Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Michael Gelb. Michael is an internationally recognized pioneer in the fields of creative thinking, accelerated learning, and innovative leadership. He leads seminars for major organizations including Nike, IBM, and Microsoft. [He] has more than 25 years of experience as a professional speaker, seminar leader, and organizational consultant. Michael is the bestselling author of How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, which has been published in 25 languages.
With Sounds True, Michael has published the audio series The Spirit of Leonardo and a new book, Creativity On Demand: How to Ignite and Sustain the Fire of Genius.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Michael and I spoke about qi cultivation practices and how engaging in such practices liberates our creativity. We talked about the one qigong practice Michael recommends as the most important practice for reenergizing yourself at any moment. We also talked about the principles involved in having what Michael calls, “a creative mindset”—and how Michael believes that creativity is fully learnable and how one of the keys is learning to embrace uncertainty, and [to] use our anxiety creatively. Here’s my conversation with Michael Gelb:
Michael, you begin your new book, Creativity On Demand, [by] making an observation that I thought was really interesting—about how the challenge of our time isn’t so much time management as it is energy management. And I thought that was really interesting, as someone who is challenged by an intense schedule—that, really, what many professional people face is this issue of energy management, not time management. So, can you speak to that some? What [do] you mean by that?
Michael Gelb: Sure. Well, you remember 20, 30 years ago, people carried around planners and they went on time-management seminars. And it was a really big business. I mean, all my clients were carrying them and trying to figure out how to manage their time. It didn’t really work! [Laughs.]
TS: Yes, I know what you mean.
MG: It didn’t really work. At first, people figured out that, well, OK—it’s not really time you’re managing, you’re managing priorities. And that was a step forward. But in the last five, six, seven years, there’s been a shift where people are coming to understand that energy is the key.
One of the pioneers of that shift is my good friend, Professor Jim Clawson. He teaches at the Darden [School of Business]. Jim and I actually do a seminar together called “Leading Innovation.” Jim was one of the first to state that leadership is about managing energy. He wrote this in a book he published years ago called Powered by Feel. Jim says, “Leadership is about managing energy, first in yourself and then in those around you.”
Jim’s an academic. His books are usually published by Harvard Business School Press. It wasn’t until Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz came out with their book, The Power of Full Engagement—which became a big New York Times bestseller. They got on Oprah. And they recapitulated Jim’s message in a way that really resonated.
They have a couple of key lines that I’ve shared over the years with my clients, because they’re very articulate. Tony Schwartz is a great writer. Jim Loehr has worked for years coaching athletes, and he figured out that the secret of high performance in athletics is managing energy. Tony figured out how to articulate that in a way that really struck a chord.
They state that, “Energy is the most important individual and organizational resource.” They add that, “Every thought, feeling, and action has an energy consequence.” And then they state, “Positive energy rituals—highly specific routines for managing energy—are the key to full engagement and sustained high performance.”
Well, in Creativity On Demand, I cite Clawson [and] I cite Schwartz and Loehr. And then I add simply that the sages of China came to these same conclusions a few thousand years ago. [Laughs.]
If we can apply that traditional wisdom to the challenges of our contemporary lives—well, obviously we’re not just making stuff up on the fly. We’re utilizing wisdom practices that have been honed and developed for generation after generation.
The great thing is that, up until fairly recently, most of that information was not really accessible—certainly to people in the West. Even in China, it was hard to get because—just in secrecy and then it was politically not acceptable for a while. But just in the last 40 or 50 years, this wisdom has come to the West. It’s now accessible to all of us. I’ve been figuring out how to apply this with my clients to help them manage their energy more effectively, and it works!
TS: Now, a couple questions here, Michael. So, it’s one thing [that] you’ve mentioned about managing our own energy, but that a leader manages the energy of the people in the organization. How does a leader do that?
MG: It begins—as Jim Clawson emphasizes—with your own energy management. [This is] because if you are disconnected from yourself, if you are out of balance—leadership is a lot like parenting. I mean, kids sense your weaknesses. They don’t listen to what you say. They watch what you do. [Laughs.]
You can read all the best manager books, go in all the seminars, and spout all the right words, but people are reading your energy. They’re sensing your integrity. And integrity is not just about ethics and morals, it’s about whether who you are is in alignment with what you say. People may not be able to articulate it—although it’s really interesting. I’ve been working with Fortune 500 companies for over 35 years. Thirty-five years ago, you’d rarely ever hear anybody talk about reading someone’s energy or responding to someone’s energy or the energy in the room. Now, it’s almost common parlance. So, there is a shift in consciousness here where people do understand it.
The first point is [that] if you’re going to lead other people, you have to be constantly working on your own integration. Then, it’s a function of being able to be empathic with others. That’s emotional. It’s intellectual. But it’s also energetic. You can feel when you’re in rapport with people. There’s a harmony in the energy field.
The people who are really good at orchestrating that—and I’m really lucky, I have to say. I don’t get hired by the types of leaders who try to exploit the worker and scorch the earth. [Laughs.] Fortunately, for the last 35 years, there have been enough visionary people who really are trying to make a difference and bring out the best in their people. Those are the kinds of people who engage me.
So, some people call it “charisma”—which, again, is one of these ineffable kinds of words. But I think it has something to do with energy. I also think it has a lot to do with—coming back to the previous notion of priority—that there’s a clear sense of vision, that there’s a clear sense of direction and purpose that people are brought to. [This is] because the leader understands how to access an alignment with people’s deepest values with their core attitudes, beliefs, and expectations.
Most—unfortunately, too many—managers try to make things happen by appealing to people’s reason—by giving them the reasons why they should do it. When you appeal to people by reason, if you’re lucky, you’ll get agreement. You might get compliance. Sometimes, you just get apathy.
A less-evolved manager tries to appeal to the people by carrot and stick—reward and punishment. Then you might get passive or active resistance.
But, what my friend Jim Clawson calls a “Level Three Leader” tries to guide other people by aligning with deeper values—a higher purpose. That’s what—when there is that alignment—then there tends to be an alignment of the energy. You can feel it. You can feel it when you walk into a place. I mean, I felt it when I came to visit Sounds True.
TS: Well, that’s wonderful to hear. I like hearing that.
But let me ask you a question, Michael, because I hear a lot—both from people at Sounds True and other places. A lot of people [say], “Oh, I’m so busy. I’m so busy. I’m kind of tired. You know—I’m tired a lot. I’m relying on caffeine.” So, tell me: what are the [pithy] instructions, if you will—the keys—to the type of positive energy management that you’re proposing [that] really makes a difference?
MG: Sure. The motto I’ve had for many, many years is, “Take breaks or have breakdowns.” So, on just the simplest level, you work for 60 minutes with total focus [and then] you take a 10-minute break. You go back, you work for 75 minutes, come back, [and] you take another 10-minute break. You work for an hour, you take a 15-minute break. And you recognize that breaks are part of doing a fine job—of performing at a high level.
Now, we know—just purely from the psychology of memory, for example—we know that if people work at something or study something for 60 minutes and they take a 10-minute break, their recall at the end of the 10 minutes will be higher than it was at the end of the 60 minutes. So, you’re going to work more efficiently and effectively—Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr call this “oscillation.”
If you’re working in a concentrated, analytical, focused way—if you’re on the computer, if you’re on the telephone—it’s kind of apparent to anybody paying attention that you want to shift out of mode. You don’t want to—in your break—send text messages. You’d be better off going outside and breathing some fresh air. Or, for years I’ve taught people how to juggle as a great way to break. Or meditate. Or do some drawing or listen to some beautiful music. Something that shifts you out of that driven, analytical, verbally dependent mode.
What if there was a way to—based on thousands of years of study and practice and lineage transmission—to optimize your ability to recharge in that 10 minutes? Well, there is. That’s why I was so inspired to write this book—because I’ve been teaching this kind of stuff for years, but this is a missing link. It’s just the most efficient, effective, powerful, simple, elegant way that I’ve discovered for my clients to recover quickly from the intensity of what they’re doing so that they feel really refreshed, open, clear, attuned, and ready to create.
TS: Now, you’re referring to the practices of the Chinese sages—qigong practices and qi energy cultivation. I’d be curious to know if you could recommend—just for the moment, pretend you could only recommend only one practice to that hardworking person in their office life, whether their office is at home or they go to a group office. They’re going to concentrate for a while and now they’re going to take a break. What is the qi energy cultivation practice that you would recommend? For beginners?
MG: That’s a great question, and there’s one clear, obvious answer—something that is by far the simplest, easiest thing that anybody can do. I just have to give the caveat—it sometimes takes a lot of practice to realize just how simple it really is.
But the practice I recommend—my dear friend Robert Peng is a lineage, Chinese qigong master. I know you’ve learned from him—
TS: Yes!
MG: Such a wonderful teacher. He teaches all these beautiful practices, a number of which we collaborated [on] and shared in the context of my book. But of all Robert’s practices, the one that I found to be most powerful—and Robert will agree is the most powerful—is what he calls “Nourishing Qi.”
If you’ve ever taken a yoga class, you know that at the end of pretty much every yoga class—certainly every one I’ve ever taken—you do savasana. You “corpse pose.” You lie on your mat or on the floor, and you’re just in a receptive state. Many of the yoga teachers that I’ve talked to will agree that it’s probably the most important part of the class.
When Robert teaches qigong, you learn the Three Treasures Standing Meditation; you can learn the Lotus Meditation; you can learn all these beautiful, profound spiritual technologies that have been passed down over a millennia. But Robert will [laughs]—he actually tells a great story, which I quoted in the book.
His master said to him—he was training eight, ten hours a day with his master—and at the time, he’s 12 years old, 13 years old. And his master says to him, “You must practice qigong 24 hours a day.” And Robert says—basically, in our minds, what he would have said was, “You’ve got to be kidding me!” [Laughs.]
He said, “I was very anxious. I was very upset, because I was working so hard. That was impossible.” He said, “Finally, my master explained to me that qi is more intelligent than you are. And all you’ve got to do is allow it to work for you. Be receptive.”
Open yourself to the creative, universal energy that is always available so that at any moment—you don’t even need to change your posture. You don’t have to do some special breathing. You don’t have to do a mantra. You don’t have to do a visualization. You don’t have to do anything.
This is the revelation that inspired the book—because I just experienced this. At any moment—like right now—you can open yourself to the creative universal energy. And by truly opening yourself and just being receptive in any moment—ah! It’s the simplest, most elegant, most powerful thing I think anybody can do, at any time.
Then, it helps to learn all these other practices just because our minds are restless and we forget just how simple it is. So, it’s good to have a ritual and it’s good to have various things that you can do that have different metaphoric meanings. I do all those other things too. But my go-to, most powerful, simple, elegant practice is just Nourishing Qi—just being open to it at any given moment.
TS: So, let’s say somebody’s listening to this and they’re driving in their car or sitting on a subway, or who knows. Maybe they’re sitting outside on a rock—lucky person. And they’re not lying down in the savasana corpse pose. But you’re saying that they’re somehow going to relax that deeply—almost as if they were lying down—but they’re sitting up and they’re going to just open, breathe, and receive. [Is that] what you mean by Nourishing Qi?
MG: Exactly. You don’t have to lie down. You can be sitting. You can be standing. You can be walking. You can be on an airplane. You can be in a generic hotel room somewhere on a business trip. At any moment, you can open yourself and receive.
It’s there. When you get this, when you get that there is—and this is something in every wisdom tradition. Every wisdom tradition refers to this creative, universal energy.
I like acronyms. I work with lots of businesses. My clients—I call them HACs. [That’s] “high acronym cultures.” So, I’m always looking for acronyms to help people remember things. I was thinking about “creative universal energy.” That’s C-U-E, which we could abbreviate as “Q.” And I realize it’s intelligent—that’s an “I.” “Q-I” just happens to be the Chinese word for “qi.” In Japanese, it’s ki—as in “ai-ki-do.” In yogic practice, it’s prana. In Hebrew, it’s ruach. It’s a universal notion that people from just about every culture have discovered and experienced.
It’s creative. It’s universal. It’s intelligent. It’s always available. So, all these traditions have come up with various ways to help us access it, enliven it, store it, and express it. That’s what yoga’s all about. That’s what the ki practices in aikido are all about. That’s what qigong is all about.
But all of these traditions come to the same, simple place—that it’s just available all the time and the simplest practice is [to] just be open to it.
TS: Now, there was another observation that you make quite early in the book, Creativity On Demand. And it’s this: you write, “Creative energy isn’t depleted when you use it. Rather, the more you access it, the stronger it becomes.”
That’s also very curious to me, because I think sometimes people think, “God, I spent the whole day and I was working hard on a project.” Maybe a creative project. And they’ll say, “I’m exhausted. And yet, you’re saying [that] creative energy isn’t depleted when you use it. The more you access it, the stronger it becomes. And so, I wonder if you could explain that.
MG: Sure. Well, I can just tell you about my own experience of writing this book [laughs] because it was just as much fun as I’ve ever had. And I just couldn’t wait to wake up the next morning and start writing it. As I was writing it—after 60 minutes, 75 minutes—OK, I confess, sometimes I wrote for three hours at a time, because time completely disappeared and I was in that magical zone. But I stopped and practiced the exercises that I was actually writing about [laughs] and felt the energy lifting me like [I was] surfing on a wave.
OK—eventually, you come to the shore. You have to dry yourself off and swim back out again. But the waves are continually flowing in, and it’s just a question of catching one. These simple practices are—when I teach this stuff to engineers and PhD scientists and I’m working with a construction management company, they’re very down-to-earth folks who are not—
TS: Sure.
MG: The flowery language and—they don’t necessarily believe in any of this. And as I explain to them, you don’t have to believe it. You don’t have to believe in qi to get the full benefits of this. If you just do the practice—and I can give them any one of the practices that are in the book. But do this all of 20 minutes or less—if they’d just do this—”Tell me if you feel better or not. If you don’t feel better, don’t do it.”
Everybody says, “Oh my God. I feel so refreshed and inspired. That’s so cool! How do I learn more?” [Laughs.]
So, that works.
TS: One of the central themes in Creativity on Demand is how to make this shift from what you call a “fixed mindset” to a “growth mindset” or a “creative mindset.” So, first of all, could you just describe these two different mindsets—the difference between a fixed mindset [and] a growth or creative mindset?
MG: Sure. This is based on the work of Professor Carol Dweck at Stanford University. She’s delineated these two mindsets. The fixed mindset believes that talent alone should suffice. If you’re not good at it [and] can’t do it right away, don’t bother. [Laughs.] And I have to confess, that was my mindset when I was a kid. That’s how school seemed to teach. Just do what you’re good at and if you’re not good at it, don’t bother because you’re hopeless. You’re either on the smart, academic track or you were on the other track—set for vocational school. And you couldn’t develop something that you weren’t obviously gifted with.
The growth mindset, on the other hand, believes that persistence and deliberate practice can—in the long term—trump talent. What Dweck’s research over the course of more than 20 years has demonstrated is that that is indeed the case. The growth mindset is much more adaptive and—here’s the best news—if you have a fixed mindset—if that is your orientation—you can change! You can learn to develop a growth mindset. You can actually learn what you want to learn. You can improve in almost any area.
What I’ve done is apply that to the notion of learning to be creative—because that’s an area where a lot of people have a fixed mindset. They say, “Well, I’m not creative.” And, “My sister was the creative one in our family.” Or, “To be creative, you have to be an artist, and artists are crazy and dysfunctional. So . . . I’m not going to bother.”
One thing we’ve learned in the last 20, 30 years—I mean, I’ve always known it, but it’s great for academia to catch up with what I’ve been teaching for 35 years—is that creativity [and] creative thinking [are skills] that anybody can learn. Of course, you have to believe that it’s possible.
It’s like—you have the “Pygmalion Effect.” The original studies that they did with Army drill sergeants. This is how a growth or fixed mindset affects other people. This relates to your original question about managing energy first in yourself and then in others. Army drill sergeants—who are not known as the most gullible, soft-headed types—were told that their recruits were far below average. So, after the six weeks of basic training, the group of recruits—who these drill sergeants were led to believe were below average—performed 25 percent below average.
Then they gave them another group and said, “These people are the best of the best. These are our best recruits.” And they performed, after six weeks of basic training, 25 percent better than the average.
Of course, all of them were average groups and the only thing that was different was the expectation of the drill sergeants. Hence the name “the Pygmalion Effect.” And then, when they debriefed the drill sergeants at the end of this, they refused to believe it. They were sure that the group who underperformed really were underperformers and the ones who were superior really were the top talent. They just couldn’t believe it.
In other words, our attitude—whether it’s our attitude towards ourselves or our attitude towards others—has a tremendous effect on performance. This notion, which has been around for a long time—the exciting thing about it is it’s finally receiving scientific and academic validation. I mean, even the New York Times said in the review of Norman Doidge’s book The Brain That Changes Itself—the New York Times’ science section, not known for their support of books in the self-help category, said, “The power of positive thinking finally gains scientific credibility.”
TS: OK, Michael. But let’s say somebody’s listening to this and they’re experience is, “You know, I have this friend and he’s so creative. He just comes up with songs and jokes. That doesn’t come naturally to me. I’m good at other things, but creativity—how am I actually going to learn? Oh, come on. I just don’t believe you.”
MG: That’s who I work with. The people who come to my seminars—they’re people [that] the boss sends. Recently, the CEO of one company sent me a group of people, and he sent out this email with capital letters saying, “ATTENDANCE IS MANDATORY.” They were all engineers who, believe me, don’t think they’re creative.
So, that’s our starting place. Again, it’s not a question of, “I really want you to believe this just because I show you the research about it. Growth mindset and a creative mindset!” That may soften you up a little bit, but this is a skill that you can learn. And when you see what the elements of the skill are, the elements are simple.
First is the mindset—the orientation, the attitude. There are specific elements that set us up to be successful in approaching a problem. They’re all in Creativity On Demand.
And then there’s learning the creative process. Whether you think of yourself as creative or not, chances are in elementary school, high school, university, and graduate school, you probably didn’t have a course in how to think creatively. You might have had a painting course, if you were lucky. You might have had arts and crafts when you were a little kid.
But that’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about are the strategies, the mindset, and the process—learning, for example, that there are five phases to the creative process. There are nine different modalities, and that most people are naturally strong in one or two of them and weak in the rest. Once you learn what these are, you can cultivate them. There are practices. There are skills that people come into my seminar and we give them a creativity test—the same one they use at Stanford—and they score average. [Laughs.]
They get four or five answers a minute in a test called the Alternate Use Test. Then we teach them some of these processes and practices. I put them all in the book. I put the best of the best that I’ve learned over 35 years in this book.
And then they score four or five times higher. I got a letter today, actually, from a—these people do sewer and bridge engineering in New Jersey. No kidding! I got an email from the guy today—because I’m helping them write their vision, mission, and values for their company. And the guy sent out this note to the whole team. He says, “Look—first we tried to do this by writing it the way we all learned. And then we tried this technique of mind-mapping,” [which] I had taught them in the seminar, “and we got so many more ideas! And they were so much more creative, and so much more diverse!”
My response—I mean, I didn’t write this to them—but I was thinking, “Well, yes, of course.” But it was a true revelation. This is hot off the press this morning.
So that’s just sort of “101” in terms of the basis of: OK, here’s the creative mindset. Here are the elements of it. Here’s the creative process—the five phases, the nine modalities. Learn how to do mind-mapping. Learn how to do stream-of-consciousness writing. There’s the most tested, proven techniques for generating more ideas in less time, for making new connections between your ideas—all of which you can learn.
Actually, it’s particularly fun taking those people who think they’re not creative and sharing this with them, because they get results just like these sewer engineers who wrote to me this morning. It’s a wonderful experience for people to learn a way to get new, fun, different ideas.
What really inspired me to write this book [was] that—having taught that sort of material for 35 years and applied it myself to write all these books and do what I do—I realized that what could take it all to a whole other level would be, “OK, what if you had the creative mindset, you had the creative process, and you powered that with the creative energy?” What if you could take these ancient technologies for cultivating creative energy—for storing and expressing it—and link them—find the qigong exercise that best supported each phase of the creative process? That best supported each of the nine modalities?
So, that’s what I did.
TS: Let me just see if you think this is fair: a tennis instructor might say, “I could teach anybody how to play tennis. But I’m not necessarily going to make a tennis professional out of anybody.”
So, is your basic premise that you can teach anyone how to be creative, but that they might not be wildly and super-successfully creative? Or could you teach anyone how to do that, actually?
MG: You know, the difference with tennis is it does require a certain amount of athletic ability. You can get way, way better than you are—I used to coach tennis. Actually, I’m a certified “Inner Game of Tennis Coach.” [Laughs.] I used to teach it years and years ago. It’s really fun to help people get way better in tennis.
I’ve [certainly] taught tens of thousands of people how to juggle. I’ve taught aikido for many years, and tai chi and qigong. People think they’re not coordinated. It’s a similar thing. And then, all of a sudden, they realize that this is something that they can learn. Then, if they stick with it, people surprise themselves.
Does that mean that they’ll become professional tennis players or aikido masters or professional jugglers? Not necessarily.
Having said that, I think the limitations on your creativity are much less than the limitation on your ability to become a professional tennis player, for example.
How many Sounds True authors, coaches, and gurus does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb has to want to change. So, if people have the growth, creative mindset, they will certainly surprise themselves with how creative they can become. Much more creative than they think they are, that’s for sure.
TS: OK—so, part of what you’ve done in this new book, Creativity On Demand, is you’ve linked these traditional qi energy practices with everything that you’ve learned about creativity and what supports it. One of the points you make in the book is, “The secret of creativity involves surrendering to a higher power.” I’m curious to know how these qi energy practices support, in your view, this surrendering to a higher power—and amplified creativity in our life.
MG: I think if you start to experience this empowerment of your creative energy—I can only say that my experience is that it puts me in touch with a sense of connection to something much greater than myself. Which has obviously been a quest of mine for the last 40 years or so. It’s the essence of the spiritual quest. We want to feel connected with something greater than ourselves.
But the beauty of this is to then integrate that connection into what you’re actually doing every day. So, there’s not a separation between going to do your spiritual practice and then having to go to work, and have them be separate things. But feeling a sense of connectedness with that sustaining, enlivening creative energy through the course of your day.
Here’s the thing: Whatever you call it—and I don’t necessarily prescribe what anyone else should call it. But whether it’s the Muses—which is the traditional way of thinking about it—a higher power, the divine, nature. That act of surrendering your own armoring—your own egotism, your own attachment, your own unnecessary tension—opens you to the flow of this creative universal energy.
It’s reliable. In my experience, it’s reliable. I mean, I consciously remember to surrender. [Laughs.] That’s how I start my day. The beauty of the practices is they make it easier to embody that. So, it’s not just a spiritual notion, but an energetic reality in your day.
TS: Now, in Creativity On Demand, you talk about seven different principles that have to do with mastering this creative mindset. There are a couple of them that I found particularly interesting that I wanted to talk to you about.
One of them is the very first one, as you talk about “playfulness” and being able to play more like a child. I wonder if you could address the serious person out therem who says something like, “You know—yes, I hear to be more creative, I have to be more playful. But look—even when I was a kid, I was like an adult in a little person’s body, and that just doesn’t come naturally to me. Play feels stupid. How am I going to do this without feeling fake and stupid?”
MG: Yes. Well, one of my favorite practices in the book—just to mention this, part of what I—while I’ve had many, many years of experience in training and teaching qigong, I thought this was a great opportunity to reach out to some of the great masters of the world and ask them the question, “What’s your most potent practice that the average person can do in 20 minutes or less to raise their baseline energy?”
One of the masters—even though he’s so delightful, because he refuses to call himself a master, but he really is and his mastery is partly expressed in his lack of need to call himself a master—is my friend Michael Winn. I recently came back from a five-day retreat. I taught at Michael’s Taoist summer camp, and in exchange I attended his seminar, which was utterly brilliant. Michael and I were talking specifically about a practice that could help someone like the person you describe—that overly serious person.
I deal with a lot of those people in the workplace—in seminars and so on. It turns out that there’s this wonderful practice. Nobody knows when it started. It just seems to have always been around as one of the simplest ways to access creative universal energy. Specifically, [to] open yourself to be a little more receptive to humor and playfulness.
If you think about it, who’s got the strongest, most vibrant, most potent, powerful qi? It’s children. Who are the most playful beings? Obviously, little kids.
So, this practice is called “The Inner Smile.” It’s a lot like what it sounds like. You just practice smile internally. If you just think about doing it right now—even as people are listening to this—just have a little smile, but from the inside out. So, it’s not a goofy external smile. Nobody needs to know you’re doing it. It’s kind of like—I think Leonardo da Vinci was onto this, because it’s what the Mona Lisa [had as an] expression. It’s da Vinci’s Saint John. It’s this little, inner smile.
And then you let that smile expand through your entire being. In the book, we take you through it: smiling at your heart; smiling into your kidneys, your gut, your legs, your feet. And your whole body [experiences] this sense of this inner smile.
If you try it—just try it—you’ll probably feel a lot better. And you’ll probably feel just a little more lighthearted—and maybe just a little more receptive to being playful.
TS: That’s great. That’s wonderful. Thank you.
Now, one of the other principles you talk about—I found this really interesting—[is] persistence in the face of uncertainty. Here’s one of the things you write: “The ability to embrace ambiguity and endure confusion is one of the most distinguishing characteristics of the creative mindset.” Embracing ambiguity and enduring confusion. Can you talk about that?
MG: Sure. This is the essence of the creative process because if it’s really creative, it means you don’t know it yet. It means you haven’t discovered it yet. It means it’s really going to be new. It’s the “nova” in “innovation.” It means it’s really new—which means you have to give up what you expect or think you know in order to discover something new.
Now, untrained people call that “anxiety.” [Laughs.] This is such a healing and transformational revelation for people to get—is that that not-knowing is a movement in the right direction. If you can learn to push the boundaries of your ability to be uncertain; if you can overload your mind with possibilities to the point where you can’t possibly rationally hold onto all of them; if you can, in other words, give up the illusion that you are controlling the situation, you learn another kind of control. This [is] the control of shifting into the receptive mode.
Look—as I’ve mentioned, I’ve been doing this for many, many years. I’ve asked people all around the world. I say, “Where are you physically located when you get your very best ideas?” And the number one answer around the world is “the shower,” followed by “the bath,” “resting in bed,” “driving in my car,” “out in nature.” Almost no one ever gets their best idea at their jobs or at their desks. Even at a brainstorming session, you don’t usually get a breakthrough idea.
But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t brainstorm. What you want to do is brainstorm to the point of overload. You want use up all of the things you think you know. You say, “At last, we’ve gotten to the place of complete frustration.” Except, it’s not frustration anymore, because you say, “Now we’re getting somewhere because we’ve burned through all of our habitual ways of thinking about this.” Readers of this book will say, “Now, we’ll do one of the qi practices and we’ll take a break.”
And we’re going to carry our notebooks with us, because by stimulating the associational network of the mind and pushing it outside of its normal synaptic grooves—opening up, creating a ferment of neurotransmitters searching for a new connection—and then taking the break and sleeping on it, the odds of you waking up at four o’clock in the morning—or taking that shower, or being out in nature—and getting an unexpected ‘aha!’ insight go up dramatically. Imagine how delightful it is—how your confidence in your ability to solve any kind of problem in your life would rise dramatically if you could just learn to trust this process.
Having worked with this process for many years myself and having shared it with others for many, many years, I’m always looking [for] how [I can] make it even more streamlined and effective and potent for people. Again, the only thing that’s better than what I told you—to brainstorm and then take a break and carry your notebook—is brainstorm, do a qi practice, take a break, and carry your notebook!
TS: You write in the book in the section about being able to embrace ambiguity—you write that one of your mottos is to “always use your anxiety creatively.” I’m curious about that, because I can imagine someone who feels anxiety—and maybe it’s about an unknown situation in their life, it’s related to their career, or something they’re working on—and they’re quite upset. You know—they’re anxious. They’re really anxious.
How am I going to use it creatively? I mean, what I’m doing instead is biting my nails, overeating, calling a friend and talking in a circle. That doesn’t seem very creative.
MG: Yes, exactly. The unconscious, destructive acting-out of the anxiety isn’t. So, we have to bring in consciousness, bring in awareness.
I’ll tell you the real, simplest thing here—and this is an act of tremendous courage for anyone who experiences anxiety. It’s to learn to be with it. It’s to know when you’re anxious. I mean, if you can just know when you’re anxious—if you can acknowledge it, if you can be present with it—now you have freedom. Now you have possibility.
OK, then what do you do?
TS: Exactly.
MG: Yes. My own personal experience is that I can’t meditate. I’ve meditated for many, many years, but the last thing I want to do is sit down and meditate in the face of that.
But what would be perfect for somebody like me, who—I started out way high on the anxiety scale. That’s why I’ve learned all this stuff and learned to teach all this stuff. What if there was a way to get that experience of that calming, soothing, harmonizing, “Ahhhhh!” feeling that you get in a really good meditation—but what if you could move? What if there was this moving meditation developed over thousands of years by adepts that have passed it along? And what if there were different moving meditations you could do based on the way the anxiety’s hitting you at a particular moment?
So, you become aware of it. OK. What am I going to do with this? Well, all these practices that I put in the book—they’re all things I do. They work for me and it seems to work for my students. I expect that they’re going to work for our readers.
TS: What would you say has been the hardest part of liberating your own creativity? The thing that you sort of hit your head against the most?
MG: I would say that it was that when I grew up, I had a fixed mindset. And I did not think of myself as creative. I was athletic, and I just liked sports. That was my focus. When I went to college, it was the time of the Vietnam War and all that sort of thing. The world became crazy to me and divided into two camps. Actually, it still does. [Laughs.]
But it seemed to me that the most important knowledge that we could have would be about the workings of the mind. I figured if maybe I could make a difference in the world by learning more about the mind worked—moreover, I also thought that perhaps this would help me just understand myself better, feel better, and know what to do with my anxiety.
So, I studied psychology. Except, I noticed that my psychology professors—as brilliant as they were—all seemed to be kind of really anxious and not really good role models for what I was looking for. I switched my major to philosophy, and that was fascinating. But, again, it was sort of empty and sterile, and there was no real connection to the being of the people who were teaching it.
So, I started studying meditation. I found an extraordinary teacher of meditation, self-observation, and self-awareness when I was 19. And I realized, “OK. This is my path.” Just 40 years ago this year, I went and spent a year with a master teacher of meditation who did embody the qualities that I was seeking.
In the course of this year, I had this epiphany: When I was younger, part of why I was anxious was I felt like the universe was empty, uncaring, vast, and that we were insignificant and our lives were meaningless. I was a devotee of Woody Allen, who asked the key question, “One path leads to misery and emptiness; the other to depression and suicide. Which one shall we take?” [Laughs.]
And when I spent this year meditating with this extraordinary teacher, I had this understanding that, “OK, the universe is vast and infinite. And it’s fundamentally a void, emptiness. But out of that is unlimited creative power and potential.”
OK—I had that understanding when I was 20, 21 years old. And I said, “OK, the real creative challenge for me [is] how am I going to translated that into the marketplace? How am I going to find a way to manifest in the world what [I will] do?” I went through a very, very challenging time where I thought of going to medical school—but in those days, they didn’t have holistic, functional medicine programs like we have today. I thought of going to graduate school to get a PhD in psychology—but again, you had to study neurosis and psychosis. Positive psychology didn’t exist.
That was a very challenging, difficult period, but through some delightful synchronicities, I found the path that I have pursued. And this is the latest expression of it.
TS: Now, Michael, I just want to end on this one note. There’s a lot of things that I could talk with you about, but I’m going to end on this note: You talked about how part of the process of liberating our creativity involves knowing our sense of purpose—that when we know our sense of purpose, this helps us master what you call the creative mindset. I’m curious—how would you help someone who has been struggling with finding a sense of purpose? How can they connect to that and how will it affect their creativity?
MG: That’s perfect, because it relates profoundly to the previous question we discussed. When you don’t know your purpose—and in the book, I shared the exercises I do with people in seminars and workshops on how to help clarify this. But when you don’t know your purpose, I can tell you what it is: it’s to figure it out. And to recognize that that may mean an embrace of a lot of uncertainty.
But if you persist—if you truly make it your purpose to discover your purpose—if you hold that question in your mind and heart on a daily basis, it will come. When you get a sense of clarity about why you’re here, it does wonders to organize and empower your energy for the fulfillment of that purpose.
TS: OK, Michael—just one final question. Our program’s called Insights at the Edge. One of the things that I’m always curious about is to know what someone’s current “edge” is. And what I mean by that is: right now in your life, if there was some type of growth edge or challenge that you’re working with—and you can be as vulnerable as you want to or not—but a creative challenge that’s really something that’s alive for you right now. An edge. What would you say that is?
MG: Well, the thing that’s most alive for me now is everything we’ve been talking about and the integration of this study of qigong—to bring this material to life in what I hope will be a transformational way. I talked about aligning and integrity, so I’m really serious about that. My own edge has been to just deepen my practice so that I am as aligned as I can possibly be with every single word and the space between the words in this book.
Literally, I just came back from a five-day retreat with Michael Winn. I’m leaving for a seven-day retreat with a lineage Chinese master on Friday. And then I come back from that, and I’m flying to New York to do a six-day, all-day retreat with a grandmaster on qi healing.
So, my edge is to just deepen my own mastery of this so that, when I represent what’s in these pages, it’s as deep and true and alive—and this is the edge, just making this as real and enlivening for others by making it that way for myself.
TS: Wonderful. I’ve been speaking with Michael Gelb. With Sounds True, Michael has just released a new book called Creativity On Demand: How to Ignite and Sustain the Fire of Genius. [This is] a book that is filled with practical exercises—qigong exercises for connecting with creative universal intelligence, and for developing a creative mindset [as well as] mastering the creative process. With Sounds True, Michael has also released a six-session audio learning series on The Spirit of Leonardo: Seven Steps to Self-Realization from History’s Greatest Genius.
Michael, thank you so much. Thanks for everything that you’re sharing to really be in total integrity with the work you’re putting out, which is so helpful to people. Thank you.
MG: My pleasure! Thank you!
TS: SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
