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Michelle
Charlottesville, VA
Creative Process & Emergence Facilitator, Consultant, and Coach. Author of Pattern Breaks: A Facilitator's Guide to Cultivating Creativity.
Interests: I use whole brain approaches and the Creative Emergence Process© to support my clients - pioneering entrepreneurs and organizations - in consciously creating what's next.
Recent Activity
Designing for Creativity: Finite and Infinite Design
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James Carse’s book, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility, speaks to designing games which cultivate play, improvisation and engaging the unknown, creating as you go. I first read it about 18 years ago, and... Continue reading
Posted Aug 26, 2024 at The Fertile Unknown
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Designing for Creativity: Design from Your Edges, Not Your Comfort Zone
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We are most alert, alive and present when we are on our own creative edges, not when we are in our comfort zone. Designing to keep ourselves on our own creative edges can help bring fresh energy into the design.... Continue reading
Posted Aug 26, 2024 at The Fertile Unknown
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12 Ways to Engage Your Creative Self
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Engaging our creative selves is an ongoing journey that needs space and time for refection, exploration, and cultivation. Here are 12 reminders of ways to engage with creative self this summer: 1. Cultivate a creative mindset. Stay open to new... Continue reading
Posted Aug 7, 2024 at The Fertile Unknown
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Moving Beyond Binary Thinking into Creative Thinking
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Based on my facilitation experiences w strong polarities present, I have come to see holding paradox, integrating opposites, and transcending polarities as core to cultivating creativity. Understanding the tensions that emerge when different polarities are in the room allows us... Continue reading
Posted Aug 2, 2024 at The Fertile Unknown
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Facilitating Creative Process: What's Underneath How Your Show Up
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Creative facilitation means tending to our creative self. How we show up plays a big part in facilitating the creativity of others. It starts with our own presence, flexibility, and creativity before we get into the room. Facilitating creative process,... Continue reading
Posted May 14, 2024 at The Fertile Unknown
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Facilitating Creative Process: Being with the Awkward Silence
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When facilitating creative process, introducing participants to a a new activity, process or framework; or asking them a question they don't readily know the answer you can get a deer-in-the-headlights look, often accompanied by a palpable silence. This silence can... Continue reading
Posted Apr 12, 2024 at The Fertile Unknown
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Creative Process: The Dance of Opposites
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Creativity comes to life at intersections. It thrives on opposites—engaging the polarities until something new emerges. Polarities can seem like opposites at first glance, but they are actually two different interdependent expressions of a larger whole. When we can accommodate... Continue reading
Posted Mar 18, 2024 at The Fertile Unknown
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Pattern Breaks Video Series: Part 2
As part of the book launch celebration for my creative facilitation guide book, Pattern Breaks: A Facilitator's Guide for Cultivating Creativity, I've been hosting a video series with several seasoned guest facilitator friends. They each share different creative facilitation techniques... Continue reading
Posted Mar 9, 2024 at The Fertile Unknown
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8 Ways to Unlock Creativity in Challenging Times
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Throughout history, times of great challenge have also always brought with them times of great creative opportunities. They are inexorably linked - crisis and opportunity. The world as we have known it is changing in so many ways at an... Continue reading
Posted Mar 8, 2024 at The Fertile Unknown
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Pattern Breaks Video Series - Part 1
As part of the book launch celebration for my creative facilitation guide book, Pattern Breaks: A Facilitator's Guide for Cultivating Creativity, I've been hosting a video series with several seasoned guest facilitator friends. They each share different creative facilitation techniques... Continue reading
Posted Feb 9, 2024 at The Fertile Unknown
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Creative Resourcefulness within Constraints
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Posted Jan 18, 2024 at The Fertile Unknown
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5 Types of Creative Blocks and How to Navigate Them
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There are many reasons resistance show up in creative process, which can play out in blocking behaviors. These often come from conscious or unconscious reasons that people may feel inhibited, such as the fear of being wrong, looking silly, being... Continue reading
Posted Jan 12, 2024 at The Fertile Unknown
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Creative Practice: Adapting (and Evolving)
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Today's practice is Adapting. This is the final practice in this "12 practices" series (but there are so many others!) Let the vision be mutable and change over time. Balance planning with emergence. Have goals and hold them focused enough... Continue reading
Posted Jan 10, 2024 at The Fertile Unknown
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Creative Aliveness Practice: Acting
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Today's practice is Acting. It's not enough to imagine what can be, we have to act on our imaginings. As I mentioned before, the creative process is non-liner, and these practices do not follow one sequence. Taking action happens at... Continue reading
Posted Jan 9, 2024 at The Fertile Unknown
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Creative Aliveness Practice: Structuring
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Once you have more clarity – after you have diverged out and expanded the “playing field” of new, emergent creative surprises – then look at how to structure that aliveness into you work and life....how to form it, shape it,... Continue reading
Posted Jan 8, 2024 at The Fertile Unknown
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Creative Aliveness Practice: Discerning
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Today's practice is Discerning. “An open mind must be mitigated by discernment. Knowing what to take in and what to discard or file away for future perusal is important to one’s growth.” ~ Safi Thomas And discernment takes practice. Discerning... Continue reading
Posted Jan 7, 2024 at The Fertile Unknown
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Creative Aliveness Practice: Tending
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Notice and be present to images, feelings, thoughts, ideas, impulses that emerge as you go about your days, outside of your “sacred” time. Record them. Repeat thequestion you are holding often, not just once, and do what you need to... Continue reading
Posted Jan 6, 2024 at The Fertile Unknown
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Creative Aliveness Practice: Cultivating
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Today's practice is Cultivating. “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” ~ Thomas Merton Using whole-brain creative processes – drawing it, painting it, moving with it, embodying it, acting it out, dialoguing with it,... Continue reading
Posted Jan 3, 2024 at The Fertile Unknown
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Creative New Year
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Michelle James 2024 Continue reading
Posted Jan 2, 2024 at The Fertile Unknown
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Creative Aliveness Practice: Committing
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Today's practice is Committing. "Until one is committed, there is always hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness...the moment one definitely commits oneself a whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising to one’s favor all manner of... Continue reading
Posted Jan 2, 2024 at The Fertile Unknown
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Creative Aliveness Practice: Listening
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Today's practice is Listening. Listen with your whole self, and whole brain...not just to words. Your mind knows only some things. Your inner voice, your instinct, knows everything. If you listen to what you know instinctively, it will always lead... Continue reading
Posted Jan 2, 2024 at The Fertile Unknown
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Creative Aliveness Practice: Holding
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Today's practice is Holding. This practice is about releasing the need for an immediate answer…or a familiar one. It is about holding the question before rushing to an answer or “the” answer. "Be patient towards all that is unsolved in... Continue reading
Posted Dec 30, 2023 at The Fertile Unknown
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Creative Aliveness Practice: Asking
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Today's practice is Asking. “Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” ~ Howard Thurman This practice is about asking yourself what is most alive for you... Continue reading
Posted Dec 29, 2023 at The Fertile Unknown
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Creative Aliveness Practice: Centering
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Get centered. During your designated emergence time, getting centered allows you to be more present to what is calling to emerge within you. It is about having intentionality, a clarity of focus, and a presence to be able to begin... Continue reading
Posted Dec 28, 2023 at The Fertile Unknown
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Creative Aliveness Practice: Clearing
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Over the next couple weeks, I will be sharing "12 Practices for Creative Aliveness." The practices are not necessarily in a linear order, and you might go back and forth between them. It's not as much about a sequence as... Continue reading
Posted Dec 27, 2023 at The Fertile Unknown
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