by Alvin Ramirez May 12, 2015
In last week’s episode of Book Journeys, Angela Lauria interviewed creative process expert and life coach Julia Roberts on her book, Sex, Lies & Creativity. Julia’s book is actually an easy-to-read version of her Master’s thesis. It is written for people who are trying to enhance their creativity in the workplace or trying to understand their own creativity at home. It opens the discussion on questions such as: What are the reasons why women’s creativity is not getting out into the world? Are there other ways to enhance creativity for men and women in the workplace? Are we accidentally chilling creativity? Julia decided to write the book to make sure that what she came to understand about creativity got out into the world. She wanted people to understand how creativity works and what we’re doing that’s wrecking or boosting it.
Julia has two other published books – the first one is a self-published memoir-style fun book about her family’s cross country trip and the second is a traditionally published self-help book for mothers that draws life lessons from pregnancy. Although her three books belong to three different genres, for Julia there was a huge difference in her third book, Sex, Lies & Creativity because while she wrote the first two out of a desire to be an author, the last one was written because she wanted to serve the reader. Being more reader-focused was for her a huge shift because she was no longer concerned whether somebody would question her right or ability to write the book, unlike in her previous book where she had so many fears and anxieties that whatever she said would be questioned. This time she didn’t write to prove herself to anybody but to give readers access to information that was not being written or presented by other people.
Julia’s idea of writer’s block is not the common notion of staring at a blank page and not being able to come up with the words. For her it’s having too many ideas with no ability to choose or focus on one. She discovered that she herself was convergently challenged and could not select or funnel her ideas. She was running in a circle because she always had new ideas and it was easier for her to hop to another idea rather than finish the one she was working on. It was only when she learned the tools to help her converge and learned the value of converging that she started going in a straight line, doing things one after the other instead of going in circles. She says that her energy is enormously different now that she has learned not only to converge but also the value of converging. Her advice for those who are faced with a similar problem is to figure out where they always fall down and might need some help through assessment tools, collaboration, or coaching, and then see which projects they have a brilliance for and choose the project that’s within their energy field because that’s usually where one has something unique to offer.
Listen to the Julia Roberts interview on BlogTalkRadio
DOWNLOAD Book-Journeys-Author-Interview-Julia-Roberts-May-7-2015
Watch out for Angela’s interview with another exciting author.