Imagine if you will, its a brilliant sunny Sunday morning. You wake up refreshed from a long evening of making a crowd of smiles and you are eager to seize the day. What better way to Carpe Diem than to knock out those pesky 10,000 steps that we are all suppose to have at the end of the day?  So you leash up your hyper energetic one year old lab mix and pounce out the door. A quicker than coffee pace down two flights of stairs and out into the bright warm sunny world. 

You're being pulled by fifty plus pounds of canine energy. Tongue wagging with joy in the fresh morning air. The dogs tongue, not yours. At first its a strenuous  isometric exercise, his energy pulling on your still, slightly sleepy human form. You strain your upper shoulders, arms, chest and back muscles for the first thousand steps or so. Then the pace begins to even out. “This is good for me," you think to yourself." I can feel my heart rate escalate to a reasonable workout rhythm.” 

Quickly passing the centennial asian couple holding hands in the park on the walkway, you and your canine partner are spreading joyful energy throughout the parkway.  Waving to joggers, cyclists and of course the cute asian centennials. Its a glorious, joyful day.  Hurray.  

Oh look, up ahead, a blue swallowtail butterfly, fluttering among the bushes.  How pretty.  Then just as you and fluffy come within fluttering flight space of said pretty blue swallowtail butterfly, your high energy fifty plus pounds of momentum instantly changes course on you to chase this beautiful natural distraction. Within a blink of your eye, your quick pace fast walking, sorta jogging pace takes an instant change of direction without warning. “Pop! Snap! Pain!” goes your shoulder as your canine partner now has jolted into a full forceful leap and bolting run in an opposite 160° direction.  Instinctively you grab the now loose leash with your other hand as your current holding arm simply dangles in pain at your side.  Your now stumbling through well kept shrubbery being dragged by your turncoat canine partner whose only goal now is to catch the butterfly. 

People are screaming, children crying the cute asian centennials are having a heart attack because of the chaos you and your demon dog of doom are causing in the public park on this once wonderful Sunday morning.  You’ve easily ceded your goal of 10000 steps. You’ve exhausted your canine companion. The pretty blue swallowtail butterfly has fluttered off into the distance, with a certain smirk of joy on her face.  

You hobble home with an exhausted fifty plus pound puppy, You with your cuts and bruises and occasional twig or two in your shoe strings, your hair, your torn t-shirt and your worthless right arm, in pain, just dangling by your side, like a toy action figure whose shoulder stitch has come undone. There is not enough aspirin, ibuprofen, or wine in the house to ease the pain of not only your shoulder, cuts and bruises, but of your ego. The day started with a bright energetic ego of yours, convinced it would seize the day. Your ego was convinced it would become the model citizen in your neighborhood and do all the right things network society tells us is the right way to live. Your ego was ready to change the world, but now it’s damaged, wounded and suffering in a pain equal to your dislocated shoulder. Your egos only current helpful medicinal assistance comes from the very source of its damage. Your fifty plus pound energetic ball of fur and supreme muscle of a beast that caused this damage. Here your canine partner quietly, softly, gently rests his head in your lap with his sad puppy eyes looking up at you.  As if he’s saying, “sorry, I didn’t catch that pretty blue swallowtail butterfly for you. Next time I will. I hope you feel better tomorrow, so we can do it again. "


*This post was created with voice dictation.” It took forever.”  Now I wish there was a voice dictation or an eye controlled digital drawing tool so that I could get my work done today.” 

Have a wonderful Sunday, Carpe Diem everybody, but leave the canines at home.

​Wouldn't it be great to see drawings and sketches from people as they visualize this story? 

Ty Recently I was invited to audit a Facilitator Qualification workshop for CoreClarity. CoreClarity (www.CoreClarity.net) helps people and teams tap into their talents daily so they can work more productively, live more fully and have more fun. Their experts work with organizations to streamline team processes by efficiently transforming individuals into a collaborative community. They help replace the combative language of judgment with a pause of appreciation. They articulate the team’s competitive advantage based on the members’ collective top talents. CoreClarity’s creative model takes strengths psychology from theory to practice. And it works! 

So, imagine my excitement when I was invited to come out to Dallas, TX and audit a week long Facilitator Qualification Extensive Workshop.  I was encouraged to digitally graphic record a few of their Participant Presentations. CoreClarity and their over two hundred certified facilitators agree that everyone learns differently. They see the value that Graphic Recording  adds to those whom learn complex information from a more visual standpoint that an auditory or verbal means of obtaining new information. I was thrilled to share my talents with them and learn even more than I could have imagined during the process.  

In the professional coaching and enhancement world there is nothing more complex and intensive than making sense and order out of the true benefits and meanings in the Gallup Strengths-Finder assessment.  CoreClarity has developed a remarkably extensive and comprehensive way of bringing such complex information to organizations that makes it instantly effective and usable beyond expectations. 

Here in this slide show are a few samples of my Digital Graphic Recordings of a couple of workshops from that very special week in Dallas.  The best value from Digital Graphic Recording is that the facilitator can provide a PDF booklet of the Graphic Recording panels. This of course is an excellent way to bring retention and greater understanding to the participant of such information heavy learning sessions.   I hope you enjoy the sample panels. If you have a workshop, corporate training course or are a professional speaker or corporate coach, and you want to include Digital Graphic Recording as an added value to your information sessions;please send me an email or call me. My contact information is on my website: http://www.tytheartguy.com/contact.html

Please and thank you and have a great day.
Ty 

A few weeks ago I had a visit with a NASA engineer. A friend of my wifes from high school. He’s an engineer that works on the air traffic control systems that the FAA uses. He’s also a marathon runner and a single father of twin 11 yr old boys. A great guy. A very active and a very creative mind. Highly intelligent. That should be a given. He’s a NASA engineer.  

The reason. Bring him up in is because during our tour of Disney we got on the topic of creative thinking. Disney seems to bring out the best in peoples creative thinking. Imagine that. He was curious about the work I do, drawing smiles. I was extremely curious about the work that he was doing in his little corner of NASA. He is one of the engineers that works on the systems in air traffic control operations.  Forecasting and planning years ahead in the safety of aviation, really interesting stuff and of course most of everything he said was way over my head. Still my imagination could see the idealistic visions that he shared with the rest of his NASA family. 

One of the coolest things I learned is that for down time and stress release that he is into,  aside from running marathons, he is also a master at the art of origami. That’s that.  I said origami. When you think about this it makes perfect sense. A NASA engineer playing with the art of folding paper.  The instinctive mathematics that goes into his creations. The planning, the per-conceived visions that it takes to turn a simple piece of paper into something clever and interesting. Recently NASA launched a new living quarters to the space station. Guess what? It was folded up inside a payload capsule. Then released into space and unfolded effortlessly to its full size and then easily installed in place on the space station.  Origami on the largest scale imaginable created by your local origami artists at NASA.  

All of the energy for satellites and the space station are generated by solar panels. Huge unfolding wings of solar panels.  That when switched on, systematically unfold into their enormous size and instantly become fully operational, generating all the power they need.  So to hear this NASA engineer brag about his master origami skills was just a wonderful example of genius ability and creative thinking to me. The bonus is that he has passed on his artistic skills to his twin 11 year old boys.   

He and the twins will pass time at restaurants, in lines at movies or in Disney, in the lines for attractions.  Together they will kill time by creating origami critters and little people then leave them n places all over the theme parks, restaurants, bathrooms and any unsuspecting public places for other pope to discover. Passing along their creative magic to others. Little magical treasures.  This is something after my own heart. I just love it.  

Imagine if you will. Your standing in line at the airport waiting for the TSA and you notice sitting on top of the little stand that you throw all your liquids into, a little origami man made of a metallic checked black and red paper waving  at you.   It is a good chance this NASA engineer or one of his twin sons were there before you and wanted to leave someone like you a little unsuspecting magical moment. 

​Isn’t that a great example of passing the creative magic along?  It certainly is a great example of using your down time in a positive creative way.  If you have any similar ways of creatively killing time or relieving stress, I’d like to here from you?  Are any of you master origami craftsmen?  Share your stories with me, I’d love to hear them.  Please and thank you and have a creative day. 

Last night I was doing my typical saving the world one smile at a time routine and I had the pleasure of meeting the Assistant Chief of EMS of Washington DC. Now, there's a true hero. Our conversation quickly turned to me admitting my shame of making a mockery of real heroism by pretending to "save the world with a smile" antics. After all, this man has risked his life saving citizens in life and death situations most of his life. I'm just a clown with a pen.
To add to his greatness, his wife is a teacher of 22 years. She currently is dedicating her services to teaching underprivileged children in the inner city district of DC. There, my friends is a true super hero. Imagine, this woman has the opportunity to do whatever she wants in the education world and she has chosen one of the hardest paths anyone can imagine. That my friends is pure servitude. 
It gets better. Their son is a fireman in the same firehouse of his father. The Assistant chief's father was a fireman and his great grandfather helped organize the fire department of some comminity I fail to remember. These guys are true first responder legacies. An entire family history of heroes. 
It was a delightful and very interesting time with them. Yet, I felt silly as they seemed so much more interested in what I was doing with my smile making abilities. I continued to attempt to turn the conversation towards their remarkable life saving services and duties, but they seemed to shrug it off as if what they do in life is nothing at all. Remarkable people.
It's families like this that teach me so much. It's families like this that keep me hungry to reach out and give more of myself for others.

In other news.... Ty The Art Guy is now bonded and Insured. 
I guess that means that if a kid should swallow one of my markers or someone I draw suffers a life threatening paper cut, I'm covered.

I also have background checks available.