Enhancing Creativity through "The Silva Life System" Training

By Linda Arnold

President, The Arnold Agency

The Silva techniques have become part of the daily routine at the Arnold Agency. They help in every aspect of agency work: the creative work that we do, business management, client relationships, and they help us stay healthy in this stressful business. If I didn't know better, I would think that the Silva people had custom designed a program especially for us. Here are some of the ways that the Silva techniques help public relations and advertising agencies:

A creative dimension
The first thing we learned in the Silva training was how to enter the alpha brain wave level where we could think with the right brain hemisphere. That is where we find creativity. Many people have gotten in touch with their creative abilities simply by entering their Alpha level of consciousness and practicing, as we are taught in the Silva classes.

Even more exciting to me is the list of highly creative people who have found value in entering the Alpha level in the Silva way and doing their creative work there:

• Best selling author Richard Bach praised the course publicly: "Mental discipline and creative visualization are what's behind the power of the Silva system," he said in an article in Harper's Bazaar magazine.
• Shakti Gawain said in her book Living in the Light, "I took the course and was amazed." She added that, "The most important technique I learned in that course was the basic technique of creative visualization."
• Band leader Doc Severinsen has composed music while at his Alpha level. A newspaper article says that he told them it helped him to be better in touch with his own spiritual life and in doing so he was a much better person.
• World renowned sculptor Harry Jackson said it brought him the peace of mind he had been searching for.
• Singers Vicki Carr and Metropolitan Opera star Marguerite Piazza are Silva graduates, as are actresses Carol Lawrence and Loretta Swit, to mention just a few.

Intuitive management
The agency business is very creative... and it is also a business. All of the Silva tools and techniques that other businesses find valuable are also valuable in this business: the ability to make decisions at the alpha level, to smooth out conflicts within the office, to forecast and make projections for the future, to manage our money better, to determine the best way to prospect for new clients... all of those things are valuable to us.

A creative business like ours is different from many other businesses, because we are constantly being pulled in two different directions: Creative people are open and spontaneous, they do not keep their emotions under tight control because this cuts off the creative flow. They express whatever they are feeling or thinking at the moment because that's what creativity is all about.

Management on the other hand is about control. Managers control budgets, work flow, schedules, projects. They prefer predictability and certainty to spontaneity. They control their emotions. When they express emotion, they are sending a message, and they assume that other people are doing the same.

There are outstanding creative people who are good managers of course, and there are managers who are very creative. The ideal situation is to have people who can switch back and forth between managing and controlling on the one hand, and being completely open and spontaneous on the other hand.

Through Silva, we have been able to understand this process better. When we are talking with someone, we quickly identify whether they are in a "management" mode or a "creative" mode. If a person is thinking creatively, then we know that the intense expression on their face may not have anything to do with what we are talking about, but might be the result of a creative thought they just had. Managers learn that they can take some time off from being strict managers and use their intuition and creativity to seek new innovative ways of managing the business. Silva is helping us to experience the best of both worlds.