Build Your Creativity Capacity with Leadership Expert + Creativity Strategist Natalie Nixon
Show Snapshot:
Time to stop thinking of creativity as fixed or finite. Midlife is exactly the right time to build your creativity capacity and inject more wonder and audacious dreaming into your personal and professional life, says author and C-suite creative strategist Natalie Nixon. Natalie shares ideas to design our days for curiosity and champions the idea of giving ourselves permission to be a “clumsy student” to better cultivate wonder and creativity. We also explore burnout, the role of AI and ChatGPT on creativity, and how we can optimize imagination. If you are looking for new thinking on how to bring your creative, professional, and personal gifts to the world, this show is for you!
Show Links:
Follow Natalie
Natalie’s Book: The Creativity Leap: Unleash Curiosity, Improvisation, and Intuition at Work
Quotable:
Wonder is audacity, dreaming, really big blue sky dreaming, as well as the ability to be able to sit in all and to pause…it's really hard to wonder when you're going 80 miles an hour… if you want to become wiser and build your body of knowledge, you've got to design space in your life to be more curious, be more audacious.
Transcript:
Katie Fogarty 0:03
Welcome to a certain age a show for women who are unafraid to age out loud. I'm your host, Katie Fogarty beauties. Buckle up. We have a fabulous show. We are being joined today by a guest who has worn so many hats over her career in life she could open her own had score. Natalie Nixon is a creativity strategist and a top 50 global keynote speaker. She is a PhD and academic. The author of the award winning book, the creativity leap, unleashed curiosity, improvisation and intuition at work. She's lived in five countries. Her background spans anthropology, fashion, academia and dance. She is a LinkedIn learning instructor, a frequent media expert and forgers force, truly a Renaissance woman, and a one of a kind creativity expert. She joins me today to spread her light. And to help us uncover how to bring our own creative, professional and personal gifts into the world. For yourself a large cup of coffee or a piping hot tea, we are getting ready for a major Dose of Inspiration. Welcome, Natalie.
Natalie Nixon 1:10
Thank you so much, Katie. It's great to be here.
Katie Fogarty 1:13
I'm very excited. I have immersed myself in your book and all of your wonderful writings, I've gotten to see some of your speaking engagements online. And I'm excited to explore creativity with you. I know that you define creativity as our ability to toggle between wonder and rigor to solve problems, right and produce novel value, what some people call innovation, you wrote an entire book on how we can cultivate creativity. We're gonna get into some of those ideas in a minute. But first, I would love it if you could help us define wonder.
Speaker 1 1:46
Well, I think about wonder as audacity, dreaming, really big blue sky dreaming, as well as the ability to be able to sit in all and to pause. And I remind people that it's really hard to wander when you're going 80 miles an hour, wander is not woowoo it's actually something that some very smart people throughout time, have spent a lot of time thinking about and investing in. And the more I've researched wonder, the more I realized that if you want to become wiser and build your body of knowledge, you've got to design space in your life and time in your life, to sit in order to be more curious, be more audacious to, to pause. So Socrates, for example, said that wisdom begins in wonder. And the Jewish theologian civil rights activist Abraham Heschel wrote that it's wonder not doubt, which is the root of all knowledge. So that's what I mean, when I say a lot of smart people have paid a lot of attention to wonder,
Katie Fogarty 2:50
yeah, it's such a it's such a beautiful word. And thank you for helping, you know, describe it and define it for us, you know, in our culture, I think attends to prioritize, you know, rigor over wonder, I think rigor requires less of an explanation. I know, you, as a coach, help companies learn to prioritize, wonder and space for innovation. And, you know, in our own lives, we are our own HR department, you know, we set the agendas for how we're focusing our energy, and our time, if somebody's thinking to themselves, I want to create space for wonder, in my own life, you what are some of your recommendations for incorporating this in our day to day?
Natalie Nixon 3:30
Well, and first, just to clarify, I'm not a coach. I'm an advisor to a lot of leader, executive leadership teams or companies. But I just want to clarify that. But in our personal lives, one of the best ways to cultivate wonder and creativity more generally, is to be what I call a clumsy student of anything. When you are not the smartest person in the room, and you put yourself into student mode, it really helps you to be in awe of the of the little things in your life, to be to humble yourself, and to really build the curiosity that is that is fundamental to wonder. So, for example, I did something this summer that I have never done before. And I'm now hooked. I'm a swimmer, I swim, I've never swam competitively, and I really cultivated my skills as a swimmer as a as a young adult. And a friend of mine last summer. Tweet texted me about this program called swim trick. It's an English company and they design swimming holidays around the world. And she said, You got to try this because she she she and I were on a work project together once in Northern California. We're whole culture is the norm and we discovered about ourselves. We both love to swim. So I fast forward, went to Crete in Greece in July and spent a week doing open water swimming, which I've never done before. I mean, I've I've swum in, you know, calm bays a little bit here and there, but I've never, you know, slept so am 3k Day, which is what we did, we were doing 3k to 4k a day. And it was the most marvelous and I mean that, in terms of the true meaning of the word marvelous it was, it was a marvelous experience. It was total immersion, I learned so much about myself, I learned so much about nature and the beauty of being really in rhythm with water and the sea, and connecting with other people with whom I'd never met before. And I was so full of gratitude every single day that I was living in these turquoise green waters in southern Crete, and doing something that I didn't know if I could do and wrote this funny story. Before I put a bow on this part of our conversation.
Katie Fogarty 5:59
I love this. I love this conversation, keep going. The first day,
Speaker 1 6:03
I went with a friend of mine from ballroom, the other area where I'm accompany students ballroom dance, and I convinced my friend Tori, to come do this with me. And Tory is a scuba diving, so I figured she'd be open to it. And she was and are playing with from Athens to to Crete was late. So we arrived a little later than the rest of the group. And we got to the part of the introductions were, our guides asked us to put on our swimming costumes because they're English. They were going to, they said was to have a go at it. And they were going to just, you know, just swim before we had cocktails and dinner for the first night. Just around five o'clock, we put ourselves in costumes, we're staying in this tiny little village, which is only accessible by boat or hiking. So this tiny little village called Loutro, which is only accessible by boat or by hiking. And we walked down to the Pebble Beach area, there's there's different families and tourists staying. And they asked us to swim out about 50 yards and to do excuse me, I just swim three loops around two buoys that are about I guess they're they're about 50 yards apart, maybe 100 yards apart. And everyone dives into the water. And I start to swim, and I panic. I don't have my breathing cadence. I'm gasping for breath. Everyone seems to be faster than me. I go my back a couple of times just to calm myself down. I do the first loop. And everyone is not like, way ahead of me. And I'm just panicking and I yell out to one of the guides. I said I'm losing my breath. I can't I can't breathe out my left side. I usually can she's like, Oh, don't worry, I can only breathe out the right side of my face. Now this one has swim the English Channel. Okay, so I try again. I do a second loop again. I'm not in the right rhythm. I'm gasping for air. Everything is dry. And I decide, okay, I'm just gonna get out of the water and I don't do the third loop. So I'm standing at the shoreline. Totally dilapidated, dripping water. Very downcast thinking. So my inner voice is saying, I should have never come. This was a bad idea. I'm gonna drown. I'm the slowest person in the group. Why did I ever do this? Like those are literally the thoughts that are racing through my head. Everyone else finishes the third loop. And they're all cheering like that was great. That was so refreshing, wasn't it? I was like, Yeah, that was that was great. I looked down at my feet. And I hone in on a pebble. That's the shape. And I'm not kidding. It's the shape of a heart. And I bend down and I pick it up. I say to one of the women Her name is Andrea. I said, Oh my gosh, look at this pebbles, the shape of a heart just like lovely. Isn't that awesome? She's in Cambridge. And I said, this must be a good sign. I'm really hoping is a great sign that talks to my husband that night. He's like, how's it going? I'm like, Oh, it's fine. But I'm like really like, I've got to I've got to do the last one every day. This is horrible. But I get over myself. I have a good night rest. I get up in the morning. And they announced the groups the teams and they decided put me in another woman in the slowest group and the groups are divided by the color of our swimming cap. So the fastest group is pink. The middle group is orange. My group we have yellow swimming caps. So I'm like, Okay, I'm the slow. We're the slow group. It's fine. It's fine. So we get on the big boat. The guides are in smaller boats. And we are going out to our first track of the first full day and have a great time. And I'm just swimming the way I swim and it's beautiful. And we have lunch like a two hour lunch and then the afternoon we swim some more but I have to tell you that at different points during the swim with Heidi and me Heidi was the other person in the yellow swim that group. The guide kept saying Natalie, you know, slow down a bit. You're getting a little bit ahead of Heidi's I would slow down fast towards the end of the day. We're all back at the hotel Nitro. We're having cocktails and the guide, save right? Well, we've had a chance to observe everybody for our first full day. And we've done a reorganization of the teams have not the teams, excuse me of the groups, and they rehab the handout, they resort the teams, and they hand me a pink swimming cap. And I said, Oh, no, no, I'm this. I'm in the slow group. This is this is pink, pink is for the faster people. And they said, no, no, you're pink. I said, Ah, I think how did I go from being the yellow slip got the slowest group to pink. And by the way, they just ended up resorting us to just pinks and oranges. Well, for the remainder of the week, one of the things I learned about myself was to get out of my head and into my body. And I also learned that the way I like to swim with just long, extended slow strokes, is exactly the way you should swim in open water, water is very different than swimming in lanes in a pool. And there literally was a moment when I realized it's probably about day three, where I felt myself swimming to the rhythm of the sea. And it was just the most incredible feeling. And again, I stretched myself physically, I stretched myself mentally, emotionally, and I learned to be okay, with not being in the lead in being the fastest one, it has nothing to do speed. It's very much of a tortoise and hare fable sort of paradigm. And it's much more about, you know, attunement, uh, to move your body attunement with the sea. And, you know, steady mix the race. So So that's that was my summer holiday adventure in Crete. And then I, I went on and met my husband and our daughter in a stumble for a week. And that was also really
Katie Fogarty 12:08
cool. Natalie, what a beautiful story. First of all, as somebody who is scared of both pools and open water, you you've, you've inspired me, you describe it so beautifully, I love that you were able to, you know, sort of talk yourself into getting back into the water and learning that you were, you were better than you thought. And you sort of stopped listening to that inner voice, which might have stopped you in your tracks. If you listen to the first time you got out of the out of the water and back onto the boat, we're heading into a break. But when we come back, I want to talk about this idea that sometimes we can push ourselves, you know, into things like experiencing wonder and creativity and that it's not something that is just accessible only to a few. Natalie, we're back from the break, I know that you just shared that you had to sort of push yourself back into the into the water to swim and have this what ultimately wound up being an incredible experience. In your book, you share that many people sort of romanticize maybe, you know, not just success, but creativity as a sort of mystical, magical process that's only available to a few, you know, maybe only available to those people wearing the pink swimming caps. You know, walk us through why this is not true. And why it matters that we wreck, you know that we recognize that creativity is accessible to each and every one of us. Well,
Speaker 1 13:25
the reason why it's important that we recognize creativity is accessible to every one of us is that we actually are hard wired to be creative as humans. And we see that very easily. When we look at small children, for example, if we reflect back on into our own childhoods, it was really easy for us to get lost in our thoughts to make something out of nothing. For example, my sister and I, when we were when we were little, we could play for hours after a rain and making mud pies, right. I mean, she typically was the chef and I was the sous chef. But still, we were able to make something out of nothing. And while I defined creativity is toggling between wonder and rigor to solve problems and generate value. A more common way to think about creativity is the juxtaposition of elements, ideas, products, stuff that people previously had never thought to put together. It's all about the remix and the mash up. So the challenge is that it's really about the way we've been educated. We've been educated in a way to value more the solution and the answer versus the process. And so that's why so many of us feel like believe that we are not creative, but it's really a matter of investing and making the decision to commit to again, making time and space for Wonder but also for rigor. Rigor is not That's something that people like to associate with creativity. In fact, people think that creativity is doing whatever you feel like and that's only part of the story of creativity, creativity requires a tremendous amount of rigor. The the awesome American dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp, famously wrote that before you can think out of the box, you must start with a box, you must know the rules. So before I could really relax into the water of the sea of Crete, I had to get back into the technique of breath. While you're swinging, I had to get back and learned all the tips from our guides about extending from the torso all the way up to the arms hip and a bit of the torque that the torso has to make. And that actually makes your story more efficient. So I would go back and forth between reminding myself of the technique, the rigor to enhance the wondrous experience I could have when I would get out of my mind and into my body. And rigor is about focus and discipline and time on task. What I find is that sometimes we think we're being rigorous, but we're actually being a bit rigid. And rigidity and rigor are really different things.
Katie Fogarty 16:19
I love that distinction. And your book is full of so many wonderful examples of people who are toggling back and forth between wonder, and rigor. One of the examples that I really love was a woman named Celine, who's a perfumer, I would love it if you could share with our listeners, because I think this really illustrates the concept so beautifully. Why is the creation of perfume, a process that really marries wonder and rigor so beautifully? So
Speaker 1 16:41
Celine Belle is French she's from the preeminent preeminence, town of perfume in the heart of France in southern France called grace. And she is a nose. She's a perfumer, who is that I FF, the International flavors and fragrances company, and I visited her at her place of work after meeting her at a really cool salon experience, not hair salon, but it was kind of like an ideas salon. And I was really intrigued by her because of the way she works and the way she thinks about the role of scent in our lives. She at one point said, My superpower is my ability to make real, what no longer exists. I thought, oh, that's, that's, that's is why I love I mean, I love perfume. It's because when, when we smell, something that reminds us of a time, a person, a space that we no longer can access, man, that smell brings it all back. So Old Spice aftershave will always always remind me of my dad. And the smell of baking bread and rolls reminds me of my grandmother, and my aunts, and Jergens lotion of the original arm almond cherries, that reminds me of being a kid. So scent is an element of our senses that we really under utilize and tap. And the way Selene thinks about her practice as creative is that she says that I merge chemistry, which is the rigor part, and intuition, which is the Wonder part. And that marriage of chemistry and intuition is something that she is able to go back and forth with every single day in her work.
Katie Fogarty 18:32
It was, I love the way you described it. And I love the way she described it in the book, too. It was just so evocative. And I totally agree, I feel like this scent is such a powerful sort of memory and juicer, really, it puts you in something and it's a wonderful example. Because I you know, when you think of create, well, maybe not you because you've written entire book of it. But when I sometimes think of creativity, I think of it as sort of the surface level of like making art or, or having a conversation or creating a story. But there's creativity and imbued in so many aspects of our life and our work that we sometimes don't even think of it in that way. You know, and that's one of the things I think that your book really surfaces. least it did for me and which which I so enjoyed.
Unknown Speaker 19:17
Thank you,
Katie Fogarty 19:18
Natalie, I want to switch gears for a moment because, you know, we're talking about creativity today. in new ways, you know, it's hard to think about human creativity. without examining the role of AI I know that you have you have thinking on this, you've written about it. We have things like chat GPT, which are creating words and articles and books, we have aI imagery, creating everything from art to LinkedIn headshots, I actually worked with a client recently who upgraded her headshot with an AI headshot. You wrote an article recently about AI for the magazine Fast Company, which turned into a workshop that you deliver to the Fast Company innovation festival recently. It's called the AI we didn't see coming. I would love for you to share a little bit with our listeners, what you see as the role of human creativity in a world where AI is on the rise?
Speaker 1 20:10
Well, I think that the ubiquity of technology is something that a we have to accept the train has left the station. But I don't have a utopian view. But I but I still don't have a dystopian view of it. I have with my friend Galit area who is a, a, she calls herself sometimes a digital hippie. She's an expert in augmented reality. She calls it a hetero Tolkien perspective, that there's some good and there's some bad and the way I think we could think about AI as relates to creativity is that AI should not be the pilot, but it definitely can be the copilot. And it can spark our curiosity. If you've played around a little bit with chat GPT, then you're well aware that it is only as good as the questions you're able to frame. And even the coders and computer scientists who are designing the algorithms, they still must be able to ask a better question, right? They need to be able to be really good observers of society. The fact that we now have job categories and job titles of people who are prompt engineers, these are jobs that didn't even exist five years ago. These are people who must be really good at asking questions. So in the article that I wrote for Fast Company, I was really helping people to understand that this is a time when now more than ever, our curiosity can be piqued. The need to be able to be improvisational and experimental, is stronger than ever. And what my next book is going to be exploring is this idea that what if our most productive selves are not when we're churning through email or on Zoom or at the whiteboard, but when we step away from that technology, and we engage in what I call motor activity, MTR activity that relates to movement, thought, and rest, because in a time where technology is everywhere, and it's getting more and more embedded in our lives, and in our work, the opportunity is to lean into technology that amplifies what makes us uniquely human to do work that makes us uniquely human, because basic tasks are being taken over right. I mean, I love a good AI app, I love that I can dictate a text into my iPhone,
Katie Fogarty 22:41
me to listen and write if I can't find my readers, I am voice texting all sorts of insanity to my kids and children, because
Speaker 1 22:49
that's great, and it offloads cognitive load in our brains so that our brains can do other things. And they're the the beauty of in the idealize optimal state, from my perspective. And what I'm exploring in my next book is to really, what is the work we can do that can tap into our default motor network, our default mode, our default mode network in our brain, right, which is where the best synchronicity of juicy ideas become juxtapose and our imagination really expands. That's the opportunity is that we really optimize our imagination. Because technology apps, robotics automation, are going to be doing the basic tasks. So with left, there's so much more than left. And I'm gonna get the statistic wrong, but I think neuroscientists say that we're only probably optimizing li maximizing, like, 20% of our brain capability. So there's a lot more to explore creatively in the midst of all this technology. Yeah,
Katie Fogarty 24:00
I absolutely love that. And the the notion of sort of offloading some of the work that can be done with AI to free up, you know, higher level thinking or imagination, or, you know, create space for wonder, as you as you described, I, I have never heard the term prompt engineer before, and you better believe I'm going to Google that because it's so interesting. One of the chapters when
Speaker 1 24:20
you go to a website like Upwork, they are they have job offerings for prompt engineers.
Katie Fogarty 24:27
I absolutely love that. And I'm thinking the prompt engineers are probably really good at something that you describe in your book as asking a better friggin question. Which is one of the hilarious titles that you have, you know, like, we need to be asking better friggin questions. And, you know, you shared earlier that perhaps the way we've been educated or way the society prioritizes solutions over, over wonder kind of inhibits our ability to ask better questions. You know, for a listener who's thinking, you know, I want to be able to do that what would be a prompt that we might Consider in our own lives to help us get to better questions. What I also want
Speaker 1 25:04
to just contextualize the reason why I talk about curiosity and questions so much, is because I realized that when I was developing the Wonder vigor framework, it wasn't enough for me to tell people to go ahead and toggle between wonder and rigor to solve problems. Off you go, you know, you're creative. How do you do that in a consistent and sustainable way? And that's when I developed the three eyes. The three eyes are how you can consistently toggle between wandering rigor. And they include inquiry, which is curiosity, improvisation, which is about being experimental, and intuition, which is following the heart the nudge, saying yes, and but get the focusing in more on your question around inquiry and how we can get better asking questions. Part Part of the skill of getting better at asking questions to build the confidence to ask questions, because so many of us have been questioned, shamed at some point in our career, in our educational experiences in our upbringing, we got a message that Don't ask too many questions are, you shouldn't dare raise your hand and maybe you receive with giggles or even worse, you were ignored. That's even worse. And you quickly get this this message that I've been asked too many questions just about, I only will raise my hand when I'm 100% certain that I have the right thought or idea, which is really not the point if we want to truly be able to innovate, because innovation is a really messy process. And it requires us to learn from mistakes. It requires us to probe more with questions. So one of the things that we can do is to is to educate ourselves about questions. For example, I love the work of Warren Burger, who calls himself a question ologists. And he's the author of a great book called a more beautiful question. He believes and I agree with him that we need to actually teach people how to ask questions, we assume people just know how to ask questions. And what a great place to start, from my view is to understand there's what I call a taxonomy of questions. So there are what we could think of as divergent questions, questions such as why and what if, and, I wonder? And then there are convergent questions, questions that help us to get a bit more tactical. And those are questions like, what, when, who? And then there are hybrid questions hybrid, the hybrid coaches are how how can be a conversion question like, how are we going to get this done? Can also be a divergent question like, how might we? So even understanding the distinctions between questions is a great place to start to begin to practice. And so when I am hired to advise teams, executive leadership teams, sometimes we just go into redesigning meetings so that they are incorporating questions in much more interesting ways, and you're normalizing asking questions, but then again, on a personal level, a great way to get better at asking questions is to become a clumsy student, because I gotta tell you, as I have studied ballroom, more intentionally over the past three years, there's no shame to my game, because I don't do anything. And I have to learn from people who are better than me, other students, I learn from my instructors, my teachers, and what begins to happen is, is that you rewire the neural synapses in your brain, the more you ask questions, the more you're not shy about improvising on something about following that nudge. You are sparking those neural synapses in your brain to so that when you return to the work at hand, your everyday work, you've normalized it, you're a lot more comfortable asking questions, and following your intuition and being more improvisational, yeah,
Katie Fogarty 28:58
absolutely love that you're practiced in that. And in somebody you said, Natalie sparked a thought on me to, to be a clumsy student, but to also be, you know, maybe a clumsy or work in progress teacher, because, you know, I'm a parent of three children I have, you know, people often ask me now that I've like a podcaster, for information. And so I've been trying to share what I know and and, you know, within the context of only what I know, but it forces you to think through what it is that you believe to be true, or what you believe to be useful or to to figure out, you know, how you want to sort of share this information. So I think being a student and a teacher is something that probably helps us with, you know, to ask better questions and get better information. Now, I do want to switch gears for a minute and ask you about something and kind of like, take this conversation in a totally new direction. I know that you recently celebrated a birthday, and I know this because we're connected on Instagram, and I saw something that you shared and I paid attention because we both turned 54 Around the same time, just within a few days. If you farther and on your birthday, you shared an Instagram post that I absolutely loved. And you said, quote, I am becoming the woman of my dreams. And I so adored this notion. It reminded me a little bit of Diane Von Furstenberg who says, you know, becoming the woman you were meant to be. I think this notion is so beautiful. And I'm just curious, I would love to know, what does this look like for you? What does it mean to be the woman of your dreams?
Speaker 1 30:26
Well, whenever I start to feel a little less confident about my ideas about my work about a choice that I have to make, I recall, I recall a photograph one of those, you know, the school picture who your mom picked out a nicer dress for you make sure your hair was combed? Yes. Ready for that public school? Yeah, sure, we have. My second grade picture is one that I just adore of myself, because I was wearing this crocheted, I mean, it was like a crochet knit dress, which I thought was so proudly wore on special occasions, my hair was on to French braids, and I had on this little necklace of a pendant that had my birth date on it. And I was so happy, I felt so immense, I would not have used those words back then. But confident, you know, I was just happy and pleased with myself. And that's the self that I hold on to which I really believe if we think of like ourselves as those Russian dolls, that girl with that bliss, and that self contentment is still inside of me. And so with that girl, one for herself is joy, is being able to be helpful to people is being able to use her brain. Well, I mean, I loved reading and still love to read. When I was a girl I loved how I could go into different worlds in different time periods and different perspectives started out with my love of theory tells that graduating to Nancy Drew novel stories on onward to like Jane Austen stuff, my high school, love, love, love fiction. And so the woman of my dreams is a woman who is able to explore who's able to be happy with the smallest of moments. And hopefully it's helpful to people. And so that is a work in progress. But I certainly am closer to it than I would have ever imagined, I would have never imagined 10 years ago that I would be an entrepreneur, I was still a professor at that time. At the time. That was my jam. That was great. That was working for me until it didn't anymore. So to be able to make that shift is has just been an incredible gift. so fulfilling to the point where I was saying to different people a lot over the summer, it doesn't feel like work. I mean, I'm working at it, but it's you, you get to the state of flow where you lose the track of time, and you really are enjoying so much the ability to have this convergence. In my case of all the very different sorts of things I've done in my career, where now they all make sense. They're all converging into one kind of thread. So that's what I mean when I when I say I am becoming the woman of my dreams.
Katie Fogarty 33:26
I love that and what role what role if any, did aging play in this process?
Unknown Speaker 33:32
What role has aging played? Well, in
Katie Fogarty 33:34
the process of just sort of feeling like, you know, with a Russian dolls that you've returned to your, to your core?
Speaker 1 33:41
Well, you know, I actually wrote an essay of somebody write an essay for a really cool platform called 4050. And it's to celebrate women and aging and similar with what you do, Katie and I wrote two years ago, when I was 52, I wrote an essay called Why I love getting older. And what I shared in the essay was that because I was such an Awkward Black Girl, I was such a nerd. I never felt comfortable my own skin. I felt like it only looked good in a leotard and tights. 30s I was so skinny, buck teeth. I went from being a tomboy to being terrified of boys and really nervous around them. I was I was a nice girl and I got along with everybody and I was a great athletes good good in school that stuff. But I can just imagine when I was 15 years old, oh my god, this is only going to get better. It's got to get better. I imagined for some reason, my 40s I don't know why I thought that when I was 15 years old, but I thought I think that when I'm in my 40s I'm finally gonna have it together. Like I'm going to be happy with the way I look. And I'm going to be confident and everything's just gonna flow and so I wrote this essay My theory of each decade I've lived through so far, and how sure enough in my 40s, I really began to come into my own. And aging, to me is really about acceptance. It's about accepting what you can no longer do as well. It's about accepting all the things you can do. Aging is about the gift of perspective, you know, the perspective I have now at age 54, that I didn't have at 44 that I certainly didn't have at age 14. And to me, it just gets better and better if you acknowledge the part of the aging process is acceptance is that you can't do some of the things you used to be able to do but there's so many other things that you now can do.
Katie Fogarty 35:48
I absolutely could not agree more. And I love the way you phrase that aging is acceptance. I haven't I've had 156 conversations, you're the first person to say that is going to stick in my brain I so agree with that. It's like the double sided coin you have to accept what's maybe hard and challenging but but but by accepting who you are to, you just sort of are so free. And there's so much joy and confidence and I just sort of contentment and who we are. I love that Natalie, we're nearing the end of our time, I do want to close with the speed round because I always so enjoy hearing people's responses to this and it's kind of a high energy way to end and I could talk to you forever. So this is just sort of a way of getting more from you before we get started. So this is one to two word answers. Are you ready? Let's do this thing. Okay, creativity requires wonder and we've said that wonder requires time and space. What lifestyle hacker Choice allows you to add space to your life?
Unknown Speaker 36:52
Sleep I love that
Katie Fogarty 36:54
creativity also requires rigor. Right this choice app or hack provides rigor and structure from ideas.
Unknown Speaker 37:03
The timer
Katie Fogarty 37:05
Yes. Oh my gosh, my I find timer runs my runs my days. You recommend nourishing creativity by choosing to be a clumsy student a beginner I know we talked about swimming but what was another new thing that you've tried recently?
Speaker 1 37:21
I always go back to ballroom dance because I'm always learning something new in ballroom right now. I'm trying to really perfect not perfect. There's no such thing as perfection. I'm trying to get much better at West Coast Swing. sets.
Katie Fogarty 37:33
So fun. What is the next new thing you want to try? Huh?
Speaker 1 37:39
Okay, I actually want to get better at attaching false eyelashes halfway. I haven't. I haven't. Whenever I speak good Ketos and I it's such a treat to get my makeup done by professional makeup artists learn so much from them. And so many have tried to teach me to apply
Katie Fogarty 38:00
Oh my god. That's Derrick. I know. I love it. I love it. I like it because it makes such a difference. I don't leave. I don't leave my house without mascara. It's like the I'm not like a huge makeup person. But you know something happened to my eyelashes in midlife. So it's like either mascara or or fake ones. I totally get that. All right, how about this one creativity is all around us. This creative thinker artists always inspires me. Probably too many, right?
Speaker 1 38:32
There's too many Twyla Tharp we've already mentioned. Oh, gosh. Ava DuVernay, the filmmaker. My dance teacher in a dari who's full of rigor any athlete? Yeah. Any professional athlete? Absolutely.
Katie Fogarty 38:57
What's I think it's so wonderful to have more than one answer to this because that's what that gives gives us like, so much inspiration. Okay, this one might be easier. Finally, your one word answer to complete the sentence as I age I feel complete. Nice. Natalie, this has been such a pleasure. I so enjoyed this conversation before we say goodbye. How can our listeners find you follow your work? Learn about your thinking find your book. Well,
Speaker 1 39:24
thank you again, Katie for having me on your podcast. It was such an awesome conversation. listeners can go to my website figure eight thinking.com is the number eight. And they should download a free sample chapter of the creativity leads. They can join the Ever wonder newsletter I shared tons of content in my newsletter. I also share a lot of content on LinkedIn so they could follow me on LinkedIn and definitely connect with me on Instagram as well at net WX phenomenal all
Katie Fogarty 39:55
of that is going into the show notes. Thank you, Natalie. This wraps a certain age a show for Are women her aging without apology? And before I say goodbye a quick favor, I would love it if you could take five minutes to write an apple podcast review. Do you feel more creative inspired or smarter after listening to today's show? Do you feel less alone more connected to a tribe of amazing midlife women? If so, please take five minutes to rate or review the show over on Apple podcasts. reviews help the show grow. Special thanks to Michael Mancini who composed and produced our theme music. See you next time and until then age boldly beauties.