todd henry [00:00:00]:
And it sounds more simple than it really is because we think we know the problem. Often when I work with companies, what I discover is that you have five people on a team and they’re struggling to make progress. And the biggest reason they’re struggling to make progress is that they each have a different understanding of the problem they’re trying to solve. So they’re having different conversations about the same thing.

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

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

Matthew Worwood [00:00:26]:
This is the fueling Creativity in Education podcast.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:30]:
On this podcast, we’ll be talking about various creativity topics and how they relate to the fields 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 today.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:59]:
We welcome to the show Tod Henry. Tod considers himself the arms dealer for the creative revolution. He teaches leaders and organizations how to establish practices that lead to everyday brilliance. He is the author of seven books, including the Brave Habit, which we will talk about today and speaks and consults across dozens of industries on creativity, leadership, and passion for work. He hosts a podcast called the Daily Creative Podcast that has had nearly 20 million downloads. Welcome to the show, Todd.

todd henry [00:01:30]:
Thank you so much. It’s great to be here.

Cyndi Burnett [00:01:32]:
So for our listeners, I wanted to bring Tod onto the show today because he works in the field of creativity, but specifically with organizations, as this show bridges the gap between researchers, teachers, and practitioners. I would like to start with Todd by sharing what it means to be an arms dealer for the creative revolution and why we need this in our organizations.

todd henry [00:01:53]:
That is a fantastic question. It was something I threw out once as a tongue in cheek reference, like a self referential thing that people ask me to describe myself, and it kind of stuck. And now it seems like every time I go speak at a conference, that’s how they introduce me. So here we go. I never envisioned myself as an arms dealer type, but I guess that’s the way it goes. Really, what that phrase is intended to convey is that talent alone is not sufficient. There are a lot of talented people who struggle and wither on the vine in the marketplace. They can’t thrive because they’re relying on their talent to get them through the day.

todd henry [00:02:31]:
The reality is that if we want to survive, if we want to not only survive, but thrive in the marketplace, we have to have practices, disciplines that we implement to help us be effective, that sustain us in difficult times. And so when I say arms dealer, what I mean is I want to equip people with the tools and the mindset and the relationships and the disciplines they need in order to not just be able to produce one piece of good work and then call it quits, but to sustain over and over and over every single day in the workplace, where we have to make it up as we go so very often these days.

Matthew Worwood [00:03:06]:
And I just want to follow up on that because we do want to situate this conversation in education. And so this is a two part question, but very related. Are these kind of discipline skills that you teach somewhat generic, that they can be applied to any professional environment? And what are some of the skills or relevancy when it comes to a classroom environment? Let’s just start off with classrooms and teachers.

todd henry [00:03:30]:
Yeah, I would say I teach practices that have general specificity, for what that’s worth, in that I’m not just teaching ideas, principles, inspirational maxims, but practical tips and tools, things that actually have proven out. So, for example, one of the core frameworks that I use was for my first book called the Accidental Creative, and it talks about five key areas where you can build practices to help you be more effective. The first area is focus. So when we talk about focus, what we’re talking about is how we allocate our finite attention. So in the classroom, there are innumerable topics that could occupy your time. There are innumerable points that you could make. There’s a ton of nuance, probably, to much of what you teach. It’s really important that you define the problem you’re trying to solve very effectively so that you can center in on the most effective, relevant material that’s going to help you solve that problem, whatever that looks like.

todd henry [00:04:26]:
And so defining the problem effectively is a core part of focus. That’s one of the core things that we talk about, and it sounds more simple than it really is because we think we know the problem. Often when I work with companies, what I discover is that you have five people on a team, and they’re struggling to make progress. And the biggest reason they’re struggling to make progress is that they each have a different understanding of the problem they’re trying to solve. So they’re having different conversations about the same thing. And so that’s one example of those practices. Another one is energy management. We have to manage our energy effectively, not just our time.

todd henry [00:05:05]:
We’re really good at time management, but we often don’t account for how our commitments drain us of the necessary energy to be able to think and synthesize and really spend time dwelling on a problem and connect, make some of those less intuitive connections that are often where creativity resides. It’s not always the obvious aha’s, it’s the less intuitive leaps that we have to make in order to get to the real value. Well, if we don’t block off the space to be able to have the energy, to be able to put emotional labor into that work, as Lewis Hyde calls it, then we’re just going to go with the quickest, fastest, easiest connections and call it a day and move on. And so again, it’s a very important and practical thing. We have to ensure that we’re managing not just our time, but our energy, which begins with pruning commitments in our life maybe that are good, good commitments, good meetings, good relationships, good things, good priorities, good projects, so that we can focus our energy on what’s really essential, the great things that we need to work on. But that is a regular discipline that we have to implement.

Matthew Worwood [00:06:12]:
And just to follow up on that, because I think some of the stuff I really liked is that there’s kind of like this, we’ve certainly covered it on this podcast, the design thinking, the creative problem solving process. Let’s clarify that problem. And to a certain extent I think that that is a process that sometimes occurs whether it’s a day or over a week, or maybe we set a goal for the semester or the academic year. But the two things that I think was really relevant and I think somewhat easy to take away with right now, is one focus. Sometimes you’re driving in, say today I’m going to focus on telling my story a little bit differently, or today I’m going to kind of focus on communicating the information to this group of students, as opposed to me always focusing on those types of students. And to me that doesn’t necessarily necessitate a really kind of elaborate creative problem solving process. So just having a focus each day is something that I think is very accessible for teachers to bring into their lives and their classroom environment. And the other thing, and that’s certainly something that I’ve recognized, is that energy piece, because I’ve had the opportunity to work with schools over a twelve month period, and there are times of the semester where we can go about taking on big challenges, taking big risks, and there’s other times we can’t.

Matthew Worwood [00:07:27]:
And sometimes we can’t do it purely because we don’t have the energy. And sometimes some teachers I think are a little bit over ambitious. It’s September, October. They set these really kind of massive goals for November, December, and I don’t in any way mean to undermine those goals, but you’ve got to keep recognizing, well, how am I going to feel, at least from an energy perspective, during the times where I know I’m going to get those bottlenecks? And I think that’s part of strategy as well. So thanks for sharing those, Todd, because I think they’re great things that teachers can probably go away and think about.

todd henry [00:07:57]:
Right. And you bring up a good point, which is energy. We don’t exist in a hermetically sealed vault. Everything we do interacts with everything else. And like you said, teachers go into the year with these big plans, big ambitions, but sometimes maybe aren’t considering holiday rhythms. What kind of energy will the students have at particular times of the year? Just because they’re my goals doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily going to be appropriate at any given point in the year if the students don’t have the energy to engage in whatever my ambitions or my plans are. And so we have to account for everything going on in our world and not think that our work or our teaching or our plans exist in a vacuum, because they don’t. And that’s part of energy management as well.

Cyndi Burnett [00:08:41]:
So I want to talk about energy and the lack of energy because I know you work a lot on passion and burnout. Matt and I have been talking to a lot of educators who are just burned out or on the cusp of burnout. So how would you recommend they move forward and how can they use creativity to help reignite that spark inside of them and rebuild that energy?

todd henry [00:09:02]:
I think part of it comes down to ensuring that you’re asking the right questions. I know that that seems like maybe a little bit of an esoteric answer, but I think that at the heart of why people start to feel burned out and stuck is because they’re asking the wrong question. I’ll give you an example from my own work, if that’s okay. I mentioned that I’ve got this book before we started recording. I’ve got a book called the Brave Habit that’s coming out. And in the book, I offer a lot of really challenging questions to people to ask about their work and challenge them to act on what they discover. Well, I realized, oh, I haven’t been asking myself these same questions and, oh, I have been feeling a little bit stuck in my work and, oh, I have been feeling a little bit burned out in my work. And I started asking myself, if I were to start over again, would I be doing things the way that I’m doing them right now? And the uncomfortable answer was, no, I wouldn’t be.

todd henry [00:09:55]:
And so the end of that story is I’ve completely reinvented the way that I’m doing a lot of what I’m doing, even after 18 years of doing it. I think a lot of people, educators and other professionals, I think they work themselves into a rut to the point where they can’t conceive of any other way of doing what they’re doing. I think an uncomfortable question that they should ask is, okay, if I were starting over, knowing what I know now, would I be doing things the way I’m doing them? And just asking that question can give you a tremendous amount of freedom to reinvent how you approach your life, your profession. It doesn’t change the tasks you’re accountable for, but it certainly changes maybe your approach or gives you permission to think of new ways of maybe reinventing yourself and how you approach your work. And think about maybe your voice is in a bit of a rut as well, because you’re just doing things in a rote manner the way that you’ve always been doing them. And they’re effective. It’s fine, nobody’s complaining, but you don’t have the same attachment or zeal or passion any longer for what you do. And this is, by the way, it’s not uncommon.

todd henry [00:11:04]:
There are phases we go through as we grow as a professional. We start our professional growth, usually by emulating other people. So I think about educators, typically educators. What do they do? They go in and they apprentice. Right? They go in and they learn from other educators. And they probably even in some ways maybe emulate some of their favorite teachers. Oh, I had this teacher who really impacted my life, so I’m going to emulate that teacher when I go teach. And that’s how they build their basic platform of teaching, is that they emulate other people because it was effective.

todd henry [00:11:35]:
But at some point they begin to discover little things that are unique to them. Oh, if I do this instead of that, it seems to resonate more with the students over time. They begin to develop their own voice, their own unique way of doing things, and it works and it’s really effective. And they maybe become known for a thing. I have three students now, two of whom are in college and one who is a junior in high school. They certainly have their favorite teachers, educators who have impacted them in significant ways over time and usually it’s because those educators had a very unique way of approaching things. Right. But here’s the thing about that.

todd henry [00:12:14]:
Once you become known for a thing, it seems like that’s a wonderful place in your life and your career. But that’s often a very dangerous place for professionals because once you become known for something, you have something to protect. You figured out something that works. And often people just circle the wagons and protect the thing that’s working for them. Instead of asking what new avenues of growth could I pursue? What questions should I be asking? What new skills could I learn? How could I go to another level of growth? And this is what I call crisis phase in our growth as a creative professional, because we often get stuck. Many professionals get stuck in that phase. Nobody’s complaining. Everybody’s happy with the work they’re doing.

todd henry [00:12:59]:
Everybody seems pleased with the results, but deep down, they know that they’ve begun to settle in. And that’s a recipe for burnout. And so I know a lot of professionals experience that, that I work with. I’m certain a lot of educators experience that as well when they’ve been doing the same thing for year and year and year and year and year on end. And then one day they wake up and they realize, I don’t know if I can just crank through another year of doing what I’ve been doing for so long. I’m certain that that’s a recipe for burnout in education as well.

Matthew Worwood [00:13:33]:
I think there’s a really good segue to the daily creativity app that you’ve released. But before we get there, I just wanted to follow up. Is, is there some type of guide or reflection activity that you could have teachers listening now do to kind of think whether or not they’re nearing burnout, or is it just a kind of everyone has their own journey where they suddenly realize that they’re having burnout? I’m just curious if there’s certain signs.

todd henry [00:13:59]:
I’ll tell you what I’m going to do because I do have a resource for that. I’m going to send it to you, and you can put it in the show notes for this episode as a download, and you can use it however you want to. But I’ll send it to you so that you have that as a resource. Some questions to ask when you’re experiencing burnout, or some things to do when you’re experiencing burnout.

Matthew Worwood [00:14:16]:
That’s brilliant. Thank you. All right, so I referenced the daily creativity app, and I think my interpretation of it is that it’s actually an app that can assist people who are starting to feel that sense of burnout and wanting to perhaps unleash that new life or new energy, new creativity for their profession. So could you tell us a little bit about that app? What made you put it together and again, package it for our teachers?

todd henry [00:14:41]:
Yeah, so it is an app. It’s at DailyCreative app. And the idea behind it was usually it’s not the big things that trip us up as professionals, it’s the small things that we know, but we’ve forgotten. And so what we wanted to do was create an app that essentially would introduce one small thought, idea, discipline, question, practice every day that people could interact with. The way we were kind of thinking of it was, I don’t know if you’re familiar with headspace or calm or some of these meditation apps. We kind of thought of it as like headspace or calm for creative professionals. It’s sort of something you can dip into for a couple of minutes at the beginning of your day. There’s a little prompt to help you respond to it.

todd henry [00:15:24]:
There’s a weekly discussion where everybody in the community can jump in and respond to a question as well as we have the daily Creative podcast, and so there’s supplemental material like the daily Creative podcast is 20 minutes long, but some of the interviews we do are 40 minutes to an hour long. So we put the full interviews in, the unedited full interviews in the app as well, and discussion questions and other things that teams can ask about the episodes, because we really just wanted to create a place for people to, on a daily, everyday, consistent basis, stay what we call brave, focused, and brilliant in their work. And those are really the three areas that we center in on, is helping people be brave, helping them be focused, and then helping them produce work that they’re proud of every single day.

Matthew Worwood [00:16:12]:
Do you want to bring more creative and critical thinking into your school? Look no further than our podcast sponsor, Curiosity to create.

Cyndi Burnett [00:16:20]:
Curiosity to create is a nonprofit organization dedicated to engaging professional development for school districts and empowering educators through online courses and personal coaching.

Matthew Worwood [00:16:31]:
And if you’re craving a community of creative educators who love new ideas, don’t miss out on their creative thinking network. Get access to monthly webinars, creative lesson plans, and a supportive community all focused on fostering creativity in the classroom.

Cyndi Burnett [00:16:46]:
To learn more, check out curiositytocreate.org or check out the links in the show notes for this episode. So you just mentioned the brave habit, and I’d like to talk a little bit about bravery. What does it mean to be brave. And why do we need to be brave?

todd henry [00:17:05]:
Wow. Okay, that’s the 60 minutes question. So I’m going to go on my 60 minutes rant. So a couple of things prompted me to want to write this book. There were some cultural trends and some marketplace trends I was noticing. And I’ve been writing, by the way, I’ve been working on this book since 2016. And since that time, I’ve actually written and published three other books with traditional publishers. So that kind of gives you a sense of how long I’ve been working on these ideas.

todd henry [00:17:31]:
But I wanted to get it right. And part of getting it right meant I wanted to make sure that I was really paying attention to the research, not just pulling together some anecdotes and saying, hey, here’s an idea. Right? But really wanted to pay attention to what the research said about this topic. The first big thing that was concerning to me is I often heard the word bravery being used in a way that I didn’t think was appropriate. It wasn’t right. People would say, oh, how very brave of you, when really what they meant was, how very bold of you to do that. There’s a difference between bravery and boldness. Boldness is brash action.

todd henry [00:18:06]:
It may or may not be strategic. It may or may not be for anyone but yourself. You can be a complete and utter narcissist and engage in bold action. And that doesn’t make you brave, it makes you bold because you’re doing things for your own personal aggrandizement. Right. Bravery, on the other hand, is something different. Bravery implies heart. It’s the deployment of courage.

todd henry [00:18:25]:
There’s been a lot of conversation about courage in the ethos of late. And to me, telling people to have courage or take courage or be courageous is a little bit like saying, jump a little higher or be a little bit better cook, or it’s like you’re telling people to do something, and it’s like, well, okay, great, I’ll try, but I don’t know how to do that. Whereas bravery, I believe the research points you. Bravery is a choice in the moment. It’s choosing to deploy courage in the moment of need. So the whole concept of the book is bravery is a habit. Bravery is a choice that we make in the moment. And sometimes the people that we think may be the least courageous person because they’re not bold and they’re not brash, make the bravest decisions in the moment of need because they’re making that choice to do that.

todd henry [00:19:21]:
And so the second part of your question was, why do we need bravery? Well, because we are confronting uncertainty every single day. Every single day, we have to solve problems, deal with difficult issues, and the stakes are often very high. And in the face of making those important decisions, we have to choose between cowardice, which is self protection, egoism, making sure that I don’t allow what’s mine to be compromised. I’m going to cower from the important decision, because at least that way, I can live to fight another day or doing the brave thing, which is potentially putting something that I value at risk in order to achieve something that matters more to me than that possible sacrifice. We often see cowardice disguised as wisdom in our culture. I think cowardice very frequently comes disguised as wisdom. Well, wouldn’t it be better if. Or maybe you should? And so what I wanted to do with this book is just give people some practical ways of thinking about their life and the uncertainties they face, and then give them some handles around which to understand or with which to sort of grab ahold of the concept and understand what brave action might look like in the face of uncertainty.

Cyndi Burnett [00:20:38]:
How do we teach our students to be brave? Because this is a hard thing for us as adults. So how do we get our students younger to be brave?

todd henry [00:20:48]:
Yeah. So there are two core underlying attributes of brave action that I discovered in doing research, and we could dive into conversations about the research and sort of where this came from, but I think it’d be easier just to give a summary of kind of what I discovered. The first is that people who engage in brave action tend to have a vision of a better possible future. So they have an optimistic vision. They believe that there’s something better that is possible in whatever situation they’re encountering. The second thing that they tend to have is a sense of agency or a belief that I can actually do something about this. I’m not powerless. I’m not helpless to do something.

todd henry [00:21:28]:
I can actually do something about this. I may or may not succeed, but I believe I have the ability to do something to move us toward that vision of a better possible future. So when you ask about students, there are a couple of things that we can do. Number one, we can reinforce their sense of agency in the classroom. We can say, hey, here’s what I see in you. Here’s what I see that you’re capable of. Here’s what I’ve seen you do before. I think that you’re actually capable of more than you think you are.

todd henry [00:21:57]:
I think that if you give this a try, you might fail, but you also might do something really remarkable. And failure is okay. That’s okay. Failure is not the worst thing. Right. The worst thing is wondering, what if I had tried, what if I had tried to do that? And we can also cast an optimistic vision for students. We can help them understand a better possible future that’s available to them, that’s ahead of them, instead of having them mired in hopeless pessimism. Concern about the future.

todd henry [00:22:30]:
What if I fail? What if other people don’t like what I do? These are often the kinds of swirling questions that students experience. And I think as educators, we have the ability, there’s leaders, I work with leaders on these same two things. How can you speak agency into the people on your team? Right? How can you speak courage into them? How can you paint a vision of a better possible future and help them see that more clearly? One of the trends that I’m very concerned about in culture right now is the destruction of narratives, the destruction of hopeful narratives. And I’m concerned that that invades the classroom as well that we are. And you would know better than I do, but I definitely see it in the marketplace we’re mired in. I call it more hopeless narratives of it doesn’t matter what I do because nothing is going to change. There’s no better possible future available to me. And as educators, I believe that there’s a possibility to paint a picture of something better for the people that we’re responsible for leading, for educating.

todd henry [00:23:37]:
So that’s why I wrote the book. And those are kind of the two core elements of brave action. And I hope know we’re able to inspire an epidemic of everyday bravery. And our students and then the people that we work with and around Tod.

Matthew Worwood [00:23:53]:
This has been an incredible conversation. I know Cindy and I have so many other questions, and we hope that maybe there’s an opportunity in the future to bring you back on the show. But I know time’s tight. So we finish all of our conversations asking our guests to provide three tips that they would give to educators that want to bring creativity or perhaps invoke more bravery in their students.

todd henry [00:24:14]:
Yeah, so we just talked about the first one, which is how can you instill a vision of what’s possible, and how can you speak agency into the students? So I think that would be my first thing, is asking the question, how can I paint a picture of what’s possible, and how can I instill a sense of agency in the people that I’m leading them teaching? The second one is actually, it’s a question that came up in the most recent episode of Daily Creative, there was a photographer who had always wanted to be a chef, but for various reasons, he ended up becoming a photographer, but it always sort of was in the back of his mind, wow, I really would love, at some point, I would love to be a chef someday. And somebody posed a question to him, which was, what would you do if fear had no hold on you and failure was an option, what would you do? And he said, I would open a restaurant. So he did. He opened a restaurant for one night. One night they opened a restaurant, and he was worried it was going to fail. It ended up being a smash success for this one night. But I think that’s a really great question for us to ask the people around us. What would you do if fear had no hold on you and failure was an option? We often ask a much more naive question, which is, what would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? I don’t think that’s a good question because failure is always an option, right.

todd henry [00:25:36]:
Failure is always a possibility when you’re doing hard things. So what would you do if fear had no hold over you, if you weren’t afraid and failure was an option? I think is the second thing that we can do, and the third is, I think we have to encourage our students to ask uncomfortable questions. We avoid uncomfortable questions because we don’t want the responsibility for acting on what we discover. I think that’s true of professionals. It’s true of teachers. I’m sure it’s true of students as well. When we ask uncomfortable questions, it means we’re now accountable for acting on what we discover. And so, again, with the example of the question that I was asking myself and sort of came out of writing this book, if you were to start over, would you be doing things the way that you’re doing them? And that’s an uncomfortable question for professionals to ask because we have some vested interest in keeping things moving along, keeping things moving forward.

todd henry [00:26:29]:
But I think some variation of that question could be good to ask students as well. Right. If you were to start the year over right now, would you approach this class in the same way that you’re approaching it right now? Right. How would you change the way that you approach this class? Or how would you change the way that you approach your studies? How would you change the way you’re approaching your relationships? How would you change the way you’re approaching all of the extra activities that you have in your life? I think it’s an important question to ask to help us identify areas where bravery could be warranted.

Matthew Worwood [00:27:01]:
Well, Todd, thank you so much for coming on the show. If you’re listening to this episode, one of the things that Cindy and I thought that you could do is take this episode, share it within your school community, and use it as a tool to facilitate a conversation in an upcoming professional development workshop, perhaps posing some of the questions that Todd has shared in this discussion. Look forward to hearing from you. My name is Dr. Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett [00:27:24]:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett. This episode was produced by Matthew Warwood and Cindy Burnett. Our podcast sponsor is curiosity to create, and our editor is Sam Atkinson.