Use Willpower: RsH-G1

Willpower demands Autonomy

Creativity does not just happen: it requires a challenge that is responded to positively and with courage. In the same way, the creative output does not just happen: you have to «make it happen». That is why its foundation is found in using willpower-RG1.

Function: The use of willpower allows you to release your personal energies and open up possibilities.

The 7 components of personal endeavour are subtly altered to become different ways in which you can exploit your autonomy effectively. Willpower must be applied to each of these 7 components, and you can think of it as flowing through 7 conduits. The formal name for these conduits is given an imperative, emphatic form to reflect the requirements for positivity and courage.

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Functions in Relation to the Challenge

Using willpower and autonomy represented by the Monads in the Structural Hierarchy of Creativity in Work.

RG17: Be Fully Willing

Being Fully Willing requires that you maintain a readiness to do anything relevant and expect to encounter surprises and experience disappointments.
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You must become the master of your willingness. Your creativity cannot be hesitant in this area. So be willing! If you weaken or fall at this hurdle, then nothing of significance will emerge for you.

RG16: Be Ever Purposeful

Being Ever Purposeful requires that you ensure that relevant values and goals are always present in whatever you think, say and do in relation to the challenge.
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Purpose provides control, structure and direction for the energies of the creative process. It must never be diffused or forgotten: and the first opportunity to demonstrate this lies in the present use of willpower. From being willing-RG17 down to taking action-RG11, everything you do must be driven by the goals intrinsic to the challenge.

RG15: Intensify Communication

Intensifying Communication requires that you refer to and describe aspects and issues more often and more carefully than usual, paying closer attention to the context, what others are telling you, and non-verbal messages.
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Communication is the way that you create your reality, and it is vital to ensure others participate properly, in line with that reality. So just being communicative is not enough. Communication must be intensified in an appropriate way including features like the amount, the care, the detail, the manner, the timing, and the focus.

RG14: Intensify Experiences

Intensifying Experiences requires that you attend constantly to the flow of inner thoughts, feelings and images, and be ready to assign them greater value than usual and sharpen your focus to explore them.
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You must give your inner experiences more value than usual. Your personal experiences include ideas, emotions, intuitions, images and inner feelings of all sorts. These are needed to pace and focus yourself, to grasp what is going on socially around you, and to appreciate what others may be thinking and feeling. It is also the essential instrument for appraising the process. 

RG13: Target Change

Targeting Change requires that you determine what overall state of affairs counts as a definite stage towards meeting the challenge.
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Creativity is about bringing something new into existence. So progress on the challenge naturally demands change. Because no challenge is well-structured and well-understood (by definition), simple planning is impossible. However, you can and must define specific intrinsically achievable stages—some small, some large—that represent meaningful achievement on the way to the creative outcome.

RG12: Focus Inquiry

Focusing Inquiry requires that you seek relevant information and understanding in a suitable and discriminating way.
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Inquiry is potentially unbounded and information/knowledge can be distracting or overwhelming. It is necessary to narrow your focus and get knowledge that is meaningful for the challenge. One implication is that you need to understand matters sufficiently well for useful knowledge to be recognized, sought, obtained and applied.

RG11: Take Action

Taking Action requires that you promptly do whatever is needed to enable the higher uses of willpower.
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Taking Action may be more challenging personally and socially than almost any of the higher levels: and action is required in some fashion for all of them. Action, if it is «right», has its own mysterious power due to its unknowable ramifications. Action consumes your precious limited resources and takes time. Nevertheless creativity means that something has to be done or made. So taking action, i.e. doing or making, is the bottom line for creativity.


The above 7 Monads are the elemental energies of creativity, essential for challenges, and beneficial for endeavours generally, but especially in work.

Their greater significance lies in how these energies combine to form the more complex requirements of creativity. Before proceeding systematically through these combinations:

OR

  • Deepen the convictions that must carry you through—it's simple: just combine two adjacent uses of willpower.

Originally posted: 31-Jan-2012; Last updated: 10-Jul-2013.