Staying Creative in Challenging Times: An Interview with Michelle Chappel

All the news on the media these days seems to be bad news. Negativity clouds our creativity. To keep moving forward as creative artists, we have to keep our spirits up.

Michelle Chappel is a Billboard-winning singer-songwriter with a Princeton Ph.D. in psychology. She’s also a creativity consultant who teaches personal growth classes and conducts innovation workshops for Silicon Valley companies.

Drawing upon her psychology background, she offers songs of hope on her new CD, “Shake It Up,” available on her web site, http://www.michellechappel.com/. In a recent interview she shared a powerful key to maintaining our creative momentum.

The key is controlling attention.
When #@$% happens, or we’re surrounded by bad news, we can easily get stuck in the negative. We ruminate, going around and around in a downward spiral that drains our energy. But there is a way out. “Try to see the bigger picture of what’s going on,” says Michelle. Referring to classic research in cognitive psychology on the figure-ground effect, she calls this process “figure/grounding” it. As the classic illustration shows, we can see either the central vase or the two profiles as the figure. We have a choice.

“We always have a choice,” says Michelle, “no matter what is going on. There’s always a background. When I’m stuck in a negative thought, I figure/ground it–and something else comes into the foreground.” Shifting our attention gets us unstuck. We can revive our spirits and become re-energized by focusing on what is going well in our lives.

Try this for yourself the next time you’re feeling overwhelmed by bad news. Remember: you always have a choice. And as creative artists, it is our duty and destiny to keep our spirits up so we can participate in the ongoing creation of a new reality for ourselves and our world.