Not everyone likes New Year’s Resolutions but I do - I think they provide a great opportunity to look back on the past year and make decisions about what you want to change in the next few months.

Having coached plenty of people through the process of making resolutions and putting them into action, I’ve seen a fair cross-section of what works and what doesn’t. So I’m going to post soon on Why Most New Year’s Resolutions Fail - and how you can succeed at keeping yours. It’s only fair to share my own resolutions with you, so I’ll post them up here and then use one or two of them as ‘case material’ for my ‘How To’ posts.

So here goes with my first one…

1. Make my blogging more like my coaching.
When I started this blog, I thought of my website primarily as a marketing platform, but I’ve come to realise it’s much more interesting than that. As well as attracting new clients (which is always nice), I’ve discovered that it adds a new dimension to my coaching with existing clients.

For one thing, clients are reading the blog and coming to me with questions, ideas and suggestions based on what they read. And now I often suggest that they read a particular category before or after a coaching sessions as preparation or part of the follow-up. The feedback I’m getting from clients is that the blog adds the following extra dimension to their coaching:

• Continuing the coaching beyond the session. I do my best to reply promptly to e-mails, but the blog is instantly available 24/7 - a way of being ‘always available’ to clients. Some of them say that just popping into the blog can reignite their enthusiasm for getting on with the agreed next steps. And lot of my coaching is highly-focused short-term work, with clients who consult me occasionally whenever they feel the need - in these cases, the blog is a good way for them to stay in touch in the meanwhile and receive a drip-feed of inspiration.
• More information and ideas - there’s only so much we can say during a coaching session, and the blog is a great way of expanding on discussions by providing extra material. It also helps me keep ‘information transfer’ to a minimum and focus on the really important stuff, like helping them find new options in their work.
• Realising they’re not alone - and that I’m not joking when I say that lots of other people have faced the same challenges as them. Creative work can get pretty lonely sometimes, even if you’re in an agency, and it’s often a huge relief to clients to realise the difficulties they are having are due to the situation or the medium, rather than something personal to them.
• Finding new avenues to explore. I have pretty wide creative interests and deliberately work across the whole spectrum of creativity, artistic and commercial. The non-linear format of the blog means clients frequently stumble across areas they might not have previously considered, which are outside their discipline or frame of reference. An obvious example is ‘artistic’ types being interested in becoming more ‘businesslike’ or (whisper it) ‘commercial’, with agency or studio creatives wanting to ‘fend off the organisation’ (as Russell said to me when I interviewed him) and inject some extra creative passion. But it’s also heartening to hear from technophobes whose curiosity has been aroused by my blogging for creatives page, non-designers who have been inspired by reading about Thomas Heatherwick, and managers who want to know what creative flow and synaesthesia can do for their creative team.
• Discovering new resources. I started the Books + Links section as a way of gathering together some of the books, websites and other stuff I regularly recommend to clients. So far I’ve made a start on four topics - creativity, creative careers, blogging and intellectual property, which have been enthusiastically received by clients - the books and websites they read invariably spark new coaching discussions. I’ve got a long list of other topics to cover, so watch out for new links in the left sidebar over the next few months.

It was only when I stopped to review at the end of 2006 that I realised how much the blog is transforming my coaching. So my first resolution for 2007 is to accelerate this convergence by making this blog as much like my coaching as possible. I’m sure there are limits to what can be achieved on a blog as opposed to a face-to-face or phone conversation - but I want to see how far I can push those limits…

Luckily for me, blogging and coaching are both conversations - so there’s lots of potential for me to develop Wishful Thinking as a discussion space, and for extending the conversation onto other blogs. For that to really work of course I’ll need your input - so please feel free to send me questions you want me to answer or topics you’d like me to cover on the blog - whether about your own creative process or career, creative collaboration with others, or managing creative professionals. Comments or e-mails always welcome - and let me know if you want to remain anonymous when I answer your question on the blog.

In terms of the blog content, I want to incorporate more of the recurring themes of my coaching with clients - i.e. to start capturing more of the things I find myself saying over and over again. The best example of this is my post on why enthusiasm is better than confidence - I heard myself saying it a couple of months ago and thought “I’ve said this hundreds of times, I need to put it on the blog”. Although it’s relatively recent, it’s been far and away my most popular post, in terms of traffic, links and other feedback. And there’s plenty more where that came from - so in 2007 I’m aiming to capture more of my ‘coaching memes’ and get them out there on this blog.

Right, that’s Resolution no.1 - I’ll post another 2 or 3 of my own, then start looking at Why most New Year’s Resolutions fail - and what to do about it.

I’m going to make Creative Links a monthly feature, highlighting posts about creativity and related matters that are inspiring, interesting, useful or preferably all three.

Here’s what I found in December:

Procrastination is a classic way to block creativity, so if that’s your Achilles heel, read Kathy Sierra’s Creativity on Speed, on the excellent Creating Passionate Users.

One of the best ways to be truly creative–breakthrough creative–is to be forced to go fast. Really, really, really fast. From the brain’s perspective, it makes sense that extreme speed can unlock creativity. When forced to come up with something under extreme time constraints, we’re forced to rely on the more intuitive, subconscious parts of our brain. The time pressure can help suppress the logical/rational/critical parts of your brain.

Kathy Sierra’s trailer is one of the creative workspaces featured in Alexander Kjerulf’s gorgeously-illustrated list of 10 Seeeeeriously Cool Workplaces. Other featured offices include Pixar, Mindlab in Copenhagen, Volkswagen in Dresden, and of course the Googleplex.

It was great to get a Christmas present from Design Observer when they linked to my enthusiasm post in their ‘Observed’ column. I can’t imagine them getting quite so excited about a link back from me, but Michael McDonough’s Top Ten Things They Never Taught Me in Design School is worth reading (even if you didn’t miss out on the top 10 by not going to design school). The list includes ‘Talent is one-third of the success equation’, ‘95 percent of any creative profession is shit work’ and ‘When you throw your weight around, you usually fall off balance’.

Staying with the business of design, Graphic Define has a good list of questions for aspiring designer/entrepreneurs - ‘Are You Ready to Open Your Own Design Studio?’.

Thanks to Three Minds @ Organic for pointing me to the New York Times’ Year In Ideas Issue, covering the ’serious and silly’ ideas of 2006, such as ‘The Comb that Listens’, ‘Empty-Stomach Intelligence’ and ‘Wine that Ages Instantly’. Three Minds also introduced me to the delightful Samorost Interactive Adventure (Not Safe for Anyone with Lots to Do).

Scamp is writing a great series of Tips for Young Creatives. No.4 was Pretend You’re Two Blokes in the Pub and try to convince your mate of the value of the product you’re working on:

It strips away all the marketing bullshit, and can lead to something simple and honest.

I’ve been using a similar technique for ages, to get writers (including myself) unblocked and strip away the ‘literary bullshit’, so it’s good to see it applied to advertising. Other tips in the series - 1. Don’t Over-Polish, 2. Choosing an Agency, 3. Play Family Fortunes, 5. Dickett’s Finger, 6. Use Never-Seen-Before-Footage and 7. How to Approach Agencies. Hopefully there will be plenty more in 2007.

Apart from being essential reading for anyone with a presentation to give, Presentation Zen provide plenty of general creative inspiration offers inspiration like this end-of-year post on The Need for Solitude in the creative process.

Finally, Brian Clark’s Copyblogger is one of the most consistently useful blogs on the web - if you write a business blog, website or e-book you’re probably reading him already, but if not you can’t afford to miss The Best of Copyblogger.

That’s it for December - I’ll post January’s creative links early in February.

Technorati Tags: copywriting, creative thinking, graphic design

I really do. But as Russell points out, new systems = new problems. Like wireless incompatibility, one of the great mysteries of modern life.

Fortunately everything is now (touch wood) compatible and getting along fine, so at last I can get Wishful Thinking going again - apologies for the delay in transmission, normal service will be resumed shortly.

(Thanks to Russell for the photo.)

Happy New Year!

Rub the lamp and make a wish for 2007…