Creative Leadership Everyday: Three Fashioning’s
Creative Leadership Everyday: Three Fashioning’s
Although a high-achiever, ever felt stagnant in your profession? Looking for ways to infuse some creativity in your daily professional routine? Look no further than infusing some creativity into your everyday.
A creative high-performing professional is a creative person. My work with leaders shows me over and over that overcoming a professional dry spell is a matter of practicing creativity in your every day and involves three creative lifestyle fashioning: a raconteuse, a self savant, and having an astute mind.
Raconteuse. I prefer the term raconteuse, which basically means a graceful storyteller. A creative lifestyle involves empowering stories. The stories in your mind, the ones you tell yourself about yourself, others, are crafts. The stories you create for yourself, the ones that empower you and those around you, remain with you no matter your professional setting/job role.
How? To craft your own stories, consider doing a case study on your favorite raconteur. Your favorite high-achieving creative. A case study is not about watching this individual. Rather, as I coach my high-achiever clients, it’s doing a systematic inquiry of experiences. It’s about case study “traveling.” It’ll feel like a culture shift because it’s culturally traveling outside of your norm.
Self Savant. Creative skills involve a work/life balance by way of changing their beliefs about oneself and seeing the world differently. What you believe about your professional world will manifest in your personal world.
Why not be a self savant?!
Being a self savant means knowing your thoughts, feelings, and actions as they relate to your beliefs.
Consider, for example, someone who works in an organization where the norm is to “work all the time” or “work hard.” You have taken on these beliefs too. So you have to do what my mentor calls live in “the in-between.” In this scenario, you will have compassion for the “work hard” narrative while not adopting that lifestyle for yourself. Instead, seek work/life elegance. Here, elegance means simplicity and precision.
Astute Mind. Fostering creativity will require an astute mind because being a raconteuse and self savant may feel like going against the grain.
What I notice is that many who go against grain run a narrative that they’re going against a group of “others” and that those “others” are trying to push their “norms” out of malice.
“Others” may be a particular job or even a community. However, this sort of thinking keeps you creativity stuck and antithetical to an astute mind because you are always “fighting” against something. This “fighting” creates struggle and stresses the mind.
Fostering an astute mind allows you are able to easily foster creativity because instead of stressing the mind you show compassion. Instead of taking on an “us vs. them” view, the astute mind sees the world as “both/and.” Not to say you shouldn’t strive for something different that is better for you, but you take the pressure off yourself. It is from this place that one creates creatively.
Raconteuse and self savant help to make an astute mind. It’s important to take action, but actions alone will not enough. Think about it. Every day, in all areas of our lives, we see people taking action while their hearts and minds remain the same. Ultimately, rather than advancing communities and organizations through practicing an astute mindset, these individuals return to situations that are exactly as they were. Change is stifled at best.
In conclusion, being a raconteur, a self savant, and having an astute mind is a lifestyle (what I call an executive lifestyle)—not a one-and-done exercise. It may feel abstract or hard, but realize that calling something abstract is just a way to keep that status quo.
Practice these three fashioning ways to creatively create lifestyle changes and watch everything around you up-level.
Photo by The Things I Wish I Knew on Unsplash