Applied Creativity: How To Infuse Innovation Into Your Work With Natalie Nixon

Speaker A: Welcome to Take the lead radio with

Speaker B: Dr. Diane Hamilton, where she interviews some of the most successful leaders, entrepreneurs, authors, speakers and other individuals who will inspire

Speaker A: you to take the lead in your

Speaker B: career and personal life. And now, here is Dr. Diane Hamilton. I am here with Dr. Natalie Nixon, who is known as the creativity whisperer to the C Suite. She's been selected as one of the top 50 keynote speakers in the world and is the author of the Creativity Leap. Unleash curiosity, improvisation and intuition at work. It's so nice to have you here, Natalie.

Speaker A: Hi, Diane. I'm really happy to be here. Thank you.

Speaker B: I was looking forward to this because we got to share time on, uh, a recent panel that was, uh, part of something that Simon Brown, Garrett Jones and Paul Ashcroft had created called, uh, was, I think it was Curiosity in Times of Disruption and.

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker B: It was a great event and I love their work and all the things they do. And I was very impressed with everything you were. We were on the same panel, so I thought, oh, I hope that you would show up on this show so we can talk some more about curiosity and creativity. But before we do, I want to get your backstory, just to learn a little bit more about how you got interested in all this and where. What led to you becoming this top keynote speaker?

Speaker A: Well, I have a very diverse background. Sometimes I call it a loopy background. And, um, it's grounded in cultural anthropology and fashion and design thinking and a 16 year career in academia. Um, I always say that my background in cultural anthropology equipped me with what I called the worm's eye view of understanding society and how to frame questions. Because as qualitative researchers, anthropologists are interested in observational studies and not so much the big data in the survey, which is the, uh, kind of 30,000 foot level view, but what I call the worm's eye view. And then fashion is something that I really got into out of need. In my 20s, I was living in New York City, couldn't afford to buy any of the pretty frocks and all the boutiques. So I went back to what I knew, started sewing a lot of my wardrobe in my friend set. Nat, you should really sell some of this. And I was like, I can't sell this. I'm just making it because I can't afford anything. And then, long story short, I convinced myself maybe I could do this. And I started a small entrepreneurial venture called Nats Hats where I designed and sold hats. And then later I worked in global fashion sourcing. That took me to live and work in Sri Lanka and Portugal. Working for a division of the Limited Brands and Fashion really was my foray into trends research as well as understanding the value of beauty and esthetics and the role of desire in um, compelling people to buy stuff. And um, that's actually a very important, um, consumer insight that I think tech and food and bev and agriculture and um, transportation, all sorts of industries could really learn from. And then I was a professor for 16 years. And my company, Figurative Thinking really started after I gave a TEDx Philadelphia talk in around year 13 or so of my professorial career where I was proclaiming that the future of work is jazz. And that catapulted me into getting invited into companies to help them become more improvisational. And I started my business as a side hustle, looked up a year later and realized I'm having more fun with my side hustle. And I have not looked back. I'm in year six of building up

Speaker B: figure eight, thinking that's, that's quite a journey. Ah, we have a lot in common. When I, when you tell me all the stuff that you've done, I mean, I still teach a lot and I, you know, have a lot of the same interests. And um, I noticed you, you got your uh, PhD in London. Is that where you ended up?

Speaker A: Okay, yes.

Speaker B: That's interesting. How did you end up there?

Speaker A: Well, I was really dragging my feet about getting a PhD. I was already an assistant professor. I left academia, I was an associate professor, founding director of a program. And my mentors kept saying, you know, you should really think about earning a PhD. I had a master's degree at the time, which was a terminal degree from my field. And I really wasn't seeing any programs stateside that were interesting enough for me to leave my full time job and live off of a pretty measly stipend or fellowship for like at least, you know, five years. And I was on my way over to London in 2007, six or maybe 2005. And right before I left, a week before a friend forwarded me an email about something called design management. He said, this is totally you. And I thought, what is this? And I killed, uh, uh, turned out it was huge in Europe and in the UK as among practitioners, but also, um, as a degree that you could earn. And I thought, I wonder if you could get a PhD in this thing. Turns out you could. And I ended up meeting with several university programs while I was over in London and decided to earn my PhD in design management at the University of Westminster in London. And that Required me to go back and forth over a period of four years. And they have a deadline so I had to finish within three to four years or else the clock would start over. And I did it.

Speaker B: That's awesome. I, you know, it's interesting because I, I worked as a doctoral chair for a long time and just to see the different types of dissertations I did more quantitative than qualitative, but I did some mixed. And so I, I like to quantify things and I think some of this stuff is really hard to do when you're talking about creativity curiosity, things that you and I talk about. And so I was really anxious to talk to you uh, today because I know you do you give a, uh, lots, uh, of different talks and you talk about creativity. Innovation, the Future of Work, for example, is one of your keynotes and at Mind's Curiosity Innovation, and maybe not necessarily future work, but we have very similar type of, um, titles to what we have. And I think it's really interesting because I think innovation is such a important topic right now and I just would love to hear what it is that you share with people when you talk about creativity, innovation and the future of work, because I think a lot of people could benefit from that right now.

Speaker A: Well, thank you. I agree with you that innovation is particularly prescient right now. But I think in every time period people believe innovation is the thing. But I think we would definitely agree that probably about 20 years ago innovation became this buzzword and people started trying to figure out how to build cultures of innovation within their organizations. And that intersected with, around the timing of my 2014, um, uh, TEDx talk. And as I was getting invited into companies to help them build cultures of innovation. What I experienced, Diane, is that a lot of people were just throwing around the I word. And sometimes that would result in what we call innovation theater. It became, um, diminished into, oh, ah, those are the people who play with the post it notes all day, which is pretty pejorative and not exactly what was happening. Um, at the same time I realized we needed kind of more of a common understanding of what innovation is. And I also was perceiving that we were starting in the wrong place. So that landed me to understand innovation in the following way. I define innovation as an invention converted into scalable value. And that value could be financial value, cultural value, social value. But how do you get from this one off concept, which might be a really cool invention, to this scalable value which is the innovation? The conversion factor is creativity.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: The challenge was that in the Hallowed halls of corporate America. If I had started with, hey guys, I think we need to start with creativity, they would look at me like I had three heads because they didn't really understand creativity in the ways that I thinking about it, right? So a lot of people, not all, but some people think of creativity is only something that artists are great at. So you hear people muttering things like, oh, I'm not a creative type because I can't sing, dance, act, paint, draw. And my perspective was that creativity was much broader than that. Artists are exceptional at wrestling with the ambiguity of the creative process. But the best engineers and accountants and attorneys and scientists, coders, farmers, plumbers, teachers, are super creative when they're. This is the definition I land on through my research when they are toggling between wonder and rigor to solve problems and produce novel value and generate meaning. And that, that, that way of thinking about creativity has really gotten a lot of traction because people then understand, absolutely, we have to build our creative capacity as individuals, as teams, as organizations in order to consistently innovate. Because my perspective is that creativity is not this, this esoteric. Add on this nice to have. It's actually a must have. It's an imperative.

Speaker B: You know, I love that. And I've had a lot of creativity experts, um, on the show. Larry Robertson comes to mind because he interviewed me this week for one of his books. And you know, I asked him and I asked all of them, you know, what do you think comes first? Uh, curiosity or creativity? I want to ask you that real quick and see what you think.

Speaker A: So I have a different way of thinking about. I think curiosity is, is a, is enmeshed in all creative work. But the, but I'm really thinking about the fundamental dimensions of creativity, being wonder and rigor and built into wonder, which is about awe and pausing. Audacity is curiosity. But I take, I extend curiosity as part of my 3i model. So I realized it wasn't enough for me to tell people to go ahead, toggle between wonder and rigor to solve problems, and off you go, you'll be creative, have fun. We get stuck there. Life happens. There are shifts in the market. And how do you consistently do that? By deploying the three eyes, which are inquiry, improvisation, and intuition. So inquiry is one of the drivers to be able to consistently create so that you can more purposefully innovate. Um, I look at inquiry, curiosity embedded in the three eyes to help activate, uh, the creative process.

Speaker B: You know, it's so interesting to discuss, like the definitions of things and when you were talking about everybody thinks of innovation as this thing or that thing. I, I taught a class at, um, a tech school here in Arizona. And one of the questions they asked him is, give me an example of something that's not, uh, technology. And you can't think of anything. I mean, you could take a walk, you know. And so when you think technology, everybody's thinking big. Computers, big, you know, chat, gdp, whatever it is we're thinking, um, where we have these ideas of what things mean. And I, I think everybody kind of defines these things differently. And a lot of times when they ask me to define curiosity, it's not just asking questions. It's not just, you know, giving ideas. To me, it's also getting. Mostly getting out of status quo thinking in the workplace. And I think that that's what we're trying to do by developing all this creativity and innovation and all these things. So I see them all, uh, intertwined to some extent as well. So I love that, that you talked about that because, you know, it was so interesting to me when I was studying curiosity to look at the stuff that dealt with creativity like George, uh, Land's Work or, um, Sir Ken Robinson's, you know, and you look at how these kids have these great levels and then they tank. And I saw the same thing with curiosity. Now my research focused on the things that inhibited curiosity. What do you think inhibits creativity or curiosity or the whole mesh that you talked about? What do you. What did you find?

Speaker A: Yeah, um, one of the things that inhibits creativity, unfortunately, is one of the biggest gateways to adulthood and to socialization, which is our formal educational system. And Sir Ken Robinson absolutely was connecting the dots between the way we teach and our cultures of learning and, and the dimming of curiosity, the dimming of building a creative capacity. And I experienced this firsthand in the three very different sorts of schools I grew up in. I'm from Philly. I also live in Philadelphia now. And I started out in urban Philly public schools from kindergarten through third grade. And then I went to suburban public schools from fourth through sixth grade. And then I finished out my high school years in a very elite Quaker prep school. And I remember being around 8th grade because. Because my grades plummeted when I got to this prep school. It's an incredible school. And the culture of learning was so different. I had gotten really good at completing the worksheets, at getting the gold stars,

Speaker B: checking off the boxes.

Speaker A: Yeah, checking the boxes, staying in my lane, not drawing outside of the lines. And. And then I got Into a learning culture, learning environment, where it was about, ask a better question, ask for forgiveness, not permission. And I was just like, what is this place? First of all, it was a campus. And you went not just from classroom to classroom, but building to building. You call teachers by their first name. It was just a lot.

Speaker B: That's a lot different.

Speaker A: Yeah, it was a lot to get used to. But it was eighth grade, maybe ninth grade, where it occurred to me. And I didn't have the language I'm, um, about to use now because I was like 14 years old. But I realized my friends back on the block, my friends in public school, we had been trained. We were being set up to be the doers, to stay in the lane, to just execute worker bees. And now I was in an environment of people who are being set up to ask the questions, who are being set up to design the lanes, who are being set up to, um, and encouraged to figure out a different way. And so why does that have to be an elite way to be educated and for learning? Our society would have 10,000x the amount of innovation if our cultures of learning were designed in a way where we were erring on the side of process rather than solutions. Because once we graduate from high school, from college, there's so much gray. And the most successful people are figure outers. That's, uh, not a word. There are people who figure it out who like, see the negative space and like, well, why can't we do it that way? Or why haven't we? So I wonder what's over here. Right. So that's really one of the biggest inhibitors. And then there's also, um, related to that. So many of us have been question shamed, um, which really also dampens, uh, the creative process. We're afraid to raise our hand some point in our education or work career. We were laughed at or we were ignored. If we asked a question, you know this more than anyone else. And so, you know, we, we dim that part of ourselves down. So, um, those are the two biggest drivers for, for dampening a creative growth, I think.

Speaker B: Yeah, you know, it, it crossed over. It's very similar to what we saw with curiosity. We, with the. I had the four factors of fear, assumptions, that voice in your head which can lead to fear, and then, uh, technology, which was over and underutilization of it, and then environment, which is teaching and education on people and everybody with whom you've had interaction. So it's very similar in the things that we've seen on the two. So, um, I think it's just really challenging. Like you said, if you use words like creativity or curiosity and you go in there to get them to recognize what you're trying to do, but you really want them to draw outside the box and get. I think with a lot of um, companies, they look in their cubicle or in their silo or in their industry and they don't look outside to try and reinvent the whole thing. Right. So, so how do you work with people to get them to do that?

Speaker A: I dig into both my background in cultural anthropology and my work in the design thinking space. So the first book I ever had published is a book I edited called Strategic Design Thinking. And the goal in that book was it was collections from practitioners and academics to offer an accessible way for people to think about human centered innovation, which values prototyping and story and um, experimentation and um. Oh my gosh, I just forgot you were asking, say, say your question how

Speaker B: you go about helping people do that.

Speaker A: So one of the, one of the big principles in design thinking is this idea of lateral thinking, this notion of what can we learn from near and far adjacencies. And the further out we get from sectors, companies, organizations that play in our space, actually the more new ideas can be sparked. So for example, if you are part of um, uh, I don't know, an orthodontics practice and you're trying to figure out a new way to help people wear braces that they feel confident, comfortable, you could just talk to other orthodontists, you could stay in the dental sector or you could talk to like Broadway makeup artists, right, who also have to deal with the role of emotion and appearance and do a lot of facial. Orthopedic. Not orthopedic, but facial, uh, work and around the mouth and the teeth and really understand, um, what can you learn from that very far tangential space, but still has to deal with kind of similar parts of the face, the body, the person. That's a really far adjacency. So one of the things I recommend that people do, if there's, if it's in the budget and the culture allows for it, to incentivize, not just to invite, but to incentivize people to go to one conference a year that is totally outside of your sector. So if you work in agriculture, go to a conference in uh, secondary education, or go to a conference, uh, in fashion, or go to a conference in biotech, um, right. To learn something new. If you don't have the budget for that, you can easily incentivize People to attend a webinar once a quarter that's in a totally different sector, and then close the loop by having meetings where people share kind of a show and tell what they learned. What was an aha moment. What did you figure out was really similar to the way your team approaches things? What was super different but could be integrated into the way that you work. So those are just some, um, some really accessible hacks to help practice that lateral thinking so that you can learn, as you said, from people who are outside of your sector and may shine a nice light into problems you've been staring at for like the past six months.

Speaker B: You know, and that's so great. And I was thinking of some of the things Simon, uh, Brown at Novartis had shared with me, uh, that they do there with some of their training, that they incentivize people 100 hours a year. And uh, all the things that they have for their, their employees give little mini TED talks kind of thing. No better way to teach something and learn something and to teach it. Right. So you, that's right. You find something you're passionate about, you share it with everybody else and then you learn more about it. And, uh, I love that they do that there. And I think we need to see more of that. I, I know there's, um, examples that I've shared with bicycle companies, seeing how other people sell their products and finding out that they aren't being broken as much as they were when they're shipping them, for example. And the only difference between their product and the other product, which was a flat screen tv, was that they had a flat screen TV printed on the box. So they printed a flat screen TV on their, their hybrid bikes and their bikes break a lot less and it cost them just a couple pennies. Right.

Speaker A: So you go, interesting, I love that.

Speaker B: Interesting. And you know, there's so many examples of going outside of your, your industry to do these things to, um, get some insight. And you talk about applying creativity, and I'm curious if that's something different than just being creative. Because one of your talks, I noticed you say applied creativity and leadership. How is that different than creativity and leadership? Because you have the word.

Speaker A: Well, I, I really want people to, I, I use that word applied very intentionally so people understand that building a creative capacity has to be an intentional focus. It's something that we can exercise. It is a competency. It's not something that some people are just gifted from the skies above and oops, I just didn't get that gene. And other People did. I did not get that gene. Other people did. Absolutely not. To be hard, to be human is to be hardwired to be creative. It's just a, um, matter of whether or not you are being intentional about designing time and space.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: To practice that wonder and to practice that rigor. So applied creativity means that there are, you're redesigning meetings, you're redesigning the ways that you think about engaging with uh, clients at the onset, at interim touch points. You're rethinking who you hire. Uh, I mean that's, that could be another intervention point for lateral thinking. So hiring an unusual suspect, even on a temporary basis, it could be on a quarterly rotational basis. But some of them give you that fresh eyes perspective to rejuvenate your thinking. These are all really important ways to apply creativity. And I, I use that word so people understand that it doesn't happen through happenstance. When people really understand and accept the effort that it takes to be creative, it's when they think back to maybe they've been athletic, maybe they have had an artistic practice, learned an instrument when they were younger, studied dance or to art, then they understand the rigor that's required in any creative effort. So for me it's been dance. I studied dance, I was four years old. And now I take a lot of hip hop dance classes and ballroom as well. And the great American choreographer and dancer Twyla Tharp famously wrote in her book the Creative Habit, before you can think out of the box, you must start with a box. You must know the rules, you must be disciplined, to practice incessantly, to um, have time on task for skill mastery. Because it's only then that you can be, um, a LeBron James. It's only then that you can be um, a Beyonce or you can be um, someone who really like Einstein, knew the rules of physics so that he could be so creative in his experimentation. So, um, the rigor is a really important part that we can't forsake.

Speaker B: Yeah, that kind of ties into my under and over utilization of technology thing. You know, I use Einstein sometimes as an example when I talk to people. Because if you just threw them the calculator and then never taught him the, the box, then he's only the greatest calculator worker ever.

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker B: So we need to, to do both sides of that. And um, I, I mean just so much of what you say ties into the same things that I, I found in all the research I had. And you know, when you were talking about how getting close and getting far and looking at from different perspectives, um, that Dr. Uh, Maya Zillahitch and I, ah, and I wrote a book about perception. And one of the things we talked about in that was, you know, how it's kind of iq, eq, CQ for curiosity, CQ for cultural quotients kind of combined. And if it's, you know, we're all sitting on different places on this planet, and if you're looking at a piece of artwork, the closer you get, all you see are brush strokes. And the farther back you get, you see the bigger picture. But knowing that sweet spot where you're sitting of everybody seeing something different is very hard at work. And so a lot of people will ask me, um, well, what if you can't get somebody? If leaders don't let you build the curiosity, or in your case, creativity at work, what do you do then if they're shutting you down?

Speaker A: Um, so first of all, I'd love, um, their point about the need to zoom out. And sometimes that means having that cognitive diversity on a team that, so everyone brings in different, uh, perspectives and experiences and skill sets. But some of it also means get up and move, get out of the building. Like literally circle the issue from a number of different perspectives. Um, but if you're in a work environment where it feels a bit punitive to raise your hand to, to, to extend the typical way you think about things, the. One of the, the things, two things that I remind people of. Number one, creativity loves constraints. So to say, oh, we work in a really highly regulated environment, we can be creative. No, I don't think that that's an excuse for why you have to dampen your, your ability on your creative capacity and growth. It's actually when we have limitations on budget, on time, on full talent, that creativity actually sparks. Um, and so that's not a good reason. The other piece to help us, um, build a creative capacity in a highly regulated environment is to start engaging in more prototyping, um, to engage in building a, uh, micro levels with among two or three other people in the organization a bit of asking forgiveness, not permission. And the reason why prototypes are really effective is that they're cheap, they are not intimidating, and you build in shorter Runway to fail and to learn. So an example of a really cheap, easy prototype is a doodle. So you literally can doodle a possible interaction or new type of service delivery or new type of technology that you want to try out with stick figures, squares, circles, equal signs, arrows. You can take a photograph of that scribble, scratch and share it around people and ask, does this make sense? This is what we're trying to do. And you'll. The whole goal of a prototype is to get clarifying questions. The goal of a prototype is not for people to say, this is amazing. It's the best thing actually for people to poke holes at it because through their questions, their clarifying questions and through the holes that they poke, you'll be able to understand how to tweak this thing so it gets closer to what people actually need. And isn't that the goal? The goal is not to sell the stuff that we love. The goal is to sell the stuff that people need that's going to solve their problems. So building a culture of prototyping can start in really small sections of the organization. It doesn't have to be a global effort or initiative. It doesn't have to be a team based initiative. It can be quite stealth and positivity is a contagion. And when people begin to say, oh, this is really interesting, it energizes people and you will gradually get buy in in that way.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that you brought up so many good points. I've had conversations with Francesca Gino and Amy Edmondson and people from Forbes, you know, that have done a lot of work in this area with teams of collaboration. And I know Francesca's work. Um, you know, a lot of leaders thought they encouraged curiosity or probably creativity as well. And then the perception from employees is a little different, uh, than what leaders probably think they're doing. And I know you've interviewed, I thought you 56 people or for your book. I remember it was a big number.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: Yeah. So did you find that there was a disconnect between what leaders thought and what employees were perceived? And what, what did you learn? What was the most interesting thing you found from interviewing all those people?

Speaker A: Yeah, there definitely is a, um, a gap analysis between what leaders think they're relaying and then what people actually can do. And actually more of the data as new as 2023 data. In terms of really understanding the value of creativity from the perspective of managers, it's a statistic such as something like 70% of managers believe that creativity is super important among their employees. But 76% of employees believe that they get minimal time to really dive into creative work. So we say one thing, but we actually don't incentivize and allow the space and time for people to build that creative capacity. And again, which is beyond picking up a paintbrush, going to a dance class, although that's amazing. I do that myself, but as I share my book, there's a lot of ways to do that. So, um, one of the most interesting moments for me, I'll share two. Um, one was when I interviewed Biplap Sarkar, who's the CEO, uh, of Vectorworks, which is a tech software company. He has a PhD in electrical engineering. And in every interview, just in terms of the qualitative research process, I would always ask the same question so that I can begin to see patterns that emerge from people's answers. And there was going to be a moment in our conversation when I would ask the following question. Would you share a story about a time when you used your intuition to make a strategic decision? And as I got closer to know I was going to ask that question, I was getting a little nervous because I thought, oh, my gosh, this is a tech company. This Guy is a PhD in electrical engineering. And my assumption, which happened to be wrong, he's very linear thinking and like, you have no time for intuition. And I was so wrong. He waxed poetically about the ways that he listens to his intuition. He uses his intuition in conjunction with the big data, the Excel sheets. And, um, that was a really interesting moment that challenged my own assumptions. And it showed how people who are perceived to think in one way at least, my perception, they were perceived and trained to think in a very kind of lockstep, only logical way, were very open to sometimes their rationality. Uh, that presents itself when we have this intuitive nudge. Um, the other interesting interview was when I interviewed Celine Barel, who is a nose. She's a perfumier at International Flavors and Fragrances. And I was able to visit her on the job at work and spent a day with her. And she described her work in the following way. She said, my superpower is my ability to make real what no longer exists. That's amazing way to think about the role of scent.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: If I smell, um, a certain, um, um, aftershave, but not, um. I'm forgetting the name of the sun my dad always wore. It reminds me of my father who passed away. Thank you. My father. Right. The other thing she said is that the work that I do and designing scent for, for perfume for me is, Is, um, I'm balancing chemistry and intuition, which again, I thought was a really interesting insight. So, so. But there were so many cool people I was able to talk to, to explore the ways creativity shows up in their work. Yeah.

Speaker B: You know, that made me think of that movie. You see that movie? He was obsessed with her scent. And he created all these scents. I can't remember. It was a great movie. I'd have to think of it. I think.

Speaker A: Dustin let me know. I love perfume.

Speaker B: It's an old movie and it's, uh, it's in the old time setting and it was a really interesting movie. But I, I think it's really fascinating to get a lot of different people's perspectives. I mean, uh, in anything that when I. That's one of the reasons I do the show. I mean, I've had Daniel Goleman and amazing people that you can find out. Because I wrote my dissertation on emotional intelligence. So I, I was fascinated to hear his perspective on curiosity, you know, and yes, I, I think that as we pursue just, you know, different aspects of what other people can teach us, I. You never want to be the smartest person in the room. You want to, you want. That's what we're here. So I could have somebody around me who's smarter than I am in different areas. Right. And, and I love that because, uh, we all have areas in which we can grow. And I think a lot of leaders and people in general are afraid of that. How can we get people to feel more confident with doing that kind of thing with mentorship?

Speaker A: Um, well, I look at the mentorship happening outside of the job and ah, it's something I call becoming a clumsy student of anything. And it should really be something that sparks your interest, makes you smile, makes something that you really want, are looking forward to. Could be learning to play chess or backgammon, or learning auto mechanics or gardening. And for my case, two years ago, maybe it was like the start of the pandemic. I really started diving into right before the pandemic started into ballroom dance. And what I, uh. One of the many things that I love about being a student of ballroom dance is that I am not the smartest person in the room. I constantly learning not only from my. My instructors, but from my peers. And we're all at different levels and some people, things come to them really easily and other people struggling and the same way that I am. And maybe if I can be helpful, I'm figuring out a different way. How do I understand? How am m doing this? How can I translate this? The people who. Who have mastered certain aspects of the technique. How I. It actually sharpens the three eyes for me. Right. It helps me to get a lot braver at asking questions and raising my hand. It helps me to be much more experimental and improvisational. And it also requires me to follow my Intuition. I. Two nights ago, I was. I had a private lesson, and my instructor Nadari, said, keep going. You're thinking too much about it. You have. You have to keep pushing through so many life lessons that I can apply to my daily work. So work, increasingly, from my perspective, is becoming inside out. The fact that both of us are in our home offices, we get a peek into, uh, the personal domains of our lives while we're also talking about our profession and our expertise. And increasingly, the companies are going to be attractive to people who are. Will be the ones that allow for that personal dimension of themselves to show up and for managers and leaders to be curious about that. So encouraging people to be clumsy students of something outside of the work at hand actually will tie back into productivity on the job. Because soon, about a year into studying ballroom dance, I was on a call with a new client, and they were throwing around all these acronyms, and I thought, I guess I should know what they're talking about. I have no idea what they're talking about. Finally, I just excused myself and I said, you know, I just have a clarifying question. What is the XYZ and the abc? Right, right. And one of them, they said, oh, my gosh, what is. What does that mean?

Speaker B: We forgot that meant we don't even know.

Speaker A: Right. So we. We have. We can't be afraid to ask the question. Um, you know, the world will not come to a screeching halt. And being a clumsy student in our personal lives actually builds those competencies in our work.

Speaker B: And most of the things we worry will happen won't happen. And, you know, and as you've. You've thrown in a word a few times about improvisation, and I. One of the things I did to make myself a little more uncomfortable was to take an improv class. And I tell you, I think that was the most fun thing. I take tap dance, and I do a lot of the things. Yeah, I. I do.

Speaker A: I'm horrible at tap dancing.

Speaker B: Maybe I should try terrible at it. But I love it. And, you know, I rock climb. I do a lot of different things, and I think a lot of people, I. I say I'm very bad at a lot of different things, and I'd rather be bad at a lot. Kind of like the book range, you know, you get a little bit range, but, you know, learned a lot from this and maybe not so much for that, but it makes everything else better. Um, and I really think a lot of people, uh, especially in my generation, the boomers, you know, they did something for 20 years, and they don't want to. They're already at the top of their. Whatever knowledge of what they should know, and they don't want to take that risk of starting over, not knowing everything, not looking like they know it all. And actually, that's the biggest growth you can have. You know, just break it and start all over again. Don't you think?

Speaker A: Yes. I. To share, um, about, you know, being bad at a lot of different things and the role of aging. I did something this summer that I have never done before in my life, and it really stretched me. I learned so much about myself. I learned so much about the thing we were doing. So what I tried was open water swimming. So I didn't grow up competitively swimming, but I've always loved the water. I'm a good swimmer. And a friend of mine, uh, did this program called Swim Trek last, uh, summer, and when she came back, she told me, you would love this. You've got to try it. And so basically, you know, people who like to golf or bicycle do organized cycling or golf trips.

Speaker B: This is.

Speaker A: People like to swim, and it's organized swimming trips around the world, in the ocean, in the sea.

Speaker B: That's the only problem I have with that.

Speaker A: But sh.

Speaker B: Involved.

Speaker A: I did not know what ticket. I was like, are they. And I did it in Greece, in cre.

Speaker B: Oh, well, for that, are they gonna,

Speaker A: like, dump us into the middle of the Mediterranean? What's happening? But I had no idea what to expect. One of my friends from my ballroom community, my. Before he joined me. And first of all, it was marvelous. Second of all, first day, I was the slowest person when they were kind of timmies. And I was a wreck because I thought, I'm going to slow everybody down. Maybe I shouldn't have done this. This is going to be hard. But it was because I was comparing myself to others, and I panicked in the water, and I couldn't catch my breath. Cadence. The m. Next day, I'm in the slower. The slower group, and I keep kind of getting ahead of the other person. And the guide is like, natalie, just slow down. You know, this other person is behind you. And by the end, they resorted the groups, and they ended up putting me in the fast group, which really, what happened to me in that day of just getting acclimated was it turns out that the way you swim open water is the way I love to swim, which is long, slow, extended strokes. And so I just got used to that. But the oldest person in the group was 73 years old with a Hearing aid. The youngest person was 28, was 62. And just to. Just to bond with people who were interested in experiential tourism and to stretch ourselves a beautiful environment. Um, learn so much. Learn so much.

Speaker B: I would love that, actually. I was a competitive swimmer as a kid and I would. I will say I pushed myself. Was, uh, scuba diving because I'm not crazy about the beasts in the water thing, you know, and the 60ft underwater when sharks are going by. My face wasn't.

Speaker A: No, I wouldn't want. There was like tiny little schools of tiny little fish.

Speaker B: Greece is a little different than. Yeah.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: I did that in Turks and Caicos, and I had a lot of, uh. Elvis was the name of the barracuda that hung there, and he went by my face a few times. We dove at a place called Graceland and.

Speaker A: Oh, boy.

Speaker B: Yeah. But, you know, I think you have to know. You got to try it to know you don't like it. And I think, you know, that's how I was with ziplining. I did things that I thought, oh, this isn't going to make me super happy, but I'm going to try it. You know, you have to keep doing it. You know, I just. You just kind of see what, what you like and pick and choose. And I think we tell ourselves that we're not going to like things from our childhood that we tried and had bad experiences maybe with and. Or what our family said weren't really fun things to do or good things to do. And, you know, and we, I think we gotta just try it. I mean, we do. I would love ballroom dancing. I, uh, you know, I would love all the things that you were saying. And rock climbing is one of my favorite things. Uh, and I, I don't really love doing it outdoors because it's a little more dangerous. So I do more indoors and you could find the balance, I think, of the things.

Speaker A: Exactly, exactly.

Speaker B: Well, I, I think that you and I would have a lot of fun. You come here and tap and I'll go there and swim.

Speaker A: Yes, please try a ballroom. I will send you information about swim track. I would really.

Speaker B: Oh, yeah, I might. That would be fun. Um, but I. I, uh, want to make sure that before we go that we touched on everything that you're working on that you're doing right now and that you'd like to share. So what. What do you want everybody to know in our last couple minutes? And do you have a website or something you'd like to share?

Speaker A: Well, first of all, thank you again, Diane. For inviting me to share ideas with you. I really loved our conversation. I would just love people to check out my. My work@figure8thinking.com. So that's the word figure, the number eight thinking calm. And, um, what's new on the horizon for me is over the next year, I'll be working on my next book, and my next book will be around something that tentatively titled right now, I call it Invisible Work. I wrote an article for Fast Company about this and Invisible Work. Invisible Work.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: It's not the gendered feminist version of Invisible Work of women work. What I'm talking about is that in a time of ubiquitous tech, unprecedented, um, burnout, and being able to work in hybrid ways, our most productive selves are not when we are on the laptop, on zoom at the whiteboard. Our most productive selves are when we step away and when we engage in what I call motor activities, MTR activities that relate to movement, thought, deep thought, and rest. And so my overarching what if? Question is, what if it turns out we can be as productive when we're away from the office as when we're at the office? And that's kind of like the spark for the book. And I'll be interviewing a lot of different people about this idea, digging into the neuroscience of things like the vagus nerve interoception perception. And really, this is a, um, hopefully a provocation for a new metric for productivity, uh, especially in very changing time. So that's what I'm working on.

Speaker B: Well, that's. That's fascinating. Um, I was a pharmaceutical rep for long, long, long time. So I love the science behind all that stuff, so I can't wait to read that. That'll be terrific. Thank you. Yeah. This was so much fun. Natalie, thank you so much for joining me on the show today, and I hope everybody takes some time to check out your work.

Speaker A: Thank you, Diane. Appreciate it.

Speaker B: You're welcome.