highly sensitive power

The Original Deck

Years ago, I made a deck of creativity prompt cards for myself – 75 prompts that propelled me into a more expansive space for finding solutions. I formatted them in Excel, printed them on card stock, and cut them out by hand.

Months later, I put them to the test. I wanted to write an e-book to help empower highly sensitive people. But what about? I’d recently read Jump Start Your Brain, by Doug Hall, and agreed with his insistence that great ideas come easier when we’re having fun, so I decided to play.

I told my husband not to interrupt me for a few hours. I took teacup hooks, twine, India-print bedspreads, a CD player, pillows, a dictionary, a clipboard, paper, pen, and my prompt cards into the bedroom and closed the door. In half an hour, I’d raised a colourful tent over the bed by running the twine between hooks screwed into the walls and draping the bedspreads over it all. Everything else went inside, including a little lamp. I entered the bewitching world, settled in against the pillows, and started the music. I couldn’t stop grinning.

One by one, I went through each of the prompt cards, writing ideas down as they came – not judging or assessing, just collecting. Card after card sparked more ideas and as they piled up I started sensing patterns and nudges toward specific directions. It all came together when I drew the card that said, “Use the dictionary as a Ouija Board. Ask first, then close your eyes and point to an answer.” I did, and everything I pointed to in the dictionary was nautical in some way or another. It was spooky.

By the time I emerged from that glorious tent, I knew I wanted to write a light-hearted e-book about healthy boundaries, using a nautical theme. The result was Stay Afloat When They’re Rocking Your Boat: How to Feel Steady and Calm with Healthy Boundaries.

Daily Posts

After that, I was really hooked on using the creativity prompts. My friend Danielle persuaded me to post one prompt a day on my website, which I did. That was fun, too, and gave me great feedback as people commented on them. I did that for 202 days in a row, creating more than 100 new prompts in the process. A surprising number of people wrote to me and said they continually got just the prompt they needed on just the day they needed it.

But by the time I posted number 202, I was ready to try something different. New readers of the site had to ferret the old prompts out from the archives, and the every-day posting schedule was too much. If I stopped, I’d have time to pursue the idea of producing hard-copy decks of prompt cards.

Card Decks

Months of research and development later, I held a beautiful deck of 101 prompt cards nestled in a neat kraft-paper box. One of my website readers, a professional marketer, had contacted me to say she was interested in helping me market them. I was good to go.

But the more I ran the numbers and the deeper I got into preparing a marketing plan, the more obvious it became that the cards wouldn’t be profitable if priced low enough to actually sell, particularly if I included my time, and even though I’d streamlined the production process, with help from a design and printing professional.

Subscriptions

Now what? Musing took me back to an idea I’d had from the very beginning: to offer the prompts as a subscription, delivered by email. Unlike at the beginning, though, I now have enough Internet technology know-how to set up a subscription service. And there are many more prompts now, too.

I’m glad to offer daily Creativity Prompts again – this time in a way that allows anyone to start at the beginning and receive them all. Creativity Prompt subscriptions (www.creativityprompts.com) are delivered in three volumes of 101 prompts each. The first two volumes are the prompts previously posted. Volume 3 is all new.

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Thank you very much for your feedback and encouragement along this journey. May I help you as much as you continue to help me by reading and commenting.

Flickr photo: come n say ‘hello’ to my new friend, by linh.ngân