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How To Get Your Creative Juices Flowing – Creativity Series Part 2

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Watch Dr. Rodney Hill, Futurist Texas A&M University, explain how to get into a creative mood.

Transcript

Brad Besancon: You truly believe that creativity can be taught and there’s a lot of people–

Rodney Hill: They’re set up. People are creative and what you’re doing is you’re setting the environment for them to get into themselves.

Brad: So it’s basically that everybody has kind of a core of creativity within their brain but because they never set up the right environment…

Rodney: Right, right. Nobody’s ever going to do it.

Brad: Nobody’s ever going to do it. So let’s talk about, what is that environment? What is a good environment? I mean, you see Google with the sleep pods, if they’re with a massage therapist or something.

Robert Riggs: But the stereotype, typical thing is, I’m in the shower and voila, here it comes. So what are these environments?

Rodney: Where nobody can interrupt you, nobody is coming in, you’re in isolation and you can think.

Robert: Is it free think though, you’re not actually really thinking about the problem?

Rodney: Right. It’s free thinking and you have the associations like going to sleep at night. Your hemispheres just sort of makes, everything comes up. I think, was it Scott Fitzgerald, what makes a really creative genius is a mind that can hold two just position of ideas at the same time without you accept the both of them.

Brad: Makes sense

Rodney: Then you figure out maybe how to blend them up eventually. Minota has soundproof chambers for their scientists. When you’re coming up with an idea and you go into a set of flow, the last thing you want is somebody to come and walk up behind you, slap you on the shoulder and say, “What about 99 flip ball?” You’re broken out of it, so like if you’re in a place where there’s a lot of people, if you put on earmuffs even though they don’t have to be wired to anything; the wire could be there but no sound, the last one that they will pick on as they come in the room is the person that has the earbuds own.

Brad: They don’t want to feel like they disturbing them, right?

Rodney: Yes. The students studied late at night by themselves because nobody will bother them.

Brad: Nobody will bother them.

Robert: But Rodney, it seems to me that we live in the absolute worst environment now for not getting interrupted.

Rodney: Right, we do. Right.

Robert: With the smartphone, and so how do you turn it off? How do you isolate? How do you let stuff percolate?

Rodney: You just have to turn it off. [laughing]

Brad: [laughing] It’s amazing. It does have an off button or do not disturb but you just choose not to do that.

Rodney: That’s right. But if you can just get away from that, you’re way better off.

Robert: So you should kind of try to apply itself to the problem and then step back, go do something else and not expect that, oh, this will come up right now?

Rodney: Right, and don’t define the problem. You don’t want to because it’s like the coffee cup; if you say coffee, they’re going to design coffee cups, so like the good example is 3M and post-it notes which it was never designed to be post-it notes.

Brad: That’s right

Rodney: Somebody said, “Hey, we can use this for this and this,” and they probably sold a zillion. 3M has a policy that I think every four years, a fifth of all the products have to be new.

Brad: That’s brilliant.

Rodney: So they have to invent and come up with new products, plus they require that all of their employees bill 10% of their time to daydreaming.

Brad: That’s brilliant.

Rodney: How long a process is that? Is it a few minutes to get into that space? Is it, I got to leave my desk, go outside? What?

Rodney: It depends on the person. Samuel Adams used a purring cat, a cup of tea, and he would do that, and then it would pop into his head. I don’t get blocked anymore but if I did and I was trying to come up with something, I would listen to some 18th century music and drink five cups of tea as I wander around the house, and then I can just sit down and come up. Mozart would take long walks in the woods and then maybe listening to the Babbling Brueck and see 50 different shades of green coming through a tree. He could feel the breeze, smell the odors, then he could sit down and actually write a piece when he got back. Beethoven had to hammer around for months to come up with a piece, so it’s different–

Brad: It all depends on the individual. I mean, I know with me, it’s a whiteboard. I get in front of a whiteboard and just start drawing stuff out, whether it’s graphically or whether it’s word maps or outlines, or whatever and you just get out there and we just start, Robert and I just start talking about stuff and here it comes.

Robert: Back in writing and journalism, and television, what I thought would kill you is if you just sat and thought about it, that you just need to start and you got that first draft, and then I would walk away from the document, you walk away from the first draft and then have a different view when you came back. Is that..?

Rodney: Yes, sure. The more you can distance yourself and see things in a new eye.

Brad: Well, I think the other thing we learned too in business and talking to our clients is you always have to be ready, not necessarily in your full-fledged flow but you never know when that’s going to pop in your mind, so be ready. I had a professor one time tell me, because sometimes, my brain starts going in the middle of the night, is put a notebook and a piece of paper, a pen and paper beside and just write down whatever it is that’s got your mind going, so things like that because you never know. And then we’re in social media and we’re working with clients and they’re trying to tell their story, you never know when that moment of your story’s going to occur either so you got to be kind of ready.

Robert: Alright, so do you want to know more? Do you want a part 3? Give us a teaser, where do we go next on this?

Rodney: Who knows? Well, like about writing, Kipling used to write with blue ink and then his assistant ran out of it, and ran and got him some black ink and he goes going like, [groans] but he had a zigging idea so he started writing, and a thousand ideas came out, and he decided he wouldn’t write again unless he had black ink. It was like a post-it [00:06:21] suggestion.

Robert: Okay, hold that thought, black ink.

Brad: Go grab your black pens.

Robert: Part 3, coming up.

Tips To Break Your Creative Block – Creativity Series Part 1

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Watch Dr. Rodney Hill, the Futurist for Texas A&M University, explain how to get into a creative “flow” when you just can’t seem to come up with any new ideas.

Transcript

Robert Riggs: Hi, we’re Robert and Brad, and we’re here with the Clarity clip of the week and with Dr. Rodney Hill, the futurist at Texas A&M University to talk creativity. Now, Rodney, a lot of people think that not everybody can be creative but you’ve got a process you take your students through where you get there.

Rodney Hill: I think everyone can be creative. It’s just through the school systems, they’re not exposed to creativity. In fact, it clips their wings most of the time. If they try to be an original or creative, or come up with unusual answers, they’re slapped down; they expect students to reproduce knowledge. You memorize this, you feed it back on a test, but they don’t ask them to ever create anything. So that’s what’s happened to kids, so I have to show them how to get into their creative mode, and a lot of people call it “flow.” Essentially, when you’re in flow, both hemispheres lock into the frontal lobe and it’s referred to as optimum behavior.

Brad Besancon: One of the things we’ve noticed is, especially with our clients, is they have no idea how to get into the flow. Is there some tips, maybe three or four tips where, did you take your students through, it kind of gets them to flow part 1 or flow 1.0?

Rodney: Sure.

Brad: What are some of those?

Rodney: Well, getting into the first day, I’ll pass out red apples to a hundred in the class, and they’re all sitting there with a red apple wondering.

Robert: [laughing] They’re supposed to give that to you.

Rodney: Yes. So I have them either lean back they can lay down on the floor, in the aisles, whatever they want to do, and then I take them to an exercise that was written by the associate dean of engineering out of Stanford. Stanford requires 2-3 hour classes on creativity to graduate any engineering curriculum.

Brad: Interesting.

Rodney: And so anyhow, they go through a whole range of what it’s like to eat an apple. About a minute into it, they have to bite into the apple, and we imagine the apple, the sunlight going in this apple’s form, the way the skin reflects the pattern of [00:02:16], streaks and dots, not just one color. But anyhow, it goes everything, from going into the ground, coming up the sap, flowing into the blossoms, etc. but essentially, they are imagining, and what’s really interesting, this is the first time and they’re just sort of like in a daze when they get out of it. Now, the second class period, I use an exercise from the Olympic Training Center which is progressive relaxation exercise where you flex your hand and your shoulders, you go through a whole range of things, and then you release it so it gets them into that idea but a lot of them all of a sudden realize that when they are creative, they go through a series of things.

Brad: So if you had to tell a business that looks at Robert and I and says, “Guys, I’m on a mental block. I’ve been doing this for two years on social media. We’re writing blogs–

Robert: Two weeks.

Brad: Or two weeks. [laughing]

Robert: We walk in with an apple.

Brad: Yes, should we bring an apple? What would you say for a company that says, “I’ve got this team of people and we just seem to be regurgitating and nothing new’s coming out,” what are some real specific steps that they can do?

Rodney: Oh, okay. There’s an exercise that you can take them through. One is, pass out, get about halfway through the second lecture on creativity and say, “Okay, stop. We’re having a pop quiz,” and they will all go gasp, “But you said it was all going to be producing.”

Brad: [laughing] “This is a creative class, we don’t have tests.”

Rodney: And so I hand them out a sheet which is down here, it’s the chemical formula for coffee and it goes through a whole series of things. You have to design this container that will keep it at X degrees centigrade and you’ll have a packet in your hand, and you have to be able to get to another room and open the door holding this device. Essentially, just before that, I told them about trigger words, that if you’re listening to music, you never listen to music with words in it because if you’re trying to come up with something creative, you’re fighting off those words.

Brad: Yes, your [00:04:30] trying to sing the song.

Rodney: [00:04:30] image. So anyhow, they come up with these fabulous Rube Goldberg contraptions that have a bunch of them, put them up on the whiteboard, and they’re like, the really–

Brad: They have no idea where it came from.

Rodney: No.

Brad: Yes.

Rodney: But they’re wonderful. But then I flip in and show them slides of, what if I told you this was coffee? They would have come up with coffee cups, coffee mugs; they wouldn’t have come up with–

Brad: This is a chemical liquid.

Rodney: Yes, an accordion thing that lifts to the served saucer on a belt, and there is a range of things. That’s what most businesses are doing. They tell the people doing the creative thing: “Okay, come up with a [clicks tongue].”

Brad: Exactly. They tee it up too much and say the same free flow.

Robert: Okay, we’ve been talking with Rodney Hill, the futurist at Texas A&M University about getting into the flow for creativity. Now, in part 2, we’re going to come back and talk about some other specific steps of, how do you get into the flow?

Digital Marketing Conversations Should Be About Them — NOT YOU

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Watch Clarity Digital Marketing Agency Dallas Video About Online Conversations.

Transcript

Robert Riggs: Hi, I’m Robert Riggs. This is Brad Besancon with Clarity Digital Marketing and we are sitting in downtown Waxahachie, Texas. This is one of the few surviving examples of Main Street Town Square Texas.

Brad Besancon: It’s a Survivor.

Riggs:, I grew up like this. You grew up like this. But it’s gone and it’s gone because of shopping malls, big box stores, and later, Walmart but although it may be gone, the principles of how to relate to a customer that walks in the door here are the still the same online.

Besancon: I mean, the way these businesses were formed, it was mom and pop, right? And I want to start a business to serve my community, right? That’s what I’m doing, I’m providing a service for my community and my friends, and my family. It should still be the principles of business today whether someone is walking in your store, a dry cleaners, or they need your help for something, or a plumber’s out–whatever the case may be, you should still have that kind of conversation marketing, that conversation attitude which is a cup of coffee and a handshake. And we’re seeing it all the time where our clients or the reason they’re hiring us is because they don’t have that and they’re really struggling online especially on social, but it really is Main Street marketing.

Riggs: So I remember walking into the shoe store on the square in Paris, Texas and the conversation did not start with, “Hey, let me sell you some shoes here today.” It was always, “How are you doing today? How’s your mom doing? And grandma?” and all of this.

Besancon: And what was the next question they ask you? “What can I help you with?”

Riggs: “You with.” You.

Besancon: “What can I help you with? What shoes do you want?” It doesn’t matter if your style of shoe is different from mine, you’re the customer.

Riggs: So that is a good point for social media online. You’ve got to put the “you” in social media.

Besancon: Yeah, you’ve got to put that. It’s customer-centric, right? And you hear big businesses talk about, “We’re going to be customer-centric. We’re going to be customer-focused,” and you go to social media, it’s all about them.

Riggs: Yeah, so for some reason, people in business have gotten the notion now that online is somehow different. I’ve got to pound it—sell, sell, sell. People do not like to be sold to online or frankly, anywhere else.

Besancon: No, I mean, we’re here in Main Street, the survivor. Why are these little businesses still thriving? Because they have a connection with their customers.

Why Digital Marketing Is A Lot Like Golf

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A Golf Pro explains how the right Approach is important to setting up a well placed shot. Here’s how the same Approach applies to Digital Marketing.

Transcript

FILE NAME: Why Digital Marketing Is A Lot Like Golf] [DURATION: 00:05:53]

Brad Besancon: Well, hello, everyone. It’s Brad with Clarity Digital and I’m here with Kyle Kerver down at the Cleburne Golf Links, here in the Pro Shop, and we’re talking about our map program which at Clarity Digital, stands for Method, Approach, and Performance.

Today, we’re going to talk about methods with Kyle because there’s nothing more important in golf than kind of a system or methodology, right?

Kyle Kerver: Sure. We follow a process in golf much like business: you start everything out the same way. You start behind the ball to set up your shot, to set up your round. You set up everything in a process.

Besancon: It’s amazing, all that you have to go through for a little white ball, isn’t it?

Kerver: That’s correct. It’s amazing.

Besancon: And the sad thing is, what we find is at Clarity is, there’s probably more people going through steps in golf than they do in their business. So one of the things we hear in golf is that you have to play your game.

Kerver: Right.

Besancon: You can’t play Tiger’s game or Jordan’s game, or Rickie Fowler’s game; you can’t have their swing.

Kerver: Correct.

Besancon: You have to have Kyle’s swing and Brad’s Swing. So tell me the importance of playing it your way and your game. What are the critical aspects of that?

Kerver: As a teacher of golf, I teach very specific things in general but when we get down to it, once we get to a certain physical level, we do have to figure out our own way of doing everything. So my swing might be a little different than yours because we’re different body types, we’re different heights, weights, everything as far as the way we’re built, so even on the physical side is different but more on the mental side as well; we have different brains, we have different approaches of everything so we really have to find what’s best for us.

Besancon: Yes, really like the attitude of your game, right?

Kerver: Very much so.

Besancon: So you can only help mechanically so much.

Kerver: Very much so.

Besancon: And then it comes to kind of the attitude and what you’re doing, which brings us to another aspect of business which is, you have to play your game.

Kerver: Yes.

Besancon: Right? You can’t go out there and be Coca-Cola or be Walmart, or be super Target; you have to be your business, your brand, your voice. The same way around a golf course it is, you have to pick up the clubs that you chose and swing it.

So you talked about some of those steps. Let’s walk through like some very one, two, three fundamental steps that kind of apply to golf that as well as kind of what businesses should be thinking of when we’re talking about this analogy.

Kerver: Right, so kind of how we start with our approach to every golf swing, is we look at the general area, we kind of assess the situation. Every golfshot is different. So we look in a general area and then we find what we want to do specifically for that golfshot; there’s so many things that are involved in that golf swing at that moment, so.

Besancon: A lot of muscle memory.

Kerver: A lot of muscle memory. And then on the mental side of it, you have visualizations; you have to visualize your goal for that shot. You have to visualize your own personal swing for that shot, and then–

Besancon: Sounds familiar? It’s like business.

Kerver: Exactly. And then as you step into your shot, obviously, you have to execute at the end of it. So a lot of commitment involved there, a lot of going through a checklist, setting up your business the same way.

Besancon: I mean, you just went through the steps that Robert and I go through with companies all the time: visualize where you’re going; we always challenge our clients, where do you want to go with this? What do you want to do online? What is your social media? What is overall objective of it? When you’re walking with that ball sitting in the fairway, where are you trying to go? Are you trying to lay up? Are you trying to get on the green? Can you get to the green? You have to go through all of those questions. And what’s really critical about the other things I think you said which is important in the game as well as in businesses, you kind of take a step back before each shot, right? Walk us through kind of stepping back and what you’re trying to do when you kind of, like you said, overall picture.

Kerver: Sure, sure. We step back behind the ball. Obviously, the most important thing is target. We look in a certain direction, we look where we want the ball to go, but in generally speaking, we look at all the elements: look at wind, we look at temperature, we look at elevation of what we’re standing on, elevation of the green, the slope of the green–

Besancon: Where you’re starting.

Kerver: Yes, where you start and where you want to end up. So all those things you take in, in a general aspect, and then as your approach the ball, it gets more specific and more specific, until we do execute the golf swing.

Besancon: Time for the action now, right?

Kerver: Right.

Besancon: You make your decision.

Kerver: Correct.

Besancon: Right? You pick the club, you visualized it, and now you make your action.

Kerver: Yes, sir.

Besancon: Sounds a lot like listen, think, speak for Clarity’s standpoint.

I think one of the key things that applies with golf and business is this step-by-step approach, right? You have to practice. You have to create muscle memory, and you have to approach or you have to create your own system, if you will, and your game so that you can stay consistent. And ultimately, that’s what golf’s all about, right? Consistency.

Kerver: It’s all about consistency.

Besancon: Yeah, so we really appreciate your time, man. I really appreciate you letting me come down here and kind of walk us through. And I think some of the key takeaways are this: you have to have a map, you have to have a method, an approach, and a performance tester, right? Which is what we’re talking about and you also have to be sure you’re taking a step back first, going through a system, thinking about your next shot with the basis of where I wanted to go, right? It’s the same in business: you have to know where you’re going before you can start.

And then I think the biggest thing that Kyle said was, is know where you’re starting, right? And look at all the things that are making up your starting point.

That’s Clarity clip of the week from Cleburne Golf Links. Come down here and enjoy a round.

3 Key Tips To Building A Digital Marketing Strategy

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Would you start a cross country road trip without a map? Of course not! Here’s how the grey haired geniuses create a MAP to successful digital marketing.

Transcript

Brad Besancon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the new Clarity Digital. I’m Brad and this is Robert, and we are standing in one of the new [00:00:05] thousands of new homes in the market which I’m sure you guys have seen. And one of the things you have to have before you build a house is what?

Robert Riggs: A plan.

Besancon: You got to have a plan.

Riggs: An architect’s plan which we find is completely absent out in social media.

Besancon: Yeah, online marketing, social media, one of the things we’ve noticed here at Clarity is, we walk into companies, midsize companies, large companies, there’s no plan. We call it a map, and not like a roadmap; this is a map and we’ve got a little acronym there that we use called your Methodology, your Approach, and your Performance, and those are the three critical things you need to have that we’ve noticed over the last four years of business that people just typically are not utilizing before they go start go [00:00:48] stuff on the wall.

Riggs: So building a house is no different from building a marketing plan for social media, so let’s start with the M.

Besancon: Yeah, so methodology. One of the critical things about methodology is, what are you going to do? Who are you going to be? What platforms are you going to be involved in? You don’t have to be on all of them. If your audience or your target clients are not on Pinterest, then maybe you shouldn’t spend a lot of time on Pinterest and post on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

Riggs: Yeah, you got to understand who the audience is and where are they. So now I have a map A.

Besancon: Yeah, when we talk about approach, what’s your voice? What’s your brand message? How are you going to make those conversations and those connections with your target audience or your particular clients? So for example, are you going to be cute, calm, or creative? Those are kind of the three C’s we use.

Riggs: And then the P of MAP.

Besancon: The performance. You’ve got to test. You’ve got to track. You’ve got to look at the data and all that really stems back on your methodology, right? So what are you trying to accomplish in the beginning?

Riggs: And so one of the things that we do to try to get to the bottom of the M and the A of the map is a brand storming session. Yes, to really understand, who are you online? Who are your customers? How do you need to talk to them? But that really is like the foundation of this house.

Besancon: I mean, these common-sense conversations.

Riggs: And what you have to think about as a business now, you’re a publisher. You’re a media producer. You’re a news company because no one can tell that story better than, no one might–not even tell it. Nobody can tell that story better than you can tell it.

Besancon: If you’re not telling it, who is? Someone out there is going to tell your story.

Riggs: Yeah, a critic, maybe your competitor is telling a story about you but you’ve got to understand who’s your story. It all starts with map.

Besancon: With map: methodology, your approach, your performance and your platforms.

Riggs: That’s the Clarity clip.