Your Creativity Isn't Dead...Here's How to Revive It w/ Laurie Shiers
🤖 AI Summary
Overview
This episode explores the revival of creativity in a world dominated by productivity and conformity. Featuring creativity coach Laurie Shiers, the conversation delves into reconnecting with our creative selves, breaking free from societal expectations, and using play as a tool for healing and transformation.
Notable Quotes
- Creativity is the old friend you abandoned. How do you repair that bond and make space for joyful expression again?
- Laurie Shiers
- Courage is putting your heart in motion.
- Katie Hendricks, on the French roots of the word courage.
- If you play before you do your work, you turn things upside down—and that’s where the magic happens.
- Katie Hendricks
🎨 Creativity as a Daily Practice
- Laurie Shiers shared her practice of turning journal highlights into collages, emphasizing the importance of giving life to creative ideas.
- Katie Hendricks recommended dedicating just 10 minutes daily to creativity, noting that even small acts can rekindle the creative spark.
- Creativity thrives when it’s prioritized first thing in the day, rather than being an afterthought.
🧠 The Trap of Excellence vs. the Zone of Genius
- Laurie Shiers reflected on her career in advertising, describing it as a zone of excellence
where she excelled but felt unfulfilled.
- Katie Hendricks explained that the zone of genius
is where time disappears, joy emerges, and contributions feel deeply meaningful.
- Transitioning from excellence to genius requires courage, commitment, and a willingness to prioritize inner joy over external validation.
🎭 The Healing Power of Play
- Playfulness can be a profound tool for processing grief and emotional stuckness. Laurie Shiers shared how playful acts, like using sparkly sidewalk chalk for event traffic control, can transform mundane tasks into joyful expressions.
- Katie Hendricks highlighted how movement and play can unlock creativity, even in moments of heaviness or loss.
📚 Reclaiming Creativity from Childhood Conditioning
- The hosts discussed how societal systems, like schools and the Industrial Revolution, stifled creativity by enforcing conformity and control.
- Laurie Shiers recalled childhood moments when her creativity was criticized, shaping her perception of self-expression.
- Rebuilding a relationship with creativity involves unlearning these limitations and embracing the freedom to color outside the lines.
💡 Courage and Creativity in Everyday Life
- Creativity often requires courage to break patterns and challenge societal norms. Katie Hendricks described courage as putting your heart in motion.
- The group encouraged listeners to embrace risk, express their authentic selves, and use creativity as a way to interrupt rigid patterns in life.
- Simple acts, like brushing your teeth with the opposite hand or dancing spontaneously, can reignite a sense of play and aliveness.
AI-generated content may not be accurate or complete and should not be relied upon as a sole source of truth.
📋 Episode Description
In a world that worships productivity, we’ve traded our inner spark for efficiency and completely lost the creativity that’s vital to flow.
For many of us, this disconnection with our creativity goes back to childhood. This is where we were taught not to be weird. Where we were trained to do things in one specific way, and forced to correct ourselves when we didn’t.
For years, we’ve heard negative things that have shaped how we feel about our creativity, so no wonder we’ve suppressed it.
But without play, coloring outside the lines, and trusting the parts of ourselves that don’t “make sense,” we’re cut off from something important.
When we begin listening to that inner nudge, just for 10 minutes a day, something extraordinary starts to happen. We come alive, playfulness begins to emerge, and our inner landscape will match our outer expression.
If our creativity has been boxed in for ages, how do we find it again? How do we venture from our zone of excellence into our zone of genius?
In this episode, we’re joined by Laurie Shiers, a lifelong writer and creativity coach who once thrived in the fast-paced world of advertising, but eventually realized she was living someone else’s version of success.
We talk about the systems that trained us to shut creativity down, and how to let our creativity become our leader, especially in moments of grief, transition, or reinvention.
Things You’ll Learn In This Episode
-The zone of genius vs. the trap of excellence Are you succeeding at something that no longer lights you up? How can you tell if you’re in your true genius, or just doing what you’re good at?
-Creativity as a relationship Creativity is the old friend you abandoned. How do you repair that bond and make space for joyful expression again?
-The healing power of play How does play help us process pain? And why is creativity often the most honest response to grief, loss, or emotional stuckness?
-Permission to color outside the lines Why do we fear being “too much”? And what changes when we stop trying to be acceptable and start being fully ourselves?
Guest Bio
Laurie Shiers is a creativity coach, a believer in the power of play, and someone who knows firsthand how transformative a blank page—or a fresh start—can be. After spending 15+ years in advertising as a copywriter and creative lead, Laurie felt burned out, disconnected from herself, and knew it was time to make a change. So, she did what she hadn’t done in years: she returned to the sandbox. She played and wrote. She made potions and paintings. Not for work or for anyone else; just for joy. Through that process, Laurie rediscovered that creativity isn’t just about making something beautiful; it’s a tool for transformation, a way t