Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Denise Jacobs 0:03
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of team anywhere. And I’m Ginny Bianca Mathis on the east coast. And I am here with my partner Mitch Simon on the west coast. And today we are thrilled to have I see her. She’s She’s all excited.
Mitch Simon 0:26
She’s jumping up and down.
Denise Jacobs 0:28
I think so I, to have Denise with us today, who is going to be talking about creativity. And we’ll be talking about her books, and different ways to get in touch with her. And welcome.
enise Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
Mitch Simon 0:48
Welcome to bees.
Denise Jacobs 0:49
Yay.
And, Denise I tie because I just feel so familiar with you. I left off your last name, but everyone else out there doesn’t know you.
Great.
Well, Denise, something we all can agree on is that 2020 is gone. And we’re looking to 2021 with a lot of different feelings. share with us what your journey was like and what you learned.
Oh, wow. So I’m actually laughing because the first first month of January didn’t actually feel different from 2020. So when you’re like it’s officially gone, I was like, Oh, that’s really funny, because it really didn’t feel like it. Things seem to feel more settled now. But maybe that’s just an illusion, we’ll see. What was my journey of what have I learned? You know, 2020 was a really hard year for me personally, because I just I had like a very, like emotional, an emotional time. And the end of an important really important relationship to me ended and I spent a lot of the year grieving that. And, and then you know that on top with all the other things just made it made it a real challenge of a year. But I think one of the things that I’ve learned that certainly is starting to feel poignant right now is that time does heal things time does heal wounds, and, and that we need to be kind of available to too, and open to and paying attention to the opportunities that are in front of us. So one of the things as a person who’s a professional speaker, and trainer, and consultant is that I spent a lot of time traveling for work. And I literally haven’t been in an airport or on an airplane since April.
What’s next? Yeah,
well, you did a knock. Uh, what next, you have your new book vanish, your inner critic, silence the voice of self doubt, to unleash creativity and do your best work? No, talk to us about that. What are the key takeaways? What, what? Why did you want to write it? And what do you want people to take away from that book?
Well, I wrote the book because I had struggled so much with, with seeing myself as a creative person. And really, that voice of self doubt, that pops up whenever you’re trying to do your best work whenever you’re trying to show up powerfully. And, and make a concentrated contribution to the world. Right. And, and I feel like, you know, this is true, if you’re a creative, I mean, the book is kind of, you know, geared in some way towards creatives. But it’s really, I actually really feel like it is kind of a quintessential professional development book, just in general. Because every single person that I’ve talked to, is can relate, like whether they consider themselves creative or not. And I would also argue that everybody is creative, in a certain way, whether you’re a leader, or whether you’re a designer, or whether you’re a developer or an accountant, or whatever. You know, everybody exercises creativity, in the form of creative problem solving. And so, you know, it’s just a matter of kind of how you’re creative, not if you’re creative,
Ginny Bianco-Mathis 7:01
yes.
Denise Jacobs 7:02
But I personally struggled with the grit question of amp, am I creative, right, for a really long time, and it wasted a lot of time and energy that I could have spent doing, you know, actually just doing the work. And that was one of the reasons why I wrote this book is to help people kind of remove those mental blocks so that they could get to doing the really good work that they’re capable of. Oh, fantastic.
And I know, you have done some speaking, which I found fascinating, because I didn’t know about it around the research part. The Jazz singers and the hip hop. Can you talk a little bit about?
Yeah, so one of the things that I was one of the things that’s very cool about writing a book is, you know, you have a premise, or you have something that, you know, for me that things that I spoke about and spoken, you know, do keynotes on and run workshops on and everything. But it’s great to, you know, I am a person where I don’t like just telling people what to do, or suggest and giving people suggestions. I like to give them the reasons why the suggestions are effective. Because it’s, it’s a very real thing for for women to be questioned about their authority. And it is a very real thing for women of color and black women to be especially question about their authority. And so I literally didn’t want anybody coming at me talking about well, you know, you’re just saying that I’m like, No, actually, this is very heavily researched. Thank you for asking, let’s move on to the next thing. So, um, so and i also personally, just from my own personal standpoint, I like knowing why things work. Right. Like, I like knowing the mechanisms of why something is effective. I, you know, it’s one thing for somebody to say, take this medicine. And it’s another thing to say take this medicine because it does blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right, right. So, so anyway, so one of the pieces of research and one of the findings that I found was a TED talk by Charles Lim. And he is a neuro science researcher. And he did an experiment where he took jazz improvisational musicians. He also took hip hop artists, but people who did like improvisational music, improvisational jazz and hip hop. He hooked them up and put them into an MRI machine. And he actually scanned their brains while they were doing their improvisational music. And one of the things that he found was there is a part of the brain, part of the prefrontal cortex in the brain. And this is the part of the brain that’s in Charge of behavior modification, self judgment, basically kind of the quote higher. And I won’t say quote, but that’s the kind of higher capacities that allow people to function in societies, right. But it’s all about, you know, making a judgment call on whether something’s wrong or right, and then changing your behavior because of it. Well, it turns out that when people do improvisational jazz are, you know, everything people are in the zone, that part of the brain is quiet, that part of the brain isn’t functioning as much. And it is very, like it’s very low level. And other parts of the brain the, quote, creative parts of the brain are the ones that are really active and firing. Whoo. And I realized, you know, during these experiments, I was like, this is the this is the inner critic, I mean, self modification and judgment. Yeah. All over the place. Right? Right. And so, I got really excited by this, because I was like, Look, you can actually pinpoint the inner critic in a part of your brain. And you know, and there’s scientific research that shows that when that part of your brain isn’t active, that’s when your ideas come out. That’s when you can riff, that’s when you can take something that somebody else has got. And that, you know, when you’re not afraid of what people think if you’re not afraid of making a mistake, when you’re not, you know, thinking that you don’t know what you’re talking about, and like, what are people going to know? So, I personally, I find all of that fascinating, but I find it also really powerful, because that means that we can, we can use that knowledge, and we can leverage that mechanism for our own for our own uses.
Mitch Simon 11:51
That’s great. I got a question. I love I love this. And I’m definitely going to check out that Ted Talk. Yeah. And I am trying to figure out, Denise, how you play a saxophone in an MRI machine. But I guess I’ll get this. Right.
Denise Jacobs 12:05
He actually had them work with keyboards. Okay. So he actually literally had like a keyboard that he like, had wired up so that they could play it while they were laying down. And
Mitch Simon 12:20
yeah, I’m interested I, you know, so I do improv, not music with my voice, because my musical talents are not that great. We, a lot of us now are at home working from home, we will be working from home for a very long time, not forever. How would I working from home where Gosh, I’m alone? Or Gosh, my kids are yelling in my ear. Or Gosh, just you know, like, if I’m working with you, Denise, and you’re I think you’re on the east coast on the west coast. And I don’t know what you’re thinking, and I’m not sure if I say something to be okay. How do I overcome that? That that thinking to actually put myself forward? Because Because it’s, you know, maybe I know you, we’ve been friends, but now you’re so far away, and I’ve kind of lost touch. And it just feels very scary for me to put myself out there. Not knowing what’s going to happen, especially online.
Denise Jacobs 13:17
Right. But so, so one of the things I mean, especially because you’re an improv person, I mean, you never know what’s going to happen. That’s kind of the beauty of, of improv and doing improv training is that you realize everything is improv. Every life is improv, right? Like, I don’t know what you guys are going to say next, I have an idea. But I literally don’t know what the next thing is going to come out of your mouth. And so the in the same kind of vein to just like, look at everything. And I think too, that’s one of the attitudes that we’ve had to adopt and adapt to, during this period of time. Is this, this kind of attitude of practice? And this attitude of we’ll see, and this attitude, I don’t know, all the answers, and this attitude of I don’t know what’s coming, right? Like we’ve really had to embrace living with uncertainty and becoming more comfortable with uncertainty. Also, I would like to point out that we have always had to live with uncertainty. And we have the fact that we thought that things were certain is and always has been, and always will be an illusion.
Unknown Speaker 14:35
But yes,
Denise Jacobs 14:36
here, but I think people are more, you know, more in touch with how uncertain things can be and how we need to you know, basically build up our muscles to deal with uncertainty, to have more adaptability and to have more flexibility and also to have less Self judgment and less self criticism, right? Because that’s one of the things you were saying that just like, what can How do I know? You know, what if I say something wrong? What if you do say something wrong the same way that you would any other time? You know, work with it. And then you can always ask questions and that you can always yes and right, like, that’s the
Mitch Simon 15:26
beauty of Yes. And I’d also like to ask you, how does a, how does a leader or a company influence their teams to be able to have that attitude of like, well, I don’t know, we’ll see. Anything’s you know, anything could change.
Denise Jacobs 15:44
I’m so so it’s really cool. Because I just finished writing and filming my latest course, for LinkedIn learning, which is developing your creativity as a leader. And that will be coming out in a couple of months, I think, probably in late in April, maybe it’s
great.
It’s exciting. It’s, it’s, I’m really happy with the course. And one of the things that that I talk about a lot in this course, is first as a leader modeling behavior, to basically give your permission to the rest of your team and the folks underneath you to, to engage in that behavior as well. And so essentially, beginning to, you know, laying the foundations for creating the culture of something. And so, you know, as a leader, I think it is that, that giving yourself permission, and knowing that there’s power and strength in saying, We don’t actually have all the answers, we don’t really know, we’re figuring this out as we go along. very open to input, or in ideas, because, you know, this is this is something that we’re all working for, and working to, together. Now.
And, and so then we open up your role model it right. So what are some of the actual techniques? Do you actually put it on the table? Listen, let’s all create a space for creativity.
Yeah, actually, there’s, there’s that there’s, you know, basically, like, really being aware of so one thing is being aware of your mindset, and, you know, seeing if you have a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset, and then working to kind of, to start developing a growth mindset. Another one is, and this is one of the things like there’s actually some really kind of cool and fun ways, I think, to start to first develop your own creativity, and then to, to then, you know, model that, so that and then create the structure for this for other people in the organization, one of them in addition to the mindset, but another one is to, to start developing your curiosity. So to kind of start sparking curiosity and to like, really, like, look at things, I call it, releasing the tyranny of the expert. Hmm. So, you know, a lot of times when you feel like you, you’re supposed to be an expert, then you don’t allow, first of all, you’re faking it, you’re feigning, being an expert, you’re doing what you think an expert should do, rather than actually being the expert. And then to a lot of times you block yourself from input that can be very valuable input. Right, right. And so when you get to a place where you start being, like, you know, let me look at this and, and see what it is that I can’t that I, I know, I, I studied this, or I know, I’ve seen this, you know, I feel like I’ve seen this 100 times before, but what is it in here that I haven’t seen before? Right? And then also, again, to encourage the folks in your teams to do that, like, hey, let’s let’s try to find what we don’t see like that. We don’t know or we don’t see. One of the examples that I like to give for that is to actually have people you know that the phrase, I know what, like the backside of my hand. Yes. What’s the last time you actually looked at the backside of your hand?
Mitch Simon 19:49
I don’t need to I know it like the backside of my hand. I don’t. Hey.
Denise Jacobs 19:54
So like I’m actually like, actually will tell people like look at the backside of your hand and Most likely, it’s been a while. And there’s all kinds of things where you like, Oh, yeah, like I have this. I have this, like, dark black spot on the back of my hand, I think because a pencil got poked into my hand when I was a kid and the graphite still embedded into the skin. I have another one actually like that on another part of my finger. And it’s like, and it’s like, every time I look at my hand, I’m like, Oh, yeah, that’s there. Oh, look at this. Oh, look at that scar. I totally forgot about that. Oh, and so it’s like rediscovering the familiar. Oh, I like that. Yeah. Um, and then another thing too, from that is that, and you know, you hear people talk about failure, failing, forward, failing, fast, and often. Bla bla bla bla bla. But one of the things that I feel like you don’t hear very often when people talk about failure, is the fact that failure is how we learn. That failure, it’s only through failure. I mean, we you, you can learn things by doing stuff well, but it doesn’t register the same way as failure does. And failure forces you to be creative failure forces creative problem solving, when you’re like, why didn’t this work? And then you have to go and you have to look at all the things and then you start to explore other options that you would make sure, yes, he hasn’t fail. So I also encourage people to reframe failure, not because of all this trendy, you know, buzzword kind of laden approaches that deal with failure, but because failure helps you learn, because you learn from failure. And because when you fail, you end up being able to do something better later.
Mitch Simon 21:54
What are what are some practices that you would have I know that in improv one of our practices, which actually is really difficult is to is to throw a beanbag to another person, and that person has to not catch it? Oh, this is the funniest, because it’s like, How can I not catch it? It takes a while actually, to get the people around the table to actually not catch it into make a mistake. What are some practices that you you have that would encourage people to reframe failure, take on failure, and learn from it?
Denise Jacobs 22:25
Actually, I think some of them is actually to fail on purpose, to actually deliberately try to do something wrong or poorly, I actually teach that as, as a creativity exercise to like to, I mean, if you were just talking about something like, you know, kind of a creativity exercise to actually, like, make something as bad as you possibly can make it. You know, if you’re like, if you’re like, I actually love having doing this exercise in my workshops, and I’ll say, I want you to write the worst poem that you can possibly write, I’m gonna give you guys like, three minute test,
Mitch Simon 23:02
right? Imagine horrible. I’m gonna do this all wrong. I can’t do it. I’m gonna do it all wrong.
Denise Jacobs 23:08
Right, right. I’m gonna do I’m gonna write it horribly wrong.
Mitch Simon 23:11
Right, horribly good.
Denise Jacobs 23:13
Right. And the things that people have come up with, I’m like, that’s a fan. That’s a great poem. Like, what is I actually can’t see any problems with this. Right? Right. And so there’s, there’s that aspect of it, but then it’s kind of like, okay, but so then what is wrong about this? What is bad about this? Okay, then, in order to move forward? Don’t do that. Right. Like, yeah, like to kind of have it have it set you have it more, like, you know, top of mind to know what to avoid or what your or what it is that you’re actually shooting for.
Great exercise. Yeah. In fact, do you have another one that doesn’t have to be for this whole create this whole creativity? What do you encourage the leaders to be doing, that they’re not doing now?
Well, I mean, a lot of this is this. You know, first of all, getting in touch with your own creativity. So this, you know, instead of so many people have this concept of, well, I’m not creative, I’m analytical. I’m not creative. I’m this I’m not creative. I’m a leader. I’m a you know, I’m a CEO or an executive like I’m a creative person is like, well, actually you are. So look at see how you are creative. And then, like I said, some of these kind of more kind of subtle and unusual ways to develop creativity. So the create the curiosity, the failure, the seeking out surprise, actually have people keep a surprise journal. And that kind of go along goes along with that that curiosity, like, what has surprised you today? You know, what did you expect? And then what was a surprise? And then what not only surprised you about what kind of ended up happening today? What surprised you about yourself? Like, did you have a reaction or a response or anything that you were surprised about? Mm hmm. So actually to have people like, seek surprise, to intend surprise and seek it out, instead of saying, I know, you know, because that’s it, everybody gets into this gets into a rut. And they start to think, been there done that seen everything, you can’t surprise me. And it’s like, well, actually, if you’re, if you’re paying attention, you’re looking for it, you will be surprised. So seeking that out, because that sparks new ideas, right. Another one is to actually understand the mechanics of flow, and what causes a flow state to happen so that you can try to engineer it. Now, the one thing that I like to warn people is that you can’t make flow happen when you can lay the foundations and set the stage for flow. And the one of the things I think that is the most important is that if you if you look back to times where you’ve had a flow state, and you’ve been in the zone, what was happening, which you didn’t realize at the time, because you didn’t care, if you were in the flow, you’re like, I’m not going to think about like, why this is happening. I’m just in an exciting, right, but that there’s this wonderful nexus point of skill and challenge. So it’s that your skill level matches the level of the challenge. And when you are walking that fine line and kind of in doing that dance, what you do is you get into something called a flow channel. And the way you stay in the flow channel is to just make sure that these two things are in balance with each other. As soon as your skill level exceeds the level of the challenge, you will get out of a flow, get out of flow. And as soon as your challenge exceeds your skill level, you will get out of flow. So I think that’s also really cool. The other thing is that, you know, the other thing, you probably were there that you didn’t realize is that you had goals, you had an objective that you’re trying to reach that your reach, you were able to focus so you had, you know, concentrated time where you you pretty much, at least believed that you weren’t going to get interrupted or you engineered it so that you weren’t getting interrupted. And then that you’ve got this feedback loop happening. And that’s really cool too, like that, you got to make sure that you’ve got the feedback, because back to the failure thing, when you have when you have something that doesn’t quite work out, you can adjust in real time. So you’ve got that feedback, and then you have a sense of control. And then you’ve got the reward that comes from from either actually creating the thing that you’re creating, or getting to a you know, a point of completion, or just the process in itself is rewarding.
almost getting, again, it’s a practice thing of almost getting used to those surprises. And feeling strong. Go ahead, throw more surprises at me, right? I’m getting better and better at dealing with and
being delighted with them. Right. Like in a lot of ways when you make those. It’s that’s that’s discovery, right? That’s like a like a like a scientific discovery. You’ve got this thing happening or you know, whatever kind of discovery and then you’re like, Oh, my God, I had no idea. Yeah, right. And then that that keeps that actually feeds the process.
What would you recommend? What do you recommend in this new hybrid environment? So I’m a leader, I’ve got some people online, you know, all over the world, whatever. And we’re trying to get things done. And I want to spark creativity, for the reasons that you just shared, right. It gives you a space, there’s no judgment, which is fabulous, because now you have people from all over and you don’t want judgment. Crimean So what advice do you give?
Well, um, so there’s a couple a couple of things. One, some of the stuff that that I recommend for people is an especially in this kind of collective creativity place is to, first of all like to leverage the power of play. So, so many people, you know, take work so seriously, but they don’t acknowledge that people actually do more and they do better. When they have play elements, and that when people are, you know, when like work becomes play, it becomes more fun than fun. Right, like work that is play is more fun than fun.
Ginny Bianco-Mathis 30:15
Yeah,
Denise Jacobs 30:16
yeah. And, and so I love, I love kind of the idea of working play or working kind of fun things into or you know, enjoyable things or things that kind of sparked that into, like your meetings or into your, you know, sessions or whatever. If you have like regular zoom sessions are, you know, maybe even people sometimes, I mean, I know I do this, I obviously I don’t work in a team. But I have a friend who has a regular writing zoom. That happens every day at nine o’clock in the morning. And whenever I am working on something, just to have somebody there, when we come in, we check in what are you working on? I’m working on this, what are you working on working on that, okay, set the timer for 20 minutes, we do a sprint, where they’re kind of like almost like parallel play type of thing. And then we check in, you know, we take a break, we check in and then we do sprints again, you know, you might end up setting up like a work sprint, like a regular work sprint for people that they could just set up a zoom. And so even if you’re not interacting with people that you just set this timer, but maybe before you start to do the work, like let’s say it’s a two hour sprint time, or it’s an hour and a half sprint time, maybe for the first 10 minutes, you can have people actually do something with their hands like Lego or coloring or something like that, that just is like, you know, putting something together or taking something apart. That that kind of put your brain to a certain space, where then you were actually able to better problem solving and focus and concentrate afterwards.
Just put on some hip hop music and go at it,
potentially. But you know, some people like I personally, I don’t like to work with music on. I find it too distracting, especially unless it’s music with. So for me unless it’s music with no lyrics. And, and it needs to be fairly unfamiliar. So. So like I can work to, I can work to jazz, I can work to classical music, I can work to like it’s called something called lo fi hip hop, which is like, just kind of like, nice, you know, baselines and like Bs, but usually no lyrics or words. And it’s just kind of like a groove on in the background. I can do that. But if I need to read or focus or concentrate, I can’t have anything on at all.
Yeah, and that’s what folks need to find out about them rice as they play with their own creativity,
right. Some people work really well with coffee house sounds in the back and stuff like that. There’s actually something called I think caffeine. It used to be it used to be there. I’m not quite sure if it still exists.
Mitch Simon 33:20
Yeah, I’ve listened. I’ve listened sometimes to the coffeehouse soundcheck over and over and over again, it’s it actually works.
Denise Jacobs 33:28
Yeah. Yeah, like it’s, um, it’s, um, it was actually, it was actually like a website that you can go to Oh, coffee, calm, cough. Cough if a tea. Coffee.
Mitch Simon 33:43
Yes.
Unknown Speaker 33:46
Yeah. Yes.
Ginny Bianco-Mathis 33:49
That’s good. Hey,
Mitch Simon 33:49
what is the what is, um, you know, because we’re getting to the end of the podcast, I was just wondering, like, three, three tips that you could really help out either leaders or members of a team on how to, you know, basically unleash your creativity. But But really, how do you appreciate that, that you actually are a creative person? And what would be the things to then start doing so okay. I okay, I’m going to listen to you. And, you know, so Denise says, I’m creative. What’s the first things I need to do to really, you know, not be so afraid of this incredible power that I have within me?
Denise Jacobs 34:31
Well, so the first thing that I was saying and I you know, I said it earlier is to figure out where you’re creative, right? Because that’s a lot of times people think people say they’re not creative because they don’t know where it is that they’re creative. Now, one of the tips that I give people is to look at where they go into flow. So what what what situations what things where is it that you you hit a flow state is it When you’re writing something, you know writing a report, because some people do, is it when you’re working with numbers? Is it when you’re talking with people? Is it when you’re strategizing? Is it when you’re designing? Is it like, what is it? Because there’s that there’s that place where you know, like, and even if you think, okay, I can’t remember the last time I went to a flow state, then you’re like, Okay, what are the tasks that you absolutely like to do? And what are the ones that you absolutely hate doing? Right? That you’re just like, how about if you take a stick, and put me in that pie in it with it, having to like, work out this budget, or whatever. So so. So when you get to that place, and you start to have that awareness of what it is that you enjoy, and what it is that you don’t enjoy, and then probably what you enjoy are also the places where you can hit a flow state, then you can say, Ah, this is where I’m creative. This is where I do my best creative problem solving.
Ginny Bianco-Mathis 36:03
Right? That’s great,
Denise Jacobs 36:05
right? And then you can take that and you can start to capitalize upon it. Right, you can try to expand more of that time during your day, and you can try to contract more of the other ones. And I always say to people, when you start to discover that, then what you do is you write a to don’t list, you write a list of things not to do, and that you on those on that list, it’s something that you’re either going to delete, delegate, or alter. So it could be something where you’re like, I actually don’t need to do this. And this is ridiculous, I don’t even know why I’m doing it, I’m just not going to do. Or you delegated, you can find somebody else who can do it, either, you know, outsource it, or maybe if you’re working on a team, you can talk to them. And you can be like, Hey, you know, Cecilia, I know, you’re really good at this, and I’m not good at it. Like, is there? What do you don’t like to do, and maybe you can find something where you can swap out, it should be like a girl, I if I have to do another, you know, like, if I have to design another or come up with another, like, you know, outline for this, like, outlines are my jam, okay, check it out. You take this, I’ll take that, you know, whatever, that you can do that or you can alter it. And maybe there’s a way that you’ve been doing it, that you can do it differently. Maybe there’s an app that will help maybe there’s a process that you can learn, or something that will change that will transform that so that it becomes more than becomes easier for you. Great,
I love how, and I’m probably going to have to now read the book more closely. I love how you’ve taken this concept of creativity that we all just sort of see in the air. Right? And you say no, sit down. Where? Where’s your flow? Uh huh. Well, what do you mean? Well, look at these things. That is a fabulous path to take someone down to pinpoint it and start being
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I think creativity kind of gets a bad rap in the respect that people think it’s this like, ethereal, you know, you know, like bubbles, like chasing, you know, bubbles being blown.
Ginny Bianco-Mathis 38:24
Yes. And it’s like, no,
Denise Jacobs 38:25
it’s like, it’s actually there’s, there’s all this great science around it, there’s all these great practices. And, and, and it’s just about, like raising your level of awareness, kind of like I was saying before,
right. And if nothing else, that’s what last this past year has done. Because we’ve had to nest and reflect this whole raising this level of awareness, which is necessary for these kinds of things to come through. And I love your piece on the research. I saw you talk about that, and that there’s this actual space and it will quiet down. You can silence all those shoulds and all the awkwardness. Mm hmm. is fabulous. No, thank you. Thanks, Mitch.
Mitch Simon 39:13
I think I think this is awesome. I am I am really excited and encouraged you know, because I always want to bring my creativity to my work and and i and i love the idea that you know a lot of us are just afraid to take risks were afraid to put it out there and and i and i like i said in the in the questions. I’m challenged because I’m you know, further away from the mothership that might encourage me to take fewer risks, because I you know, I don’t want to upset someone. In fact, in fact, the Wall Street Journal article today was about being funny at work, be funny, but you don’t want to upset anybody. And so that’s, that’s my You know, it’s it’s one of these things where, you know, I’m isolated, I don’t want to upset anybody, then how can I move towards being more creative because as you said, Denise, that’s my jam is to be much more creative. And that’s, in fact, how I contribute to the team in greater ways. So that’s that, for me is really, from a team anywhere perspective. My greatest concern is how to make that happen to be in flow, and how team leaders can encourage that when we’re in this new paradigm of everyone being dispersed and not having that personal interaction like we used to have.
Denise Jacobs 40:41
Well, and you know, that one of the things that you said, I mean, that just as kind of a parting Kant’s idea is that, when you contribute, and you share your ideas, that means that people can benefit from it. If you hold on to your ideas, and you’re kind of miserly with them, or you’re too afraid to share them, then this potentially extraordinarily beneficial idea isn’t actually going out and proliferating throughout your, your, your network with it throughout your group. And so then people lose out on it. So that’s the other thing I would think is, you know, do you want to risk withholding something that can be very valuable? Right. You know, it’s almost like it’s almost like it’s food, you know, people people need to eat, and you’ve got something that’s like, you know, tasty and nutritious. But you’re afraid that, you know, like, somebody doesn’t like beets? I don’t like yes, personally. But beets are good for you. And some people love them. So bring your beats search along for the people who can who people who like beats are going to be all over them. And for the people like me who are like hard pass. That’s fine. But you know, so So bring your bring your knowledge, bring your tasty and nutritious and delicious knowledge. great
Ginny Bianco-Mathis 42:05
analogy. Yeah.
Mitch Simon 42:07
I love it. I love that.
Denise Jacobs 42:08
Yeah. Well, thank you so much. This has been fascinating. Of course, now I’m going to be thinking about creativity all afternoon. And NBT That is correct. And
Mitch Simon 42:23
yeah, I’m okay. hater.
Denise Jacobs 42:26
Yeah. And I’m looking forward to getting this out to everybody. So that just as you said, they can take advantage of hearing this and putting it and incorporating it into their lives. Wonder. Thanks again. Thank
you.
Mitch Simon 42:43
Yeah, thank you, Denise. And thank you to all our listeners. If you’ve enjoyed this episode of tea man or anywhere, please share this episode with Denise Jacobs, who all of your friends and colleagues and even those people who don’t like beets, but we’ll see you next time next week on another episode of team anywhere. Thank you so much.
And I’m looking for the
Ginny Bianco-Mathis 43:14
Yeah, where is it?
Unknown Speaker 43:16
I’m looking at my cursor. There. It is.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
