Partnering with your brain part 2: How stress kills creativity and limits learning with Collin Jewett
Links
Superhumanacademy.com
Maven.com
Elementalkinetics.com (Hint: You’re already here!)
Transcript
This is part 2 of our 3 part series Called partnering with your brain. If you haven't heard part 1 be sure go back and listen. Collin Jewett and I discussed how powerful our physical experience is when trying to learn and remember new things. Collin is the Director of Coaching for Superhuman Academy, an e learning company known for their blockbuster learning and memory courses. As an engineering student Collin struggled with the transition from high school and found himself failing, feeling stupid and being rejected at job fairs. He knew he needed help. So after a tearful experience with his guidance counselor and making some humbling changes, Collin learned how to work with his brain to turn his college career around, get on the Dean's list and land a senior engineering position out of college. Today he’s the author of 2 books on learning and lifestyle design and has helped executives, psychologists and nuclear engineers become learning experts. He’s on a mission to share the love of learning with as many people as possible and ultimately transform the education system.
An unsung and underappreciated piece to being successful as a fitness professional is creativity. Today’s episode is a mindset reset on what creativity is and it’s value to learning and memory. Collin and I discuss how to use creativity, curiosity and imagination to help our brains adapt to perceived environments and how stress can kill creativity and limit our success learning or remembering things.
So let’s jump back in with Collin Jewett.
Collin Jewett 0:01
And I think as adults, you know, as we grow up we start to kind of just get settled with. I've got my mental model of the world and it works good enough. And we stop testing things and we stop asking questions what will happen if I do this, and then trying it and seeing if we're right and if we're not updating our model. And so many people I talked to you they really really struggle to imagine doing something like I can't I just can't imagine what that'd be like, it's like, that's a muscle you have to build you have to practice that. And if you haven't practiced this since you were six, it's no wonder that it's hard to do, you know, it takes time.
Ericka Thomas 0:36
Right, we forget. We forget that curiosity, I think it's maybe socialized out. It's socialized out because what you're talking about here is, is having some curiosity, number one, And then number two, having the courage to possibly be wrong about what you think is going to happen. And I think for most people. Over the years I mean, we were not encouraged to be wrong, or to make mistakes, and even when we know, even when we know in our rational mind that it's only by making mistakes. That's how we learn something new, if you, if you're right all the time you're not learning anything. Like, there's nothing to learn, you're just right and so it's, yeah, so let's not be right anymore. Let's be wrong everyone's.
Collin Jewett 1:36
Yeah, that's another part of it too, like our, what we experience as pleasure, a lot of time. That is our brain, rewarding us for experiencing something novel. That's not all of it but that's part of it and the reason for that is because when you experience something novel that is an opportunity for you to adapt further to your environment and become a more effective person that doing whatever it is you want to do or understanding the world better, and we get this like people get this you like to go on a roller coaster, it's because pile this is a novel experience, this is something different than, and you will like it because of that your brains like this is great do more of this, because it's helping us to understand things about the world we didn't understand before. And so it's like learning and experiencing pleasure are very tied together. So if you find the things are mundane in your life, that's probably a big part of it you're not doing things that are new, you're not challenging your perception of how the world works.
Ericka Thomas 2:38
Yeah I like that a lot, and actually I don't know have you read the book dopamine nation, it's kind of new,
Collin Jewett 2:45
but I'm sure it talks about,
Ericka Thomas 2:46
oh my gosh, talks about that pleasure, pain balance and the dopamine connection there, when we learn new things and how you the first time you learn something new it's super super fun, and then you go back again it's a little feels a little less fun and a little less bad because you're, you know it, your brain learns it it's it's interesting it's really interesting book
Collin Jewett 3:07
It's your brains way of pushing you to adapt. Yeah, grow,
Ericka Thomas 3:11
yes. So, what I'm hearing you say is we should keep trying to learn new things all the time.
Collin Jewett 3:17
Absolutely. And if you, if you're not, and you feel like things are mundane that's a big reason why, or you feel like about and if you don't mind, is it okay if I, I touch back on something you said, Absolutely. Okay. You brought up something about like how we avoid we avoid doing new things in that fear of failure, he kind of touched on that a little bit. And I think, are being right now trying to be right, we just want to be right often. I think that is another really serious issue not just with how we do do school, but a lot of times how we do life is, there's two types of two basic types of errors, there's an error of omission. In other words, you did the wrong thing. And then the or there's the error, error of omission of like not doing something that you could have done that would have been better. Okay, so, in schools, and I think this is often true in work and relationships and just life in general. We are trained to perceive errors of commission. In other words, errors, in which we tried something and we failed as being much worse than errors of omission, with not trying things. And that is a very negative has very negative consequences because essentially what we're learning is, it's better not to try, than it is to try and fail. And we see that with with school time and you get bad grades, it's like, well I tried and I got a bad grade as a result of it and even though this is terrible. There's some standardized tests, in which case, if you guess and you get it wrong, you actually get like negative points, and if you don't guess you just get zero points like there's no, you do increase your balance but you don't decrease it either, so it's like at least I avoid the negative points, and what they're trying to do when they design tests like that is we want to prevent people from succeeding by randomly guessing, we don't want to reward people for randomly guessing so we'll punish them if they guess wrong. But the problem with that is that it prevents you from trying new things and you don't want to learn, you don't want to risk, it's better to not try than it is to try and fail. And the truth is if you flip that and you say, errors of omission are worse than errors of commission, it totally changes the way that you live your life is that I would rather try and fail and learn than not try at all.
Ericka Thomas 5:37
Yeah, that is so great. And as I'm listening to you talk I'm thinking maybe we should be talking about the school more.
Collin Jewett 5:46
That's my, my life work there, I'm going,
Ericka Thomas 5:52
oh my gosh there's so much there but I think that might be another podcast.
Collin Jewett 5:58
A whole podcast I'm starting one pretty soon just totally talking about that school stuff.
Ericka Thomas 6:04
Oh my gosh, it'll be great. It'll be great. It'll be great for people to hear. Okay so let's, let's get back to talking a little bit about memory. Okay, So, you said, nobody really has a bad memory. Right, it's possible I mean you could have actual impairments but most people who think they do. Okay.
So are you saying that you can actually get better at remembering things with certain skills are our practice. And if that's true, what are the things that we can start doing right now to help with that, to make it, make it better sooner.
Collin Jewett 6:50
Yeah so here I'm going to I'm going to give a list of a list of numbers. For example, I'm going to share this because most people when they hear list of numbers, they're not going to remember to directly say like 172596 Have you already kind of lost it at this point
Ericka Thomas 7:12
172596 something. I actually like, okay, okay. Oh no, oh no, yeah but I had to do, there was a lot of focus going on on my end for that.
Collin Jewett 7:30
The reason I use numbers as an example is because that's one thing where it's, it feels so abstract, that it's like, I can't remember that and I think that that teaches you something about memory, it teaches you several things about memory if you're, if you think about it. So one of those things is how your working memory works. Working memory words, your working memory is your super short term memory. It is what allows you to understand and put into context when you hear the end of the sentence. You remember the beginning of the sentence well enough to make a cohesive picture of what I've said. If you remember if your working memory was completely impaired and it didn't work at all, every single word that I say would be like the first word I said, and you'd have no idea what I was talking about, ever. Every new experience would feel like the first experience you've ever had, essentially. And assuming the rest of your memory was also impaired, okay. Alright, so there are, there are very tight limits to our working memory, and there are good reasons for that, for being from like an evolutionary adaption perspective but it's kind of like analogous to like your conscious awareness versus your subconscious awareness, your conscious awareness is extremely narrow and it's important that we narrow, because I like the phrase like you, you see what you aim at. You don't aim at what you see you see what you aim at you can only see the things that you're looking for and that's it. Alright so that's your conscious mind you can only see the things that you're looking for essentially. And if you if you didn't have these value structures to determine what to look at what you're looking for, you wouldn't be able to process anything because there's so much information coming at you all the time, through all your senses, you would be overwhelmed and you won't be able to do anything. There's just too much going on. So your brain has to, in order to make sense of the world, it has to filter like crazy. And so your subconscious mind does most of that work for you. It's behind the scenes and it's filtering things out, and throwing them out so you don't deal with them and your conscious mind can just deal with a very, very narrow sliver of what it can handle, and focus on and make decisions based on. Okay. So, all that to say, your working memory is very limited and it usually you can contain seven plus or minus two, you're going to hear that a lot if you dig into memory at all you hear that term, seven plus or minus two, that's the number of like conceptual units you can hold in your working memory. So a conceptual unit can be lots of things but like if I gave you a list of animals you probably remember five to nine of the those in the list if I gave you like 20 animals for your realistic grocery items if I give you a list of numbers like I just did. And it's actually a side tangent really quick. It's actually really interesting in Asian countries, people who speak, I think it's like Mandarin. They're their numbers. At least I'm not an expert on this at all, but I know that a lot of them are just one syllable. It's like one one through one through 10 or something's like one syllable each for us, they're not like seven, two syllables, and stuff like that. And so they actually take up like more space in our working memory when we try to save them, you have that phonological loop that's like the, the audio voice in your head you can kind of repeat things over and over and over again. If you were repeating them in your head, it would take longer to say, like, seven, than it would to say the end now, like one syllable another language that represents the same idea of seven. And so, people who speak those languages can often remember more numbers just kind of interesting. And it's just, it's not because their memories are better it's just because they're taking up less space with the concepts. Interesting, which is an important. The reason that's really important is because those conceptual units, you can kind of this, you can kind of fudge those. And what I mean by that is like you can combine things into one conceptual unit that were originally multiple, let me give you an example. The numbers 1947 You hear if you hear those as four distinct digits. Those take out four spaces in your working memory, that's like half of it, maybe more, right there. You can't remember much more than that in a quick string of numbers. If I tell you 1947 Like a year, all of a sudden it's one conceptual unit takes one space. That's crazy. That's a quarter of the space ticket before.
So you can actually hold a lot of information in that working memory, if they're combined the right way into single conceptual units, if you understand them to be one thing instead of multiple things. And we do this all the time when I interact with people. So like, if you look at a person, that's a lot. There's a lot going on there, you've got their nose you got their mouth, you've got the sound of their voice, there's a million different experiences and yet we're able to understand that person, at least from like first impressions. You can remember a lot about that person because of visual information. We can have a visual that takes up one essentially conceptual units worth of space, even though there's a ton of information encoded in that. And that's why when you hear a picture's worth 1000 words, it really is, it's worth a million words
Ericka Thomas 12:50
and. And so, along those lines, If you were to be able to connect that single conceptual unit with the single name. Theoretically, you would always remember that person's name and.
Collin Jewett 13:08
So let's dig into that a little bit more, I'll get to name specifically, since you brought that up. But what I'm trying to communicate here is that, like, not all forms of information are created equal in terms of how we remember them. So you can describe a person to me like they have brown hair, they have blue eyes they have, whatever. And this whole list of attributes and pretty soon, if all I'm thinking is in terms of like those individual pieces my working memory gets overloaded and it's hard for me to understand everything that's going on I'm gonna forget things. You showed me a picture of them. I got all that I can recall it back to you. And so there's, depending on how you're experiencing something, it will be translated in your brain very differently. And here's the practical application of that you can choose how you process information. You don't have to process 1947 as four distinct conceptual units of me saying like you don't have to process it in auditory way. You don't have to hear yourself in your brain saying 19471947 Keep it there. You can imagine the year 1947, either as someone's saying it, or maybe you haven't. You have something about that year that's really important, like that's roughly when the Second World War was. Please tell me I'm right on this ending. I didn't know my history better man. But, but anyway, like, people often mistakenly think they have to try to store information in the way that's presented to them, and that is a critical error that causes them not to be able to learn things nearly as fast as they could. And so that is an example of tying back to like verbatim note taking, you're thinking to yourself, I need to recall this the way that the professor the person my friend, my boss said it to me. Why, why do you need to number their words, that's not what's important. What's important is the concept and the concept doesn't have to be experienced as merely words in a sentence, it can be experienced as a physical sensation it can be experienced as an image, you can experience in all these different ways, that's what we're talking about bodied learning anything. Every single abstract concept and I know this might be hard to grasp if you haven't thought about this before. Every single abstract concept has a physical analogue that we use to understand it. When we think about time for example, how do we experience time. It's kind of hard to explain, isn't it, but when you try to explain it, you'll end up using.
Ericka Thomas 15:47
I don't think I've ever thought about that question,
Collin Jewett 15:50
how do I experienced time? And if you try to explain it, you'll find yourself you cannot explain time without describing it in physical terms you will describe it in terms of distance, which is something that you experience physically what is distance, it's something that it's a amount of space I can travel through with my body, I can move through it. And that's how we explained time. We can't understand that otherwise it doesn't make sense to us we have to use physical explanations, and that is true. Everything we always, always understand things in terms of some physical analog even if we don't identify that immediately.
Ericka Thomas 16:29
So when we don't do that, which most of us don't, I, this is the first time I've ever heard any of this. So, if we don't do that where we are making it so much more difficult for us to for ourselves to learn anything, doesn't matter where it's coming from or who's teaching it or, you know, how we're how we're how we're experiencing it. So I want to I want to just tie this back, is what you're talking about. So you mentioned how we can kind of change the default settings in our brain and how we receive. Is this what we're getting to hear like has. Okay, okay. Oh, interested now.
Collin Jewett 17:11
Probably not boring the audience. Yeah, yeah, so essentially we can choose how we process information and there is some man it's, it's so analogous to, to working out and for physical fitness. If you struggle to do what I'm talking about, it's because you haven't been doing it, you know it's it's a muscle you have to improve so you may you probably did it when you were a little kid without thinking about it, and you probably stopped over time and it's become much, much harder. I found that people who read like fiction books for example, are typically they take onto this better, because they've spent more time, like a semi imagination,
Ericka Thomas 17:53
spent more time dissociating living in another world, something like that.
Collin Jewett 17:59
They're using their imagination so like the difference between first, for example like reading a fiction book and playing a video game, like what's doing the work of imagination there.
Ericka Thomas 18:09
Oh, yeah.
Collin Jewett 18:11
In one situation, the game is doing all of the work of the minds and the fiction book, you are doing all of that works. And that's not always true, I mean some people when they're playing video games, it's there's a huge imaginative component to it in their mind. So, if you're listening to this and you play video games all the time you're like I've always like imagining stuff and sorry if I get that totally. But for a lot of people what you're doing is outsourcing, something that your brain can do. And when you outsource something that your brain can do it stops doing
Ericka Thomas 18:41
that makes sense. That makes so much sense it's it's basically atrophy of the brain "muscle", right. So, okay. I would like to kind of touch on this idea of creativity and imagination, and how that can come in and help us with learning and memory. So, so let's dive in to that a little bit. What does creativity have to do with lateral thinking and what is lateral thinking and how can we do more, that,
Collin Jewett 19:17
that is such an amazing question because, creativity, and hopefully you understand this in context of everything we're talking about plays this incredibly important role in learning. And I think a lot of people lose that over time because they don't perceive it that way and it's not told to you that that's true or even, you know, when you're in school, you aren't oftentimes you're not encouraged to be creative, maybe you have a great teacher who does that, you know some people usually people's best experiences of school is not because of a subject they loved it's because of the teacher that was amazing and really cared about them or some friends or something. But a lot of times in school and in work and kind of everywhere, we're not really encouraged to be creative, talking about the omission versus commission that's part of it. And, and as a result we tend to think there is a, it's called binary thinking. There is a right way to do this there's a wrong way to do this, we get locked into lots of those patterns and it's very unproductive for learning. So, to talk about lateral and or creative thinking. It's important to think about why you would do that, like what is the motivation behind creative thinking why would your brain need to think creatively, what's the point. Because if you think about what the point of it is. You can even think about it from an evolutionary perspective, then you'll start to recognize maybe why you're not doing it and why you've feel like you've lost that creative ability. Alright so let's, let's use an example here, if you are, let's say you're a prehistoric Hunter and there's a, there's a tiger in the bushes. That is not any here at wrestling and you're thinking oh no I'm about to get jumped by a tiger, that is not really a good opportunity for creative thinking, because what your brain is going to do it's like, I need to do what works. Now that I've tried before. And you're gonna be like, I'm gonna run, you know, and you're not just going to run, you're going to run as fast as you can in the opposite direction and the tiger. Like you're probably not thinking creatively you're just,
Ericka Thomas 21:15
you're not thinking at all.
Collin Jewett 21:19
Yeah. So when do we think creative what will we think creatively in order to answer questions, which again if you're getting chased by a tiger, you're not thinking about questions. And this is analogous to even if there isn't a real tiger in your house prowling around or at your workplace. A lot of people are under constant stress, where there might as well be a tiger, that's how they're experiencing the world.
Ericka Thomas 21:45
Yeah, that I actually wanted to bring that up with you because you mentioned something earlier about how the subconscious can basically hijack your conscious brain to get something done, that works in the moment to keep you safe. That's basically your stress response and that's exactly what you're talking about here. There's no time. There's no time to figure out a new way to run away from the tiger, or to you know make friends with the tiger, like there's just no time for that, when you've got a tiger. Okay, so, so yeah so that cuts off all of that creativity, and may explain a lot about the folks out there who are going to say straight out, Hey, I'm not creative at all. I don't have any creativity. So, yeah,
Collin Jewett 22:39
your brain adapts or it tries to help you adapt to your perceived environment that's what learning is. It's your brain trying to help you adapt to your perceived environment that word perceived as critical, because it doesn't matter, like, what the objective reality if you even think there is one, is that's not that's not what matters the brain doesn't adapt to some objective reality, your brain adapts to your perceived environment in your perceived environment is colored by all of your life experiences and a trauma that you've had color's your perceived environment. Anything you've learned or been told or identities that you've given yourself. Like there's all this stuff in your perceived environment that may or may not like objectively exist, just because there's not a tiger sitting behind you at work, doesn't mean you don't feel like there is. And that is what your brain is adapting to and it's trying to help you deal with that issue. And so if you feel like you're constantly under stress, and you're overworked and underslept and underpaid, whatever. There's no reason for your brain to be creative, it's in survival mode it's trying to get you away from the tiger it's not trying to come up with a new way to, to do something you know is, you're not paint picture mode you're in. Run for your life mode. Right. So that's the first thing, and there's lots of, like, if it's helpful, some like criteria like time pressure. Now, good for creativity, feeling like an someone who's out of a group like being on the outside of the group, not good for creativity. It's more of a perceived thing of course, because then your brain is like how can I get in the in group because that's much better for survival. And what are some of the things perception of judgment or evaluation internal or external not good for creativity. This has been shown scientifically if you give kids, some pencils and paper and you tell them draw me a creative picture, and then at the end we will award the most creative picture, their pictures are going to be a lot less interesting than if you just give them pencil and paper and then do whatever they want because they have this perception of being judged. And that's true for everybody if you, if you think your work is going to be judged, or you judge your own work, very critically, you will be less creative and the things you'll produce will be less novel, because when there's stress or there's room for Oh no there's risk I'm going to die. This is an exaggeration but it's the same kind of response. That's not the time to be creative. Right, so all those things are there so you then you think about what what's the flip side, and why would I be creative, what is the impetus to be creative. Creativity thrives when you are asking questions and you're trying to answer them. So, and they're it's open and open ended answers, So it's not right or wrong, it's anything could be true. What is true. So it's starting with that assumption that anything could be possible, anything could be true. I just wanna explore what it is, I want to answer those questions then your brain kicks into creativity mode, because I like to think of creative one way to think of creativity is it's the, the art or the ability to generate answers to questions.
Ericka Thomas 25:54
I no I don't think I ever thought about it like that. And, and I consider myself to be a pretty creative person I like a lot of, I like to learn a lot of new things, I usually pick one big new thing to learn every year. And, you know, I like to make things out of other things and I guess if you break it all down. That is the question that I mean that is it's just questions about what, what could this be instead of what it is now, or. Yeah, that's interesting. Ever thought about. So
Collin Jewett 26:31
that's one way to understand it and why I think that's a really valuable way to think about creativity is because the next question is, are you asking questions. If not, if you don't have any questions to answer. There's absolutely no reason for your brain to be creative, it won't be. There's no questions to answer, so why bother because creativity is somewhat expensive and takes some cognitive effort, you know, and like, so why waste resources if there's nothing like there's no point. So a lot of people when I, when they say they're not creative. I asked them well. Are you curious about the world around you do you ask a lot of questions. If not, make sense. There you go. That's why you need to start asking questions and if you don't you're not gonna be creative. So that's one side of it, and something that's really empowering about that is, you can ask questions, you can just choose to do that. No one can stop you from asking questions, you can do that all day long. And if, if, creativity is inspired by asking questions and you have the freedom to ask as many questions as you want forever, boom, you have no limits your creativity, there's no reason why you can't be creative as soon as you start asking questions, your brain will start to start to activate those muscles and they might be old machines they might be rusty. Maybe they haven't been used in 30 years, but they will turn on and they will start to work and the rest will come off and as you ask more questions the creativity will start to flow.
Ericka Thomas 27:58
And I think, something that is a piece of this, a piece of starting to ask more questions or letting yourself ask more questions, is that you have to pay attention. Like you have to notice something in order to ask a question about it. And I think we're over consumers these days of things that take us out of where we are, you know, Social media, you know, all kinds of distractions. There's so many things out there that are competing for your attention. But very rarely are we do we let ourselves, you know, you know, just focus on something long enough to ask a question, right, and to notice that hey that doesn't that looks like. That's something weird over there, what's going on. We don't even do that, we just Google it right. It's just,
Collin Jewett 28:59
yeah, oh my goodness, a million, million points. That is so important I think that's one of the reasons why so many people think they're not creative these days, instant gratification or instant answers is one of the worst things for creativity. If you have a question then you immediately answer by looking it up. First of all you've programmed yourself to think there is a right answer to this question that's something I can just look up, which is not helpful, very binary thinking. But the next thing is your brain never has a reason to wonder about things. I don't need to wonder about it I just looked it up on Google. And I think that's, that's one of the issues with one of the many, many, many issues with with social media, and why it can be used for good news for horrible evil is that it's that instant gratification cycle of your, if you think about it, I talked about this a second ago, your brain adapts to its perceived environment, right. If you're on social media. Most or a lot of day. What is your environment, that is a bigger part of your environment than maybe most other things in your life and your brain will adapt to that environment. And that environment is one of instant gratification. It's one of reinforcing previously held beliefs, because that's literally how it's designed to work. I like this thing okay I'll show you more of it.
Ericka Thomas 30:26
And also false perception of reality, which is really, really dangerous especially for young minds, in particular teenagers about what it takes to be happy. Look, I'm just gonna lay it out there, nothing on social media is really real, like nobody really posts, their real life, they just post the happy shiny pieces of it. And so, the perception there is everybody's life is great. And if your, your perceived reality doesn't match that now we've got all kinds of issues that can come up for people, and it is, it is kind of an epidemic that, that we see in our young people it's really really sad. So it's interesting that you, the way you put that about social media being your perceived environment because that's a really, that's really good language to use around it, I wouldn't have thought of social media as an environment but it absolutely is.
Collin Jewett 31:31
Absolutely. And what you just said. And I get a little emotional about this topic, like what you just said comparison. Comparison is the thief of joy. Absolutely 100% I wrote a chapter just about that my first book because that is one of the most one of the major things that prevents people from learning it's, again it goes back to that commission and omission, like when we aren't we now live in a world where you can compare yourself to the best in every category. That wasn't true, not so long ago, you didn't have access to the best possible musicians in the world in history. You didn't have access to the best athletes. Now we do, you can see you can look up the, what's the record for this what's the record for this, and you can compare yourself to the best all the time and that that can be really really destructive. Why learn anything, I'm never going to be as good as that person. When we can actually say that with like factual evidence you're not going to be. And that's brutal. Yeah, we've expanded our awareness of what's possible and in some ways that's amazing. That's really good in some ways that's, that's really, really devastating for comparison and our joy, and I want to do, you asked about creativity and lateral thinking. I gave answers to questions that's one perspective that's not the only perspective. Another perspective I think is really valuable is the understanding that creativity is not origination. Creativity is combination. That's something that yeah hey that's a great kind of like people who are listening that as you can see kind of like the back camera.
Ericka Thomas 33:22
Blew my mind to actually with that not origination, but combination, and that's, that's actually should be a relief for people because I think there's a misunderstanding about what creativity is like that you're coming up with something completely new that the world has never seen but really there's nothing new under the sun.
Collin Jewett 33:43
Nice biblical quote there. That's absolutely true. There is nothing new in, in every creative idea, you can always find pieces that were already known that were just combined in a way that they hadn't been combined before or hadn't been thought about before. It's not that they came up with something totally new, it's that they took two ideas that freebie previously existed, and they throw them at each other and say what happens. Yeah, That's how we figure out everything about our world. I know exactly what you said is, this should be really for people because most people would think they're not creative, they think they've averse, they think creativity is origination, it's starting from nothing, and somehow just magically pulling something out of thin air. That's never been creativity and never will be creativity isn't art, we cannot do that, we are physically mentally incapable of just pulling something out of nothing, sorry we can't do it. We're not gods. No, it's always in combination and so if you want to start, like if you tell somebody, if you give somebody a piece of paper and a pencil and you say, write me a creative story. They will probably freeze like a deer in the headlights. I go, No, and their stories, like I said with drawings earlier, probably won't be very good. But if you say, if you just throw in like a list of options. All right here's, here's 200 things a great story about, I want you to pick to randomly throw a dart at the dartboard. Two things from this list, combine them and write a story about it.
Ericka Thomas 35:20
It could be really interesting. It could be, it could be brilliant, brilliant.
Collin Jewett 35:25
And you can do that with anything you can, like if you want to just, just take a problem that you have something you're dealing with, take that problem, and now combine it with something else throw something else at it and see what happens. And the great thing is you can cycle through this and you can do this whole bunch and this is how usually amazing solutions are come up with, they take a problem that they already know and then they throw something new at it, and sometimes it happens when they're dreaming and their subconscious takes that problem that they're trying to solve when they're awake, and it throws it into the jumble and the craziness of everything that is in your brain and lets it kind of bounce around until it hits something hits something new. Yeah, yeah, then that combination is what you wake up with and say you rica you know I just figured out this amazing solution.
Ericka Thomas 36:17
Yeah, and that's that is interesting that you brought that up because it kind of makes me think about how sometimes in the entrepreneurial space, there's sort of a mindset that you know you are coming into maybe something new, and you don't really know if you have enough of the knowledge base, or the experience or the letters after your name to be able to do, you know, X, Y and Z. When in reality, most of the time, you have in your experience in your world, wisdom, experience everything that you need to create whatever it is that you want to create in the world of your taking, you can just pull out of your toy box of of life, all the things you've collected over your lifetime, you, you can you can do whatever you need to do, you've got everything you need. And that is only if you allow yourself to tap into that combining creativity to make it happen. Wow, that is really important stuff to understand. The great thing about what we've learned in this series so far is that it's never too late. We can choose to be more curious, we can choose to be more present, we can ask more questions. I think that's amazing. Next time on the work in. We'll wrap up our three part series with the foundations of learning to improve memory. You won't want to miss it. Thanks, Colin.
Collin Jewett 38:06
Thank you. It was a pleasure.
Ericka Thomas 38:10
Thank you, my curious listener, if you like what you heard, and you want to learn more you can find all the links to connect with my guest today at elemental kinetics.com, forward slash, the Dash work dash in, as well as free resources for fitness professionals to design, trauma sensitive classes with confidence and creativity within your scope, and without the burnout for you and your students. Get your free guide to holding space at elemental kinetics.com See you next time.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
I’m Ericka
The Work IN is for fitness professionals and refugees from the body brand nation who are ready to make trauma informed instruction the gold standard of professionalism across the industry.
I’m a highly caffeinated resilience coach, course creator and entrepreneur with over 2 decades of experience as a fit pro and a certification collection that includes registered group fitness, RYT, trauma release exercise and more.
If you’re looking for a way to expand your professional scope and burnout proof your business with trauma sensitive, creative class design you’re in the right place. Let’s chat!