Creative Success Expert Astrid Baumgardner: Eight Ways to Play to Your Passions and Strengths
NEW YORK, Jan. 23, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Anyone can be creative — given the right mindset, the desire to find and stay true to your authentic self, and access to the appropriate skill set.
"Creativity — the problem-solving process of generating and actualizing new ideas — is the number one skill required to navigate the uncertainties of the global economy, according to an IBM survey of global CEOs," says Astrid Baumgardner, author of Creative Success Now: How Creatives Can Thrive in the 21st Century (2020, www.indiebooksintl.com).
Dividing the book into three parts that address mindset, authenticity set, and skill sets, Baumgardner presents an easily digestible primer that empowers anyone to pursue the creative life, "both for your personal journey toward success and because the world needs your ideas." She sees creativity as an essential, wide-ranging, 21st century skill involving hard work and multiple cognitive processes that can promote happiness and well-being — and observes that creatives are able to make a living in today's economy.
"Creativity is highly valued skill set that drives a significant portion of the global economy," Baumgardner says. "The digital revolution has fundamentally changed the 21st century workplace, and creatives can take advantage of many opportunities for making a living. Thanks to their flexible ways of thinking and solving problems, creatives have a leg up in spotting those opportunities and creating their own career paths."
A leading voice in arts entrepreneurship, Baumgardner is a Yale School of Music faculty member who teaches career entrepreneurship and heads the Office of Career Strategies. She also runs her coaching company, Astrid Baumgardner Coaching+Training, coaching and guest lecturing on creative success. Previously, after graduating from Mount Holyoke College and Rutgers Newark School of Law, she practiced law in New York City for 25 years.
In Creative Success Now, Baumgardner provides roadmaps to creative success that include persevering with a growth mindset, getting in the flow with positivity and proactivity, and aligning with your values and purpose. She also shares the following eight ways to play to your passions and strengths:
1. Tap into your creative passion to remember what got you started on your journey.
2. Use your passion to inspire your creative work and inspire others to follow you.
3. Find your strengths by taking the StrengthsFinder 2.0 assessment and writing down five compliments that people give you.
4. Assess how often and how well you use your strengths.
5. Identify the strengths that you do not use enough and make a plan to use them more often and more effectively.
6. Check the strengths that you overuse and dial them down appropriately.
7. Identify the weaknesses that are holding you back and take actions to improve them.
8. Redesign your week to maximize the use of your strengths.
"I am privileged to teach and coach world-class professional and pre-professional musicians, brilliant arts leaders, entrepreneurs, and creative business professionals," Baumgardner says. "When my students and clients incorporate the principles that I lay out in this book, I have seen a shift in their energy that inspires and empowers them to get their creative work out in the world so that the world can benefit from their vision."
Those principles include six skills that can be developed with hard work and good strategies, as opposed to inborn talents: creative goal-setting and achievement, overcoming creativity killers, time management for creatives, personal branding, networking, and sustaining creative success with financial planning and a good support team.
"Creativity is not just a burst of brilliant ideas arising out of nowhere," Baumgardner says. "Having a great idea is just the start of the creative process. Creativity involves defining the right problem to solve, experimenting, risk-taking, reframing, developing ideas, putting ideas together in new ways, incubating to leave time for ideas to evolve and mature, and redefining the product until it is just right."
About Indie Books International
Indie Books International (www.indiebooksintl.com) was founded in 2014 in Oceanside, California by two bestselling business authors. Since then, the company has released more than 125 titles. Similar to indie film companies and indie music labels, the mission of Indie Books International is to serve as an independent publishing alternative for business thought leaders.
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SOURCE Astrid Baumgardner
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