Ruth Richards [00:00:00]:
When we say everyday creativity, again, it’s just what you do every day. It’s not only when you do cooking or only when you do something else. It’s what do you do every day? And what is that bringing out from us in a way, if we are really free to explore not what you do, but how you do it.

Matthew Worwood: [00:00:21]:
Hello everyone. My name is Doctor Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:24]:
And my name is Doctor Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood: [00:00:26]:
This is the fuelling creativity in Education podcast.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:29]:
On this podcast, we’ll be talking about various creativity topics and how they relate to the field of education.

Matthew Worwood: [00:00:36]:
We’ll be talking with scholars, educators and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and exploring new perspectives of creativity.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:44]:
All with a goal to help fuel a more rich and informed discussion that provides teachers, administrators and emerging scholars with the information they need to infuse creativity into teaching and learning.

Matthew Worwood: [00:00:56]:
So let’s begin. Hello and welcome to season nine of the Fuelling Creativity in Education podcast. And welcome to our first regular season episode of the new academic year. And we have an amazing episode for you today, which is actually a double espresso episode, which as a reminder, is when we have one interview and we split it into two different episodes. And if you are an emerging scholar or an educator interested in bridging the gap between scholarly research within the field of creativity and classroom practice, you’re going to love this episode because we are going to be digging deeper into the concept of everyday creativity and talking a little bit about how that translates to the teaching and learning environment.

Cyndi Burnett [00:01:36]:
So today we are very excited to kick off season nine with Doctor Ruth Richards. Doctor Richards is an educational psychologist and board certified psychiatrist with more than 25 years of experience. She is also a professor at Saybrook University in creativity studies and consciousness, spirituality and integrative health. She has published numerous articles, edited, written four books on everyday creativity, and received the Rudolph Arnheim Award from Division X APA for outstanding lifetime accomplishment in psychology and the arts. Welcome to the show, Ruth.

Ruth Richards [00:02:16]:
Thank you very much. I’m delighted to be with you in such a show with such potential to change things.

Cyndi Burnett [00:02:24]:
Oh well, we have to start off with the words everyday creativity because for those educators out there, you’ve probably heard this phrase thrown around everyday creativity. Let’s practice our everyday creativity. But Doctor Richards, Ruth has actually trademarked this term because it is the area of research that she’s been working on for decades. So Ruth, what is everyday creativity?

Ruth Richards [00:02:51]:
I think it’s really important we all do this thing. We all have a potential to do this thing. It doesn’t matter what we call it, but we decided to call it everyday creativity, me, Dennis Kinney and others at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School because we had a particular purpose. And that’s very important here. Not that it made everyday creativity any less general for everyone else, but we wanted to look at mental health and creativity issues. And to do that, it is important that we be able to look at what people do. That is, and we use barren, original and meaningful. Meaningful is good because it isn’t kind of stuck in the past like useful is.

Ruth Richards [00:03:45]:
You’ve already got the use. Does it make it or nothing? Meaningful may not have a use for five years, but it makes it to we’re using and are using originality and meaningfulness for everyday creative product. Okay, so there’s the definition. But we went further and spent years and with some wonderful students, assistants and helpers to develop and validate something we call the lifetime creativity skill. It’s interview based. It takes a long time. We used it for research, but if you’re interested, it’s in, I think, a 2012 book edited by Mark Brunko on creative research methods. Something.

Ruth Richards [00:04:29]:
Write me anyone who wants to write and I’ll tell you. But the point is that this term is actually grounded in something that had many rating, has many rating levels, examples, and looks at both quality and quantity. So it’s like originality and fluency, but it looks at what we do in real life. So since you asked, I’m going to give you the long answer. It looks at what we do at work and what we do at leisure. And guess what? We’ve suddenly included the whole world instead of the small number of people who are artists or poets or scientists or something, because that’s not our interest. We want to know where this impulse, if you will, and this complex talent of generating anew and being able to do something with it can come out in life. And it comes out in a lot of places that you wouldn’t think, but that we ended up raiding really good ones, like World War two, resistance, because through Seymour Caddy and others at McLean, we were able to partner with an adoption study, although we weren’t doing an adoption study, that was in Denmark and other places.

Ruth Richards [00:05:49]:
So we had a lot of people in Denmark. Denmark was really good in world War two. And there are a lot of people we ended up having interviewed by our danish psychologist interviewer who had done things in the war that were not only risky and dangerous, but very ingenious. And so that’s just one example, I think, an obvious one of someone you wouldn’t want to leave out. But they’re not in your usual scale. If all you’re looking at is artists. And there is the view that creativity is only about arts and sciences and the other stuff, well, that’s important, but not so much. They’re really these traditional fields, not here.

Ruth Richards [00:06:31]:
This is how, and this is less what we do than how we do it. So for another example, one of our people in the danish study, and so we weren’t interviewing him because it was the interviewer. He was an auto mechanic who, you know, did the kind of repairs you hope an auto mechanic would do. So the car worked, but he invented his own tools. And I’m not sure if he did that because he was left handed or some other reason, or he had a particular interest in doing a certain kind of operation. So I was just giving examples of people who might not be obvious participants in the kinds of samples of studies that are chosen for the product. Now we’re going to study artists, we’re going to study scientists, we’re going to study whatever. We don’t care about that.

Ruth Richards [00:07:33]:
We want to study people who are maybe in a very innovative classroom, as in Cindy’s 20 lessons. Seriously, we want to study people who may have ADHD and see if they’re more creative. There’s some good literature on that. What is the best way to work with that learning style? We may want to study. And we wanted to study people who were at risk for bipolar disorder. And later we studied schizophrenia. And bipolar is very prevalent in the world with less than, but not far from 1% of people with bipolar one. And then there’s a whole spectrum of lesser mood swing disorders and cyclothymic personality.

Ruth Richards [00:08:25]:
And then you have relatives who don’t show these symptoms. But there are various factors, and I won’t even say risk factors, because some of the effects can be very helpful that run in families. So we were interested in that. In fact, Daniel Goldman ended up writing about our findings and the lifetime creativity scales, which is what I’m addressing here. You don’t want to have some random measure. You want to know what that construct is for. The New York Times Tuesday science Times feature. The key, again, was that wherever they were, whatever they were, whatever they were doing, these people in these families who had problems, their relatives, we wanted to, to see what their lives were like at work and at leisure.

Ruth Richards [00:09:15]:
Now we look at people who get left out, and there are sometimes people who don’t have salaries, so they are homemakers, they are people who are gourmet cooks, in the evening for their family. They’re people who are remodeling their house or landscaping their backyard, whatever it is. We wanted to be able, all at once, all in the same potential, to put these people in there and look, not in a fine grain way, but look at what is kind of. We had criteria, we had examples. We have. You can look it up for each of these categories. They have to do with quality and quantity. And we were looking for peak creativity, peak everyday creativity.

Ruth Richards [00:10:02]:
So something that would be part of a major enterprise that, since you asked, that someone would be doing not for 2 seconds and never again as part of their life. And we wanted to be able to see if this happened over time. That’s the quantity and quality thing. But we wanted to give them the credit that if they’d done some major thing once and then had a few bad years, that we weren’t going to count them off for that, you see? So we had our purposes here, but it actually works for anyone, because we’re trying to get a picture of how people spend their time. And if it’s making up stories with their kids at bedtime, hallelujah. And that’s probably a pretty good one. But we’re not looking at all the people who make up stories and comparing the stories. This is about a way people choose to live their life in the present moment richly and using imagination and etcetera.

Ruth Richards [00:11:05]:
That’s not the definition. Therefore, it gets into process as well as product. Because I was just saying it’s how the guy invented tools to repair cars. It’s the kinds of stories the parent maybe makes up with the kid. They take turns or the teacher with the class, and each student adds on to the story. Right. It’s about how that happens. It may have mistakes, as we know.

Ruth Richards [00:11:33]:
Mistakes can be really good. This is more, though, of a very rough kind of rating about the kind of originality, presence, the immediacy and the richness to make up other terms that are not in this of everyday experience. And if we have time, which we don’t. I did a little study at a recent conference where I had people imagining something that was really everyday creative for them and had them put down how it made them feel in three different words.

Matthew Worwood: [00:12:10]:
Well, Ruth, I’m loving this. And what I wanted to do is just share with you how I’m translating some of this. To a certain extent, what I was hearing, this idea of something that someone’s proud of and value, which you just referenced toward the end. My middle son, for example. I don’t think his teacher is listening to this, but his teacher is retiring. And last week she said, I’ve got all of these books that I’m happy to give away. And in a split second, he said, oh, I can take all of these books and sell them. So anyway, he came back with a huge bag of all of these different books.

Matthew Worwood: [00:12:44]:
And then immediately he came out, set up a table, and he said, I’m going to do a buy one, get one free, dad, because that makes it more appealing. But then he also identified the fact that some of those books were of value and other books he probably was going to struggle to sell. And he came back and he was really proud of his strategy. He said, dad, I split up all of the books that I didn’t think would sell and put them on a different table. And then I put all of the books that I thought would sell and put them on another table. And he said, when I got them to come over with the buy one, get one free, I had them choose their book, but then encourage them to go to the second table to grab their second books. And he was really proud of himself. And the reason why I bring this up, Ruth, is that I think in that moment, that’s an example of everyday creativity.

Matthew Worwood: [00:13:32]:
It was obviously something that was somewhat serendipitous to him. He was responding to the situation. He came up with this idea, but at the same time, he obviously valued it. He recognized it. And I think that probably there are lots of these small incidences in these classrooms where we see these acts of everyday creativity in students. And I suspect we can also see everyday acts of creativity with teachers as well. I was with a group of teachers yesterday, for example, from another perspective, and we were talking about creativity and how it manifests. And I’ll read one of the responses that the teachers shared with me.

Matthew Worwood: [00:14:07]:
They said, well, creativity in teaching is kind of reaching every student despite learning abilities with unexpected variable constraints and unpredictable pathways, having to be flexible, constantly decision making and improvising while embracing these teachable moments. And I think that last moment, those teachable moments again, I feel like it’s like reacting to that situation and coming up with new and useful ways to go about that. Just in those two examples that I’ve shared, do you feel that’s kind of moving toward that definition around this everyday creativity that you’ve been talking about and as a construct to which you’ve studied from both the student and teacher perspective?

Ruth Richards [00:14:47]:
So thank you, Matt, and congratulations to your son. And I love the way that evolved and emerged and as we could talk about chaos theory another time. But what I want to say is everyday creativity for us, and this is me, Dennis and the others, where we developed this and validated it, is an umbrella term. It includes many things. So I realized that later. I. Plucker and the ghetto. I think James Cawthon, too, came out with four different types, and that’s nice and that has a purpose.

Ruth Richards [00:15:21]:
We weren’t doing that. So they were using a little c as opposed to a small c, whatever it is, for what goes on in the classroom. That’s very, very. But this is broader and certainly includes that, because what is true about everyday creativity is it’s what we do every day. That’s it. And it’s going to be very different for this person and that person for your son. No kidding. Compared to other people who probably didn’t even want her books.

Ruth Richards [00:15:52]:
Right. And so on. So this is important, too, because what we do can get trivialized. And I don’t mean by trivialize that it isn’t important, but it’s back to these things that are not real jobs and nobody gets paid. And you’re kind of advising your friend during a spare moment. That can be the most creative thing you do all year, advising that friend at that moment. But that’s what we’re looking at, not what somebody’s job or their hobby or what they are known for. And so the point here, again, where we started was to deal with these families that had a range of different kind of manifestations of who was in them and what they did and to want to see what they did, whatever it was.

Ruth Richards [00:16:40]:
And it may have been selling a teacher’s book, it may have been writing their novel. It may have been doing their particular wonderful art. Van Gogh never, I think he sold one before he died through his brother. It’s doing whatever it is that’s important to them that uses these capabilities, let me say, these competencies, not skills, these complex ways of being that are so special. And so I don’t know if that’s clear yet. And I was giving some of these examples just to show some outliers that might not usually be considered. But here’s why it was important. If you believe, as we did, that there is a compensatory advantage that can go along with certain conditions.

Ruth Richards [00:17:35]:
And the example here, sickle cell anemia, which is much more complex than any psychological disorder. But as you’ve heard, and even in DSM two, creativity was on the criteria for a hypomanic personality. I think that there is an advantage somewhere in something that may be causing huge pain to the individual and or their families, then we want to know, one, what this is. Two, how it manifests, and three, can it even be preventative, curative? Can it help them live a better life? Because that’s not the myth either. And there’s a myth here about creativity and madness. And the story about everyday creativity and mental health is, yes, it is about health and coping and resilience. And you can make it official art therapy, writing therapy, whatever it is. Or we could look at Pennebaker’s work on creative writing about traumas and how that, properly used, can really help that.

Ruth Richards [00:18:41]:
This is where creativity can not only be joyful and fun and interesting, but can be healing and even at times life saving. And when we were talking about people who were bipolar in their relatives, and the Kennedy studies were dealing with huge groups of people. So we got to piggyback on these studies, including mood disorders, and you’re talking about maybe up to 1% of people who have a full bipolar one disorder. And then there are all these relatives, some say 5.4% of the family. Okay, we’ve got eight plus billion people in the world. How many could we generalize this research to? Millions?

Matthew Worwood: [00:19:31]:
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Cyndi Burnett [00:19:39]:
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Matthew Worwood: [00:19:50]:
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Cyndi Burnett [00:20:05]:
To learn more, check out curiositytocreate.org, comma. Or check out the links in the show notes for this episode. So I do have a question. I want to go back to this notion of meaningfulness. And as I was reading your book, which is everyday creativity in the healthy mind, I was thinking a lot about meaning in the classroom, and particularly when you go into mindfulness, because it’s very easy when teachers walk into the classroom to sort of hit play and they go into their motions and they do all their things and they’re not really mindful with their students. So one of the things I’d love for you to share with us and our listeners is how do you bring mindfulness and presence and authenticity into the classroom and those moments of originality with it? So this everyday creativity, how can we deliberately bring this everyday creativity and I know you say it’s a way of being. It’s not something you do. It’s something that you are.

Cyndi Burnett [00:21:05]:
So how can I. Teachers go into their classrooms with this sense of everyday creativity. Do you have any recommendations for us?

Ruth Richards [00:21:16]:
Okay. Something you are would be true only part of the time, right? Something you are, perhaps at better times. As you know, mindfulness is wonderful, and it represents not only skills, but states of consciousness and can be used in many ways spiritually, for sure. And there is good reason to practice mindfulness, which is one whole thing. And how are you going to have see that bare attention? How are you going to be aware of the world around you? I’m getting to meaningfulness here. How are we going to be aware of what’s going on inside of us? So I was doing outer. Now let’s look inside. We don’t always want to look inside.

Ruth Richards [00:22:01]:
That’s what Jung called the shadow, is the stuff we especially don’t want to see. But if we’re really being creative, we are going to be more willing than maybe someone who doesn’t want to be to be in touch with that, to see the things we don’t want to see. We’re doing creative writing. That turns out to be the best part. We thought we were the only one, but everyone does that, right? So. But this is part of the practice, too. It’s part of what makes creativity at times hard or what makes some people not want to have it in their classroom. I’m not talking about any teacher who’s listening now.

Matthew Worwood: [00:22:42]:
To a certain extent, though, from what you’re sharing, I really do see the challenges. I think, Cindy, in the question you were asking, you’re setting up the fact that there’s a curriculum, there’s learning objectives, and there is an intention in that space over the next 60 minutes to deliver an experience. And that everyday creativity, that piece of who you are, if it doesn’t necessarily fit in that moment, it might not necessarily be expressed.

Ruth Richards [00:23:11]:
I was giving a talk once to parents years ago, and they said, well, you’re just trying to make our kids be wild and they need discipline and so on. No, that’s the bigger picture. It’s both how are we going to generate new possibilities and what are we going to do with them? And of course, there’s discipline. Of course there’s a whole, well, there may not be a whole plan in the beginning, but of course there’s a structure. And so all of that’s part of it. And I don’t mean to leave out any of that. But I think that what gets left out way too often is the creativity part. And so that would be where I’m coming from there, not to leave anything else out.

Ruth Richards [00:23:54]:
Mindfulness is a particularly wonderful example because it can apply to so many aspects of life. But as you know, it also correlates with various measures of creativity. And there’s a reason for that. And so there would be reasons to look at that in itself. But if you wanted kids to do something in a classroom, I’d really like to, if it’s okay with you, Cindy, tell the story of the discovery science lesson I did with four fourth to 6th graders. Yeah, because that’s a good example. It’s like you don’t tell them, turn it on now. They know when to turn it on.

Ruth Richards [00:24:32]:
There can be joy in that. So this is while I was getting a teaching credential. And I had also, I worked with a very gifted guy who’s no longer around, John David Miller at UC Berkeley. And I’d also helped him give a workshop for middle school teachers on discovery science. So I was taking discovery science from that. And if we get in another broadcast to things like Win Lose and win win models for creativity, we’re doing win win here. But the openness in science really came after Sputnik in 1957. It took having a space race, and are we going to get beat by the Russians? Which does sound a little too familiar to get some creativity in the classroom, which was in science.

Ruth Richards [00:25:25]:
And so I was bringing this discovery creativity to a classroom where a friend was teaching in this three room schoolhouse, and her room was k through three, and then there was a four through six and a seven and eight. This was the school in this little town. So I figured from how creative she was with cushions all over the floor and gingham curtains and kids were reading and listening to, to music and doing fun things, that this would be okay, too. So see if sounds okay to you. Was okay with the middle school teachers. So the kids in the fourth through six, you know, kids get serious in fourth grade. Right, fourth grade slump for creativity. So they were all lined up in desks, in rows.

Ruth Richards [00:26:14]:
And I asked people, I was a guest teacher, and I had given every other desk a battery, a c battery, a wire, and a light bulb. And then I asked people to get into pairs, which they did, which was unusual for them to be wandering around the classroom, and then to do whatever they could or felt like or wanted to try to light up the light bulb. And so there was a lot of discussion right away, this. But wait, you’re supposed to give me two wires. Not just one wire, one light bulb, one blah. Okay. And then suddenly, someone, a pair, did it. Yay.

Ruth Richards [00:27:01]:
We got it. We got it. Look, look. And the other students were racing over, and I’d been working with older students. I probably could have had. Yeah, but anyway, who cares? So they were thrilled and racing over to see how the first pair had done it. And the first pair showed them. They raced back.

Ruth Richards [00:27:21]:
And then there were other screams of joy as other people were able to light up their light bulb. And so finally, everyone had done it. They were very satisfied with that. We had a discussion at the end, and the discussion was what you would think, but it was so animated. I’m saying, well, here’s how you lit up your light bulb. And by the way, you do it with one wire, you don’t need two wires. You can figure it out why you don’t need two wires to light up a light bulb with a battery. I asked them, how do you think that light in the corner when you turn that on? What do you think’s happening, etcetera? Or why somebody asked.

Ruth Richards [00:28:03]:
Or I asked, who knows? Why does this wire have two parts? So we had a really good discussion about circuits and electricity and light bulbs. And then this class was over. The students left. They were chatting, happy, joyful. And the teacher came up to me and she said, I am so sorry. And I said, why? She said, they have never acted this way before. And I was really sad by it. As Cindy knows, I ended up writing a chapter for a book on nurturing creativity in the classroom from the ghetto, Kaufman and others that was led off by this, but got into some of the issues about how do you bring out these wonderful moments of discovery and let them be? And that’s the challenge.

Ruth Richards [00:29:00]:
It doesn’t mean there always has to be a lot of noise and running around the classroom, but once in a while, what? What’s the problem? Okay. And then, of course, there are a lot of other issues and reasons that teachers want order and so on. So all of this needs to be dealt with in a context of how are we going to allow people to bring out their creative potential? But I am defining that as much more natural that we are talking when we say everyday creativity. Again, it’s just what you do every day. It’s not only when you do, you know, cooking or only when you do something else. It’s what do you do every day? And what is that bringing out from us, in a way, if we are really free to explore not what you do, but how you do it.

Cyndi Burnett [00:29:49]:
Ruth, something I find really interesting is about the teacher’s response and saying that she’s never seen the students before act like that. And it reminds me of a conversation we had on the podcast before with Doctor Heather Lyon, who talked about engagement and how most teachers view engagement as students sitting quietly at their tables and just listening and thinking that the students are engaged because they’re sitting there quietly. When, you know, I think back to my days in the classroom, and there were many days in the classroom where I would just sit there quietly and watch the clock and waiting for the time to pass. I know that’s not engagement, but I think about that situation where students are discovering things in the classroom and that is the creative classroom. Right? So you bring that authentic creative self and you are being original and you’re providing meaning for the students, and that brings out their everyday creativity and your own. Does that encapsulate everything you just said in your story?

Ruth Richards [00:30:53]:
I think it encapsulates the students end of the story, that they were turned on, they were with the flow, and they also were working with each other. By the way, don’t miss that. When we get to win lose and win win, they were working with each other and they were less concerned about who got it first, then can we get it at all? So, yes, I think that’s true. And then from the teacher’s point of view, it was, oh my goodness, where is the control? Where is the lesson plan? Which was that we were going to listen to her and they still had to listen to me. And how are they going to score on their achievement test? Actually, pretty well. Okay. Because another thing to note here is everyday creativity, again, can be about anything. So it can be about science class.

Ruth Richards [00:31:44]:
And you can learn about science class class from doing experiments and having findings, which was the whole point of some of these curricula that became very popular for a while after Sputnik was put up in the air by the Russians. And leads to much more permanent learning, too. Right? If you’ve actually lit up the light, well, you’re going to remember, you’re going to go home and tell your parents, I know why that light lights up on the ceiling.

Matthew Worwood: [00:32:12]:
So when I hear stories about this, I ultimately think even if we don’t always call it creativity, creativity is so connected to learning. It’s happening all of the time. And I’ve sometimes thought about this. Like sometimes I go in, I’m talking about creativity. I want to promote creativity. I’m talking about ways we can do more things to cultivate creativity in the classroom. But I think some of the examples that you’re sharing today in this concept of everyday creativity in a good class where the focus is on learning and individual discovery that creativity is already there because it is part of the learning experience, is that a fair assessment from a classroom and learning perspective?

Ruth Richards [00:32:53]:
Absolutely. And furthermore, that it’s there in every moment, if we’re really living in the present moment, that when we are having a conversation with each other, we are probably not reciting some sentence that we figured out we would say beforehand. We are spontaneously interacting and reacting, and in ways that for any number of reasons may be considered original. So, for example, we consider empathy and particularly mutuality with someone else as a particularly creative place where one might be. So, yes, I think it’s like little sparkles, little sparkles, and then we have bigger sparkles, and then we have moments that stand out. And I’m sorry, it’s chaos theory again. We have little earthquakes all the time. I’m in California.

Ruth Richards [00:33:46]:
And then we have medium ones, and we hope we don’t have a big one anytime soon. But the big ones are much more rare. But I think it’s probably not a dissimilar process.

Matthew Worwood: [00:33:59]:
Going back to something you said at the very beginning, the connection with mental wellbeing, and it’s something that we haven’t spoken a lot about. I was just wondering, instead of you necessarily giving us three tips, which is how we typically end all of our episodes, and we will probably ask you for three tips in the second episode, I was just wondering, when we’re thinking about everyday creativity potentially in its relationship to wellbeing, what are some of the exercises or practices teachers might be able to do associated with promoting everyday creativity, but also promoting the wellbeing of their children? I’m just wondering if you’ve got a few quick practices that you could share as we look to wrap up this first double espresso episode?

Ruth Richards [00:34:35]:
Well, sure. I mean, I think almost anything you do that honors them would help with their well being. But asking questions is always good because that assumes we don’t know everything. If you read Torrance and Myers book that I read years ago, I had the privilege of meeting Paul Torrance at an aera. But one of the examples in that book involves a young kid who wasn’t doing well in school, but he loved radios, and so Torrance focused in on his love, and this kid ended up not only doing things with radios in class, but becoming the radio consultant to a number of other students, point being, find their passion. What do you really wish that you were doing right now could do tomorrow? Could change the world? What’s the thing that you would like? And let’s share those and then we’ll comment on each other’s. That’s something. One thing.

Ruth Richards [00:35:34]:
Is that going to make people feel good? Probably what the one I did the little study on was think of something you did in the past and really put yourself there. Mindfully. Mindfully put yourself there and describe, you know, where you were truly being original in a moment, whatever it was, and then give a few descriptions of, like happy, like joyful, like bored, probably not of what that was like. And what came out of that was a lot of joyful and so on without any prompting of that. But what also came out were different groups. So one was very kind of adrenaline driven. I want to jump, I want to, you know. Another was very contemplative, sort of mindful, thoughtful.

Ruth Richards [00:36:26]:
And the third one was a little more esoteric, sort of dreamlike and so on. But what was coming out of being in these places? It could also be a guided visualization by the beach, but was really positive things for mental health. They were not thinking about themselves and their worries. They were appreciating. I’ve done all this stuff on our measure, but our measure actually has excellent inner rater reliability and construct validity, and that’s very important. So we didn’t just go and say, here’s this thing, everyday creativity. We validated these scales on hundreds of people, and that’s very important. If you’re going to have a construct, people will take seriously.

Ruth Richards [00:37:14]:
And someone always comes up to me after. So I’m going to add this. What did we find? We found that the better functioning people in these families, which could be the identified patients or relatives or people who are considered psychiatrically normal, whatever that means. Those were people who showed unusually high everyday creativity by this general definition, how they lived in the world compared to appropriate control groups. The fact is, everyday creativity is good for you.

Cyndi Burnett [00:37:48]:
Oh, Ruth, that’s so lovely. And you’re not done with this yet because we do have a very special double expresso today. So we’re going to be doing part two with Doctor Ruthen Richards. And in this next double espresso, we’re going to talk about have we lost our everyday creativity? And how could everyday creativity help favor a win win instead of a win lose ethic in schools? So join us in this special second episode, Double espresso with Doctor Ruth Richards. My name is Doctor Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood: [00:38:22]:
And my name is Doctor Matthew Word.

Cyndi Burnett [00:38:25]:
This episode was produced by Matthew Warwood and Cindy Burnett. Our podcast sponsor is curiosity to create, and our editor is Sam Atkinson.