E145 – Creativity & Burnout (w Claire Bridges)

so welcome to today's podcast. We're having a great conversation. Today. We're going to be speaking about a few things that are fairly close to my heart, that I think are really interesting. We're going to be exploring the concept of creativity and looking a little bit more at what creative roles are and what's involved in that creative process, and looking a little bit beyond that. We're going to look at how burnout might occur in those types of roles, and then the sort of relationship between creativity and burnout, and how we can explore burnout for ourselves and start to look at mitigating some of the factors associated with burnout. And we've got a great guest today. We're going to be speaking today to Claire bridges from now, go create. She's the founder of now. Go create. Claire, could you say hi to the audience and say a little bit more about yourself and your background. Hi

James and everyone. Yes, hello, and thanks very much for having me. So yeah, my name is Claire, and I am Chief spark of now go create. We are a training consultancy focusing on creativity and innovation, and I've been in business for about a decade doing that, prior to running my own company, I have been working in the creative industry, so in mainly in PR agencies and marketing agencies, for around 18 years, and I was in the management team for a long time. I ran the teams, many working consumer PR and then I turned my hand to becoming a creative director, was one of the first female creative directors working in a PR agency, and actually one of the first people in that role in a PR industry. And then in the past decade, have turned my hand to helping others to be more creative brilliant.

Well, it sounds like you're in a great place to speak to us about creativity. So that's fantastic. Creativity is something that I think is interesting. It's a word that's out there. And obviously we can think about creation and a bit of a root in to create. But when we think about creativity as a process, and almost creativity being a job, being something that we do, being an output, what does it really mean to you? What does that process like? What is creativity at its core? Well,

it's a really interesting question. And I think because your your podcast is the world of work, I think if we, if we bring it into the workplace, when we talk about creativity, it can seem like this big, amorphous blob, this thing that's very hard to nail to the wall. And I think if we were talking about, you know, grace and Perry's work, or Banksy, or, you know, Mozart. We could be here for, you know, literally, this could be the podcast that never ends. But I think, in terms of business, what we're talking about is applied creativity, and that really means more about problem solving, critical thinking and creative thinking. And these are all things that the World Economic Forum has a future of jobs report that they update every year. And having bobbed around those three things, having bobbed around within that list of the skills that we need as human beings to tackle business problems, societal problems, global problems, they are now the top three skills that the WL, the World Economic Forum says that we need and I think that's a really important distinction from probably even when I started working in my career, of what it takes to be a creative person in inverted commas. I fundamentally believe, as somebody who trains people in innovation and creativity, that that you can be given framework skills, and you can be help. You can be helped to develop your creativity. So just like you can anything else, you know, I'm learning the guitar at the moment. I'm probably never going to be Eric Clapton, but I can learn the chords, and I can put them together, and I can get better and better at that. And I think it's an important distinction to make that, particularly in business, is that everyone is equipped with the with the, you know, the ability to be creative, but throughout life, whether it's childhood or university or even in the workplace, I think we get put into these categories of haves and have nots and then, and I've been a have and a have not, depending on the context in different companies, but I don't think that's very helpful, and it certainly isn't helpful if you're you don't have somebody with a job title, Creative Director or creative in your company, which, unless you're working in the advertising industry, you're quite unlikely to do. Yeah,

that's interesting. And you know, we've, we've done some, had some conversations with a range of people in academia working in that innovation and creativity space who very much echo some of that. A toolkit based approach for some of this. And I think you're right that bringing this into the world work is really helpful framing for us. If I were to ask you, if we think about creativity in the workplace, if we were to think of the output of creativity, what is the output that we're trying to achieve through that process of creativity, or what are the multiple outputs? What is the output

creativity? Yeah, again, it's a really good question, I think so I I tend to think of it. I do a lot of work in with the creative industries, and in particularly the marketing side. So I work with a lot of communications agencies, a lot of comms teams, in in house, in brands. Also work with quite a lot of charities. And I think that's probably a useful way to think about it in some ways, because there's a definition of creativity that I like, which you'll see sort of brings this background, which is from Sir Ken Robinson, who, sadly, is no longer with us, but he might know his TED talk on creativity in schools, yeah, is still one of the most viewed. And he talks about the fact that creativity needs to be as important as literacy is in schools, and he said that in in his view, creativity is a process of having original ideas that have value. And the reason I like that definition is because it's very easy to break down and actually put into quite actionable steps or process. So the first part is that it's a process. So yeah, there are things that we do and that we can do that are repeatable. And then the idea that it's about original ideas. How new is your idea? You know, how novel is it? And then the other part to that is the value. So if you're working with a brand or an organization, to your point about outputs, then that that's often going to be about a the value is going to be a pound or $1 amount. So am I selling more Krispy Kreme donuts? You know, it's Black Friday in a few weeks. Times are we selling more stuff? But when it comes to say an organization, I'm lucky enough to have done some work with the UN HCR in this past year, and also UNICEF, and so for them, or for other organizations, the output is a behavior change, and the value is in changing our behavior, either to consume less, arguably, and obviously it's cop. Whilst we're speaking at the moment, it's cop. So the output, the value there, would be about how we change our behavior to help save the planet. So can we recycle more? Can we consume less, and so on. Or the value may well be in if you were political party, the value is in persuading you that you should vote for me rather than the other guy or girl. So I think it's just really useful to sort of bring it back down to how new or original are your ideas, and what value are they bringing. And so to me, that would be the output. But as I say, the value can change. Another way to think of it. And I was just talking to a group this morning about, this is the idea of impact. What impact will your have? Will your idea have on the world? You know, will it be an idea that is impactful, again, in terms of making something more sustainable? So you might be working in a not for profit, but that's the impact. Or again, this morning we were talking about, we were actually talking about brands, very popular brands, of things that sold in tins. And, you know, the value is therefore, then about, you know, how do we sell more of that? So, but I think that starts to help. I really like the idea of having a sort of definition that you can then pull into the the execution as well. And that's as good as any that I've come across. Yeah,

that's, that's a lovely definition, and, and I guess if we think about those original ideas, something that came to my mind while you were speaking, there was probably, for me, a little bit of a broadening to say that there's probably something to do with original ideas in the context that we're operating in. So I think that borrowing of ideas, you know that that sort of, you know, cross sectionality, intersectionality of ideas can can be a really powerful thing when it comes to creating ideas.

Yeah, absolutely. I think context is the really important bit which often gets missed, which is what is original. So we can't all be working on unless we're working, you know, for Tesla, or, you know, we're working on something which is new to the world and is literally original in any way that you think about it. Often that newness, or that originality as exactly as you said, comes from the context. So something that's original in one context may not be original in another. It may just, I think a good example of that is something like pop up stores. You know, pop up stores like, I think the first pop up store was around 2530 years ago, and it was for a for jeans brand, and it was, you know, the idea that you didn't have to have, this was even probably pre e tails. So the reason that, the fact that you didn't have to have your own dedicated store, but you could create these kind of pop ups, created a real buzz. And was limited, limited supply, and therefore, you know, scarcity and all of that stuff. If you were working in a retailer now, and you talked about the idea of a pop up, and you were in a brainstorm, everyone would roll their eyes and say, Oh, seriously, where's the newness in that? But if you talk about a pop up doing something else, perhaps, you know, restaurant pop ups, for example, again, quite COVID. And now, but they weren't common before. So I think, you know, there's, it's, again, it's about timing and context and the space that it's in, and that's the the idea of surprise. The idea is surprising. Oh, yeah, I wasn't expecting that. That's often why we'll say something is created, because it surprises us. Yeah.

So potentially, some of those new links between things when we've been speaking, you've been speaking a lot about your working experience, which is in that creative space of advertising, marketing, PR, things like that. If we look at this definition of original ideas with value, I guess a question, particularly if we're thinking about what we have said about key skills for the future. I guess a question for me would be, what roles do you think have scope for creativity? Or where should we see creativity? What types of roles that exist in the wider world do you think benefit from having creativity? Is it just limited to these creative roles, or is it broader? And

no, I definitely don't think it is just limited to creative roles. In actual fact, that's an area that I feel really passionately about, in terms of helping people to unleash their own creativity is that I work with a very large range of companies and individuals. I say so quite a lot of those outputs, for example, might be about selling something more, but it might be about when, when we think about creativity and innovation, which obviously really closely linked together, the question that we always ask, and we think about the ideas, the types of ideas is, do I want to do it differently, or do I want to do it better? And I think you could ask that question, and then, what ideas do we need? And I think if you're in any any area that you're working in, and in actual fact, I think a lot of public sector, not for profit, all of those sorts of areas where sometimes people don't want to take risks, they don't want to do things differently. They're almost the spaces where we do need to think about doing something, not just differently, because differently suggests there's nothing wrong with differently, but differently suggests taking something and moving it the needle slightly, whereas, sorry, doing it differently means not doing the opposite of that. So if I say that again, sorry, doing it better means taking something and then moving the needle slightly. And I always think, you know, it's a very kind of, probably old fashioned reference now, but to think of a washing powder box or something that says, you know, new and improved on it. You know, everything's new and improved. We're not quite sure what that is, but it's new and improved. Whereas, actually, if you think about washing powder, you know what? 30 years ago, the only way the washing powder was literally powder. Now it's a dried, you know, that to build on that point about doing things that are good for society, the environment, as well as for business, you know, now tablets, we've gone from kind of liquid tablets, haven't we, so we've gone to liquid then liquid tablets, and now we're moving away from needing water to be transported all over the country, and it's kind of gone back to water, but in really concentrated tablet form. So you could argue all of that is doing it differently. Sorry, is doing it better? But there's also a point at which you know, where, where is it? Is it an original idea again, or is it something that's breakthrough, so different, or or or incremental? And I find that really interesting. It's like, so if you take something like the iPhone as well, you know, people will always say, Oh, the iPhone is complete breakthrough invention, and actually, but then you say, Well, yeah, the very first iteration of that might have been, but actually since then, we're not. We're now on iPhone 12, you know. And actually the iPhone is made up of all sorts of different aspects of something else. We've got email in there from one provider. We've got the phone provided by Sony, you know. So it's actually still that thing that you referenced earlier, which is combining things, yeah. And

the iPhone is a great example about, I think, something like, you know, 90% of a core patents in the original one were from DARPA, right? They're like military tech that couldn't be commercialized. So they're about creative spark. Was for seeing the links and seeing the opportunity. And that is an original idea with value in itself. We find all these other things and bring them together. And that's a really creative thing. My background is, I'm, you know, originally by first training, I'm an accountant, and a lot of people in this sort of accountancy profession feel that it's a non creative space, right? I mean, like some roles end up being slightly labeled in terms of potential in some of them, and I've always found that's a little bit of a tragic thing, because in reality, there's a huge amount of creativity in what a lot of professional finance people do, because nearly everything that's involved in that role is solving problems, which I think is probably really closely related to creativity. Coming up with a solution is probably a new way to do something, at least within your group, that adds value. So I think, I think helping people feel that they, I guess, have the right, or have permission, to think of themselves as creative. Is is a helpful thing. I think, do you find it in your work that people don't feel that they can be creative? I feel they like need to be able to paint a picture to be creative, or something like that. What's your experience? Yeah,

yeah. I think, I think it's a really interesting point. And I think it does come from, I think, again, it. Comes from this sort of, there's a stereotype or an idea of what a creative and adverted commerce person is, and it does probably come from the arts. And the fact that, you know, you might be a sort of, if you're, well, in these days, it would be, you know, you're a bespectacled, sort of bearded person working in Shoreditch, and you know, you work in an agency and all of that, all of that good stuff. But just like all other stereotypes there might be, there might be a kernel of truth in there that's become a very easy and sort of very lazy shorthand, but it, but, yeah, but it's, it's not, it's not really like that. I think what you're talking about a lot of is, I mean, I've got quite a young child, and I can see as he's going through school, you know, there's, there's no doubt that when you sit with a group of five year olds, and you asked them to imagine, we did. I did. It. Made up a story of my son in bed last night, and it was just absolutely hilarious, just in the sense that there's no rules, there's no constraints, you know, it doesn't mean that a pig can't be flying into outer space and then be caught by a monkey and brought back down by the dog. You know, why can that not happen? Because they don't have the rules, they don't have the boxes, they don't have the constraints. And what happens is we sort of go through, in some ways compliance, in many ways compliance, or learning the rules, is the opposite of what we need to be creative is to just look at what the rules and constraints are and see whether we can break them. And it's interesting, you're talking about accountants, because, you know, when I was working in some of the American firms, you might be familiar being an ex accountant with Sarbanes Oxley, you know, yeah, which is when people go getting too creative with the rules, and then it's just like, No, no, we need to rein that back again. But interestingly, there was what some of the models of creativity that we now have sort of proved by live MRI scanning and neuroscience and all those developments in the past, even 10 years, there was a very famous mathematician called pankari, and it was actually some of his original work around creativity and the creative process that has been proven by neuroscience now. And he was talking about it because, yeah, in maths, you are there. And with accountancy, like you were talking about, there's still, there's still, there's many, many ways to get to the same answer. And again, it's interesting. In schools now, they're much more interested in the workings out than they are in the answer. If anyone's got kids is listening out there, you know, you it's not one, one plus one equals two. It might be how, you know, I'm terrible at maths, by the way, so. But there's so many different ways to get to that. And they're interested in how the child gets to it, rather than the right answer. And I think that's that's quite helpful.

Yeah, I don't I'm not sure, like now is the time for for this conversation. But I my sense is that there is a relational pattern between sort of societal trends and the ability to be creative and sort of conformity. You know, when you were speaking about conformity, and as children, we learn to fit into that box, that there is that correlation between how much we adhere to the box and how rigid the box that we exist within is and our own ability to be creative. And so I'll talk a little bit about this and then move it on. My sense is that one of the educational challenges that's being and has been being faced by China over the last 10 or 15 years is that ability to do the creative piece. So there's been a lot of core skill and replicative work and production and efficiency, but as a result of sort of educational processing system in China, over the last couple of decades, there's been that gap in what has been considered to be that innovative, creative space. And I guess that goes back to the question of the importance of context in our sort of social and working context and creativity. And if we bring that back to organizations, do you, I guess, in your role, see a variety in the sort of culture of organizations and how that contributes to creativity of individuals in

there. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's a really interesting point, because quite often someone will come to me. They might come to me from, say, the L and D team or the HR team, and someone in the business will have a requirement and will have said to them, Look, we need to get better at creativity. It might be, you know, all of this, obviously, all that the COVID has presented people with challenges and opportunities in relation to, you know, how we do things differently or better. But there's, you know, a change is required. But quite often that people will, yeah, people will come to me and then settle from, as I say, from as I say, from those sort of different roles, and say, what we need more creative. We need more creativity. We need to update our products, or we need to update our services, or we actually just need to, we need new products and services, and we need you to help them. You know, look, look at what they may be. And so you can do any amount of training. You could do any amount of training in the skills that we talked about earlier, which is, I can give you a toolkit for problem solving, for critical thinking and for helping you to be more creative. But one of those aspects of being creative is being able to tolerate ambiguity, or to put it in layman's terms, you know, like not knowing the answer. And a lot of organizations are do, do not, do not want that amongst their they want certain. Certainty, and with creativity comes uncertainty. So there is a, there is a kind of basic dilemma in a lot of organizations where they'll say, we want to be more creative and we want our workforce to be more creative, but what we want, oh, and then we want it in a nice, neat box that says we will be more creative and sort of break glass here. And so trying to manage that, particularly in a risk averse business is really difficult, because what I find will happen is that you can only skill people so far, and then then it comes about mindset and permission, as you said right at the beginning, if I go sharing, you know, tools and ways to start, if you like, all change, all creativity is challenging the status quo in some way, whether it's a tiny, tiny bit to the left or the right, or whether it's completely somewhere else, outside of the space that you're working in, if the if the leadership of that company, if the culture says it's it's all about business as usual. This is how we make our money since how we've always made our money, then trying to challenge that is difficult. And people, there's a combination of, I think, either risk aversion or complacency. And, you know, there's, if you look at something like Blockbuster, and then you look at Netflix, you know, Netflix apparently tried to buy blockbuster, and they said, no, no, we don't. We don't. We don't need that. Thanks very much. You know, we don't need that way of thinking, whether it's Nokia, whether it's Blackberry, you know, these brands, even Kodak. Kodak is a tragic example of a company that was so innovative and first what they did and then kept saying, No, we don't need to modernize. So it's that balance in an organization between business as usual, what we do now, and what makes our money now. I sometimes call it like jam today and jam tomorrow. You've always got to be looking, particularly in this technologically advanced age that we live in, in what the jam tomorrow is, and and, you know, COVID has done that for my business. Personally, for my business, I was a face to face business for eight and a half years, and overnight, I was not a face to face business. So I have had to make those changes myself, take my own medicine or and make change or not survive. So, you know, but that's not, I think it's interesting when we're talking about failure, and we were talking about, when we started talking about this, and we're talking about, you know, the idea of how to fail is that sometimes, you know, failure is not fun. It's not fun in any way, shape or form, but sometimes we have to be able to to to take that. Somebody said to me, once you know, if you lose or if you have a loss, if you have a failure, don't lose the lesson. And, and, you know, I think that's a really useful way to reframe it and and to think about it. But yeah, you have a dichotomy in all organizations, unless they have a plan for creativity and innovation, that they want more of it, and they want their people to do it, but you can't have a good can't have a group of, you know, if you were 100 strong, let's just say organizational 3000 strong. You can't have 3000 Mavericks running around trying to challenge the status quo every day, because they wouldn't turn up to work on time. If they turned up at all, they'd be saying, No, we can't do that. We won't do that. We're doing it a different way, and it would be totally unmanageable. So it's having that. That's where we go back to process, like we talked about earlier. It puts things in place that enable that to happen. But it's a rub. It's always a tension. It's always a tension in a business,

yeah, and that whole point about, you know, the dilemma that organization space as innovators, is really important. And when you were speaking there about not losing the lesson from failure. I think one of the things that we've spoken about a few times is turning what we do into experiments. And you can have a successful experiment, that is a failure, right? I mean, the experiment is success, the outcome is a failure. But that's great, a great way, I think, to think about this and certainty and ambiguity is a topic that I've been exploring with a few people recently, and I think it's fascinating and and I guess a question for you, is it possible to be creative if you are 100% certain, or do you need to have ambiguity to have an element of creativity? What do you think that relationship is? I don't

know. It's a really good question, and it's probably a PhD worthy. So I'm not sure it might be my topic, although I think if I went off and did that, I think my husband might divorce me after having done having done a Masters was was hard enough. But, yeah, it's a really good question. But I think all creative, everything requires, even just, you know, some sense of not knowing, I don't know if anything, if you can then say, you know, is anything certain? Because, if you again, you know, hate to keep talking about COVID, but things that we thought were certain were suddenly not uncertain. And, you know, I know a lot has been written about that, the book Black Swans and all of that stuff so but I think it's interesting when you get into a, you know, let's call I brainstorms get a really bad rap, and I almost hate saying the word brainstorm, because some people will just kind of cringe and roll their eyes and go, no, no, no, no, no. But I sort of feel like, for want of any better word, you know, when you are trying to change things, when you're trying to generate ideas, and if you're trying to collaborate with other people, then come. Just call that a brainstorm and like, be happy with the word. You know what I mean for now, well, for day, let's totally do that. Yeah, let's just

do it. Just now. Is that so? And that's that challenge where I think where brainstorms go horribly wrong is where people are trying to they have a challenge they're thinking about, you know, how might we solve problem X, Y and Z and and then we start our brains, start making connections, and we start, you know, using the insights and the data and our experience and everything else, we start generating ideas. And that is the sort of discovery phase, the uncertain phase. It's kind of like could do, might do, not sure. But then some people and and their their tolerance for ambiguity is so low that they just want to say, no, no, no, we can't do that. We won't do that. We're not doing that. We've done it before, but it's not giving any of those nascent ideas that are just being formed like as little neuron connections in your brain any moment to kind of fire off and make a connection. So you know, there's allowing that uncertainty just to flourish for a little bit of time before you try and get certainty. I mean, if you think about that, there's a there's a when I knew, obviously, we were talking today, I was thinking about a video that I love, which is worth people looking up if they feel like it, which is called how not to land an orbital rocket. I don't know if you've seen it, but yeah, SpaceX. It's absolutely brilliant. It's basically 30 ways that they crashed. A very, very, very expensive the fails and the fails and the fails and the fails. But what they're saying from that is we couldn't have even got a rocket into space if we hadn't all have done that stuff before. So I think, you know, and clearly in in in businesses that are that are really forward looking, and that are looking for breakthrough changes, very, very different, not just better, but different. There is that much more sense of a mindset of we're going to, we know it won't be right first time, but we're going to have to play, and we're going to have to try, and that's a very expensive way of doing it, by the way look at it now, right? Yeah, exactly, exactly. So it's, it's knowing, I think it's understanding that I think sometimes when we talk about process, and I was listening to one of your podcasts about Lean and Agile early today, you know, there are the reason those processes are really helpful is that they start to give you a framework in which to test and prototype and see what works. It's not just, let's scatter gun everything. Let's throw it all out there and see what works. You know, it's actually saying, Okay, let's take, like you say, an experimental mindset and try things and then use that, you know, as as the way that we move forward, knowing that it might go wrong. And I think that's quite different. You know, the word failure is almost, you know, definitely needs a kind of it needs a PR campaign in itself, really, or a rethink, I think often, just for organizations, that it's not a failure. If something didn't work, it was a test. And obviously it depends how much time and money and resource you've put into that test. And there is a useful I wanted to share. There's a useful model, I don't know if you if you know the 7020, 10 rule, that kind of came from learning, I know it from the learning, yeah, based, but only in learning, yeah, yeah,

yeah. So it's used in innovation and Coca Cola. Use this model, Google, use this model, and which is that if you, if you had 100 let's just say 100 pound budget, then you'd spend 70% talking about this certainty and uncertainty, you'd spend 70% or 70 pounds of it doing what you know pretty much is going to work, all things considered. You know, COVID, you know, like planning, as much as you can plan, you're going to spend it doing what you know works. Then you're going to spend the next 20% or 20 pounds on on something that on on on ideas that you still you've researched, you think they're going to work, and you've but they're a little bit more of a bet, because maybe it's a new technology, maybe it's a new target audience, maybe it's a new product, or whatever it might be. And then the last 10% if you like, is like your wild card, but it's your you've got a pretty strong idea that you have tested and you're trying to evidence. And again, if you like, it is your experiment of, let's see how this works. But we know that it is experimental. So it's a way of not betting the farm and taking what's been called an innovation terms, you know, like Little Bets. And I sometimes think it's a it's a really good way of thinking about just, just how you can start to push the boundaries and perhaps be a little bit more uncertain. But without saying, Yeah, we're gonna bet the farm. It

gives you that little bit of a safety net, which I think is comfortable, particularly in that world of business and profitability and risk management and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, so we've talked about creativity being a bit of a process, or something that can be a process, and have other elements of it as well, and how we can bring some of that stuff in. I'd like to move on and talk a little bit about burnout and how how burnout works in that creative space. And I guess my reflection on certain aspects of creativity from my own perspective, when I try and be creative and. Whatever format is is, but I kind of need to feed myself with ideas, with differentiation, with a variety of inputs, with diversity, and all those things give me sort of a richness within myself that makes it easier for me to generate outward in that creative space. And that's a cycle that feels like it's something that works for me at a personal level, I really believe in the importance about intersectionality for finding links and things like that, at least in that perspective. And I find, for me, I need to go through that process. But I also find that when I am trying to be creative, with or without a process, that it is to some extent depleting to be thinking in these ways and trying to find these types of things. And I guess if we assume that, you know, all effort is effortful and depleting in some ways, then then it sort of drains us a little bit. So I'd like to just sort of check that back to you and see if you could build a little bit on that and say a little bit about how you see burnout appearing when it comes to creativity. What are what is the end state of that? What does it look like when one's burnt out from a creative perspective, what does it feel like, and what might some of the science be of that heading your way? Yeah,

so I think from your own perspective and what you just talked about, I think if you were being really brutal and trying to distill it down, which I do believe that distillation is a creative superpower. If you can tap into it, you know, it's to kind of really to distill something down. We could distill it down into two things that you talked about there. Well, there's different ways of looking at but, but what I would call state, your personal state, to create or not, and stimulus, so like external stimulus and internal stimulus. So if we, if we take those two things separately, you know, probably your, your state is and your, your how you are feeling in any on any given moment or any day, could look, could look like I sort of break it down, almost into emotional state, physical state, intellectual state. So, you know, on some days I might be kind of mentally firing on all cylinders and feeling quite Sparky, but physically, maybe I overdid it, you know, in the gym, and my whole body hurts. And actually, my dog's not feeling very well. So emotionally and physically I'm feeling terrible, but intellectually, I'm kind of feeling okay that so I need to think about it's almost like, um, I almost think about it in this stage is like a triage of like, what's going on for me. And I think it's so complicated. It's such a big old suit when it comes to creativity that there isn't a one size fits all, but you can start to think about what's going on for you. So you know, we're probably all your your listeners are probably familiar with the concept of flow. And you know, when it's good, we are. We don't even need to think about it. We get embedded in what we're doing. We lose track of time and when it's an intrinsic enjoyment in doing it for itself. But let's face it, often at work, I think that sounds like work Nirvana, but how often are we actually in that really nice state of work? Maybe we are sometimes. It depends, you know, I think if you're a maybe, if you're in a really hands on, you know, quite a, kind of, like a, quite a craft based creative scenario. Then maybe that's more often than not. But sometimes it does feel forced. It feels hard. It feels like, yeah, we've got a problem given to us on, you know, on any given day. Maybe it might be a crisis, it might be an opportunity, it might be something really short term, and then suddenly you've got to do that whole like, stand up comedy, be creative, do it now. So I think most of the time we are then that's where skills come in and where process comes in, because you start to kind of say, Okay, I know I'm doing I've got a process to go through. And I think what we're very bad at in business is the natural creative process includes what we'd call incubation, which just, is just a fancy word for your brain will think about things that are important to it when when you're not doing what it is. So you know, you cannot leave your work at home. It's one of the reasons why sometimes we can't switch off. If it's important to you, your brain will obviously just keep nagging you and nagging you and nagging you. And that's why, you know, we have our best ideas. Often, people will say, when I'm swimming, when I'm running, when I'm walking my dog, when I'm just about to fall asleep in the middle of the night, you know, whatever it is. But what we're really bad at in business is allowing each other the time to incubate. Will say, right? We're going to have, you know, even if you're quite well organized, we're going to have a creative session next Wednesday on, you know, like, how can I be more collaborative? Or, how can I sell more sausages, or whatever it is? How can we, you know, do this, this, how can we do our invoicing better? How can we get our people to fill out our timesheets, whatever it is, and then we kind of turn up and expect people just to switch on that state, and then, often without any stimulus as well. So I think there's, there's sort of this trying to determine, sort of what burnout looks like. It's like, is there? Is it just, you're not feeling very creative because you haven't got the you're not mentally in a great state to create, and you don't have the right sort of stimulus, whether that's data or being out and about in the world, or whatever it is, or, I think more often when you start to feel burnt out. Is and this is certainly true, as we when we were talking earlier, I've experienced creative burnout, definitely a different state. Ages in my career, and I think is, and it is quite akin to, it can feel quite akin to starting to feel a bit like depression, which I've also suffered from in my life. But I think the difference between, for me to distinguish it between, you know, burnout, creative burnout, if you like, and sort of that feeling of depression, is that one with creative burnout, if you take action and you you notice it, and you take action, it will get better, whereas with depression, it doesn't, sort of, you can't necessarily get yourself out of it. But for me, I think with creative burnout, it's where you just feel like you are. You just feel kind of quite apathetic and bored with the task that you're working on. Maybe that might be because, actually, you do find it is a dry topic. It's difficult. I mean, in my life, I've worked on everything from, you know, bleach to photocopiers. So, you know, I've done my sort of share of stuff that, but that. But I think if, if you can generally Gen generally, you can find some motivation, whether that's intrinsic or intrinsic, extrinsic, to do the job. But I think if you're sort of feeling permanently overworked, you feel like your ideas aren't very good, you start doubting your own ideas. You you kind of have feel as if you're sort of looking after you're kind of looking after other people more than you're looking after yourself, I think, creatively. Yeah. Then that starts to feel like you start judging your own work and saying, my ideas are just not very good. You start, you can get very self critical and and as I said, I think it's just that apathy of, oh, I just can't look at that again. I don't want to look at that again. And so I think in that situation where you just feel bored by the task, or you feel like you've you've just gone round and round in circles. We talked, don't we, about getting stuck in a rut? Well, getting stuck, we get talked with that is literally a mental rut or a groove that we cannot get out of, because we may be, you know, quite often in jobs, I think, in in in the work that we do, you know, there's, there's, there's a seasonal calendar, isn't there, you know, January is like, you know, January is New year, new you you know, like all the cliches, but that's what, if you're working and trying to get the anyone's attention, you're often working to that calendar. So you start doing things, and your, what your brain will do is go to what it knows, rather than, like a big old Rolodex, it will go to what it knows and but that doesn't help you to be creative. So I think if you're feeling creatively stuck in a rut and you feel a bit burnt out, I think that's different from sort of the general malaise of, I can't cope. I'm not having much fun here and and either being with other people or being solitary doesn't solve it. Basically, I think you'll, I'm sure you'll be familiar and your listeners will be familiar with them. Susan Kane's book, The Power about introverts and extroverts quiet. It's called about, you know, and I think if you are an introvert, then, or you have an internal preference, then, you know, maybe if you're in a noisy office or a noisy space, you just do want to go and have some where, where you could be quiet, whereas someone who's extrovert or has an external process just wants to go and chat it through with someone else. So again, that might be about, you know, where you get your best ideas in terms of, is it a social process or not a social process?

Yeah. And she's got a great TED talk as well on an introvert, introvert, extrovert piece as well. That it's all it's interesting. You know, you were speaking about flow at the beginning of this. And again, this is personal reflection on stuff when I've done certain types of work that have felt, at least to me, creative, what I found, and I don't know that I've ever been fully burnt out in a creative sense. I don't know I've reached stages, but maybe are, maybe not. I don't know, but, but certainly, what has felt to be the case to me is when I've been doing repeated types of sort of on demand creativity, as you describe over a longer period of time, I find that it gets harder and harder to get into that state of flow. So when I'm working on something and being productive and creative, I'm in flow, I'm immersed, I'm engaged, I'm positive stuff is connecting. And the first time I do something, it's easier to get into that state, but by maybe, you know, the 15th time, like, I know that state, and I know I want to be in that state, but I've got, like, all this weight that I'm carrying with me that makes it hard for me to move into that state and and I want to be there. And sometimes I find I can sort of force myself to do that, but it's each time I'm going to that well of reserves I have, and drawing more of that reserves and depleting myself to get myself into that state. And I can do it, but then sometimes I just don't want to go through that effort of dragging myself to where I need to be to work effectively. Is that like? Is that how similar to. Your personal experience of going through things like this? Yeah, I think, I think that's really interesting. I think,

I think, like you say it's that you can't, you can't, you can't, you know, you can't draw from an empty from an empty cup, like to, I'm sorry I'm making that bit clumsy, that analogy, but, but that point is, yeah, you need, you need to constantly be sort of topping up your reserves, and, oh yeah, that's the point I was thinking about, when you're talking about it was, it's really interesting, because, actually, I think that's about resilience. And so, you know, resilience is what we need, obviously, when things don't go our way, or when things don't, you know, they don't necessarily, it's how we, for want of a better phrase, how we bounce back from the disappointment, or the, you know, not being where we want to be, or something being hard. And I think collectively over the past year and a half, and, you know, through this whole lockdown period, I think I'd personally talk about personal experience, I feel like, where I had resilience before, where I might have said, Okay, this feels hard, but I'm going to go to some, some of my go to kind of refreshes would be, you know, is always getting outside, always walking, always or, you know, maybe just going off and, you know, do all the cliched stuff, but going to a gallery filling up my filling up my reserves filling up, if you talked about combinational creativity earlier, and Steve Jobs famously said creativity is just connecting things. And what he meant by that was that he said that creative people in inverted commas, that is, anybody who is going to be creative has loads of dots to join. So, you know, like if you go to a manga exhibition, or if you go to, like a super truck exhibition, or you go and do what I did with my kid the other day, which is, we went to, you know, like a pumpkin patch, you know, and we, we went and picked her own pumpkins, which was all like, such a cliche, but actually, do you know what? Something like that? I just thought, I can't help myself. I was like, this is genius. You know, they can't, they can't get the staff to pick them, so they're making us pick them ourselves. You know, with it, it's all about the experience economy still or in immersive experience. So we're all coming here. We're getting filthy. We're paying to get in. We're paying twice as much for the pumpkin as we would in Sainsbury's. We're picking it ourselves, you know, like, I can't help but sort of unpick that. But I felt and then there was some amazing, kind of, like, just sort of some really brilliant stuff that had been done around the Wizard of Oz, in the in the maze, maze and all of that. And I just kind of get some I get things to join the dots with on that. But so there's all of those sort of good things. But I think if you if you have resilience, or you find ways of getting resilience, by topping up your tank or talking to people, or just getting out, I think our collective resilience over this sort of nearly two year period now, I think it's been really tested. You know, there's only so many times that you've got a nice work set up here. I'm lucky enough I've got, you know, a little cabin at the end of my office. But there's only so many times I can expect to talking about state and stimulus to to find that in myself. So I think it's that kind of sense of trying to then build up talking about burnout, if you're just feeling, you know, you if we if we were looking at Formula One, and if you've come across Aki hinster, but the whole idea of hinster is really interesting because it's a kind of philosophy that that the Formula One drivers. So basically, you know the optimum they are looking at the optimum performance of every single thing that they do, whereas obviously a nanosecond can mean the difference between them winning the championship or not, and it's all about the whole person. So it is about their nutrition, it is about their fitness, it is about their mental fitness. It's about their sleep. It's about all of those things. And I think, you know, somewhere along the line, looking after all of those different aspects has kind of got bucketed into this sort of self care thing, which feels a bit trite sometimes, and feels a bit sort of cod psychology. But actually, if you're doing it properly, the way to to kind of to build up our resilience again, is sometimes actually to to retreat. You know, there's a phrase that I love which is, and I can't remember who said it, I can, I can find out for you. But there's a phrase that I love, which is, like, everything will work better if you unplug it for for a minute, and that includes you, you know. So I think, I think there's just that sense of, we have to, you know, we're not. We don't just bring one bit of ourselves to work. We bring all of ourselves to work. And if you don't, you know, if you've got small kids and you're not sleeping well, or if you're, you know, you know, you just got insomnia, or you're anxious, or whatever it might be, all of these things come together, but when they all come together, like they sort of unfortunately have over the past year. And as I say, I really find this personally, some of the things on some days that just shouldn't bother me or say shouldn't that's the wrong phrase to say, but would not normally bother me. Just floor me, and then, yeah, I like, you have then got to go through. I have got a ritual. But you know, it's, you know, when you're facilitating or doing stuff like we're doing today, you know you can't, you can't do that half heartedly, so, but it costs you. It costs you. And I think, you know, that's the I just. Came back from a retreat. Actually, five weeks ago, I went on a retreat to kind of, you know, refill my cup, if you like, and just to literally retreat in order to move forward, because I just felt I needed some of that. And it wasn't actually so much stillness, you know, it was, it was actually, it was, it was quite a physical I went off and did quite a lot of physical things, but I had a lot of but I also took a lot of rest, and I think I did definitely come back just feeling a little bit more equipped to deal with the day to day and then to switch it on. When you do have to switch it on. Yeah, you

know what you're speaking about, facilitation, though, and you spoke about sort of introversion, extroversion and stuff earlier I'm as I get older, increasingly introverted. I think there's about trend as people get older. And, you know, when I was young, I was, you know, probably margin extroverted. As I get older, I'm more introverted. But being an introvert who's done a lot of facilitation that that like, I love it, and it's that sort of performative piece, it's enriching. I'm in flow, I'm in the moment. I'm present. I've got all the intellectual stimulation I want. It's real. It matters, all that stuff, but boy, it's tiring. And your talk about this year and that residual occupation of our brains and our emotions that's been going on for the last 18 years, it just, I guess, lowers our capacity to recharge. For me, it lowers some of those do you find you spoke about rituals? I can't remember your exact words, sort of rituals, habits, remedies, things that you do to keep yourself well. Do you think if you get to the stage where you're moving towards real burnout or moving towards maybe even greater degradation in aspects of your mental health, do you think you tend to jettison those, or do you think they carry on.

Oh yeah, yeah, no, no, I think it's like anything. I definitely think that it's, it's, it becomes a batten down the hatches, doesn't it? It becomes a, literally, just like you do the bare minimum to get through, as opposed to having, definitely having enjoyment in your job or in your role or in anything else. And again, I do think that they, they are warning signs when you just feel like I definitely felt when between my in my transition between being in the management team and one of the agencies I was in and then going off to become creative director, I had a three month sabbatical because, again, that was actually much more about what was going on in my personal life than it was sort of situational. And I ended up getting divorced, actually, but I I was functioning. You know, I was managing director of a team of 30 people. And on the outside I would have looked like I was, you know, I had it quite sorted, but I literally would do what was in front of me on a daily basis. And and it would cost me to be giving that energy like you were saying app to somebody else. And actually, again, that's where I did. I was lucky if my employer was, you know, they were sympathetic, and they, and I say, I had three months off. And again, I went off and just did various other things, and I ended up getting divorced because, you know, that was what was kind of causing a lot of the issues. But it def, I think that's why. And again, sort of using that formula, one analogy, or just all sports people, I think it's Mo Farah says that when he wins races, he's excited, but in his head, he's won that race 30 times already, because he's visualized and he's worked on the end game, the end game, so that and the things he needs to do, you know, if his left leg or toe starts hurting, he does a certain thing. You know, he starts, and that the Formula One drivers, they are so they practice in the good time, so that when it really matters, they can bring it on. And I definitely think, yeah, there's that sort of aspect of you trying to have some things that are your that are your go tos, that it is hard when you feel terrible. And we all have duvet days, and we all have days where we just think, I just think, I just want to watch Netflix, you know, from the minute I get up till the minute I go to bed. But, but, yeah, I think having those things, I have an app, and there's loads of them out there, but I have the calm app on my phone, and I find that if I'm if I have to facilitate, for example, and I'm feeling in a right miserable mood, I will go off and just do 15 minutes of I'll just take my unplug and kind of just listen to something. And to be honest, it doesn't even really matter what that meditation is. It can be the, you know, the daily they have a daily meditation, or they have whatever. It doesn't matter what it is. What it does is it just helps my, you know, parasympathetic nervous system, get off of the wheel and just take it down. And I think, you know, I know that, I know that I sometimes need to do that. And also, you know, just basic things like not drinking too much coffee and stuff like that, we can get really into, you know, the stuff that helps us. But then it doesn't, you know, because it starts to feel like it's, it's a bad habit, so it's just trying to get into good habits. And that's a whole nother podcast, directly on, you know, routines Exactly, exactly on how you Yeah, exactly on how you make good habits. So there was something that I found really interesting, actually, just on that point, which people might find useful, which is not, it's not rock. Science at all, but I found really helpful was that I'm sure your listeners will be familiar with Dan Pink and lots of his work, and he's done loads of work around your chronotype. I think he calls it a Corona type, which is basically, you know, when are you? When are you on an average day, you know, are you a night owl? Are you an early bird? When are you good? When do you slump? And it is different for all of us. And so just to think about, if you can group your tasks into, you know, Gen generating ideas might be one of them, doing your admin, doing your writing proposals, you know, having meetings. Can you group write down what it is you're, you know, a lot of the things that you are repeatedly doing over a day a week a month, and then figure out, you know, is there a time of day when actually it is? You know, you're better off doing some of those things. So for example, normally we're on a Friday afternoon here, normally on a Friday afternoon, I might be doing some admin or some invoicing, because, frankly, I'm fried, you know. So I hope I'm making some sense, but, you know? But actually, you know, what I've realized is that there's only about half an hour a day when I think I'm truly effective, but you know, that's a whole nother thing. But, you know, but you know, I'm right. I'm on fire during that half an hour between about 11 and 1145 literally, no one can stop me. But, you know, I think that's quite helpful, and it definitely just made me think about being a bit more ruthless about my own diary, and just again, carving out that space. And I do think this sort of zoom, you know, everyone being on meetings endlessly. I also deliberately add 15 minutes onto every meeting that I book because and then I end the meeting early because I want people to be able to just take a second to reflect on what it is we've just been talking about before they go to the next thing. And I do think that's a problem with this, you know, with the hybrid and sort of distributed workforce, is that when the heck you can have any time to do what you're supposed to be doing, or time to think, really, yeah, it's

incessant, isn't it? You were speaking about, you know, your larks and all that stuff. And there was an article that came out this week, I think it was about, like, optimal bedtimes and all that stuff on BBC. There's one that came out anyway. It said you should go to bed between 10 and 11, because otherwise there's an increased risk of heart failure, blah, blah, yeah, yeah. And I'm one of those people who read it, and I was like, gosh, I need to start staying up later.

Yeah, oh, yeah, exactly, yeah, exactly 10 o'clock, yeah, yeah, exactly. What's that all about? Yeah? No, I know, yeah, yeah, no, it's funny, but yeah.

But often I'm an early, early morning type of, type of person, and I know that, like, I'm kind of compulsive, and some of my sort of proneness to anxiety means that I don't relax until I've done what I think is what I need to do that day. So I have this sort of desire to earn my rest at the end of the day. I'm not I'm not a an avoider or procrastinator, but I need to have done X amount before I can stop. And that can be really productive, and it can be, yeah, unhealthy for other reasons as well. I guess we're sort of getting to the end. I've got one one question for you, but I'd like to just sort of wrap up with there was a lovely piece in in one of the newspapers I subscribed here where I had a video, and the video was all about quitting. And it said things like, our society, for a long time has had messages about not quitting. Quitters never win. Winners never quit. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, we can't, you know, never give up all that kind of stuff. But it said as an observation that more people are doing that. So, you know, you some of the tennis players have stepped away, some of the gymnasts, it feels like people are finding it or some people are finding it more acceptable to say, No, I don't want to do this anymore. And I think that goes so against a lot of a narrative that's played out for us in a lot of world that you've worked in, in advertising and media, you know, success is, I think we've said before, getting up early, having a power breakfast, smashing it out in the gym, having 16 meetings, picking your kids up, going to the theater, going for a nightcap, going home for three hours sleep, and doing that again. And that's what what real successful people do. So I guess my sort of question is, how do we as individuals balance that sort of pressure of what success is for a lot of people versus the reality of a fragility of us? How do we find acceptance, but it's okay to switch off? How do we how do we really believe that it's fine to be fragile beings who need to have a rest or need to turn off at the plug, like, how do we quiet those voices of

Yeah, I mean, it's such a big, big question. I think I don't know how old you are, James, and I'm not going to ask

God, you're on your youngling. So I'm nearly 50. Okay, so I'm 49 tomorrow, actually, as Thank you. And I do think that this is something that, you know, I think maybe, like the 20 somethings of the world don't. Worry about quite so much in my experience, you know, and I think that's why, I think there was some work done, some research that I saw, that it's, on average, it only takes 18 months for most graduates to feel disillusioned when they get their first job. You know, they because they kind of go into their job thinking that they can, you know, we teach our we teach our kids and our young people rightly so, that anything is possible. But then you start to get into a job, and you go into that whole conformity thing that we're talking about earlier, and then you suddenly go, Oh, God, I'm not changing anything in the world, you know, I'm just trying to sell more, whatever it is, or I'm, you know, whatever it might be. So I definitely think, and I think there is a definite move towards fight, having more balance with people who are who are younger. I also think it is, you know, I hate to kind of sort of say this, but I feel like it's a very privileged thing to be able to say, I don't want to do that, because there's sort of, you know, even if we think about, you know, when you know, basically just the basic needs that we have. We need to earn a living. We need to be able to put a roof over our heads. We need to, you know, look after our kids and so on. But beyond that, once you've kind of got beyond that, I think a lot of it is is tied into, into, you know, consumerism and, like, wanting more and more and more of everything. And I actually think that, you know, I don't know if you saw yesterday, but the all the stuff around cop, which is obviously timely, as we're talking now, but which is we've got, we've all actually, if we want things to change, we're all going to have to think a bit more about, you know, what we what we buy, everything from expecting to have strawberries in December, you know, and what impact that has on the planet through to, you know, do we need, do we all need to buy, you know, new clothes every month or every week, or whatever it might be. So I think there is definitely, there's change coming. Is definitely coming. I think some of us, who are, you know, perhaps, you know, bit further on in our careers, like, like I am, and perhaps like you, you are, is that actually it's only through having the experience of sort of what you don't want that you realize what you do want. But I think some of that stuff is going to be sort of not, not forced upon us. But if we want things to if we want to be in a society in a way that we all that we're proud to be in and that is actually sustainable, some things will have to change. But, I mean, it's such a big question, isn't it? You know, it's such a difficult thing when we're talking about, you know, it's a way where we can talk about SpaceX, and we can talk about Tesla and all of that, but, you know, Amazon, you know, really, do we need to? Does Amazon even need to? Mean, if we Amazon could sort of stop existing tomorrow? And would it? Would it? Would that be a good thing or a bad thing? And say, until we sort out all of these issues, we're just not going to make any money anymore. But it's not likely to happen. And I think, sorry, I'm getting a bit philosophical, because it's just, it's Friday afternoon, isn't it? It's a big question, absolutely, yeah,

yeah, but yeah. So I don't, I don't have a good answer for you, but I do think a lot of the younger people that I speak to, they've got a bit more of that they feel, that they feel that pressure that you're talking about, I think slightly less than than perhaps we have done in the past, to to the point where we get to that burnout is almost like them going, that's not for me. That's not the way that I want to, want to live. And I, I, you know, I think that's I can think that can only be a good thing, yeah,

well, that's a lovely message for us to wrap up on, and we should be more like the kids. And just on that, I took my little boy swimming today, and he asked me to turn off a heated seat in the car. I put it on when I put it on when I was cold, it was like, No, you shouldn't do that, because we should use less petrol. So there we go. That's a little example of doing a little bit less in a little micro way. Yeah. Okay, definitely. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you very much. How can people learn more about you and the stuff that you do? Claire,

so I wrote a book, which was published a few years ago. Now, after I I, I'm one of only about 200 people now in the world to have a master's in creativity, innovation and leadership, which I studied in London. And as a result of that, and some of the things that I learned, and mainly about, you know, trying to sort of demystify creativity and taking it from being something that people have or don't have. So I wrote a book. It's called, in your creative element, so you can, you can have a look that's this available on Amazon. And you know, all good book, book retailer, retailers and sellers and and then my company is called now, go create. So you can find me on it's now go create.co.uk You can find me there. You can find me on LinkedIn, you know, and all those other good places where we network these days. And I do quite often put resources. And at the moment, I am sharing a free 20. In an E Learning Program, which is sort of was talking earlier about moving my business from being face to face to being digital so people can have a look, have a little try on that you can find that on my website, which is about how to run brainstorms, how to run effective, useful brainstorms, and say, for one of a better word. And so yeah, you can find me there.