UP & OUT! Creative Ways to Get Unstuck


Non-Fiction - Self Help
194 Pages
Reviewed on 10/22/2020
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Author Biography

Chris Newcomb has been teaching creative problem solving in one form or another since the late 1980’s. He taught Gifted & Talented Programs in Maine public schools for 30 years, focusing primarily on Creative Problem Solving. He’s offered UP & OUT! as a Continuing Education class and as a workshop at the Maine Correctional Center. In addition, he’s taught several outstanding Creative Problem-Solving classes through the Great Falls Creative Youth Program (five years), and Creative Video Production at The Maine College of Art’s Department of Continuing Studies (middle and high school students) for ten years. He received his BFA in 1977 from East Carolina University and his Gifted & Talented Certification from the Maine Department of Education in 1990. Chris is also a practicing artist, actor and storyteller.

    Book Review

Reviewed by Vincent Dublado for Readers' Favorite

Every now and then you find yourself in a rut. These come in the form of well-laid plans that you are not able to implement because your creative muse refuses to perform. Then self-criticism besets you and aggravates your creative inventions and you just cannot get out of it. In times like this, author Chris Newcomb offers UP & OUT! Creative Ways to Get Unstuck. This slim volume offers easy-to-follow creative methods to get our creative juices flowing. Built with the concept of ideation, the mental exercises provided herein involve generating thoughts and suggestions to trigger our imaginative faculties, and these exercises do not skimp on humorous elements. Can you imagine how you would use the idea of “Yukk!” in improving your personal relationships? If that doesn’t get your creative wheels thinking, then you’re a robot.

Reading UP & OUT! will help you to discover that waiting for external change to happen is not necessary because change must happen within you. Chris Newcomb assures immediate, positive results when you practice his recommended techniques in finding ways to make your environment more reflective of your needs. Getting stuck does not mean that your situation is hopeless. This book, while not the panacea to total creative breakdown, can help anyone to gain a practical understanding of themselves as creative individuals. As a self-help guide that provokes our ability to change, it will constantly remind us that the journey to getting unstuck is to start from where we are and not from where we wish to be.

Rabia Tanveer

UP & OUT! Creative Ways to Get Unstuck by Christopher Newcomb is a self-help book on ideation and awaking the “creative genius that is inside you.” This is the book for people who are stuck in an unsatisfied life or have lost the purpose to do something that makes them happy. Human beings are creative by nature, they like to explore new things, discover something different, and crave change every so often. When they don’t get that, their lives become stagnant and boring. This book is a gentle yet informative guide for such people to wake up their creativity and have it flowing endlessly. The author shares different strategies and tips for readers to boost their creativity and get out of situations where they feel most trapped.

UP & OUT! Creative Ways to Get Unstuck is a wonderfully direct and useful book that almost everyone will enjoy. You don’t have to be a creative professional to be able to reap the full benefits of this guide. You can be a housewife, a retired person, or simply feel like you are stuck in your current routines. Lack of goals and dreams can be disheartening for us. We need something to look forward to, something that brings excitement and change in our lives. This book is a perfect companion for such people who are looking for motivation. Christopher Newcomb shares stories and strategies that he practiced on himself first. He gives a proper guide on how to use this book and then he shares his proven strategies with a checklist, explanation, and reminders at the end of each chapter to refresh what the reader gathered from it. The narrative is smooth, simple, and easy to read, which is a bonus. This is a book that many of us need when we are stuck in a rut.

Peggy Jo Wipf

Christopher Newcomb teaches you to approach problems from many angles to get the best solution, or solutions, in Up & Out! Creative Ways to Get Unstuck. He first defines common words we would associate with creativity and clarifies their meanings. By simplifying words we use with creativity, we can now easily apply them to our lives. Creativity is a process that can be nurtured in your workplace, home, and attitude. The answers to problems are all around you, you just need to generate a solution. By altering the way you do, act, or respond to things you can get a different variation. The author inspires his readers with stories that illustrate the point he is trying to get across.
 
Up & Out! Creative Ways to Get Unstuck by Christopher Newcomb is a resourceful read that gets the reader thinking outside the limitations they place on themselves. He shows us how to erase the boundaries of a problem. The pace seems quick as he presents one flawed thinking with an alternative variation of thought. I loved the stories he used to get his point across. The solution to his aversion to frigid winters was an amazing example of how to find an answer to a problem. You see the author take a problem and break it down, and then ask questions to find the best, or second best, solution; you see how it can work in your life and your dilemmas. Overall, I learned many new formulas to apply to a problem when I am trying to find a better solution. I loved his aggressive approach to a problem and how he is relentless in searching out an answer.