Workshops

I offer  customized workshops and seasonal retreats.  Together we can customize a program to your particular needs using my innovative skill set.   Half day, full day and weekend formats.

Currently offering Women at the Well, a restorative retreat for women to relax, reflect, and renew.

In development – Women at the Well for Leaders, Women at the Well of Midlife, Women at the Well in Transition

Ongoing workshops include Creativity in Business, Quick Draw and The Spirit of Circle.

Creativity in Business

Mary Corrigan has now adapted Stanford’s acclaimed Creativity in Business (CIB) program for entrepreneurs.  This six-week program will forever change the way you approach challenges and obstacles in your business and life.

Today, more than ever, being self-employed is an adventure into the territory of uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.  CIB gives you proven tools – field tested for 25 years and counting — to navigate this terrain without surrendering your unique expression.

This highly interactive program will enable you to powerfully rely on your own inherent creativity – in order to approach work relationships and business problems with more inspired energy, and a fresh perspective – heightening value to your business, your employees and your customers.

If you:

• Want to worry less and innovate more
• Utilize practical tools that are relevant to business and life
• Understand that learning, stretching and growing yourself grows your business
• Are tired of flying solo and enjoy contributing to others success while achieving your own
• Are eager to bring more of your vibrant self, your own fresh ideas, and inherent creativity to your business

…this program is for you!

Using your current business challenges you will learn to:

• Crack the code on accessing and trusting your inherent creativity
• Develop a creative mindset to approach complex business challenges
• Respond to new opportunities and possibilities on a consistent basis
• Cultivate allies and resources to nourish your success
• Achieve breakthrough results on your real time issues

Email for more info.

QUICK DRAW

if you can hold a pen, you can draw

3 Great Reasons to Learn to Draw

I meet hundreds of people a year in my work.  If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times: “I can’t draw.”

This makes my eyeballs spin around in their sockets and the inside of my head feel like someone poked a stick into a hornets’ nest.

“I can’t” is an old story we tell (often with pride) as protection against the threat of embarrassment, criticism or shame.

If you can hold a pen, you can draw.  Impossible as that may sound for some, here are 3 reasons why it’s good for you.

1.  Reclaim your Natural Creativity
Drawing is one of our earliest forms of self-expression.  Leave any toddler alone in a room with crayons, a tube of lipstick or a colorful sticky food and you know what you get — modern day cave painting.

Creative imagination oozed out of us until about the time we entered classrooms and were asked to do something completely unnatural.  Sit in straight rows and stay between the lines.

Somewhere in the dark recesses of our past we experienced a variation of:

• What is that supposed to be?
• You’re all thumbs.
• Stand in the back and mouth the words but don’t sing.
• Being picked last for the team.
• You better have a back up plan.

The message switched from encouraging our playful, natural self-expression to performance, assessment and competition.  Life now said:  “If you’re not good at something, don’t do it.”

Slam! …went the door to play, exploration and our natural creativity.   It’s time to welcome it back.

2. Build your Visual Language
Look around you.  Drawing is back.

UPS, the Kauffmann Foundation, Lowes and Lenscrafters all currently feature drawing in their commercials.  When you start to see a theme in the media, there is a trend a foot in the popular culture.

The most engaging keynote speakers now publish video drawings of their talks. RSA animation is the hottest thing going in marketing your message.  The field of Graphic Recording is exploding.

Travel much?  Graphic icons are the universal translator.  We will see even more as it becomes essential to communicate across cultures.

It could have something to do with global communication, the rise of the Millennials and the generation coming fast on their heels who have never known a world without visuals.  Maybe it’s the fact that we are inundated with messaging and a simple, human drawing cuts through all the noise.

A picture really is worth a thousand words.  And you don’t have to be an artist to draw one.

3.  Nourish a Healthy Brain
Boomers take note!  Brain Fitness is the new Pilates.

Research is exploding with new information on how we think, learn and can change our brains.  Mental exercise is one of the four essential pillars to maintaining a healthy brain that functions better now and lasts longer.

According to SharpBrains the recipe for good mental exercise includes Variety, Challenge and Novelty.

• Vari­ety: to stim­u­late mul­ti­ple func­tions of the brain.
• Chal­lenge:  to avoid routine.
• Nov­elty:  to stim­u­late parts of the brain such as the pre­frontal cor­tex that are mostly exer­cised when we learn to mas­ter new cog­ni­tive challenges.

If you can only do one thing, learn something new every day.

So, Why Draw?
If you want a creative life, do what you can’t and celebrate the experience of the mistakes you make.  – Dan Pink, A Whole New Mind

I chose to highlight drawing because it’s something I learned to do as an adult.  And because once upon a time I didn’t think I could.  No one is more surprised than me that it’s been my livelihood for the past 14 years.

Recently, I’ve been teaching educators simple drawing techniques to use in their classrooms and the results have been thrilling – both for the teachers and the students.

If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area I’m opening this workshop to the public. Come have some fun with other beginners and develop your visual literacy.

If you’re not local, pick something new – anything – and go be a beginner.  Make mistakes, stimulate your brain and reclaim your creativity.

Enjoy!