Meet Creativity Strategist Natalie Nixon

“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working” - Natalie Nixon

Our guest today is Creativity Strategist Natalie Nixon who is known as the creativity whisperer for the C-suite. Natalie is CEO of Figure 8 Thinking, and in addition to being a creativity strategist she is a global keynote speaker, and author of the award winning The Creativity Leap: Unleash Curiosity, Improvisation and Intuition at Work. Natalie advises Fortune 500 leaders on transformation by applying wonder and rigor to amplify growth and business value. Natalie has won a slew of awards, and is also an accomplished dancer. You can learn more about Natalie, and check out her moves by following the links below. 

Have a question or comment? Email us at themanifista@gmail.com.

Resources Mentioned 

The Creativity Leap: Unleash Curiosity, Improvisation, and Intuition at Work by Natalie Nixon

Figure Eight Thinking 

Natalie Nixon on LinkedIn 

Natalie Nixon on Instagram 

The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul 

A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger

The Wonder Rigor Lab 

Your “invisible work” is key to your most productive self article by Natalie Nixon

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown

Find Your Unicorn Space by Eve Rodsky

Transcript

TRANSCRIPT - NATALIE NIXON 

INTRO 

Portia Mount  0:00  

Natalie Nixon, it's so wonderful to have you here. Welcome to the Manifista podcast.

Natalie Nixon  0:06 

Thank you, Portia. It's awesome to be here.

Portia Mount  0:09  

I'm so excited to talk to you about your book, The Creativity Leap: Unleash Curiosity, Improvisation and Intuition at Work. I can't think of a more timely topic, as we have experienced this incredible change over the last couple of years. So I want to start off by asking you, Natalie, and I talked to many early career professionals who were thinking deeply about how to shape their careers in meaningful ways. You were a fashion designer, you've been an academic. Now you are a CEO and thought leader, can you talk about the path that led you to become an expert on creativity? And also talk a little bit about your company Figure Eight Thinking and how that came to be?

Natalie Nixon  1:03  

Well, that's a really great question. And it's definitely a question that lurks in the backs of our minds when we're trying to figure out the pathway forward. Because when we look around us sometimes it seems that people have a very rationally linear path and plan. I'm a person who has never had a five year plan or a 10 year plan.

Portia Mount  1:26  

Amen. Yeah.

Natalie Nixon  1:28  

For me, I literally have followed my heart. And at every juncture, I commit to doing that, which doesn't make it easier. Because actually, when we decide to follow our hearts, there's often a lot of ambiguity, right? It's not crystal clear, you just have this nudge that my heart isn't in this work anymore, or this other direction. So I often describe my background as a very loopy background and cultural anthropology. As you said, fashion, I was a professor for 16 years. And that really steeped me in the field of design thinking. And what's really magical and beautiful about where I am in my life and work today, at this juncture is that all of those seemingly divergent threads and pathways have now converged into being so key and critical to the work that I do as a creativity strategist. And by the way, I made up my job title. I never, I never met a creativity strategist before. But when I had the opportunity to ponder and wonder, what, what else might I do if I decided that I didn't want to teach as a professor and I didn't want to work in higher ed anymore. What else might I do? And what could that look like? And it landed on those two words, because those are the domains and practices that I love, creativity and strategy. And it's what I'm really good at. And so I did a mash up of those two words, and came up with this job title of creativity strategist. I would really just encourage anyone who is open to my two cents of advice, that when you reach those forks in the road, to sit with that, wondering and that ambiguity, my mother often would tell us when you don't know what to do, don't do anything yet. Because you have to write because you have to remember that, well, everything seems to be where we are central to the swarm of events happening around us. There are so many other factors and variables that are at flux. And you never know what is happening around you that you've no idea about, you have no control over, that can really impact your next steps. So pausing and you know, that's a big part of my work is really important when we are trying to identify our steps forward. So I landed on Figure Eight Thinking, actually, before I left academia. Figure Eight Thinking started as a side hustle. And it started as a side hustle because I gave a TEDx Philadelphia talk in 2014, where I was proclaiming that the future of work is jazz. And here's how and why. After I gave that talk, I started getting invited into companies to help them really design improvisational more adaptive ways of working. And those invitations were coming fast and furious. And my husband looked at me and said, Hey, this is something you should formalize. So I did and I started Figure Eight Thinking, and lo and behold, when I reached that juncture, I realized I don't want to teach anymore. As Figure Eight Thinking had been evolving. And so what I do in my company is I advise leaders on transformation through the lenses of creativity and foresight.

Portia Mount  5:05  

I love so many points that you have just made Natalie and I think a couple of them really stick for me. One is around no five year plan. I think so often we're pushing young people to like, what do you want to do with your life, map it out, and then go and basically stay the course and jump on it. And in fact, you tell a really lovely story in your book about how your parents were really very expansive and encouraging around your academic exploration. So I love that point. The other thing that really sticks for me is that you started Figure Eight Thinking as a side hustle. And I think that I love that idea. Because I think so many wonderful ideas get germinated when we're not necessarily trying to monetize them right away. And so I think that's a wonderful lesson as well, especially because so many of our listeners are early career women who are really just looking for, you know,how did someone else who was very successful do it? I want to zero in on this concept of the pause, and of not knowing what to do, because I think especially in this time of really frenetic activity where we're expected to always do something. Talk more about that. And I wonder if you could talk about it in the context of something you talked about, and we'll link to the video around it as well as the CQ, the creativity quotient mindset, and how important pausing is to that?

Natalie Nixon  6:35  

Yes, great question. I, you know, during this, these past two years, that we've not been experiencing the pandemic, there's really been an incredible opportunity to pause. And some of us have taken advantage of that. And others of us have not because we are so used to being on the durables will and, and kind of plowing ahead, but it's been this kind of universal call to action to sit our collective behinds down and pause, and reconsider the way we've been living the way we've been working in the ways we've been connecting to others into ourselves. And the creativity quotient, or CQ, as I like to call it, came about because I was thinking about the fact that we have IQ, you know, this kind of emotional way to measure our intelligence. So we talked more increasingly now about an EQ or emotional intelligence. And CQ is a phrase I came up with, just to remind ourselves that we have a capacity to build out our creativity as a competency. Creativity is not something that just kind of falls down from the sky, or that a few anointed special people have are blessed with and the rest of us just just don't have it. And sometimes we also just conflate creativity with art and artists. Artists are exceptional at exercising, and being very intentional with the creative process, which often has a lot of ambiguity. So pausing is very important. And being able to apply what I call both the wonder and the rigor components of creativity, the creative, the creativity, quotient, or or mindset is really a way for us to think about what are the mental models that we need in order to drive creativity. And, again, I prototype a lot even when I reference side hustle, I think of a side hustle as a type of a prototype. Prototypes are great because they help us to embrace experimentation and not letting perfection be the enemy of good. And you never know if you're actually going to like this, this launch or this feature career that you think is so wonderful, right? So the creativity quotient, or CQ mindset really starts with gratitude. Because when we are grateful we actually that's the first step into building a systems design mindset. And what I mean by systems designs is that systems thinkers are people who are really adept at understanding the interconnection between things, the networked way of thinking about life, organizations, work society, they identify all of the nodes in a particular process or system. And so when we are grateful, all of a sudden, we're able to zoom out, and we understand that we are not the center of everything. That is the reason why we're able to think things that we take for granted, just breathe. The reason why I have this incredible laptop in this setup in my home, there are all of these different inputs and people and individuals and teams and histories that made this possible. So it starts with gratitude, gratitude then leads to humility, right? Because you realize that you were part of a larger whole. The humility leads to curiosity. Because one of the biggest barriers to being more curious and asking different and better questions, is this fear of appearing stupid, right?

Portia Mount  10:18  

Oh my gosh, yes.

Natalie Nixon  10:20  

We think that if we ask a question, it will reveal that we didn't know XYZ, well, guess what? You didn't and it's not such a shocker that you are not the smartest person in the room. And that's really the way it's totally good. So that humility, which comes from gratitude leads to curiosity leads to the ability to ask better new and different questions. And then the curiosity extends to empathy. Before you can empathize with a soul, you must be curious, you must be able to ask new and different questions, you must be able to wonder, why do they do it that way? And not our way? Why do they sit over there and not over here? And then the end ideally, empathy, when we're able to walk a mile in another person's shoes, that leads to action that leads to equitable action. And all of these mindsets are wrapped up in what helps us to have the courage to be more creative, to try new things, to ask different questions, and to reframe.

Portia Mount  11:26  

So as I think about this, you know this from gratitude, to humility, to curiosity, to empathy, to action, I'm really struck by and then at the beginning of this conversation, you talked about how you help companies that are to transform, these are really powerful concepts that I can imagine, like, can transform a company culture and can transform leaders. Have you seen that in the work that you're doing? Because you work with many, many companies. Many that we've all heard of. And I'm just curious, what has been the impact as you, I don't know if teach this model is the right word, or share this concept? What has been the response when you share that with the leaders that you work with and who engage you?

LEADERS/LEADERSHIP

Natalie Nixon  12:19  

Well, the great news is that by the time a company decides to hire me, they have experienced some humility. And that the way they've been going about their work isn't quite working anymore. New upstarts are eating their lunch. And they have to figure out a way to shift. And everything that we've just been discussing that mental model of what I think your creativity quotient, that capacity, what was required in our minds, culture change starts with shifts in our mental models, we need to have a shift in our mindset, which leads to shift in behaviors, which then translates into cultural change. And that doesn't happen overnight. So what I see and observe in my client work is that it has to start with leaders who, is not about having the answers, but all of a sudden are open to questions, are open to new, they're open to exploring those questions themselves, and are open to encouraging their teams to ask those questions. 

What I also observe in a lot of organizations is that you can't start from a place of from the onset of expecting teams to be overflowing with that ability to ask questions, because so many of us have been questioned, shamed you often. In organizations where it feels very punitive to ask questions. So one of the things I advise leaders on and I take them through are, not all questions are created equally. There's actually what I call a taxonomy of questions and to understand that I've learned a ton from Warren Berger, who's the author of A More Beautiful Question and the book of beautiful questions. He also made it his job title, he's a question knowledgist. And he's convinced and I agree with him, that we should be teaching how to ask questions. It's not just natural, well, actually, maybe it is natural…

Portia Mount  14:19  

For kids it is. For kids, for children it is, right?

Natalie Nixon  14:23  

But then we dampen that, right? Somewhere along the way in our educational system we learn different cues to not ask questions. So a great place to start for leaders is for them to practice self inquiry, and then to be transparent with their teams about new questions that are emerging for them about a marketing strategy that we've started working on, or a former competitor who now maybe we should reconsider reaching out to them and forging the beginning of a partnership. When teams see leaders going through the process themselves and modeling that behavior of asking questions and empowers them to be able to ask those questions themselves. And one of the things that Warren Berger said in an interview I did with him on a podcast I had a year ago called The Wonder Rigor Lab, Warren Berger said, we have to understand that when we are encouraging leaders to ask questions, it's terrifying, because you fundamentally are ceding control, you don't know what the response is going to be, when you admit that you're not quite sure what we might do next. Here's a couple of ideas. And I encourage you all, also to opine, because any leader who has been trained in a very traditional MBA sort of curriculum, modeled leadership has been about certainty, right? About what's the path forward, it's not about causing too much. And it's not certainly not about sharing that amount of self reflection, but servant leadership and those sorts of models. And what Warren Berger, and I espouse in terms of inquiry based leadership, those absolutely are encouraging, leading with questions.

Portia Mount  16:10  

I think that's really powerful. And if I think about some of the most incredible leaders that I work with, they do that really well. And I'm, and I happen to know that they also are people who have done a lot of self reflection, and they have evolved a lot as leaders, but watching them and watching them model, you know, admitting what they don't know, asking provocative questions to say, has the team conserve what what about, and I'm not sure about XY and Z. And it's really true, Natalie, that it opens up a completely different line of conversation, and I work for a highly engineered products company, we, you know, we work around with engineers, and, and it's, it's about lean, and it's about problem solving. And, you know, on the one hand, that's, it's incredibly efficient and powerful. But on the other hand, the ability to admit what you don't know can sometimes be difficult. And I think it's such a powerful skill, why don't we talk about it more?

Natalie Nixon  17:24  

Why don't we talk about it more? And why don't we realize that when it comes to problem solving, if you haven't even asked the right question to begin with, you may be going down the wrong road. And then design thinking, that's one of the valuable things, is that we have to really first ensure, we spend so much time in the discovery phase of really identifying what's the question or questions that we should be asking because the question is going to frame the rest of the entire process. Right, we thought the question was, how can we gain more market share? And maybe the question is, is this the business we should be in? Are we actually in the food business? Maybe now we're actually kind of a tech company. And that kind of shifts the way we even think about the markets that we're in. We've got to start with revaluing and really evaluating the questions that we're asking.

INTUITION

Portia Mount  18:25  

So I love that. And it's a really great segue to talking about intuition, which I will just say, again, I work in an engineered and highly engineered products company. We don't talk about intuition a lot, Natalie. In fact, if I think about my career, I don't know that we've ever talked openly about intuition. So I was really fascinated to get to this chapter. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about why intuition is so important? And does it really have a place where sort of data and certainty is so aggressively, let's just say, revered. Where is there room for intuition? And how do you build that into cultures where or you introduce it into cultures where they are so rigorously data oriented? Or are they even, maybe they're not mutually exclusive, though?

Natalie Nixon  19:19  

Yeah, exactly. I'm glad you landed there. I don't think they are mutually exclusive. I believe that intuition, or pattern recognition which is the way I define it. Intuition is a type of data. You're putting the world around us people. It's barely perceptible. But it gives us pause. We have this this nudge or this nagging, we must pay attention to it because intuition is a type of sonar, or sometimes I call it a muscle and the more you use it, the clearer it gets, the stronger it gets, and the more you ignore it the flabbier again. So you really have to pay attention and exercise it. You know, I share in the book, in the chapter about intuition. I think that's a part of the book where I shared about my interview with Biplab Sarkar, who is the CEO of Vectorworks, a tech firm, hire a lot of, you know, engineering processes at the core of the company culture. And he has a PhD in electrical engineering. So he's a real engineer. And I thought to myself during the interview process, oh, my goodness, when I start to ask him to share his perspective and stories about the role of intuition in his work, maybe I'm not gonna get anything from him. But it's completely the opposite. So here is a CEO of a tech company, who is an engineer, who wholeheartedly engaged in the reality that his intuition is central and integral to the ways that he makes strategic decisions. Now, he doesn't forsake quantitative data that's just jam naturally, that clarifies a lot for all of us. And at the same time, he understands that what he can intuit it's the in between bits is the interstices between interactions that can reveal so much and actually, in the book, The Creativity Leap I interviewed over 50 people, really successful leaders, and to a person, they acknowledge the role of intuition. And I actually had become much more interested since the publication of The Creativity Leap about neuroscience of creativity, and learning about the vagus nerve for example. The vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve and it extends from our brain, into our hearts and down through our gut. So what that means is we literally have like this, this human antenna, we're hardwired so when we say things like, my gut is telling me. So it literally is right.

Portia Mount  22:11  

You can actually feel it too, right? Like when you get this sort of like, you can feel a clench or a tingle or something like that, right? Oh, it's so interesting.

Natalie Nixon  22:20  

Yes, absolutely. And I'm reading a wonderful book right now called The Extended Mind.

Portia Mount  22:32  

Yeah, well link to it, we will link to it.

Natalie Nixon  22:34  

Yes, by Annie Murphy Paul. I haven't finished the book. But I love this book, because she is really exploring, embodied in our work, which is something that I am getting very interested in myself. I've been saying for a long time that we have to stop showing up to work in drag, we have to stop showing up to work only from the chin up. And not even only from the heart up. But from the gut up. And actually this moment during the pandemic, in these virtual work environments is hybrid working well, you know, redefining what the office is, there is an opportunity to show up from the gut up. And I'm actually now a contributing writer to Fast Company and I have an article coming out next week, where I talk about something I call the invisible work. And the invisible work that I'm referencing is not the work, not the invisible work that feminists have talked about. Right? 

Portia Mount  23:40  

Unpaid labor.

INVISIBLE WORK

Natalie Nixon  23:43  

When I reference invisible work, I'm talking about the work that's not done at the whiteboards, not done during the meetings, that’s not done during the Zoom call. But it's the observation, the listening, the reframing, and the pondering the asking new questions to ourselves, the walking away from the work going for a walk, the ruminations that need to happen, that if we if we think of the Pareto rule 80% of the work that's really powerful and incredibly important for synthesis is that invisible work, right? And then the 20% of the time is when it all converges, and it begins to crystallize. But that's a very important and magical opportunity to dive into further. Especially because in this fourth industrial revolution, we know that there are casualties and basic tasks type of work because of AI, robotics will take over. There's an opportunity for more of the human and more of that invisible work, to be incentivized and to be acknowledged and to be practiced.

Portia Mount  24:56  

I'm so fascinated by that. And as you were talking about invisible work, which we will out we will absolutely link to that article as well. I wonder if, as I think about what's happened over the last couple of years, in terms of, you know, we've moved, and I think you've written about this some too, we've moved from this sort of hybrid culture, hybrid remote, just the fundamental nature of what it means to work has really changed. And the fact that so many of us are in like back to back to back to back Zoom meetings, there's just like the time, in some ways we get time back. Because we're not doing long commutes. But in some ways, our time is more fractured than ever. And so thinking about invisible work, and how important it is for synthesis and for observing and pausing and thinking, and consolidating. What is your thought around where we're headed, and maybe the story is still being written around just what our work environment is going to be like, and then connected to your whole thesis around creativity. What is this shifting work landscape going to do for creativity and innovation and all the things that you've talked about that are necessary? So that's a loaded question. I know, but I'm really curious, because how we work has changed so fundamentally over the last couple of years.

WORKLIFE 

Natalie Nixon  26:31  

Yes. The jury's still out, we're still at the precipice of really, first of all, getting our, our new TrueNorth to navigate this unprecedented amount of ambiguity. But what I know to be true is that in a world, in a world where we can work from anywhere, we can learn from anywhere, the organizations and teams that work at the intersection of productivity, technology, and meaningful human experience will flourish and thrive. And among my clients, what I'm observing is that they've got two out of the three down. They've got the productivity and the tech down, but it's about figuring out how to create the meaningful human experience and connection. And that is where creativity comes in, in my view, is creativity. That's the through line that combined, bind I should say, productivity, tech and meaningful human experience. Because the world moving forward will be full of tons of blurred boundaries. Blurred boundaries between work and home, home and play, play and learning, learning at work, work and, and play. And rather than a struggle against that, and cause more friction, let's acknowledge that this is what it is. And what's interesting to me is that centuries ago, when we went and went around the world, there were primarily agrarian economies and agricultural economies. You'd wake up in the morning, you would do your ablutions, you'd eat something, you step over threshold, and you were at work. And this morning, I woke up, I did my ablutions, ate a little food, I stepped over the threshold of my home office, and I'm at work, right. We've come full circle, it feels foreign to us. But we've been here before. We've been in places where work and home were so enmeshed, and so very close together.

Portia Mount  28:44  

Well, I feel when you pose it that way, it doesn't feel quite so foreign. Because I have to say, as someone who has commuted her whole adult life, the first year of working from home, if like exactly what you're saying, Natalie waking up eating breakfast, getting my kids ready, and then sort of, you know, going another 30 feet to my home office, was really just kind of bewildering in some ways, and figuring out how to turn that off. When it was time, you know, so sort of getting back to creativity, of realizing that some of the things that I, you know, I don't miss a lot about my 500 mile a week commute. But one of the things that I do miss is that uninterrupted “think time” that I had when I was in the car, and I was not in, you know, my brain wasn't engaged. I was just taking in the scenery and thinking and listening and, and I know I'm not the only one who's thought about that, like, we have to find ways to shift our thinking into this new way of being.

DAYDREAMING 

Natalie Nixon  29:53  

Yes, we have to be intentional about designing new boundaries for ourselves, right? It's so it's like, be intentional about it. Oh, create the boundaries, turn off your computer, there are all sorts of apps that are involving, which are fascinating to see that are prompting us to look away from. And to look out, one of the things I advocate are for regular daydream breaks. After we finish our conversation, I'm going to go on one of my very short, brisk five minute walks. Because every time even when I think, Oh, I have to finish this, I have to do this, I do that. When, when I,  how do I say, obey is not quite the word I'm looking for. But when I commit to, that's a level of rigor that I'm committing to honoring that space and time that I need to allow my brain to space out. So those are the words we use. But there's but it's at that spacing out. There's there's, there's deeper recesses and regions of our brain were all the actually more potent, more interesting synthesis. And neuro synapses are at work. So you can let the frontal lobe be a bit more at rest. And how many times have you walked away from your desk, you have gone for a short walk, it doesn't matter. You know, it doesn't have to be a 30 minute walk, it can be five minutes, it could be two five minute walks throughout the day. And when you return to the work at hand, you feel so much more refreshed. There's something you have observed that's going to trigger a new thought and new way of thinking approach. So it is it is essential that we create new boundaries that we turn off the computer, we turn off our phone that we get outside that we in my case, I advocate what I said already daydream breaks, it could be a 90 second daydream break, it could be 5 minutes, but you your prompts are the clouds drifting across the sky, or an ant crawling on the ground, you got to do that for yourself.

Portia Mount  32:15  

I love that so much. And I think I came late to that way of thinking Natalie, about a year into the pandemic, when I realized I was staring at a screen for eight hours a day for days on end and just feeling like I was not. I was productive but I wasn't feeling creative or particularly, I didn't feel like I was able to bring new and novel insights to my work. And I, I have to say, I always feel like my best ideas come when I just close everything down and just go, you know, bake a cake or walk outside or hang with the kids.

(BREAK)

So I want to ask you, and you sort of intimated a little bit, but I want to ask you more directly about, how does failure work into either the creativity mindset or just creativity and innovation? And you know, and as I think about the the first part of our conversation where we talked about these asking questions, and the level of self inquiry it takes to ask questions, and how, as we get older, we don't want to look stupid, and we don't want to look stupid, because sometimes we don't want to fail. We don't want to make mistakes. And so I just wonder if you could just talk about how you think about failure, where does it enter into your work?

FAILURE 

Natalie Nixon  33:57  

I'll share a couple of things. I created a course called The Wonder Rigor Lab. I first prototype the course as a live group coaching course, it's now a DIY self paced course. But one of the things I learned and insights insights that I got, as in the process of developing the course, was this, this, I think I kind of butchered this word, I made it up, which is this idea of, of the need to oxygenate our ideas, which is related to this idea of prototyping. But when I say oxygenate your idea, I'm referring to the reality that when you are tinkering with something new in a creative process, when you're trying out a different approach, you must at some point, have given air light and fresh eyes from people who are not you and minutely this is pretty scary because the moment we decide to, as I say, oxygenator ideas and share it and ask for feedback, or what do you think of this? The reason why it's so scary is that the answer could be, I don't know, that's, I don't get it. Or why would you do that? Or it's stupid, or it's unattractive, or I don't like it. And what we know from the process of prototyping is that these are all opportunities to ask, Oh, would you say more about that? And you realize sometimes it's a, it's a missing step. It's apparent in our head, but we haven't articulated it for other people, we want to interact with it. So the creative process requires us to oxygenate our ideas. Now in the arts, that's called the recital, or the grits, or the audition, or the portfolio review. And you get really good at being able to take the feedback. And so failure does not feel good. Now, there are psychological reasons why even the step of getting the feedback is so scary, terrifying, and annoying for us. When we get feedback, and the feedback is not what we expected, maybe it's not in full endorsement of this thing we've been slaving over and working on, we actually are having a physiological reaction. If you pay attention, your breath is shortening, you feel your heart rate more rapidly beating. Your palms get a little sweaty, if you could look deeply in your eyes, your pupils might be dilating. And you literally physiologically are going through all of the physical shifts of fight or flight. Now, let's think about that. You are putting out an idea to your community of your team, classmates, whatever it is, and the feedback is not “oh, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread”. This feedback is why I'm not understanding XYZ or Y, right? And you feel yourself internally kind of having a big freakout moment. And you’re having all of those physiological reactions.

Portia Mount  37:18  

I know this feeling all too well, by the way.

Natalie Nixon  37:22  

And sometimes the first reaction is defensiveness, right, you get, you go into full defense mode, you shut down, you either go into full defense mode, verbally, or you just shut down and then it's like, wah, wah, wah, you can't even hear it anymore. But if we understand why we're having that reaction, a lot of the time, it's easier to take the feedback and ease away from the cliff of failure and the way that we have been approaching it. What's happening is that the limbic brain is actually going into that fight/fight mode, because aeons ago, feedback that meant that the tribe wasn't understanding what we were contributing, or that they were rejecting what we're contributing could mean death. It could mean that the tribe would leave us behind. It could mean that we would be deserted. And the tribe, that community was everything. We needed that for survival. So when you understand that in the, in the, in the deep recesses of the limbic brain, that is what's going into action to help you survive, and you realize, okay, I'm not in the wilderness. I am safe, these people do not mean any harm. At the end of the day, it's an idea. And you know what, maybe they're right, this is actually maybe I should pay attention to because I can make what I'm working on even better. So there. So one thing that we understand about failure, and that's and then, and I've been contextualized in terms of just feedback, because sometimes, sometimes we conflate feedback with failure. And it's not.

Portia Mount  39:12  

Ah, interesting. 

Natalie Nixon  39:15  

It’s not failing, it's just feedback, like just just like, just extrapolate objectively what it is. And if you understand and your mind and your brain what's happening that helps. For me, that has helped me so much in calming myself down and not going into defense mode. And being quiet and absorbing it. Just taking the feedback. The other way I want to share that I've been thinking about failure is I often talk about how important play is because play is number one, it emotionally, it uplifts us, it wants to release all the good, positive hormones like serotonin. And it also is amplifying the executive leadership skills that we say we want in the corporate environment. So if you think about it, to be really good at play, you must be really good at actively listening, at grading, at negotiating, anticipating what's next, at waiting, you know, all of those skills are essential for great leaders. But here's the part of play that is also super valuable, that we don't talk about as much: play really good, great deep play, teach us how to fail. Conditions of play is that there's probably going to be a winner, which means there's also some losers. And when we're children, we are having, we're being open to all sorts of opportunities to learn about how am I going to deal with the realities of when my team doesn't? When am I going to point the finger? Am I going to put my hands on my hips and go into a slump and put my lips out and be in a funk for the rest of the day? And are we going to like revel up and try again and have another go at it and just do our best? Are we going to huddle? Are we going to learn from and say okay, next time, let's try to do X, Y and Z instead. Right? So the other thing I would say about failure is to engage in play, and all and all the types of play that energize you in order to learn and to sit with yourself about hmm, this isn't cool the way I am responding. And how might I respond better? So those are the two ways I would think about failure in terms of play and in terms of oxynizing your ideas.

Portia Mount  41:58  

I love both of those things. And I will tell you, I feel like at least in the Mount household many lessons about failure have come through playing Jenga. And especially just because there's always someone who, there's a definite winner and a loser but I think what's really fun about it is the energy and the conversations that happen as a result of it. I want to get back to something on play. When I was doing my research and preparation for this I, because I'd like to stalk online, stalk the people that I'm getting ready to interview. I learned that you are a ballroom dancer.

Natalie Nixon 42:41

An emerging.

Portia Mount 42:42

An emerging, aspiring ballroom dancer. I don't know if I can share this but I loved it and you have these amazing photos and I saw the video but I think what I'm struck by is how incredible, and you did talk about how this is something you are learning but I was struck by how incredibly just happy and incandescent you looked and so I just wondered if there is a link between if dancing is play for you or and just just talk a little bit about how you got into it and you know in relation to what we've just talked about in terms of play?

Natalie Nixon  43:22  

I don't know if you are and your listeners have been watching the show Ted Lasso?

Portia Mount  43:28  

Oh my gosh, I love that show.

Natalie Nixon  43:32  

Ted Lasso and all it teaches us but you know how the character I'm just forgetting his name Diego I forgetting his name the Mexican player.

Portia Mount  43:42  

Yes yes Diego.

Natalie Nixon  43:44  

I'll be shouting football is life football is life, for me dance is life dances life like dance gives me life. Dance, life dance adds to my life. I started dancing when I was about, I mean formally training in dance when I was about four years old.

Portia Mount  44:04  

Oh, a long time.

Natalie Nixon  44:06  

My mom started taking me to take modern dance lessons. I studied technique up through my college years. And dance has been something that has, it's gifted me so much in my life. It's taught me discipline. It's taught me cultural curiosity through music. It's taught me how to show up over and over and over again because of the audition process. It has definitely taught me how to fail. It's taught me how to integrate mind, body and spirit because of what is because that is the best integration for performance. It's taught me how to perform was by a was a big ingredient of my success as a teacher because students are some of the biggest skeptics optics and they can smell. Okay, and you got it, you gotta come in, you know, strong and positive, and, you know, engaging and that is performance.

Portia Mount  45:11  

That is performance. Yeah, absolutely.

Natalie Nixon  45:14  

I've often said that dancing at different stages of my life has saved my life, because it has anchored me in the grittiness of it. Like you don't, you don't get to just do a pirouette, you don't get to just leap across the stage, heck you don't get to just be on stage. There is so much incremental fundamental work that has to be done that is hard, and is tedious. And you got to show up over and over and over again. So it has grounded me. And it's helped me to be so dreamy. Everything from the music scapes that you're exposed to, to the different types of people that you get to interact with to theater and being backstage and costume and makeup and story that a choreographer is trying to tell. That's dreaming. And so those two counterpoints which are reflected even today in my work I realize in terms of wonder and rigor, have been really essential. But as an older dancer, I can't stretch the way I used to. Because I used to be ballroom has been amazing. And ballroom has been my go to, for still being able to do a little bit of performance. Actually, I'll share with you. It's funny, we're talking today. I study, I'm from Philadelphia, I live in Philly, and I'm a student at The Society Hill Dance Academy. One of the nice things that the dance studio does is every Friday night, there's a dance party. And sometimes there's something that they call a spotlight. So the teachers who will do a short, a solo or duet, or will be student and teacher, or sometimes an engaged couple. And so I'm doing a piece tonight with my teacher Nadari, we're doing a hustle. I've been practicing a hustle. But I have my outfit picked out, a little makeup. And it's just the ability, it’s just like two and a half minutes. But it's just that ability to, to perform again. And then also, I participated in a dance congress, I got a medal, I got a little trophy. My teachers really encourage me to look at other things down the line that I can work towards. So I talked about in my work that we must be clumsy students of something I have to be under some laws, we're not the smartest person in the room, while you're making mistakes, and you also have so much joy, because you just find yourself giggling, or you just find yourself getting lost in time, because you're so immersed in the work.

Portia Mount  48:00  

I love that. I just wrote that down too. We must be clumsy students of something because when you say it, it sounds so liberating to try new things and to be and to be unafraid. And to really...

Natalie Nixon  48:18

Or to be afraid and try anyway. 

TIPS ON HOW TO GET MORE CREATIVE

Portia Mount  48:20

Or to be afraid and try anyway. And maybe this takes me to the last of my, you know, a couple of questions. So, you know, I know that our listeners will be well, first of all, I just think just resonate with so much with that you've shared today, Natalie, you know, if someone if you had to give, you know, a couple of pieces of advice, and as I said, we're going to link to your book, and so many of the articles in so many of the other resources you've shared in terms of beginning this journey. Maybe someone's listening to this thinking, you know, I think there is a lot more that I could be doing to open up my creativity. What would be the couple of things that you would encourage listeners to think about?

Natalie Nixon  49:06  

Well, one thing they could do is to buy the book or to listen to it. 

Portia Mount  49:10  

Absolutely. We will link to it. Yeah.

Natalie Nixon  49:13  

Yeah, so that's a start just to start to immerse yourself. And there's so many incredible thought leaders and writers on the topic of …. right? So there's a lot out there. So first, immerse yourself in all the ways to start to think about creativity. The way I like to think about it, of course, is that it's about toggling between wonder and rigor to solve problems. So, one, one step is to be really intentional about your day, and making sure you actually are carving out space for the wonder and for the rigor. Because in the front of my book, I include a quote from Picasso, Pablo Picasso, and the quote is that inspiration exists, but it has to find you working. So like you gotta, I think one of the reasons why more of us are not intentionally creative is because it's actually quite hard. Let's take writing for example. The way you get better at writing is to write.

Portia Mount  50:24  

Is to write, and to write a lot.

Natalie Nixon  50:28  

You don’t always feel like it, you feel like you have nothing to say, you feel like what you're about to say is stupid it might be, you have to commit to it. And I and I talk about rigor sprints, and that could be, I like to use odd amounts of time, like 17 minutes, 30-33 minutes, or whatever it is, don't don't say if let's say, let's use the example of writing, don't say, I'm going to, I'm carving out all of Tuesdays and Thursdays to write. That's not gonna happen, you're gonna all of a sudden, find ways to do laundry, refill the dishwasher, procrastinate, right?

Portia Mount  51:00  

Look at my Instagram.

Natalie Nixon  51:04  

Small focused, regimented sprints, and you just and there's all we're not talking about writing today, but there's all sorts of hacks that you can do to ensure that you are typing. And then there's the editing process, all sorts of phases of writing, but you must dedicate the space and the time and make them succinct, short and sweet. So that you revisit them a show up over and over. That's an example of practicing and applying rigor, whatever that that is in your life. And then the wonder, we've already shared a few one is, you know, practicing daydream breaks. They do literally wonders for your day, and your mindset. It’s moving being embodied in, and finding who you are, and what you are feeling, by walking, definitely walking away from the computer. Being immersed in nature, if possible. The Japanese have this phrase, forest bathing. And we don't have an equivalent word in the English language. But we now know that when we are immersed, for example, in the woods, the light that goes through leaves in the chlorophyll, there's all sorts of positive reactions that happen in our body. When we're walking on the dirt and the earthen floor, there's different bacteria that gets emitted. That when we breathe that in, that's incredibly healing, it's good bacteria, it's incredibly healing to us. So movement, being embodied, taking time to pause, to come full circle to our conversation, those are ways that we end being a clumsy student of something, those are ways that we can practice wonder and rigor.

Portia Mount  52:46  

I love that. And you are right. And one of the things that I was struck by in your book is that there's so much it is deep, deeply full of really powerful research, but it's also highly applicable. And so I think congratulations on taking, I think what is for such a complex and intimidating topic, and making it so accessible and doable. And the exercises that you have at the end of every chapter, there's just a lot that's super practical. So I'm excited for our listeners to pick it up and check it out. And, and also go and take a look at some of your videos as well. 

LIGHTNING ROUND

Okay, so now we have a couple of, these are the last few questions. And these are sort of fun questions that always our listeners like and so to hear. And so do you have a favorite motto that you like to live by?

Natalie Nixon  53:38  

I do but I first want to say thank you so much for saying that. That was really high praise what you just said about the book. I did not want…

Portia Mount  53:45  

You are welcome. It is so heartfelt because it is really just such a delightful book. I'm super excited to share it.

Natalie Nixon  53:54  

Well thank you. I have many mottos I live by, a couple would include keep your eye on the donut not the whole. Because in like statement to don't focus on what could or should have been and another one that my husband I like to say all the time is follow the law of momentum. And what we mean by that is keep going through the door that is opening for you, don't keep banging on…. Like yeah, like move on. There's a window over here. There’s a door over here, go through that door and then the next, and the next. 

Portia Mount  54:34  

And you got my praise hands. You got my praise hands going on that one. Amen. I want to ask you and you haven't you've recommended a few different books by Is there a book that you find yourself giving or recommending over and over again, I have this we've got this incredible list now from the podcast of all these amazing books. So what's the one book that you recommend constantly?

Natalie Nixon  54:55  

I mean, there's a lot of books. I said the primary one right now is The Extended Mind. I can't get enough of The Extended Mind by Amy Murphy Paul. Loving it.

Portia Mount  55:09  

Okay so we definitely have to link to that, and I have…

Natalie Nixon  55:12  

I also like Eve Rodsky’s Find Your Unicorn Space. 

Portia Mount  55:16  

Oh it’s sitting on my desk right now. We love Eve so much.

Natalie Nixon  55:20  

Love Eve, love Essentialism by Greg McKeown. So a lot of a lot of great, great food for thought.

Portia Mount  55:25  

Yeah. And so I have to say this maybe one of the best parts of the pandemic and there haven't been a lot of good parts, but all the books, all the books that I've discovered. So is there a new habit or belief you've adapted that made a positive impact on your life?

Natalie Nixon  55:42  

Yes, this is really recent, I have decided to commit to solitude on regular increments of time. Which may sound weird because people are like, well, it's a pandemic. Don't people feel so socially disconnected already? But I mean, being really intentional about solitude because I gifted myself a personal mini retreat, solo retreat in December the week of Christmas had a great year. And my husband actually encouraged me to do it which I loved and, another friend and we were just talking about like why is that to be just once a year what if it's quarterly? What if it's like once a month, if you can afford it. Is it, within your hometown or city, is there like a little hotel that you can check yourself into just for one night and have room service and then you reemerge and go back into the world. But solitude, intentional solitude is something I'm committed to for myself.

Portia Mount  56:41  

I love that and I can tell you I know a lot of women who would absolutely 100% the one also talking to you included would completely agree with that. I think we deserve that. And final, final question for you Natalie, what's been the best investment of $100 that you've made recently?

Natalie Nixon  57:02  

Okay, so I am not a person who goes to the hair salon regularly. I keep it really simple with my hair. I don't get my nails done. My favorite makeup is lipstick. I love lipstick.

Portia Mount  57:18  

And you're wearing a fabulous lipstick right now by the way, I might add.

Natalie Nixon  57:21  

I do indulge in massage. I don't go to really fancy places. I love a Chinese massage because it's very connected to a medical perspective therapeutically and connected to the, the lymphatic system in our body. So I actually, twice a month I get a two hour massage for $85 plus tip and it's at a place in northeast Philly. That is like no frills but it's clean. And it's you know it's mask, you know, everyone wears a mask, and it's and it is an indulgence. That is the gift that keeps on giving. It's wonderful.

Portia Mount  58:14  

Oh my gosh, I love it. This is why I love this question because the things that people share are just incredible. Natalie Nixon, thank you so much for today. It has been such a delight. I cannot wait for our listeners to discover The Creativity Leap. We're going to link to your site Figure Eight Thinking. Just thank you for a delightful conversation.

Natalie Nixon  58:40  

Thank you so much for having me. Portia. This was awesome. Thank you.