The diagram below shows the main sources of blockages and also the area in our bodies in which they are mainly sited. Note that there is not only a fair bit of overlap between these sites but also a huge amount of cross-communication too.

Starting from the bottom up, if we are in a desperate state the lights are switched well and truly off. When we are in danger, the flight or fight response kicks in at the limbic centres of our brain and no amount of creativity can see the light of day. This is unless, of course, you are trained in a martial art where you have learned to control these base instincts. With just some basic training, we can indeed work inspirationally about how we handle pressure situations. The keys to becoming a master of such arts overlap considerably with the skills that conjure up light bulb moments on demand.

If you are in pain or discomfort, creativity can fly out of the window. A toothache perhaps affects an area of just a few square millimetres but it can put your whole mind in abeyance until you get it sorted. While you are in that dentist’s chair, you probably won’t be composing an opera. Somewhat ironically, if you could manage to do so, it would make the time go much faster.

Moving upwards on the diagram now, a secure environment sets the seeds for inspiration to flow. If you are in a workplace where you are underpaid (hungry for money) your creativity will be stifled. This can be exacerbated if there is a lack of recognition in your home or personal environment where you can’t share your achievements. One of the benefits of the Internet and social media is the ability to share your talents with a larger community should your local connections not recognise your genius.

Fears which we mainly store in our gut are the next causes of blockage.

If we were ever told an essay was poor by a teacher, this memory can stay with us for years. If you find someone else is getting you to write sales proposals or difficult customer emails, you can bet they had this experience at school.
Similarly, if our peers laugh at our attempt at art or music, we might never pick up an instrument or a brush again.
If you don’t try, you can’t fail so procrastination is also a marvellous success avoidance strategy. The other one is being a busy fool, perhaps starting loads of projects but never finishing any.

The two times in my life when I have been the most financially successful were co-timed with the points in my life when I was most stressed. Accordingly, fear of success has been with me for years and I have only just finally dealt with it now I am the other side of my half century.
We move now to our heart. The observant amongst you will notice these sites of imbalance and blockage are also sometimes referred to as chakra points.

If we are grieving or unloved, it is not time to start that novel. That is, of course, unless you are using the writing process as catharsis. A sad heart will reflect in your work. People who see your paintings, hear your music or read your words will pick it up in their hearts first as opposed to their heads. Again, if you want to induce this feeling, it is possible to temporarily recall that time of sadness while you are working. The ability to empathise and associate yet with detachment is the sign of a true master of their art.

We leave now the areas in our body that, for the most part, operate outside our conscious control yet that can affect us greatly. These centres evolved last in our evolution along with the ability to speak and the ability to be self-aware and think. The two are interlinked and often mimic each other. I am sure you have met someone who has to say something in order to think it through.

The very act of talking can suppress creativity, for the time we are actually speaking at least. This is especially if the thing we are talking about is of little consequence. If, however, you are an entertainer and your voice is your art, the opposite is true. The subtlety here is that any inspiration comes in on the in breath while we are not talking. The reason for this is that we speak on the out breath and there is a periodicity to the flow of creativity. Our aspirations flow on the out breath and inspirations come on the in breath or the still point between the in and the out. This flow is so subtle that is difficult to detect and tune into. Once you do though, the difference between external inspirational guidance and internal thought becomes clear.

As well as actual speech, there is self-talk. I am sure we have all been in a situation where someone is talking and we’re not listening but working out what we are going to say next. This is natural but while doing this it’s difficult to have a massively creative spurt on what to say next. It might sound counter intuitive but by truly listening to what the other person is saying, we have a better chance of replying with something erudite and off the cuff. We just have to learn to trust in the process and to trust ourselves. There is many a time when you can just listen and the other person will tell you at the end what a fabulous conversation they just had.

When we are by ourselves, we often have inner conversations. We might be rehearsing a speech or a talk or replaying a conversation where we wished we’d come up with a wittier and more incisive retort. From a light bulb moment perspective, this inner chatter – which is also referred to as the Monkey Mind – is an anathema. Later in this series, I will be showing you the arts of Whole Brain Thinking and Whole Mind Not-thinking and how to make the Monkey Mind quieten down and go for a rest.

Only when your mind is silent can the light bulb moments come in. This is of course why in the normal run of things light bulb moments occur when you aren’t expecting them. Perhaps you are driving, dreaming or in the shower when that flash of inspiration occurs. The proximity to water by the way is not coincidental.

The trick is to induce the conditions for light bulb moments to occur under your own volition. So, next in this series, I will dissect a light bulb moment and explain how it interacts with all these mind centres – all in less than a second.
P.S. if your mind is closed to all of this, this blocks external inspiration coming in via the crown

Here’s four ways to learn more about the magic of light bulb moments, how to have them on demand and how to stop those good ideas from getting away:

1. Buy the book

2. Watch the webinar

3. See Tom live !!

3. Book a Light Up Your Business/Light Up Your Life session

As a direct result of joining only in September last year, I had a light bulb moment while on holiday about how I could model the success of the Circle and create a vehicle for my writing, teaching and mentoring.

So here we are in January and the resulting site has just been launched – see Recipes for Fresh Thinking to see what has come together in the most remarkably short space of time.

I thought it would a great help to others starting new ventures to share how it came about.

Modelling Excellence

When I first went to an Entrepreneur’s Circle meeting, what struck me most was the energy. Everyone in the room had a desire and a determination to succeed and the content delivered is geared solely towards that goal. There’s no time wasted moaning about how slow business is or in gossip and tittle tattle. The sessions are geared to encourage attendees to generate focused and channelled energy into their business.

What is taking place is knowledge transfer of a successful model – i.e. Nigel’s – to allow you to replicate the bits of it that apply to your business. I was no stranger to modelling. I have used it extensively in human interface design when I was a software architect and more latterly in coaching and mentoring with my NLP practitioner’s hat on – although I’ve moved on, upwards and away from NLP per se these days.

Nigel’s model and modus operandi turned out to be just what I needed at that point in time. The seed was planted.

My local meetings are run by an amazing force of nature called Vanessa Lanham-Day – she walks her talk, delivers with wit and charm, doesn’t pull punches and leaves you both on a high and with razor sharp clarity. At said meetings, I also bumped into a contact of mine who I hadn’t seen for a while, Karen Skidmore. By chance, and there are no coincidences in my book, Karen had be running a membership-based portal called the Web Tech Club for some months very successfully.

So rather than reinventing the wheel, I looked at Nigel’s financial model (from a customer perspective of course) and modelled the bits I needed for Recipes for Fresh Thinking. I also found out what tools Karen had used to create her site and used all of those too. One of Karen’s webinars was even on the topic of how to build and run a site just like the one I was planning. I even heard about that webinar the very day she was running it. As I said, there is no such thing as coincidence!

As a result, I started the site build and population in week 1 of November, the first entry level product sold before Christmas and the first subscribers signed up this week.

Spirals of Abundance

There is another key factor in making all of this work that I sensed I had to model.

Our current financial system is, in essence, a debt spiral. It is ultimately propped up by selling someone some debt that they could do without and at a premium. There are other ways!

The most successful franchises generate abundance not only for the franchisee and franchisor but also for the people who buy the product or service at the end of the line.

In the case of the Entrepreneurs Circle, the product even allows the user (i.e. people like me) to generate even more abundance. It is in essence a no-brainer.

Again, I felt this nuance worth emulating so set about it in two ways.

Firstly, the product and service I am essentially delivering from the site is a simple and inexpensive way for each of us to change our mind set such that the world around us changes in our favour. To do this, I have taken esoteric (or hidden) wisdom and made it exoteric (or known). This has been the focus of my writing for the last few years.

My skill is to take stuff which is inaccessible and make it both accessible and useful in a contemporary setting. In essence, it is practical magic and, like all magic, it only appears to be a trick until you know how its done. Those that know the secret we call lucky nowadays. So when just a little of what I teach rubs off, life becomes easier, blocks vapourise and serendipity blossoms.

See the blog Slowing Down : The New Speeding Up to see how this even involves less not more effort

The second essential part of the model is to allow those who invest time and energy in the site to learn even more inner secrets to benefit financially from subscriptions and content delivery. In the Entrepreneurs Circle, these people are Business Growth Advisors like Vanessa. For Recipes for Fresh Thinking, I had already developed a Tour Guide Training programme for coaches, healers and therapists centred around even more arcane knowledge I have contemporised and called the Cube of Karma.

It’s too early to say how all this will go but I do know that pulling it together has been one of the easiest things I have ever done. It’s like having a guiding light showing you the way. It feels good.

I’ll report back on progress and Big Thanks to all mentioned here, my new Tour Guides and all those that subscribe over the coming months.

P.S. just back this week from an Entrepreneur Circle day with two massive, colour-coded Mind Maps of even more things to implement to make the site blossom – a day very well spent.

Related Links

Entrepreneurs Circle
Web Tech Club
Recipes for Fresh Thinking
Flavours of Thought
Tour Guide Training
Cube of Karma

For example, one person might love your writing, music or art and another may loathe it. The former will appreciate your talent and the the latter think you don’t possess an ounce of it.

So one simple way to boost your perception of your talent is just to find the people who like your stuff. When you do find them, watch out for sycophants and the perils of an ego that comes from having a fan base – remember it might be temporary.

When you get reviews, remember to thank people for them.

From an objective perspective, there’s a bunch of really practical things you can do to improve and hone your talent.

The first three might not normally be associated with the arts but they are as follows:

1. to get regular exercise
2. to eat the right things
3. to breathe using your diaphragm

Each of these increases the nutrients reaching your brain which in turn facilitates increased interactivity between your neurons. By the way, the exercise doesn’t have to be strenuous, a brisk walk with diaphragmatic breathing is enough – this is why I recommend writers should be dog owners. And when you walk, if you can, look up not down – it makes a huge difference.

Now onto honing your talents themselves … here’s my top seven tips

1. Practice … and then practice some more
2. learn how to Mind Map (properly)
3. create something each day
4. have an Artist’s Date per week – see Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way site
5. when you read, see or hear something you like, spend a little thinking about what you like about it
6. then plagarise, copy and emulate a style you like … making your own fusion along the way
7. don’t hide your reviews away, pin them on your wall, post them on your web site, Tweet them

Finally remember the best way to hide your talent is not to create anything at all … and that your talent is a gift and natural endowment, not to be hidden under a bushel or suppressed by any of the fears in this series.

In any case, it should be remembered that these fears are only there to give us the indication that there’s something we need to tackle and embrace.

The world is speeding up – we are being bombarded by TV, news, social media – how is it possible to keep up?

Well it’s a common misconception that the march of time and it’s ticking clock is both fixed and immutable.

You hear people saying things like, “You can’t change the past” and “There are simply not enough hours in the day.”

Both these statements are not necessarily true.

It’s also said that, if you want something done, give it to a busy person. I even heard someone say once that they didn’t have enough time to read a time management book !!

Well there’s two books I recommend highly both that take a different approach, mentioned at the bottom of this blog … but even they don’t really show how time can be bent, managed and stretched.

It’s all in mind

Now this might seem far fetched, or in the realms of Doctor Who or Back to the Future, but scientists are coming to the conclusion that our reality – our space and time – are linked to our consciousness. In fact, it’s more accurate to say that it’s our very consciousness that actually creates our reality and space and time. So all you need to do to change time is to make a change in your consciousness.

A fly and an elephant both perceive time differently to us … and I for one have noticed a difference in peoples’ cognitive reaction time. Have you ever tried to swat a fly only for it to seem to know where you are about to strike? It’s nerve signals don’t have to travel as far as ours so its physiology and neurology means it reacts quicker.

I am sure you have heard about athletes who have been “in the zone” – a sort of timeless place – or perhaps you have had a light bulb moment where in less than a second, you get a flash of inspiration – a whole picture for a new idea. If you were able to MRI scan your brain at this moment, you would see both the right and left hemispheres light up in synchronism. For that split second you were Whole Brain (or even Whole Mind) Thinking. A brain scan would show that your brain was generating alpha and probably even theta waves.

It is now thought our left brain sits in space and time and our right brain everywhere and “every-when” else. By making our left brain go silent and work in harmony with our right, our perception of the speed of time changes.

Now you can access this state while meditating. When I mention this to people, their first reaction is that they don’t have time to meditate. I know it sounds counter-intuitive but I can testify that 20-30 minutes meditation before any creative session will deliver not only the time back by a factor of 3 or 4 but also produce the most sublime output that appears to have come from nowhere.

“But I can’t make my mind go quiet,” is normally the next protest swiftly followed by, “I’d like to meditate but I don’t have time to learn how.”

Well, if you hear yourself saying this, help is now at hand. You don’t need necessarily to enter an ashram for two months. Although, if you did, it might well be time well spent …

Have a listen to this audio track to learn a routine you can use anytime and anywhere – great also for getting back to sleep in the early hours – but not as one client of mind did for listening to while driving !!!

By practicing getting into this state while your eyes are open, you will find time changes its speed … and you will get more done in less time !!!

P.S. coming soon, I’ll be sharing secrets on how you can change the past and future and how time is not as immutable as once thought (and how karma means you can’t use these tricks to win the Lottery)

Quietening your mind

Recommended Reading

If what I’ve written above it just too whacky and you just want to better manage your day and “claw back” time, then read Time Management for Dummies by Clare Evans (no relation).

I also recommend getting hold of a copy of Steven Taylor’s excellent book called Making Time – it explains in some detail how consciousness and time are interrelated and how you can start to control time to your advantage.

Do you want this year to be like last year? Book a session with me this month and I guarantee you will have the best year of your life !!

How can I say this?

Well it would be easy to assume that Light Bulb Moments, by their nature, happen at random and outside our control. They are after all elusive, ethereal and intangible by their very nature.

Imagine though being able to tap into ‘future memories’ and tune into your natural precognition so you make just the right moves at just the right time.

It’s entirely possible to have light bulb moments on demand and around a specific requirement or subject. 

This unique service is designed not only to generate one or more light bulb moments but also to teach you how to generate and experience them too.

It’s available on a one-to-one basis, or for teams or businesses, in just a few hours this process will transform your world and take you in entirely new directions.

One to one sessions can optionally involve creativity walks in the wonderful Surrey Hills.

Download PDF with more details here

For businesses, these sessions are a great focus for ‘away days’

- and all attendees will get a copy of my new book,  The Art and Science of Light Bulb Moments

What you will learn:

• The source of inspiration
• The skill of free association
• The generation of unlimited spin offs
• The art of Whole Brain and Whole Mind Thinking
• How to prevent ideas getting away and being copied
• How to bring in all the resources you need, as if by magic
• How to form a permanent [24 hour] connection to your Creative Muse

Our light bulb moment session was enlightening and profoundly insightful and I would first like to thank you for being who you are and leading so rapidly to new perspectives and fresh thinking. – Phil Shepherd, Thortsphere

“Thank you Tom for a most enlightening, transformational and productive ‘Light Bulb Moment’ session. Your passion and generosity of spirit has transformed my self limiting beliefs and helped me recognise my true value and worth; something I have struggled with for years! Such an innovative approach to help even the busiest of people to experience breakthrough and emerge with one big happy smile! You are truly a modern wizard in these challenging times.” – Alana Clynes, Holistic Dimensions

Email me at momentsoflight@me.com or contact me here to book me for a private or team light bulb moment session.

You may even have it printed and published … but maybe it’s not selling and you’re struggling to promote it … and yourself.

This is a fear that I have experienced first hand. One of the reasons I discovered about why it affected me so much was that when I was the most financially successful in my life with two businesses, this was when I was also the most stressed.

So I directly equate success with stress and used my creative mind to avoid success at all costs.

The signs that this is happening in your life are:

• You jump on to the next project without really finishing off the first
• You work on behalf of other people before you get on with your own stuff
• You become a ‘busy fool’

And I am proud to say I have all these T-shirts.

Strategies for Getting over the Fear of Success

1. Redefine what success means to you – it doesn’t have to be about the financials and, of course, being successful without the associated stress is a success in its own right

2. Get in the habit of celebrating all milestones no matter how small and in what ever manner you feel, e.g. every review I get for my books, I proudly share on Twitter and Facebook

3. Have a listen to this short visualisation on Becoming Fear-less

It’s natural for us to fear the unknown. Like all fears, this can start at an early age and remain with us for most of our lives.

When it comes to embarking on a creative project – or specifically not-embarking on a creative project – it can be somewhat debilitating.

The signs that this is happening in your life are:

• You are a bit of a control freak and won’t start working until you know exactly each step of the way
• You spend more time planning than doing
• When you start creating, doubts about your ability start to sneak in which you use as excuses to stop

To add more complexity and confusion, there are actually classes of unknown-ness.

There’s obviously the stuff we know we know – the Known Knowns – at least that is until we find out whatever we thought we knew, we didn’t know that well after all.

There’s stuff we know we don’t know – the Known Unknowns – for example, for writers, who is going to publish our bestseller.

There’s a weird category of Unknown Knowns – these are things we know but didn’t know we knew. I love it when authors are actually quite surprised that people like reading their stuff. They were just not be quite aware of it.

Finally there are the Unknown Unknowns – these are the bête noires to creatives – these are the demons that can stop us in our tracks.

Strategies for Getting to Know the Unknowns

1. Just accept we don’t have to know everything and getting to know things, make mistakes is part of the rich tapestry of life

2. Remind yourself that not trying is failure and giving it a go is success

3. Know that all you need to know is to know how to find out someone who does know

4. Learn how to use boolean searches on Google, Twitter and Wikipedia – and if you don’t know what a boolean search is or why they are useful just click here – take this as a tip from a person who knows

5. Use Cross Crawling and Mind Mapping to suppress the ‘critical’ left brain

6. Write down three things you think you know and three things you think you don’t know – then have a think about them.

7. Learn something new every day, no matter how small – for example, I subscribe to the Words for the Day from Dictionary.com and Visual Thesaurus so each day I improve my vocabulary … details on this blog

Incidentally, I find out daily that words that I thought I knew the meaning of – I really didn’t.

The Known Knowns weren’t quite what I thought they were !!!

Job done!

Somewhat ironically, we can be really creative on how we go about this. As for the other types of fears, in nearly all cases, other behaviour masks what is actually occurring.

Typical signs that this fear is in operation include being a ’busy fool’ and finding you are always serving other first before generating our own output.

Low self-esteem and pessimistic tendencies can also come to play. You may also find you give up at the first hurdle and any sign of adversity. You become an expert at creative procrastination.

These are all the tell-tale signs you are avoiding failure.

The route out of this downwards spiral is one of the most satisfying things we can do – we must learn to enjoy being self-indulgent and to put ourselves first. When you do this, you will both earn the respect of the people who you have been serving and show them ways they can do this for themselves whilst also reducing their reliance on you.

These are seven steps to take:
1. Diarise appointments with your Creative Self for your projects
2. Guard them with a passion
3. Share these dates with those that might thwart you by crossing your boundaries
4. Before each Creative session, go for a walk or meditate
5. During the session, switch off all distractions – phones, social media …
6. When you finish each session give yourself a treat and pat on the back … I have a digestive biscuit and cup of tea and sometimes I tweet to the world to declare another milestone has been reached
7. Then, and only then, get back to working with and helping others … you will find they haven’t been waiting for you and were getting on with other ‘stuff’

When you are successful in this practice, you realise that the real failure was not to even try in the first place.

You are now ready to take on the next fear, that of the Fear of the Unknown …

Here are just some of the things that stop us in our tracks:

• Fear of ridicule

• Fear of failure

• Fear of the unknown

• Fear of success

• Lack of time

• Lack of talent

- these are of course all subjective perceptions and can be dealt with and removed relatively easily.

In this series of short blogs, I’ll explain a little about why and how these issues manifest and give some simple tips to get around them.

The Fear of Ridicule

This is really common. The best way to avoid being ridiculed for your creative output is not to generate anything at all. Our unconscious minds protect us from harm by inventing loads of ways for us to avoid being ridiculed.

Signs that this is happening in your life are:

• Procrastination
• Being a busy fool
• Loads of half written manuscripts, unfinished sketches or musical samples

A classic trigger for this might be a teacher marking down an essay you wrote at school or you forgetting your lines in a school play. I did this in a nativity play and got demoted from Jesus to an innkeeper and then from an innkeeper to an angel without wings on the back row of the chorus.

As a knock on result, I used to have a repetitive dream of freezing as the lead guitarist on stage when playing with Pink Floyd or The Who. Since I eventually played a solo classic guitar piece at a local arts centre, the dream has not returned. I just remembered that I even posted that same piece of classical guitar on YouTube but notice that I was still back then too shy to put my face in the video … thought you might enjoy it though

Putting Your Head Above the Parapet

The simple way around this fear is to start creating and ‘publishing’ small bits of work and discovering that you don’t get shot down in flames.

The good news is there are loads of really good, free and supportive places online to do this.

For writers:

Your blog

Tweet a story or sample chapters on the brilliant Twimagination

Or submit your whole story to somewhere like Authonomy

Or throw all caution to the wind and just publish on Kindle Direct Publishing

I did this for my proto-novel Soulwave and the first reviews have encouraged me to dust it off and finish it …

For musicians:

Publish samples on Soundcloud

or AudioBoo – here’s some more music and poetry from yours truly

or of course YouTube – see this Mashable blog on artists picked up on YouTube

For artists:

Post your material to TwitPic

or artist communities like the appropriately named FoundMySelf

or why not sell your art using sites like ImageKind ?

So, in summary, there has never been a better time to flex your creative muscles … so get creating and posting, you never know who might spot your nascent talent …

P.S. some of these links are blatantly self-promotional – please add your examples below and links to any sites you use !!

P.P.S. For cases of deep trauma though, these techniques might not work so do get in touch as this is what I specialise in dealing with.

So when it comes to finding the source of something even more ethereal such as an idea, where do you even start looking? Even an expensive MRI scanner won’t help you here as it measures the brain state after a thought has occurred. Apart from anything else, you might not have an MRI scanner handy when that idea comes along as they tend to be random in nature.

Bring in the Thought Detectives
To find the source of ideas, we have become sleuths. The first clues to pick up on can be found in our language.
It is no accident that we say things like, “Off the top of my head” and “At the back of my mind”. When something is on “the tip of my tongue”, it well be exactly where it is at that moment in time.
If you observe people when they talk, the position of their hands gives much away too. Sometimes people reach above their heads as if they are pulling an idea out of the ether. They will pat the centre of their chest if they feel passionate about something.
It turns out that thoughts exhibit properties similar, but different, to electromagnetic waves. The quantum physicists, neuroscientists and the mystics (and crackpots) are all converging on the same type of somewhat preposterous conclusion. It looks like our three space and one time dimensions sit on top of a number of other dimensions that, accordingly, sit outside space and time. Furthermore, it is in these ethereal realms that thoughts propagate from the present, past and future.
So it seems that the latest theories in cosmology are somewhat converging with those on consciousness. These theories could explain things like your dog knowing you are coming home or that you know the phone is about to ring and who is going to be on the other end of it. Da Vinci may well have had the prescience to invent the helicopter and parachute by using a similar mechanism.

Water, Water Everywhere
A similar mystery exists around where ideas and thoughts go once we had them. The search for the location of our memory in our brains has proved fruitless.
Some further illumination into this conundrum can be had from the phrase, “I can feel it in my water”. Many people I spoke to when researching my book on light bulb moments testified that they got their ideas when in the shower or when out walking near a river or waterfall.
It is also reported that people who have had transplants of organs like the heart, lung and kidney exhibit personality changes and can even pick up memories from the donor.
It appears that the water in our cells is not just to stop us drying out. The Japanese author Masaru Emoto has done many experiments with water that show its state changes with the mood and emotions of people around it.

Nothing New Under the Sun
For some readers, some of this might sound bonkers and for others, it may nothing new you may have heard bits or all of it elsewhere. Well it appears that much of what we are re-discovering was known and accepted by the ancient Greeks and civilizations that predated them by thousands of years.
There may be a benefit to those who suspend their belief and accept that some of this might be true, even if it’s not been quite ratified and embraced by the left-brained scientific community. If you accept the notion that thoughts might come from outside our brains from a collective thought pool, we must then ask the question of why we just picked up on a specific thought at a specific time. After all, if this is all true, there’s a near infinity of thoughts bouncing around in the cracks between our neurons.
If these specific ethereal whispers are filtering through to your conscious awareness, perhaps it’s important that you pay attention to them. What’s more, as they only occur in the space between your thoughts and if you want more of them, it may pay great dividends to attend that meditation or yoga class.