The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 150 - Create

Transcript:

Jen: Hello, listeners. Before we get to this week's episode, Pete and I are so excited to let you know that we are co-facilitating Akimbo's upcoming Real Skills Conference. It's August 19th, from 3-5pm Eastern. If you are inclined to meet amazing changemakers from all across the globe, I hope you'll join us. Head on over to thelongandtheshortpodcast.com/realskills for all the juicy details.

Pete: We would love, love, love to see you there. Also, while we've got you, we would love it if you took a moment to take a screenshot of the podcast and share it with a friend or post it on social media, or jump on to Apple Podcasts and leave us a review. It helps us find more amazing listeners, just like you. For now, please enjoy this week's episode.

Pete: Hello, Jen Waldman.

Jen: Hello, Peter Shepherd.

Pete: So I feel like a lot of our episodes start this way, which is, "I was talking to a client of mine yesterday, and they said something that blew my mind."

Jen: Well, that's because we have very inspiring clients.

Pete: It's true. It's true. So one particular brilliant client of mine said to me yesterday, "I've been starting to look at my days through the lens of this question. And the question is: What am I going to create today?"

Jen: You know I'm a sucker for any question that has the word "create" in it. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Pete: This is why I'm bringing this to you, because I knew you would love it. I knew you would love it. So, this question came up...let me set some context. This is a one-on-one coaching client I have, a truly brilliant leader working in an organization that many people would know if they heard it. And we were talking about how she's approaching her work, and what it looks like to show up as a leader in that work. And she was kind of thrashing a little bit with the idea that sometimes you get so bogged down in to-dos, and, "What do I have to get done today," and, "I've got to do this. And then, I've got to do this. And I've got to cross this off. And I've got to attend this meeting." And she shared with me this great aha moment because she's quite a creative person, that she'd started to think about it more through the lens of, "What can I create today?" And I just got really obsessed with that. We ended up spending like thirty minutes of the call unpacking what that could look like. Can you apply that to creating an email? Can you like apply that to creating connections within a meeting? Like, how does that change the way you show up? And I think it changes the way that I would show up, and I'm going to show up. Because I'm going to start asking myself that question. I just, I feel like you have some thoughts.

Jen: I love this question so much. Because first of all, the level of accountability that it requires is just awesome. I mean, you really are putting yourself on the hook for so much even by asking the question. The other thing I love about it is that you can answer this with the tangible. Like, "What are the literal things I'll create?" Like an email, or a painting, or whatever it might be. But there's also the intangible. "What sort of feeling, or environment, or vibe am I going to create today? What sort of experience am I going to create for myself, and for someone else?" It kind of feels a little like it could dance on a similar line as hard skill/real skill or hard skill/soft skill. Like, tangible creation/intangible creation. They are both really important, and also both the responsibility of the creator. So, I'm pretty jazzed about this question.

Pete: Yeah. So one of the things I loved about it was the the ability to finish your day and almost do the inverse of the question, which is, "What did I create today?"

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: And to have like a moment of pause to reflect on that. And we were kind of joking of how satisfying it can be to start from scratch (i.e. the morning of a new day), and then to look back and go, "Wow, look at all the things I actually did create in that day." And I, as I sometimes do, I took the metaphor a little too far, but I think it still applies. And I was like, "If you think about making a cup of tea, here is something that didn't exist before. And by, you know, taking leaves and adding water, you've created this concoction that you then get to sit and have a moment with. And you created that moment from scratch." And I know that's a slightly ridiculous example, but I think it's applicable to the fact that we can find ways to create in the most mundane days or in the most seemingly trivial elements of our lives. So, I just am like jazzed about this.

Jen: Yeah. It's so excellent a question. So, along the lines of the tea...I'm a coffee drinker, not a tea drinker, but same idea: warm beverage going down. I cherish my coffee time in the morning. Because what I create for myself is silence, stillness, space for creative thinking, space for learning. That's what comes out of my brewing a cup of coffee. So I don't think it's a ridiculous example, I actually think it's pretty spot on. That we have more opportunity than we might give ourselves credit for to create moments for ourselves and for others, experiences for ourselves and for others.

Pete: Mmm. Oh, this is wild. I hadn't actually realized, or applied it to my own coffee morning routine, which maybe I'll just share. Is at the moment, each morning, I go...there's a great cafe across the road from where I live. And I go across and get a coffee for Tracy and I. And then we both sit in like our own little part of the house. And I do like my Five Minute Journal, and I do my journaling exercise, and I just write, and I drink my coffee, and I eat my peanut butter toast. Which is, it's like...

Jen: You never catch Pete without the peanut butter toast.

Pete: It's just, you can't have me without the peanut butter toast. But there's this, it's like this twenty-minute period, I would say pretty much every single day, except for the moments where I might be on a call with you and I'm eating my toast in front of you (like this morning). But there's this whole ritual. And, you're right. The ritual allows me to create ideas, generate aha moments, create gratitude for myself as I'm writing in my journal. Like, there's a whole element of creation to even just that. It's not just savoring the coffee and peanut butter toast, it's what that allows me to do. Hmm.

Jen: Totally. Okay, here's another angle on this question. Several weeks ago, we released an episode called Antici...pation. And we talked about how we can sometimes catastrophize when we're anticipating certain events. And I see this question as a possible antidote to that experience. That if you have to have, let's say, a stressful meeting with your boss and you're anticipating all the ways that it could go wrong, or, "Why am I being called into the boss's office? Am I being disciplined? For what? I'm trying to replay the last week. Like, I didn't say anything bad." Instead you could say to yourself, "What might I create during that meeting? I might create a deeper relationship between me and the person I work with. I might create an environment that is conducive to calm. I might create an opportunity for the other person to ask me questions. I might create an opportunity for me to ask the other person questions." It feels like it is the kind of question that immediately reminds you of the agency you have.

Pete: Right. I was just thinking the same thing. The word "empowerment" was coming to my mind, as you were sharing. It's so much more empowering to think with that lens. As opposed to...you know, if I think about, "What do I need to do," it's almost like someone else is putting that on you. Like, "to do"...it's almost like, for who? Who is dictating what I need to do? Whereas what I get to create is so much more empowering and, yeah, gives me some agency. Hmm.

Jen: Okay, another...

Pete: Please.

Jen: ...totally different angle. For the last sixty-ish weeks, I had been leading an online space, literally called CREATE. But it was an acronym. It stood for Creative Resilient Eager Artists Totally Experimenting. And every week we would get together for an hour (eventually, it grew into an hour and a half), where I would just offer some prompts and then people would create something new in whatever artistic medium they were choosing to work with that week. But I started to become kind of obsessed with the cute acronym we came up with. Because being able to say at the beginning of each session, "Totally Experimenting," changed what we were trying to do. It wasn't like, "Create something, and have it be done, and know that it's going to work, and be certain about your output." Something about the "Totally Experimenting" (with the "T" and the "E") gave people permission to exit the time with pretty crunchy ideas, things that were half-baked. There were so many times people would come off of mute to share and would say, "I have no idea what I just made. But here it is."

Pete: That's amazing.

Jen: And I think maybe like the subtext of the question, "What am I going to create today," could be, [whispered] "And experiment with?"

Pete: Mmm. Mmm. Ooh, I like that. Especially the whisper.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: The idea of experiments has come up a lot recently for me, but I think for us in a workshop we were running recently on decision making. And I know we've done an episode on experimenting. And it feels like, it's always...it feels like it's worth revisiting through this lens, like you just described. And I'm wondering, like, what is it about the notion of an experiment that helps unlock some level of permission or freedom? I'm trying to work this out in my own head at the moment. What do you think?

Jen: Well, inherent in the idea is, "I don't know." There's an, "I don't know," attached to an experiment. Like, "I have a hypothesis, and we'll either prove or disprove it. And then we'll learn something from it, and we'll try something new." There's something about the word or the concept of experimenting that allows people the space to be wrong, and the space to be imperfect, and to just make a bit of a mess.

Pete: Yeah. Yeah, I tend to agree. The word that comes to mind for me is "humility", which I think is recency bias.

Jen: Mmm.

Pete: It's definitely recency bias, because I had a fascinating conversation with a brilliant, brilliant, very senior leader last week about this exact word. And I wrote a blog about it a couple days ago, around this idea that humility is a superpower, was my assertion. And the reason it's a superpower, I think, is it opens you up to feedback from others, it opens you up to the fact that you don't have to or will ever know the right answer or know everything about a particular topic, and that then empowers other people because you can ask them for input. It allows you to grow, and bring in others. And so, I was just like...as a leader, I was thinking about this notion that humility is a superpower. And I think in experiments, what you described, is a level of permission to have humility, or something like that.

Jen: I also think being a creative person (which, P.S. we all are) requires humility. Because sometimes the thing you're seeking to create takes a turn that you didn't quite expect, and you can either muscle it back into place, or you can go with the flow. But you've got to have humility to be able to go with the flow.

Pete: Ooh, sunk costs coming in. Yeah. Yeah.

Jen: Okay. Totally different angle, yet again.

Pete: Please. We're just creating.

Jen: Are you familiar with the work of Marie Forleo?

Pete: Yes. Yes.

Jen: Okay, cool, because I'm about to quote her. She has a rule she lives by, which is just four little words long. "Create before you consume."

Pete: Mmm. "Create before you consume." Okay.

Jen: So this is her mantra, or rule around how to start the day. So do not open the phone, do not open the social media, do not turn on the news, don't read a book until you've created something. It could be a sentence or it can be an entire symphony, but create before you consume. Which leads me to a counter-question, that actually is giving me nausea as I think about saying it out loud. Another way to align your day with your values (which I think, "What am I going to create today," does) is, "What am I going to consume today?"

Pete: Ooh. Oh my gosh.

Jen: And...barf.

Pete: Wow. Wow. Wow. Okay, yeah, that's a little punch in the guts. I like that. I've thought about that always, that Marie Forleo idea...I've always thought of it as like proactive versus reactive. I think we did an episode on morning routines once before, where we talked about, "What does it look like to carve out some proactive time?" Which, I would suggest, is that create time. As opposed to the reactive time, which was the grab your phone and scroll social media or jump on an email straightaway. That immediately puts you in the reactive.

Jen: Well, one of the things as a creative person, I think having a mantra like, "Create before you consume," does is it frees you from starting your day with other people's ideas. Infecting...is that too strong a word? Infecting your work.

Pete: Mm-hmm.

Jen: Like if I, for example, am trying to work out how I want to express a certain idea or philosophy, and the first thing I do in the morning is pick up the New York Times and read the news and then I try to articulate my philosophy, as much as I want to detach myself from what I just read, it's in there already. It is clouding the kinds of words that I'm choosing, my sentence structure, my tone, all of that. So to give myself space to express first, and then take in the world second.

Pete: Yeah, I like that. It reminds me of an episode that never made it off the cutting room floor.

Jen: One of those.

Pete: Where we talked about...just a quick synopsis is we talked about this idea that, you know, there's a saying, "You are what you eat." And so, is it not also true that you think what you consume? Or you think what you read? I think was what we talked about. And ultimately, what we're saying there is the things we consume shape our worldview, shape our thoughts, shape our ideas, shape the way we create.

Jen: Mm-hmm.

Pete: So yeah, I think that's definitely true and stands up. The other thing I was thinking about when I was having this conversation with the client (that we ended up going down the rabbit hole of) was, I think there's an element of...I was going to say, "self-empathy," but maybe it's more "self-compassion" in starting your day with this question. Because what I really like about it is, even if you wake up feeling 10%...you know, like, "I'm at 10% of where I'm usually at. I'm usually flying at 100%, and I'm creating all sorts of things." Some mornings, you wake up, and you just feel bleh. And in my experience, if I'm thinking about to-dos, I might beat myself up about the fact that I don't want to do as much as I did yesterday. It's like a way of starting fresh every single day, meeting myself where I'm at. "What might I create today?" And so, that's actually where...that was the precursor to this idea of, "Well, it might just be, I'm going to make myself a cup of coffee or a cup of tea. And like at 30% of the energy that I usually have, I think I can muster that." And so I just love the fact that this question, it sort of meets you where you're at each day.

Jen: I love that. I love that. And you also just did a clever little word swap that I feel like would be pretty easy to just let pass on by, but I'm going to pause us here. You just said, "What might I create today," instead of, "What am I going to create today?" And I love the word "might", you know I love this. I think it's a question word that is so full of possibility, and opens things up in a way that "can" or "will" or "am" sometimes closes things down. So I want to just double-down on, I love the rewrite. "What might I create today?"

Pete: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.