Turn off Autopilot: See the World with Fresh Eyes Using Street Wisdom

We’ve all felt our own rendition of a creative rut before. Maybe you were waffling on whether or not to switch jobs, asked to lend an insight to a project at work, or simply needed an answer to a question you were wrestling with. These moments of indecision and feeling up against a wall can be demoralizing and intimidating, but what if there was a practice we could use to help us see inspiration everywhere? Oh, and better yet, we’d have access to this muse anytime, everyday, for free?

Even if you don’t fancy yourself a creative person, the practice we’re about to introduce you to has the power to help you get in touch with your skills of mindfulness, decision making, and clarity. All you need is to put on your walking shoes and step outside.

Street Wisdom, A New Way of Looking at the World

So, what is this practice? It’s called Street Wisdom, and it’s a creative exercise that you can incorporate into your daily routine as you walk. Street Wisdom can help us unlock our minds and unblock our creativity so that we can find answers to our questions using the world around us as inspiration.

Founded by business, social change, and arts innovator David Pearl, Street Wisdom is a movement and non-profit that is available to people around the globe through in-person events led by volunteers and audio guides that are available to stream on all major platforms. (We’ve got links to those below, so stay tuned).

Walking Through the World with Fresh Eyes

How often are we on autopilot when we are on our routine commutes? When was the last time you really noticed your surroundings as you walked through downtown? Did you really notice the sounds of the birds when you walked into your backyard to tend the garden? We spend so much time getting from one place to another to “do things” that we hardly ever look at the spaces between those tasks and see their richness.

Having Street Wisdom in your back pocket allows you to turn the spaces between things into an enriching space to unlock your creativity and connection to the world. Have a question that needs answering? Take it to the street! Stuck on where to start in your business planning? Take a walk! Need to figure out a creative way to approach a problem? Get outside! Street Wisdom gives us the opportunity to see the world with fresh eyes and get back in touch with some basics of our humanity like curiosity, creativity, and wonder. 

You don’t have to be a top level executive, the next Andy Warhol, or on a journey to find the key to existence to use Street Wisdom. It’s approachable, fun, and available to us all! Here’s a great video featuring David Pearl to get you inspired on the idea of Street Wisdom, and then we’ll give you some resources so that you can start cultivating Street Wisdom in the next 5 minutes.

Inspired to get started?

While Street Wisdom events are happening around the globe (73 countries as of the writing of this article). You can start your practice right now with their incredible guided practice series. I did them myself as I wrote this article and it was such a wonderful experience. I’ll definitely be returning to them as I go through my day.

They’ve taken the basic principles of Street Wisdom and broken them into 5 easy to follow and practice audio guides that will give you the confidence to give Street Wisdom a try. You can find the guides on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and you can watch subtitled videos of the exercise on their Instagram, too. The guides take you through an introduction of the practice, a fun exercises to help you start to listen to your curiosity, tune in to the world around you, and start using all of your senses, before you take your first question for a walk on its own quest. It’s a really fun series that I highly recommend you give a try!

Oh and if you want to try this out alongside other people, check out the Street Wisdom Events page to see if there’s a “Walkshop” happening near you! They even have some online events from time to time you can tune into if you don’t see a location that you can attend.

So, what’s next?

If the idea of Street Wisdom excites you, the best thing you can do is share it with others. Young people making their next step in life, second climbers who are trying to figure out where to turn next, professionals and creatives who are looking for a new way of looking at their work – everyone can benefit from this tool. There really is no end to the ways we can use practices like Street Wisdom to help us unlock new ideas and get intouch with our intuition in new ways.

If you want a little inspiration to help you further cultivate your habits, mindfulness, and approach the world in new ways, here are some great companion reads to help you get started:

I hope that we’ve given you a little inspiration today, and a new tool in your kit to help you walk through the world with more mindfulness, curiosity, and creativity. If you’ve made it this far in the article, you’re probably somebody who wants to contribute positively to our future, and we need people like you who care and who want to see possibilities in the world to make progress. Thank you, you’re not alone, keep making progress in ways big and small, they all add up!

Stay beautiful & keep laughing!

-Liesl

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