part0008

I once heard a story about a little girl called Molly. One day, all the children in her class were drawing pictures. When the lunch bell rang, the teacher asked the children to stop drawing and put away their crayons. Molly took no notice of the teacher’s instructions and kept on drawing.

‘What are you drawing, Molly?’ asked the teacher.

‘I’m drawing a picture of God,’ said Molly.

‘No one knows what God looks like!’ said the teacher.

Without looking up, Molly said, ‘They will when I’m finished with my drawing.’

I love this story. I can see this little girl, completely immersed in her drawing, her cheeky determination to finish it, unfazed by lunch! Children are empowered with an innocence that grants them permission to believe in their own powers of creative expression and to believe that they can be anyone or do anything.

The little girl in you who could be anyone or do anything is within you still, so bring her along and keep her close!

If you have access to a childhood photo album, have a look through it and reacquaint yourself with your girlhood. If you don’t have an actual photo album, just sit or lie down, close your eyes and visualise the snapshots.

What did you love to do as a child? When were you completely immersed and ‘carried away’? Who did you get to be? Who was your superhero? What did you love to play?

I remember devouring Nancy Drew novels and enacting the adventures of the intrepid girl detective through the house. I also worshipped a Mouseketeer called Annette Funicello – I would race home after school every day to watch the Mickey Mouse Club on television and learn her every song and dance. To this day I consider myself to be highly analytical and observant (the girl detective lives on), and for me, singing and dancing are life joys!

Enjoy your reflections and memories and notice any emotions and physical sensations that arise. The act of reawakening can be a bit noisy and demanding when you’re listening!

Creativity is unique in how it shows up in each and every one of us. All too often, the belief that creativity dwells only in the world of the arts and artists hijacks us. Hearing the words ‘I’m not creative’ spring from the voices of women – engineers, accountants, business-development directors, fund managers, academics, healthcare specialists – is painful, and it’s such a myth.

In the everyday performance of our jobs and responsibilities, we forget parts of ourselves for periods of time, sometimes for whole chapters of our lives. Often, these parts are what we might call our creative selves, and they go dormant. The piano not touched for a decade, the favourite poems not read since school, the voice that once sang now speaking only workplace jargon behind a PowerPoint deck, the sketchbook abandoned for spreadsheets. Where is my doodler-dreamer, my secret songwriter, my fashion illustrator? So long lost.

Recognising this can be painful. How did this happen? It happened because our work-life persona said: ‘No time for self-indulgence (a few minutes of daydreaming, a moment’s meditation, a breath of inspiration). There’s a job to get done here! Deliverables! Accountability! Performance!’ We tell ourselves: ‘At some point there will be time for me, but not right now.’

When we connect with our creativity, we are happier and healthier, more productive and purposeful, and more whole. While engaged in a creative act, we enter a state of flow, that mental state of immersion and energised focus named by pioneering psychologist, Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi.

Take a moment to write down the things you love doing, that make you feel in flow, energised, passionate, fascinated, immersed. Reflect on what these activities bring out in you and how they connect to your best self on the job. Your acknowledgement of your creativity can boost your professional story.

Please don’t throw any of yourself away. Please listen to the stirring of something that has been dormant and is now reawakening in you. It is a moment of remembering yourself, a homecoming. Stoke that fire and unleash your unique creativity. It is a profoundly powerful resource for being at your best – as a professional player and as a human being.

Jane, a financial director, was firmly attached to her story that ‘numbers are dull’. Given that her entire job was about numbers one way or another, it was a debilitating story. Or, to quote Hamlet, it was ‘stale, flat, and unprofitable’. 8 One day Jane told me a bit of her life story and out flew her childhood passion for poetry and how images came to life for her in the language of poetry. So we turned our attention to poems, of course!

The more Jane started reading poems aloud, the more she gave herself permission to enjoy poetry again. It became a pleasurable way to connect with herself; a warming up to herself . Jane’s big ‘aha’ moment came when she recognised that her poetry-reading voice was very different from her financial-presentations voice.

When Jane presented, she was credible and efficient but dull! Her presentations were blocks of dense information that she ‘got through’. When she read poetry, Jane was thoughtful, nuanced and beautifully animated. Her love of language came through in her expression. How powerful it would be, she realised, if she approached her number-crunching presentations with more of her poetic self – if she made sense of the story behind the numbers for her listeners, made the story of those numbers compelling and valuable by investing her voice.

Happily for her boardroom audience, Jane quickly shed her rather buttoned-up ‘safe pair of hands’ (her words) approach and developed into a more confident and colourful presenter. Connecting with her long-dormant passion for poetry brought another dimension of her into the room. She inspired herself and she inspired others in the process.

So whether you lightly touch upon it (lift up that piano cover and tinker), reunite with it with a vengeance (turn your garden shed into a painting studio), explore new forms of it (join a choir, start a book club, visit art galleries) or just redefine what it is for you (cooking, putting together extraordinary travel itineraries): embrace your creativity. What it brings out in you is urgently needed on the job!

Years ago, at a brainstorming team meeting in Calgary, my colleagues and I sat around a large table covered with paints, pens and coloured paper. Our facilitator began the meeting by asking, ‘Who here is an artist?’ No one raised a hand. Self-conscious titters rippled through the room. After a pause, the facilitator said, ‘OK. You’re seven years old. Who’s an artist?’ Every hand shot up in the air, and we all laughed in recognition of the ‘belief jump-start’ she’d just given us.

Connecting with our inner child (we’re seven, we rock!) gave us instant belief in our creativity. For the rest of the brainstorming meeting, we were artists at play. We used painting and collage to conjure up and capture ideas. We removed censors and judgement. We enjoyed fearless, raw, messy self-expression.

Not only was it liberating, it was productive! We came up with new ideas. We surfaced powerful insights. ‘Playing at being seven’ allowed us to break out of our habitual head zone (‘I can’t draw’) and our default adult mindsets: the ‘realistic’, the ‘practical’ or the ‘analytical’ (take your pick, or all three). By entering the child zone of play, we tapped into the wellspring of our intuition and imagination.

The psychoanalyst Carl Jung believed that innovation, creating something new, was achieved more through play than through the intellect. Playing before analysing primes the pump for better-quality thinking. When we play, we open our bodies, hearts, minds, and senses. We are energised and in ‘flow’ – feeling spontaneous, full involvement and enjoyment in the process of the activity while in the act. 9

Many women tell me, ‘I haven’t played since I was eight!’ Clearly, it’s time to return to that state of wonder. I’m sure you’ll agree that children at play, in their immersion and flow, in their innocent confidence, are profound and magnificent role models. We need to stay in touch with that child within us!

Some of those wild and whacky ‘ice breakers’ you’ve experienced in training programmes are about getting into a state of play and breaking through the resistance of professional masks and job titles. When everyone takes the plunge, the room becomes an imaginary playground and invites laughter, abandon and connection. Playing is a fast track to bringing forth our humanity. In the act of playing together, we warm ourselves up to ourselves, to one another and we warm up the environment itself in which we can make something meaningful happen .

We may be surprised by the emotional impact we experience in moments of playing. This is because in the act of playing, all performances are perfect. We experience complete acceptance .

Playing isn’t just for icebreakers in off-sites. Creatively exploring ideas and enacting, moving, and engaging with ideas by using all our senses and faculties – not just our heads – is key for developing high performance . Denise, a senior executive with a global recruitment firm, shared these thoughts about her experience of playing and enacting exercises in a leadership programme: ‘Playing helped us all to override the analysis think-switch that we use pretty much exclusively, and just dive in… so exhilarating!’

Emily, a CFO in the home entertainment industry, described her role in the business: ‘I’m the one who keeps a tight grip on the money and says no.’ She was aware that she was seen by others as ‘locked down’.

In living her description of her role she was straitjacketing her body, strangling her voice and restricting her choices for impact and engagement with her board. She habitually embodied the tight grip and the no , and she desperately wanted to find other options for her body language, behaviour and the story she was telling herself.

While working on a presentation during a coaching session, Emily and I did lots of playing. Sceptical at first, Emily ended up ad-libbing her way through her content as a playful experiment going completely off script. Not only did Emily show a daring, fun side of herself, she was a supercharged creative! Emily discovered she was at her best when she was improvising. Through improvisation, she brought her subject to life in a way that burst through her notes and slide deck.

Emily loved playing within the safety of the ‘rehearsal room’, and she took some of that creative courage with her back to work, where she dared to release more dynamic body language, more range in her voice and to make incrementally creative changes in the way she delivered her presentations and engaged with her team. Small changes can make a big impact. Emily brought more of herself through the door, the sky didn’t fall in, and she got some great feedback, as her colleagues felt the benefit of better-quality engagement!

Sometimes the stories we tell about ourselves can become so entrenched that they lock down our identity (‘I’m not creative’; I’m not the sort who…’; ‘I wouldn’t be authentic if I did that’). They shape our physicality and posture (crossed arms, legs twisted in a pretzel, collapsed chest, hunched shoulders, unconscious shifting and rocking when standing, etc). If this is true for you, it’s time to step inside the rehearsal room with me. Let’s hang a sign on the door that says ‘Do Not Disturb: Serious Playing in Progress’.