 2 groups – those who were stopped by not knowing how to do something and those who weren’t. I’m sorry to say that it was a direct gender split as well.

The boys plowed forward. They demanded the cameras, held them, turned them upside down, pushed buttons without fear. The girls, though, just sat there, afraid, it seemed, to even ask a question.

Every client I have has a great idea and doesn’t know what to do next. They know they need additional resources and support. But I often think about all those people out there who don’t know or are too intimidated to ask. What are the key qualities one needs to internalize to develop and launch a new idea? What do we have to teach our children, especially our girls, so they can do this?

Some people get really bogged down by what they don’t know. It becomes an obsession or something to hide. But to me, the question is what can you learn? I know if you have curiosity and the capacity to ask questions and learn, you can accomplish anything.

This starts in our society by allowing our children to watch us in our own decision-making processes as opposed to just presenting them with a finished, perfect result. My hairdresser has a great story about her father. But before I tell you that story, I have to tell you about her. She is in her early 30′s now but when she was 18, she got pregnant and dropped out of high school. She decided to go to beauty school because it was a 9 month program and she could be working and making money pretty quickly. Now, though, she is getting her BA online in psychiatry and planning on getting her masters and becoming a therapist. Why, I asked her, are you capable of this when so many women in your position would have given up? She told me this story about her father.

When she was 6 years old, he decided to build a jungle gym for her and her siblings because they couldn’t afford to buy a pre-made one. He bought all the wood, he laid it out in the garage and then he began drilling it together. She spent many afternoons in the garage with him, handing him nails and tools. She said that it seemed like he unscrewed more screws than he put in. It took him years and it wasn’t until she was 10 years old before she actually used it. But to her, watching him figure it out, being there alongside him as he tried, failed, and tried again was much more fun than actually playing on it. And now she is a person who knows that she can figure anything out. As she said, if she needed to learn how to do brain surgery, she could. And I believe her.

I am thinking about those 14 year old girls in my after school program. The editing part was the most challenging for them. As the boys were at their keyboards, trying, messing up, undoing and trying again, the girls were sitting there in front of their final cut pro systems afraid to press the wrong button.

If you find yourself sitting there, in front of your next step or unsure about your next step, remember the father building the jungle gym from scratch. He wasn’t a builder. He was just a dad who loved his kids and wanted to create something for them that would make their world a better place. He did his research. He did some planning. He looked at existing examples to see what he liked. He drew a plan on a piece of paper. He documented his idea. He talked to people at the lumberyard. He asked a lot of questions and then he dove in, continuing to learn as he went.

Lack of knowledge or experience never needs to stop you from your dream. It’s not an uncrossable chasm but a space to be filled. Begin asking your questions.

And those girls finally got there. I worked with them, one-on-one, so they could ask their questions privately at first. I celebrated their baby steps, I sat them next to each other so they could be teachers to each other, asking more questions and sharing what they’d learned. Slowly but surely, they each edited their own shorts.

At our screening at parent’s night a few weeks later, they stood up proudly as they each gave a short introduction to their films. We all – families and friends – cheered their success. My hope is that in the future, they will remember their capacity to learn anything and that no matter what ideas fill their minds, they’ll be unafraid to start asking the questions whose answers will fill in the gap between idea and execution.

We are conducting a research experiment to investigate the key factors that stop us from moving our ideas forward.  Although it’s easy to blame our blocks on external factors like the economy or something going on “out there”, we’re interested in digging a little deeper.  Since our mission at Lightfield Media is to develop ideas from the inside out, we are also interested in exploring the shadow of our ideation process from the inside out too.

Join us in this project and participate in creating a knowledge base that will help others move forward more quickly and effectively.  In this economy, when many people are needing to be more resourceful than ever, our own ideas are often the key that will unlock the door to our greatest future.

Come explore with us what’s holding you back and become freer in the process.

Post your email address below and we will email you the questionnaire.

Thank you for participating!

Susie Arnett/Founder, Lightfield Media

There are always times when I feel like giving up. I work with ideas, which means that I don’t have a 9-5 job and I don’t have a regular paycheck.

Like many people, I am cutting my own path. And when you are cutting your own path, you can get tired. I have a project that I am trying to put together. I hate that word “trying”. I don’t want to try, I want to do. But sometimes, I have to try to bring all the people, the resources, the funding together to really begin something.

During that time of “trying”, sometimes, I think about giving up. It’s insidious really. Perhaps it’s the echoes of my mother, deep in the recesses of my unconscious that prods me to get a real job. I consulted with a shaman years ago on his book project. It was called “Coyote Goes Global” and he always repeated, “The dark side works through distraction.” Those thoughts about jobs and security and health insurance paid by a corporation are certainly distracting.

What are the best things to do to during those moments of weakness when what is most called for is focus on your goals?

What I do is write down all the distracting thoughts. There’s something about getting it out of my head and onto paper that makes them less insidious. It’s no longer a secret whisper that I can’t really put my finger on. Now, it’s facing me and I can say, “No way!”

Really, though, it’s the same muscle called for in any commitment. It’s the muscle that keeps us monogamous, that keeps us making breakfast in the morning for our children even if we were up all night, that powers us through our process (whatever it looks like) to achieve our goals.

Are you someone who can be monogamous to your idea?

Sometimes walking away is the best answer. I’m not preaching commitment at any cost. Life evolves and we change and sometimes, it is best to walk away. But I get this question a lot. How do you know when you’re working through a tough time or when you’re just beating your head against the wall?

The problem with this question is that it’s impossible to answer. People spend months even years agonizing over whether to stay or go. They make lists, they ask people, they analyze, they think and think and think. It doesn’t lead anywhere.

Of course there is something valuable in clearly assessing situations and making informed decisions but I believe the answer is not in the analysis. And it’s not in recklessness or impulsiveness either.

Rather, there is a middle path. There is who you are. Are you someone who stays or goes? Neither is morally superior. For some, staying is dysfunctional and for some, going is.

When you look at who you are and how you operate in the world, does this work for you? Do you regularly achieve goals or walk away from them before they are completed? Do you want to do things differently?

Developing ideas is a learning experience like having children, getting married or divorced, buying a house, anything we do. The important thing is to choose consciously if you want to give up or stick with your project. Ultimately, at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter. Did you show up in a way that you can be proud of? Did you do your best? Are you reducing the amount of regrets or increasing them as you go on?

“The yoga market is completely saturated,” the literary agent said over the phone.  He had just taken a look at my book proposal for a coffee table book filled with pictures of babies doing yoga.  The pictures that my partner, Doug, had taken were charming.  There was no doubt about it.  I reminded myself that even Casablanca was repeatedly rejected before it sold.

The idea came to me about 8 months before that phone call.  My 7-month-old was learning how to crawl and spent most of his day in Cobra pose.  And when I looked around at my friends’ children, they were also doing yoga poses that varied depending on their stage of development.  It was true.  We are born yogis!

I called my friend, Doug, who had taken pictures of our family weeks after my son had been born.  The sweetness of his photography convinced me that he was the perfect partner for this project.  I pitched him the idea and ever open, he said, “Sure.”  It was all I needed.

Within a week, I had organized a test day where we would shoot 6 kids.  Doug came out to our home and we traveled from house to house in the neighborhood and Doug took pictures.  They say that babies and puppies are the toughest models and Doug found this to be true.  Some wanted a nap, some cried the whole time, one alternately cried and squinted under the hot, California sun as we waited for him to do down dog, something his mother assured us he “always” did.  Not that day!

My son came through for us.  When we got the proofs, Doug had captured a perfect picture of him in Cobra pose.  As soon as I saw that picture, I knew the idea would work.  Doug and I decided to go for it.  We would need 5 “rock star” pictures for a proposal to sell the idea.  We started shooting.  Everyone I knew and all the babies Doug ran across at the mall became test models.  At first, I thought every picture should be taken at a yoga studio.  But Doug insisted that no.  It would get boring.  Break it up, shoot some in homes, let’s see if I can catch the pose in the middle of their day, in bed, on the floor, in the yard.  He was absolutely right.

Having never been to a yoga class, Doug didn’t know the poses at first so I’d point them out if a child did it.  “Down Dog, now!” I’d yell and Doug would shoot and shoot.  Pretty quickly, he caught on and can now be spotted working up a sweat at Golden Bridge Yoga Studio in Los Angeles.

The proposal took about 7 months to create.  There was all the time shooting to get the perfect handful of pictures.  I come from television and in that business, a proposal is an approximation of an idea but in publishing, the proposal needs to be perfect.  What is in the proposal should be the best of the book you’re pitching.  And ours was beautiful.  We spent a lot of money on it, too.  We got a graphic designer and spent almost $1000 on 5 copies which included 3 of our top pictures plus text, Doug and my bio, and a query letter which is a one page overview of the concept plus demographic information.  So when the agent, a friend, gave us this hopeless assessment, we were upset.  “I’ll try,” he said and generously sent it out to Random House and a few other top publishers.  They all rejected the idea.  The yoga market was saturated, they agreed.

Doug and I went back and forth, debating the benefits of self-publishing or just walking away.  On a whim, I sent our proposal to a friend in NYC who was a publicist at Simon & Schuster and she happened to know the editor at Rodale Press, the top independent publisher with a focus on health.  A couple of months had passed since we began sending the proposal out and we were losing steam.  My family and I went to Ireland for a month and during that trip, I had decided to walk away.  We didn’t have the money to self-publish at that point and that was it.

When we got back home from this trip, there was a message on the answering machine from the editor from Rodale Press.  I called her NY number immediately.  Although I was exhausted from jet lag, I had to know.  She said the magic words, “We want to publish your book.”  If I wasn’t on the phone with her, I would have squealed and done cartwheels across the living room.  We had sold the book.  We made a deal with her within a couple of weeks and went into production on the book immediately.

Although other books had come out about doing yoga with babies, nobody had gone the coffee table book route.  Also, although some had published calendars with pictures of children doing yoga, nobody had tried to photograph babies and neither did any of the other products have the quality level we did in our pictures.

Compared to other books, our experience of selling the book was very quick and easy. From the day of our first shoot to selling the book was approximately a year.  I attribute this to the idea being unique and beautifully executed but who knows.  Ideas have a life and karma of their own.  I called the agent and told him the good news.  “Oh of course, he said, that editor loves yoga.” Go figure.

http://www.bornyogis.com