The Unusual Way Creativity Helps Us Find Success

Hey, I’m Paul Krismer, I’m your happiness expert, and this week I’m coming from somewhere close to Bakersfield, California. I’ve just worked with this great client this morning, and I was thinking about their original style, the way that they were bringing leadership to their small, but very successful organization, and how progressive it was. But more than that, the way that this guy is leading is hugely creative. Even bringing me in, someone teaching emotional intelligence to leaders, is an unusual step that a lot of businesses, of course, aren’t thinking about and aren’t investing in. I got to thinking about creativity in general, and how important that is. In fact, I met someone earlier this week who’s just one of these individuals that leaves an impact right away, makes a big impression. What was so interesting is that she’s this brilliant intellectual, double master’s degrees, brilliant at finance, does financial consulting for big companies and yet she said this to me: she said her greatest strength is to dance.

I was puzzled and bewildered. I couldn’t believe it that she takes time out of her busy and very successful career to teach dance as a therapeutic intervention for people. Through that creative release, she made people happier, healed, and more successful. Similarly, I thought, in some respects to this leader I’ve been working with this morning, through his expression of creative leadership, he is happier and more successful. So that’s what this video is about. It’s about how do we get more success in our lives through an unusual, not rational way.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. So here I am, behind a landscape of retired Boeing Jets and windmills. It goes into the symbolic innovation, the way that society has evolved to be what we are today with all of its faults and concerns, but people have made the world better through their creativity, including inventing jets and windmills and the like.

We don’t often think of creativity that way. We think of creative arts, and painting, and pictures, and music, and dance, and that kind of stuff is though that’s the typical creative channels. When we think of people who are into those things, they’re artsy, they’re less serious, and yet all of us have some need for a creative outlet. Ideally, we can bring it into our workplaces, like this gentleman this morning who’s a very creative leader. It’s in leadership that he’s expressing his biggest, most beautiful, and most joyous song.

Even the work I do, teaching emotional intelligence and how to be happy, is my gift. It’s the thing I can give to the world, and I feel very creative in this work. We all want to lead into some ways that we can be creative. For this brilliant woman I met, it was in dance. It seems like it’s something contradictory to her financial, high-powered consulting, but she did it because she knew it’s important. In her view, it brings her closer to her creator.

Often, our society overvalues rationality and intellect. Modern philosophy that began with Descartes and Hobbes emphasized that ‘because I think, I am’. The thing that sets us apart as humans and makes us special and capable of doing so much was our thinking. The reality is, even those philosophers, as they wrote that, they were expressing their creativity, and they undervalued it. Yet that undervaluing made a mistake for our society where we overvalue and reward people for their intellect, without recognizing that it’s of course intellect is important, but it’s the creative expression of that intellect that’s the criticality that makes our lives as individuals better and indeed makes our society better.

It’s when we emphasize the need for creativity, encourage it, and do like this leader this morning, running this very progressive, hugely successful company in a macho, blue collar, industrial setting, that most often people wouldn’t be thinking very much about emotional intelligence. But he knows that that’s going to be the creative way that’s going to make the difference in furthering the success of his company.

So where are you in your life and how are you applying your creativity in a way that’s going to help you to be bigger, better, and get more of what you want in life? Don’t look to your intellect, or don’t look there alone. Look to the thing that makes your heart soar, and that’s going to be some element of creativity. It’s not necessarily art, dance, and singing, although if it’s those things, it’s great too. But there’s creative outlets in the way that you live your life, in the way that you do your business, in the way that you relate to the people that you love. That’s going to be the key to more success.

It’s not happiness through changing our thinking, in part, it’s happiness through our actions, through our expressions of creativity. That’s the point of this video, go find that way to be happier through your most creative actions. If you like this kind of content, click the like button and share with your friends and family, maybe with your Human Resources Director. I’m Paul Krismer, happy to be doing this work that I do, and I’ll see you next week. Bye for now.