The Change Artist brings Carla Rieger's powerful recipe for mastering self change into a compelling story format.
The story begins with the troubled relationship between an adult daughter and her dying father.
Posted on September 21, 2009 by Carla in Uncategorized
The Change Artist is about moral dilemmas and a person who justified his actions (as many of us do) only to later regret those choices.
The father character chose to do some things as a young man to try to make amends and thought that those actions never made a difference his whole life, when actually they really did. The Change Artist is about the price we pay when we choose to act based on survival rather than on principles. It’s also about the price we pay when we label ourselves as a victim or a villain and never find forgiveness for ourselves or others. At its core it’s about the power of forgiveness.
Most people live their entire lives condemning themselves or others for past mistakes. This form of condemnation can be a self-made prison and will sap the joy out of life. Yet, why is forgiveness so difficult? So elusive? Because to forgive yourself is to truly take responsibility for what you’ve done and to learn from it, to grow from it. If you condemn yourself it’s a way of splitting yourself off, of distancing yourself from the human part that falls down and makes mistakes.
Similarly to condemn others is to distance yourself from the collective human shadow, to make yourself “better than”. This can create the illusion that you are somehow not responsible. This is a natural human tendency. To be responsible is to literally be “able to respond”. If we see people in the world choosing their response instead of letting their response choose them, then we see the beginning of growth, evolution and change for the human condition.
If it’s always someone else’s fault then there can be no learning or growth. Forgiveness takes the courage to look at yourself and at the world. It challenges you to choose your response, to choose to evolve and to choose to grow. The more people in the world taking back their ability to respond, the sooner we restore ourselves to wholeness.
In an era when only the “creatively resilient” among us are surviving it helps to remember that all of us have this ability. To be a Change Artist is simply to reconnect to the archetype of the artist within us all. As Pablo Picasso once said, “”Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”
Or, as David Whyte says, “When you neglect your creative energies they work away at you and almost blacken the inside of you like creosote. One of the first steps is to simply create a sense of spaciousness, to give you room to take flight.”
Here is a TV commercial you have probably seen from the 1990’s called “Think Different”. The concepts bears revisiting because this is a time in history when we all need to recapture the artist within to reinvent our personal lives, our work lives and our organizations.
This was an advertising slogan and TV commercial created for Apple Computer. The one-minute commercial features black and white video footage of significant historical people of the past, including (in order):
Albert Einstein
Bob Dylan
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Richard Branson
John Lennon (with Yoko Ono)
R. Buckminster Fuller
Thomas Edison
Muhammad Ali
Ted Turner
Maria Callas
Mahatma Gandhi
Amelia Earhart
Alfred Hitchcock
Martha Graham
Jim Henson (with Kermit the Frog)
Frank Lloyd Wright
Pablo Picasso
The commercial ends with an image of a young girl, Shaan Sahota, opening her closed eyes, as if to see the possibilities before her.
“Remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall — think of it, ALWAYS.” – Mahatma Gandhi
Creativity and innovation without integrity is, by universal law, unsustainable. We see this throughout history with investors like Bernie Madoff, or companies like Enron, or political leaders like Hitler. They impress people at first with their “innovative” way of changing things for the better. But if the innovation isn’t based in integrity then it cannot be sustained and eventually the leaders self-destruct and those that follow them lose out.
The Change Artist within us all is the archetype of the dreamweaver. It’s the part of us that can re-program our virtual reality movie. However, have you noticed that it doesn’t always create a rosy picture of health, wealth and happiness? Sometimes The Change Artist attracts challenge, loss and hardship into your life. Maybe these are opportunities to grow, to learn how to live more in harmony with universal laws, to make ourselves right with the world again. You cannot learn about integrity unless you transgress it from time to time and most humans have done that in big ways or small at some time in their lives. Like a child learning how to walk, we take a step and fall, then get back up and try again.
The suspense novel, The Change Artist, was recently reviewed by Clare Swindlehurst in her Blue Archipelago book blog in the UK. The novel explores how three people in three different generations of the same family deal with change, creativity and integrity in their own lives. The story goes back and forth through time and spans from the early 1930’s to the 21st century, and is inspired by true events of those who have suffered great loss but then found their way back to creativity with integrity.
Alvin Toffler, the famous Futurist, once said that, “The ability to creatively handle constant change will be the most sought after skill in the 21st Century.” Also, Pablo Picasso once said that, “Everyone is born an artist. The trick is to re-capture that innate ability as an adult and put it into all aspects of life.”
I think people are more likely to be creative artists of change not through intellectual reasoning by through daily habits. That’s why I run events open to the public for staying creatively adapted in uncertain times.
People who can lead, adapt, innovate, and facilitate while facing constant change are the leaders of the future. An “artist of change” sees how to benefit from changes affecting their life, can create their own change process, and can build a culture of innovation wherever they go. There are simple habits anyone can apply daily that will allow you to:
* do things you didn’t think you could do
* find a way to benefit from a change that seems “bad” as first glance
* thrive during uncertainty and be a living bridge for others in that regard
* move from being reactive about change, challenge and conflict to being proactive
The Artistry of Change is an innovative system that blends diverse fields such as educational kinesiology, western and eastern psychology, change management theory, creative process models, and neuroscience. Witness how these fields are merging in exciting ways to produce the new ‘business artistry’.
Three public seminars across Canada and a retreat are coming up this year entitled “The Artistry of Change: The Top Creativity habits of People Who Will Thrive in the Coming Decade.”
They are in Edmonton on Apr. 28, in Winnipeg on May 14, and in Vancouver on June 17. There is also a 4 day retreat October 1-4 at Hollyhock Retreat Centre.
You can read more about these events http://www.carlarieger.com/artistry_of_change_seminar/
The story is suggested by true events. However, for more simplicity, brevity and clarity I collapsed the journey of uncovering of my father’s other identities into a few events in this story. In truth it was a 10 year journey. I also changed the names of all the characters, collapsed several characters together, changed the gender of some characters, added in a few plot elements and took out some other ones.
