The Voice of Hope

Unleash Your Infinite Creative Potential

Editorial by Tomas De Bruyne

The most creative act you will ever undertake is the act of creating yourself! The words of Deepak Chopra are full of wisdom, aren’t they? There is no easy way around it, though. It involves fighting for the things you believe in. It means keep on going with a perseverance mindset to achieve your goals.

Thinking back to my early days, I know I had the ambition and the drive. But I was feeling as an unheard florist seeking ways to get in touch with my ideal client. Sound familiar? Finding people who were open to my ideas, my vision, my interaction with botanicals, elements and principles translated to them appreciating my designs and my efforts. I have learned that ideas do not stand by themselves. Something must be done about them, and the best way to predict your future is to educate yourself into reinventing it!

All of us are born with an immense package of talents and it’s up to us to discover them and help ourselves flourish. Life is a constant process of instantaneous creative decisions as your decisions make you who you are. We are each different, grown in a unique, organic way. Finding personalised education to fit each capacity is so relevant to our development. We have to cultivate a personal creative spectrum through our education, beliefs, ambitions, goals and values. As Albert Einstein said, “Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think”. This process cannot be achieved through a one-way monologue. It has to be a dialogue where the teacher understands the uniqueness of each student, while the latter is empowered to discover WHY and HOW to take action through learning.

Great teachers keep on being a student--as to teach is to learn twice! A teacher's purpose is not to create students who reflect his or her image, but to develop them into creating their own image. For that, education has to be dynamic, to reflect the spirit of time, and the needs of a culture and a community. I, myself, am an advocate of pure creativity! This concept is not about people calling them selves (or being called) “artists”, it is latent presence in each of us and we owe it to ourselves to discover it and act on it.

My advice is to go to teachers who share their knowledge through the “knowing factor”, because the trial and error way is a very narrow path to walk on. Wisdom comes from knowledge and experience together. I do believe in ACTIVE learning! Learning and attention are strongly related to the depth of the mental process. For this, personalised education has to become a culture and a way of life. It has to focus on the student’s growth by laying the foundation for a life changing experience. Everybody has creative potential. No doubt about it! From the moment you can express that creative potential, you can start changing your world. It all lies in your unique power to act. Go for it!

Tomas de Bruyne, CEO @European Master Certification

Vietnam Floral Designers Call For HOPE

The contest launched by the Vietnam Floral Designers organisation is a 100% non-profit event with the purpose of calling for support for Vietnam's flower industry. The domestic flower industry was, as many others, severely affected by the pandemic. The contest wants to convey the spiritual value and beauty of inner flowers with the message of Hope for a bright future to the public so that the public can support the flower industry to overcome this difficult time.

Among all rules of the competition, one has specifically drawn attention as participants could only use locally produces flowers for their designs. The competition got support from some of the most influential master florists in the world: Gregor Lersch, Bart Hassam, Daniel Santamaria, Hiroto Inoue, Kazuhiro Sugimoto, Frédéric Dupré, Per Benjamin and Tomas de Bruyne.

”Their presence truly encourage Vietnamese florists to be much more creative in their entries”, says Hoan My Do, the initiator of this amazing event, who so modestly introduced himself as ”someone in the floristry who wanted to do something good for my colleagues, because it was quite painful to see how things happened. The quarantine made florists' job much harder. They had no access to good quality flowers including local and imported flowers. Florists have never faced such a crisis before. With little access to good material and harder working conditions, they started to lose confidence and creativity. I realised it's important to keep everyone in floristry to stay positive and creative. Otherwise, we lose everything as creativity is fundamental of floristry. I want to make florists to realise how strong they can be. I want to prove that even with little access to good material and flowers, florists can do amazing works. This is why i came up with the idea of an online competition using only local flowers.”  

The competition gathered 69 beautiful entries from local florists in Vietnam, which can be seen on the official website here. ”For the website, I worked with my IT partner who has been working with me last 15 years. The most important part of the website is the judging section that only judges have access to. They supported this project much so the goal was to build the judging section as convenient as possible for them. Tomas de Bruyne has helped us immensely with so many insight information regarding what is involved in judging such a competition and we are very grateful that he was willing to share so much from his experience as an official judge! The quality of a competition is also given by the quality of the jury so the fact that we have been able to raise the bar so high shows not only through the entries submitted, but also through how the winners will be determined. This way, the Vietnam florists also have the opportunity to learn and grow from this contest”, Hoan My Do kindly recounts for us. He adds: ”Everything was done in a very short period of time because I think the faster this project was to take place, the more HOPE we can send out there. I believed everyone will support, because we have done it all with an open heart”.  

The competition is now in the judging phase. The winners will receive a certificate with extremely valuable confirmation of the judges. The winning designs will also be published in Fusion Flowers Magazine and Floral Today (Korea) and the organisers have amazingly managed to gather sponsors so that the first three places will also receive a financial prize. 

Congratulations to Vietnam Floral Designers and the judges and sponsors who supported this beautiful online event! The way this event has been supported so far only shows that, indeed, there is HOPE.