October 9, 2023 • 44 mins
Sandra Cavanaugh believes that everyone has an inner creative genius, and she uses the truisms of acting and improvisation to help people tap into it.
Her favourite saying comes from Shakespeare, 'All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players’ and taking this view she shows people how to become the writer, director and main character of their lives.
In this episode Sandra shares the common rules of acting and life, and how you can take the steps to start becoming a conscious creator.
Happy listening!
xo Abi
Ps. For more information about this episode and our guest, head to: www.crispcomms.co/podcast-episodes/becoming-the-writer-director-and-main-character-of-your-life
Creativity: Uncovered is lovingly edited by the team at Crisp Communications.
Creativity: Uncovered is a registered Australian Trade Mark.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Hello and welcome to Creativity (00:00):
Uncovered.
My name is Abi Gatling and I'm on a journey to uncover how everyday people find inspiration,
get inventive and open their imagination.
(00:21):
Because basically I want to find out how people find creative solutions and then how they
use them at home, work, play, sport and everything in between.
And my goal for this podcast is that by the end of it you'll be armed with a whole suite
of tried and tested ways to summon creativity the next time that you need it.
(00:48):
Now today I'm speaking with Sandra Cavanaugh.
Sandra is a creativity specialist and a coach and an author and she helps people realize
their unique creative genius.
I'm so keen to find out more what that is and well, welcome Sandra.
(01:09):
Thank you so much Abi.
I'm really happy to be here.
Yes.
It's fantastic to have you on.
I wanted to start with asking what is a creativity specialist?
Sounds fancy.
It's basically a professional bent that I took once I had really evolved through 35 years
(01:40):
in the entertainment industry.
I've been a teacher of acting and improvisation and imagination and spontaneity and a professional
in theater for about 35 years and actually a little more now.
I've been saying 35 years for several years so I'm dating myself.
(02:02):
But with a creativity specialist what I do is I help people recognize and then express
their unique creative genius.
Essentially, I worked for so many years.
I was working with people and I would hear, particularly when I started teaching at universities,
(02:25):
I would hear adults say to me in class all the time, "I don't have a very good imagination
or I'm not really a creative type person."
And that just floored me.
It blew me away.
The other thing that blew me away was I went from when I started teaching acting, I started
(02:46):
in New York in a conservatory and then I started teaching at universities and I would have people
come up to me in acting classes or improvisation classes and say, "How do I get an A?"
And I'd be like, "You've got an A. Just try every day."
And they'd be like, "Yeah, but how do I know I've got an A?"
(03:08):
And I thought, "Oh my God, I had degrees from college but I had forgotten what that
drive for the grade, regardless of what you're learning or experiencing is, that we've sort
of moved our education system to.
And I fortunately at the time that I was teaching at that university, there was a chair of the
(03:31):
department, bless his heart, who when I went to him and I was like, "These are grown adults
that are afraid to play.
They're afraid to take a chance.
They're afraid to try."
And I said, "I want to create a class called Imagination and Spontaneity."
And he went, "Cool."
And so I did.
(03:53):
He put it in the catalog and the class filled up with not just actors and dance students
and people you would expect.
But I had engineers and nurses and lawyers and political scientists and all these different
(04:14):
majors that just blew me away.
And in that class, no one ever asked me how to get an A. They stopped.
It just freed them from that.
And so it put me on a quest for many decades to free people's imagination and not to sound
(04:38):
too woo-woo, but as the years have gone by and I've been a spiritual person as well, I've
come to recognize that we're all born with a passion and a purpose that we came here
to share and that what we do in pursuit of that is really about that collaboration between
(05:09):
our soulful self and the character that we're playing here on the planet.
There was a point where I recognized that as I was teaching actors, every day I was saying,
"In acting as in life, this is true."
Or in improv as in life, this is true.
(05:31):
And I would insert some wisdom in there that worked for both.
And then one day I finally realized that hearing myself, I was like, "Wait a minute, wait a
minute, wait a minute.
There really is something here."
And that Shakespeare's line, "All the world's a stage," is not just a pretty piece of poetry,
(05:51):
but literally what I've come to refer to as a metaphorical, metaphysical guide to life.
So that's a mouthful.
Yeah, right?
So I just use the techniques from theater, from teaching improv and teaching acting.
I use them to teach people to basically utilize techniques that work for a great performance
(06:14):
on the stage to help them have a great performance on the great stage of life, because that's
what we're all here to do.
Yeah, wow.
I love that.
I love that.
All the world's a stage.
So why I'm still grappling with your new class being filled up with nurses and engineers and
(06:38):
all types of people from across the school.
Why do you think that that course resonated with so many different types of people?
Well, I wish I could go back and look at the class catalog and see what it was that I put
in the catalog as the description of the class, because I'm really not sure.
(07:00):
But I have to think that I know that it said something about playing, right?
And my passion at that time was to reteach adults how to play.
And because this is, I mean, I would say to my actors when I was running a professional
(07:21):
theater company and everybody get real tense in rehearsal, I'd say, "Hey, lighten up.
There's a reason why they call it a play."
And if we are all here on the great stage of life, then we all have, we all need to
lighten up and play.
And I think that when I got those people into that class, right off the bat, I would disarm
(07:47):
them with the things that we were doing in class.
They would not know one day to the next what we were doing.
And so there was no predetermined path to follow.
And they couldn't help but either relax or find themselves incredibly uncomfortable on
a daily basis, which fortunately nobody did.
(08:07):
And I never told them that I was a lot of times making up the class as I was teaching,
staying one step ahead.
I was improvising as well.
I would bump them into a problem, see the problem, and then just imagine what an exercise
might look like that would take them to the next level of moving past that block.
(08:30):
And then we would play in that realm.
So some days it was very movement-oriented.
Some days it was very voice-oriented.
Some days it was straight improvisation.
Some days it was weird word games.
Who knows?
But it was all focused on reminding them what that childlike curiosity is like, what that
(08:54):
imaginative freedom is like, and the empowerment of that.
And every one of those students, I ran into two students that were in that class about
probably right before COVID.
Now, I hadn't seen these people since the 1980s.
They were my students in the late 1980s in that imagination class.
(09:17):
And they walked up to me at a jazz club and said, "You probably don't remember us.
I actually did remember one of the two."
You probably don't remember us, but you changed our life.
It's not really me changing their life.
(09:37):
It's me giving them permission to change their life.
Because ultimately at the end of the day, what I teach people is that in improvisation,
in acting there are about seven big rules.
In improvisation, there are just three fundamentals.
And life is by its very nature a 24/7 improvisation.
(10:01):
We might think we have it planned, but we're improvising.
And so in improvisation, the only things you are ever doing are either making an offer,
accepting an offer, which means acknowledging it as a fact in that universe at that moment,
or blocking an offer.
(10:23):
And you want to learn to offer, accept, and not block.
And in life, since life is a 24/7 improv, same exact three things.
Anything you are thinking, doing, or saying, anything is either an offer, the accepting
of an offer from someone else, from your own mind, from the universe, whatever, or it's
(10:48):
blocking an offer.
And we block far more than we are aware of.
So when I mentioned in the Imagination Spontaneity class, literally the reason I would make up
the exercises as I went along was because I would notice their blocks and find some way
to take them around that block gently and playfully and let them notice what they were
(11:13):
doing.
Yeah.
So you're basically training the muscles in making an accepting offer.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And showing them that I believed in their creativity, even when they did not.
(11:37):
I got very cocky about the things that I could get people to do in, oh gosh, about 10, 12
years ago when I full-time became a creativity specialist and a coach and just started focusing
(11:59):
in my life on this more than directing professional theater, et cetera.
And I would go to classes where students were either emotionally troubled or cognitively
disabled in some way.
And I would work with them and get them to improvise and get them to write and get them
(12:23):
to do things that teachers didn't think that they could do and they didn't think that they
could do.
And so one day I did get really thinking, "I've got this kick."
And I marched myself into this class.
I'd gotten a residency all set up, so I was all paid for.
I walked into this class, it was a high school class, that was taught by the special needs
(12:49):
teacher for the entire school district.
She was the head of special needs for the entire school district.
And this class was kids that were particularly having extreme difficulties, mosaic down syndrome,
are out on the autism spectrum, they had seizure disorders, lots of different problems that
(13:12):
made some of them nonverbal.
All of them had not written very much at all in their entire school career.
And I walked in and I said, "Hey, I'd like to teach this class to improvise and write,
and then I'm going to enter their plays or screenplays into a Kennedy Center competition
(13:36):
and they'll compete with kids all over the nation for plays about disability."
And she just looked at me and she was like, "Okay, let me just give you a reality check.
These kids don't talk to each other.
They're not going to talk to you.
They are not going to improvise.
They are not going to do that."
And I'm like, "Okay, but can I try?"
(13:56):
And she's like, "Well, okay, I need a break every hour and every morning for an hour,
so sure, you can come in the class."
And so I did and started working with them.
And the short version of this story is that by the time I had worked with them, basically
(14:19):
in three years, two of those students won the Kennedy Center competition.
And I had every student that I worked with in that class, which just became like my
favorite place on the planet to be, every one of those kids wound up doing things that
nobody thought they could.
(14:42):
And the teacher one day in the middle of the class, we were just, we were working on some
big, I had them doing these big poster boards of their future life.
And so we're all working on them and I'm wandering around the class and all of a sudden that
same teacher that had told me like a year before, this is never going to work, she all
of a sudden she yells, "You know what I love about Ms. Kavanaugh?"
(15:06):
And the kids all stop and look at her.
She goes, "She teaches, like she doesn't know there's anything you can't do and so there
isn't."
Wow.
And yeah.
And I was like, and the kids were like, yeah, whatever, and went back to what they were
doing, you know, they could not have cared less about her revelation.
(15:28):
But I realized in that moment that that is what I do.
I approach everybody, every single human being on the planet as a unique creative genius.
And I know that's true and I think that when people hear me say, "Everyone is a genius,"
(15:51):
they think I mean everybody that's sort of neurotypical and conventionally, they have
some smarts that can be done and test in class.
But I literally, I mean everyone.
Everybody.
Yeah.
And I think that's what makes me a creative genius inside them.
(16:11):
Yes.
That is uniquely theirs.
They've got something they bring to the planet that nobody else is ever going to.
So how do you know what that is and how do you tap into it?
I take people through quite a journey to feel into it, to find it, you know, because
(16:34):
in the book, "Spontaneous Brilliance," I have a whole chapter on uniting our two selves
that basically, you know, if we're the character, right, that is being played by this soul, right,
we tend to forget that there's this intimate relationship between the actor and the character,
(17:00):
you know, and there's this symbiosis going on in any performance.
But what we tend to think of as human beings is that we got to this planet and we're here
and we're doing our thing and we've been born.
And so the soul is just hanging out and waiting for us until, you know, it'll check in when
we're dead and see if we did it right, you know.
(17:21):
And I equate that to this weird picture that we get where we're almost like an airplane
that thinks the pilot's just along for the ride, you know, so I will say to my clients,
let's look and see who's flying the plane, you know, let's pay a little attention here
to what is it that your heart, your soul is trying to communicate and manifest in as and
(17:47):
through you, just as an actor plays a character, you know, when we go to play a character on
stage or even in a game, you know, everybody can relate to playing, you know, video games,
even if they can't relate to being on a stage.
And a lot of times, you know, one of the one of the acting rules that I tell people is
(18:12):
embrace the obstacles because that's where the fun is, you know.
And usually when, you know, people like embrace the obstacles, are you kidding?
I want to get rid of all the obstacles.
That's what makes life happy.
But no, actually, if you think about it, nobody wants to go play a character in a game that
has no challenges.
(18:33):
Nobody wants to play a character in a play that has no challenges.
That's boring, right?
Too boring.
We grow, we have fun through bumping up against those emotional, you know, issues, the challenges.
Because we grow, that's what we feel as, that's how we feel success, that's how we feel empowered,
(18:57):
that's how we feel, you know.
But we don't know until we try, you know.
We don't know until we push up against that.
And it's the pushing our muscles against that obstacle is what makes us emotionally stronger,
creatively stronger, right?
And brings our passion to the forefront.
(19:17):
And most of us spend our lives blocking the obstacles, right?
Trying to stay away from them.
Trying not to experience them.
And that makes for a very mundane life, right?
Yeah, vanilla.
Yeah, yeah.
Another acting technique that I always share with people, or an acting truism, if you will,
(19:40):
is you've got to find the love.
Whenever an actor goes to play a character, instead of playing their concept of the character,
you know, especially if it's a villain, right?
You see people playing that sort of one-dimensional thing.
Finding the love is finding out what the character loves.
(20:01):
And then playing that.
And that is the answer to your earlier question about how do you tap into that?
How do you find that creative genius, right?
You tap into with each person, I go through quite a process when I start, you know, working
with somebody to really pull out of them what their real end goal level desires are.
(20:26):
What do they really, really want?
If they're not worrying about the how?
If they're not worrying about the obstacles of time, money, yada, yada, yada, right?
What do they really want to bring on to this planet?
What do they want to experience?
How do they want to learn and grow?
How do they want to contribute to the world?
And as you start to connect with those feelings, you start to go, "Oh, wait a minute.
(20:49):
I really want to do X."
And then the next key is to start doing it because in acting, feeling follows doing, right?
It's all about action.
It's about behaving as if it's true.
So that's that age old, you know, acting as if spiritual teaching is an acting truism.
(21:11):
How do you behave truthfully in the moment?
You behave as if it is true and that is what brings that successful performance on to the
stage.
Yeah, wow.
So you help people tap into their inner love, inner desire, what they want the most.
And then do you help them with that action?
(21:32):
Do you say, "This is the thing that you love.
How do we get you there?"
Yes, yeah, I do.
I do because I think, you know, the steps, a lot of times we just, we not only need that
inspiration, right?
And we need to attach to our creative imagination.
(21:53):
We need to take personal responsibility and we need to take inspired action, you know?
So if you get that inspiration, but you don't take action, that's how you end up in that
moment when you're watching television and you're going, "Oh, I can't believe that guy
invented that thing I thought of that 10 years ago."
(22:14):
Right?
That could have been me.
Could have been me, right?
Yeah.
But we don't, most of us, we don't take the inspired action even when we feel and know
the inspiration.
So the moment has to move us.
(22:34):
And so I say with my clients, when people are, you know, bringing me on as their coach,
I say, "Okay, we're going to have a considerable amount of compassionate accountability here."
You know?
So I will always be compassionate, but I will also hold you accountable to be responsible
(22:57):
to your dream, right?
Yes.
To be responsible.
And I always hyphenate the word responsible, you know, because I will say to people, "We
have 100% responsibility for our lives."
And we do.
Just like an actor has 100% responsibility for their performance, it's 100% on them.
(23:19):
Doesn't matter what the director told them, what some other actor in that moment does,
whether or not the light is bright enough, your performance is your job, right?
And so we, as human beings, performing on the great stage of life, we have 100% responsibility
for our performance.
And that means response hyphenability, the ability to respond as we choose.
(23:45):
We are choosing how we respond to every moment.
And so if we get that inspiration and we choose to go sit on the couch and eat Cheetos and
go and sell Cheetos and watch somebody else on television live their dream, right?
That's on us.
That's on us.
So there's obviously a downside to not taking that action once you figure out what is your
(24:12):
purpose.
Yeah.
What's the downside of not even getting to the point of figuring out what your purpose
is?
I think that brings, I mean, to me, that sounds really, really sad.
You know, that's a sad life.
Well, it's a sad state of mind.
(24:34):
We talk about mindset a lot in sort of new thought and spiritual conversations.
We talk about, and even business conversations, we talk about people's mindset, right?
And if your mindset is, "I'm not worthy.
I'm not good enough.
(24:55):
I'm not," you know?
Or if your mindset is, "My whole life is just about, get up, go to the job, do the thing,
come home, eat a pizza, go to bed," you know?
If you get in that train, then you have never asked yourself, "Where's the love?"
You have never taken the moment to treat yourself with the respect and the honor to say, "I'm
(25:23):
here for a reason."
You know, I'm trying to think of where the term originally came from, but I know Mary
Morrissey refers to that longing as divine discontent, right?
That if you have that discontent, if you're feeling like, "This isn't enough.
There's got to be something more.
(25:44):
There's got to be more."
That's because there is.
That is the divine in you longing for, stretching for something more.
That's the actor that wants to play the great role but is afraid to, right?
And so you can either go to the audition and go to classes and get better and keep on trying
(26:05):
and audition again and audition again and audition again until you find your moment
or you can decide to quit acting or you can decide to just stand in the sidelines and watch
somebody else or you can decide to just play a runner-up, you know, like the background,
like an extra in somebody else's story.
(26:27):
But none of us, none of us were born to just fill up the background of the stage in other
people's lives.
We were all born to play the lead in our own life.
And so if you're not, then you just haven't asked yourself the right questions.
And I always say that I'm helping people to be conscious creators because the truth about
(26:52):
creating is we are all creating 24/7.
Everything we do is creating our reality.
It's creating our life.
Everything we think, do and say, that is what is creating our life.
So if we're not taking responsibility for what we're thinking, doing and saying, we're
not consciously creating our life.
(27:14):
We're very creative.
So conscious creating is not just going along with the status quo, it's actually making
purposeful decisions about each creative act.
Absolutely.
Right.
Taking that inspired action.
Yes.
So it seems like there's kind of three parts to it here.
(27:35):
There's one is awareness because I think there will be people who go along in life who don't
even take the time to even be aware that they may not be that happy with their trajectory.
And so there's awareness.
Then there's the self-reflection of what is that love.
(27:55):
And then there's the action taking.
I guess people have to at least hit their awareness thing before they come to you, right?
Well, actually, no, they usually don't.
I usually wake them up to the awareness because they come to me when they're frustrated or
they're, well, not all of them, but some of them just come when they're frustrated, when
(28:17):
they don't know what they don't know.
They don't know why it doesn't feel like enough or they just want to come and play or they
just want to see what it might be sometimes.
The thing is that I call them presets.
What we get, our presets are our judgment, our expectations, our limiting beliefs, our
(28:45):
preconceived notions, those things that become our personal myths about what we can and can't
do.
Those are our presets.
And when we rely on our presets as the roadmap for our life, instead of our inspiration, our
(29:05):
imagination as the roadmap for our life, when we stick in the presets, that's when we can
feel it doesn't feel good.
It doesn't feel right.
It doesn't feel like enough.
And if you feel that there is something, which I would say to a person, we all do it.
(29:27):
Even if we think we're very active and creative in doing things, there's always another one,
right?
There's always another inspiration.
And even if we're that person that is just on the couch eating Cheetos commenting on
what the person on TV isn't doing, either the politician or the actor in the movie or
whoever they are, right?
(29:48):
That they are watching them and judging that rather than looking here.
That's usually because of fear.
And fear comes from our presets.
So when we are afraid of whatever that pain point is, whatever that failure might be,
whatever our presets from our childhood or whatever told us, ugh, you don't want to
(30:14):
do that because the crash and burn can look like that.
We have to get to the point where it's just like improv.
When something falls in improv, you make another offer.
When it crashes and burns, you make another offer.
It won't crash and burn if everybody is there for everybody else in an improv and in acting.
(30:39):
One of the other truisms is it's all about making the other guy look good.
So when your focus is too much on yourself as an actor on the stage and you're worried
about where's my foot, what do they think of me, do I sound right, is that what the
director wanted me to do?
Oh, is that person in the front row blowing their nose?
I must be boring.
Whatever it is that your brain is going to, when your mind is on yourself, you're not
(31:03):
totally present playing the character full out.
So the way to get fully present in that moment is to put your attention on the other players,
on the other people in this scene with you and make their experience as positive as possible,
feed them with offers and your experience will raise.
(31:25):
Oh, okay.
You're sort of bouncing off them and both of you can progress.
You're offering to them.
And even if they're blocking you.
Even if they're not accepting what you're throwing down, you keep finding the offer
that works and you keep accepting what they're doing as offers.
(31:47):
And I'll tell you one more spiritual truism in this metaphorical metaphysical guide.
In acting as in life, it's all about relationship.
And I've already talked about the relationship of ourself to our higher self, the player
to the character.
And in acting, it's all about as in life, it's all about these different relationships.
(32:11):
You can have a relationship to your environment.
You can have a relationship to other person, to yourself, to animals, to inanimate objects,
et cetera.
But there's a relationship that we tend to blame or put the responsibility for how things
are going on a lot.
And that is our relationship with the universe.
(32:32):
That thing to remember is that the universe never blocks.
So is this like when people go, "Oh, I'm so unlucky.
This always happens to me."
Why is this happening to me?
Why is this go like this?
Or it must not be meant to be.
(32:53):
What?
Right?
I always say, "What do you mean to be?
Not what is meant to be because nobody's meaning this except you."
So how are you meaning to respond to this moment?
How are you meaning to respond to this offer?
The universe is completely the best producer any theater company ever had.
(33:17):
We like to think when people come to the metaphor of this being the great stage of life, a lot
of times they'll think that God or the universe must be the playwright.
But that takes them out of responsibility for the story.
No, you're not only the actor, you're not only the character, but you are also the
(33:39):
playwright.
You are writing the story as you go along.
You are creating your life by the choices that you make and how you write the story.
And then people will think, "Oh, okay, well, then the universe is the director."
No, no, no, no, no.
Because the director is that person that holds the vision, that brings everything together,
coalesces it and gets it on a train.
(33:59):
Now, some people abdicate their role as director for holding that vision for their own life,
but you are the director, whether you realize it or not.
What you are not is the producer.
The producer in any production is that being that brings all the resources and provides
all the resources to make that production possible.
(34:21):
So if you think of it that way, the universe is providing whatever resources you could
possibly need.
It's a play with an unlimited budget.
Yeah.
So the whole world is super excited to be in that play.
There isn't a director, any theater company that wouldn't give their collective right
(34:41):
arms to be furnished by that kind of producer.
And we are.
We have no excuses in that universe, in that picture of the universe.
We have to accept that offer rather than looking at the broken bone or the change in relationship
(35:06):
or the thing that happens today or tomorrow or whatever, rather than looking at that as,
"Oh, that's a block, right?
That's the universe blocking me."
Saying, "No, the universe never ever ever says no."
It's offering you an opportunity to do something that your higher self, that player, as this
(35:29):
character is saying, "At some level, you really need this, right?
When those obstacles are there, there is something that you invited and the universe provided
it."
And so it may seem tough.
It may seem hard, but that's that opportunity for creativity.
You were talking about in the introduction, how do people find creative solutions?
(35:56):
You take the obstacle as an offer and you accept it and offer back.
And you continue offering.
Don't quit offering.
Don't quit offering, which doesn't mean stay in every circumstance until the end of time
and just keep throwing things into it.
It doesn't mean that.
(36:17):
But an offer is an offer into your life.
So that might be that the solution in this moment is to recognize that this problem that
I'm beating my head up against is not my problem.
And so since it is not mine, then again, we're going to find the love.
(36:40):
What's the most loving thing I could do right now?
I can move away from this.
I can make the offer into my own life that I'm going to change direction here.
Or I'm having inspiration.
Or I'm having frustration, which is that divine discontent, which is another form of inspiration.
(37:00):
It's you showing you where your offers might be.
That's very empowering, I feel.
You're saying that I'm like, "Gosh, I feel like if I could reframe every block as an
actual offer, as an opportunity to pivot, redirect, move around, change my thinking."
(37:27):
That's such an empowering thing.
Really, really is.
But I can imagine that it takes a lot of effort to end training and building that muscle,
to be able to, in that moment where you are thrown a block, something bad happens, to
(37:51):
get yourself out of that and go, "Actually, no, this is an opportunity."
That's a lot of work done, this sounds like.
Well, it's no more work than those people that walked into that imagination and spontaneity
class and stopped worrying about the grade.
It's the same thing.
When you step into your place and center stage and realize that this is your production,
(38:18):
this is your game that you're playing here, and you're going to make the choice to play,
to offer, that's all.
It's not saying that you're not going to make a mistake.
It's not saying that you're not going to have a bad day.
Of course you are.
People have bad improvs go, "Oops," all the time.
But it is never the end of the world.
(38:40):
It changes your perspective on quote unquote failure.
Lots of people don't create actively, intentionally, and consciously in their lives because they
are afraid of failure.
But in the words of Borden, Edison, and all those folks, there is no failure, only feedback.
There's only feedback as to a different way to try.
(39:02):
So if it's a game, and you say as this moment comes to you, "What's the gift in this?"
It looks like a big problem, but what's the gift in this?
It's no different than playing a strategy game.
It's no different than playing a character in a role-playing game.
(39:23):
We are here to live this life fully and completely.
And part of that is honoring this character by noticing what this character feels and
loves and wants and needs, and then going and taking action toward it.
(39:45):
I think that's great.
I think that if we could help more people get into that space, which obviously you're
doing through your coaching, it would be an amazing thing because it would help people
be more empowered, more engaged, and more conscious with the choices they're making
in life.
(40:05):
Which is why I wrote the book and why I'm just really on a mission to change the way
we think about thinking and the way we think about our behavior here, our purpose here,
what we're doing here.
So your book, does your book provide some of those practical tips that people can take
(40:30):
and apply in their own life to get into this space?
It does.
It goes into immense detail throughout the metaphor.
It gives you all of, helps you really understand not only fundamentals like offering, accepting,
and blocking, but all of the kind of metaphorical truisms from the stage that really start
(40:51):
to change the perspective.
And I take people through forgiveness and through taking responsibility and through all
of the different gratitude, just all of the different kinds of things that we normally
look at as kind of a spiritual pursuit.
But these are very practical, playful, simple ways to just reframe our thinking and become
(41:17):
real conscious creators.
There's also leadership tips in there too because you can't be a director without holding
a vision and bringing other people along to that vision.
And also recognizing your responsibility to your fellow players.
So it's a wonderful, festive way to start to be a conscious creator.
(41:41):
Love it.
And I can't wait to read it.
I'll pop the link to the book and to your website and everything like that in our show
notes for this episode.
But thank you so much, Sandra, for taking me through that.
That was such an interesting metaphor and I can see how it is so linked between life
(42:03):
and art and play.
It's amazing.
And it is loads of fun and that's what it's supposed to be.
That's what life is supposed to be.
And sometimes the fun is in overcoming those great big challenges.
Success looks a lot of different ways.
(42:23):
And so I would just encourage your listeners to recognize that wherever they are, wherever
they are in their journey, if they take a deep breath and really look inside, they can
see something, they can feel something that's calling to them no matter where they are in
the journey.
And when they feel that calling, write it down, look at it, play with it, let your imagination
(42:49):
visualize it and then start taking an inspired action step in that direction.
Beautiful.
I love finishing on a practical tip.
So yeah, thank you so much, Sandra.
And thank you to everyone who's tuned in to Creativity (43:04):
Uncovered today.
I really hope that this episode has inspired you to step onto your own stage so you can
be the main player.
And I also hope that it helps you summon your creativity the next time that you need it.
(43:24):
.
(43:53):
If you've made it this far, a huge thank you for your support and tuning into today's episode.
Creativity (44:00):
Uncovered has been lovingly recorded on the land of the Kabi Kabi people and
we pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging.
This podcast has been produced by my amazing team here at Crisp Communications and the
music you just heard was composed by James Gatling.
If you liked this episode, please do share it around and help us on our mission to unlock
(44:26):
more creativity in this world.
You can also hit subscribe so you don't miss out on any new episode releases.
(gentle music)
Uncovered.
My name is Abi Gatling and I'm on a journey to uncover how everyday people find inspiration,
get inventive and open their imagination.
(00:21):
Because basically I want to find out how people find creative solutions and then how they
use them at home, work, play, sport and everything in between.
And my goal for this podcast is that by the end of it you'll be armed with a whole suite
of tried and tested ways to summon creativity the next time that you need it.
(00:48):
Now today I'm speaking with Sandra Cavanaugh.
Sandra is a creativity specialist and a coach and an author and she helps people realize
their unique creative genius.
I'm so keen to find out more what that is and well, welcome Sandra.
(01:09):
Thank you so much Abi.
I'm really happy to be here.
Yes.
It's fantastic to have you on.
I wanted to start with asking what is a creativity specialist?
Sounds fancy.
It's basically a professional bent that I took once I had really evolved through 35 years
(01:40):
in the entertainment industry.
I've been a teacher of acting and improvisation and imagination and spontaneity and a professional
in theater for about 35 years and actually a little more now.
I've been saying 35 years for several years so I'm dating myself.
(02:02):
But with a creativity specialist what I do is I help people recognize and then express
their unique creative genius.
Essentially, I worked for so many years.
I was working with people and I would hear, particularly when I started teaching at universities,
(02:25):
I would hear adults say to me in class all the time, "I don't have a very good imagination
or I'm not really a creative type person."
And that just floored me.
It blew me away.
The other thing that blew me away was I went from when I started teaching acting, I started
(02:46):
in New York in a conservatory and then I started teaching at universities and I would have people
come up to me in acting classes or improvisation classes and say, "How do I get an A?"
And I'd be like, "You've got an A. Just try every day."
And they'd be like, "Yeah, but how do I know I've got an A?"
(03:08):
And I thought, "Oh my God, I had degrees from college but I had forgotten what that
drive for the grade, regardless of what you're learning or experiencing is, that we've sort
of moved our education system to.
And I fortunately at the time that I was teaching at that university, there was a chair of the
(03:31):
department, bless his heart, who when I went to him and I was like, "These are grown adults
that are afraid to play.
They're afraid to take a chance.
They're afraid to try."
And I said, "I want to create a class called Imagination and Spontaneity."
And he went, "Cool."
And so I did.
(03:53):
He put it in the catalog and the class filled up with not just actors and dance students
and people you would expect.
But I had engineers and nurses and lawyers and political scientists and all these different
(04:14):
majors that just blew me away.
And in that class, no one ever asked me how to get an A. They stopped.
It just freed them from that.
And so it put me on a quest for many decades to free people's imagination and not to sound
(04:38):
too woo-woo, but as the years have gone by and I've been a spiritual person as well, I've
come to recognize that we're all born with a passion and a purpose that we came here
to share and that what we do in pursuit of that is really about that collaboration between
(05:09):
our soulful self and the character that we're playing here on the planet.
There was a point where I recognized that as I was teaching actors, every day I was saying,
"In acting as in life, this is true."
Or in improv as in life, this is true.
(05:31):
And I would insert some wisdom in there that worked for both.
And then one day I finally realized that hearing myself, I was like, "Wait a minute, wait a
minute, wait a minute.
There really is something here."
And that Shakespeare's line, "All the world's a stage," is not just a pretty piece of poetry,
(05:51):
but literally what I've come to refer to as a metaphorical, metaphysical guide to life.
So that's a mouthful.
Yeah, right?
So I just use the techniques from theater, from teaching improv and teaching acting.
I use them to teach people to basically utilize techniques that work for a great performance
(06:14):
on the stage to help them have a great performance on the great stage of life, because that's
what we're all here to do.
Yeah, wow.
I love that.
I love that.
All the world's a stage.
So why I'm still grappling with your new class being filled up with nurses and engineers and
(06:38):
all types of people from across the school.
Why do you think that that course resonated with so many different types of people?
Well, I wish I could go back and look at the class catalog and see what it was that I put
in the catalog as the description of the class, because I'm really not sure.
(07:00):
But I have to think that I know that it said something about playing, right?
And my passion at that time was to reteach adults how to play.
And because this is, I mean, I would say to my actors when I was running a professional
(07:21):
theater company and everybody get real tense in rehearsal, I'd say, "Hey, lighten up.
There's a reason why they call it a play."
And if we are all here on the great stage of life, then we all have, we all need to
lighten up and play.
And I think that when I got those people into that class, right off the bat, I would disarm
(07:47):
them with the things that we were doing in class.
They would not know one day to the next what we were doing.
And so there was no predetermined path to follow.
And they couldn't help but either relax or find themselves incredibly uncomfortable on
a daily basis, which fortunately nobody did.
(08:07):
And I never told them that I was a lot of times making up the class as I was teaching,
staying one step ahead.
I was improvising as well.
I would bump them into a problem, see the problem, and then just imagine what an exercise
might look like that would take them to the next level of moving past that block.
(08:30):
And then we would play in that realm.
So some days it was very movement-oriented.
Some days it was very voice-oriented.
Some days it was straight improvisation.
Some days it was weird word games.
Who knows?
But it was all focused on reminding them what that childlike curiosity is like, what that
(08:54):
imaginative freedom is like, and the empowerment of that.
And every one of those students, I ran into two students that were in that class about
probably right before COVID.
Now, I hadn't seen these people since the 1980s.
They were my students in the late 1980s in that imagination class.
(09:17):
And they walked up to me at a jazz club and said, "You probably don't remember us.
I actually did remember one of the two."
You probably don't remember us, but you changed our life.
It's not really me changing their life.
(09:37):
It's me giving them permission to change their life.
Because ultimately at the end of the day, what I teach people is that in improvisation,
in acting there are about seven big rules.
In improvisation, there are just three fundamentals.
And life is by its very nature a 24/7 improvisation.
(10:01):
We might think we have it planned, but we're improvising.
And so in improvisation, the only things you are ever doing are either making an offer,
accepting an offer, which means acknowledging it as a fact in that universe at that moment,
or blocking an offer.
(10:23):
And you want to learn to offer, accept, and not block.
And in life, since life is a 24/7 improv, same exact three things.
Anything you are thinking, doing, or saying, anything is either an offer, the accepting
of an offer from someone else, from your own mind, from the universe, whatever, or it's
(10:48):
blocking an offer.
And we block far more than we are aware of.
So when I mentioned in the Imagination Spontaneity class, literally the reason I would make up
the exercises as I went along was because I would notice their blocks and find some way
to take them around that block gently and playfully and let them notice what they were
(11:13):
doing.
Yeah.
So you're basically training the muscles in making an accepting offer.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And showing them that I believed in their creativity, even when they did not.
(11:37):
I got very cocky about the things that I could get people to do in, oh gosh, about 10, 12
years ago when I full-time became a creativity specialist and a coach and just started focusing
(11:59):
in my life on this more than directing professional theater, et cetera.
And I would go to classes where students were either emotionally troubled or cognitively
disabled in some way.
And I would work with them and get them to improvise and get them to write and get them
(12:23):
to do things that teachers didn't think that they could do and they didn't think that they
could do.
And so one day I did get really thinking, "I've got this kick."
And I marched myself into this class.
I'd gotten a residency all set up, so I was all paid for.
I walked into this class, it was a high school class, that was taught by the special needs
(12:49):
teacher for the entire school district.
She was the head of special needs for the entire school district.
And this class was kids that were particularly having extreme difficulties, mosaic down syndrome,
are out on the autism spectrum, they had seizure disorders, lots of different problems that
(13:12):
made some of them nonverbal.
All of them had not written very much at all in their entire school career.
And I walked in and I said, "Hey, I'd like to teach this class to improvise and write,
and then I'm going to enter their plays or screenplays into a Kennedy Center competition
(13:36):
and they'll compete with kids all over the nation for plays about disability."
And she just looked at me and she was like, "Okay, let me just give you a reality check.
These kids don't talk to each other.
They're not going to talk to you.
They are not going to improvise.
They are not going to do that."
And I'm like, "Okay, but can I try?"
(13:56):
And she's like, "Well, okay, I need a break every hour and every morning for an hour,
so sure, you can come in the class."
And so I did and started working with them.
And the short version of this story is that by the time I had worked with them, basically
(14:19):
in three years, two of those students won the Kennedy Center competition.
And I had every student that I worked with in that class, which just became like my
favorite place on the planet to be, every one of those kids wound up doing things that
nobody thought they could.
(14:42):
And the teacher one day in the middle of the class, we were just, we were working on some
big, I had them doing these big poster boards of their future life.
And so we're all working on them and I'm wandering around the class and all of a sudden that
same teacher that had told me like a year before, this is never going to work, she all
of a sudden she yells, "You know what I love about Ms. Kavanaugh?"
(15:06):
And the kids all stop and look at her.
She goes, "She teaches, like she doesn't know there's anything you can't do and so there
isn't."
Wow.
And yeah.
And I was like, and the kids were like, yeah, whatever, and went back to what they were
doing, you know, they could not have cared less about her revelation.
(15:28):
But I realized in that moment that that is what I do.
I approach everybody, every single human being on the planet as a unique creative genius.
And I know that's true and I think that when people hear me say, "Everyone is a genius,"
(15:51):
they think I mean everybody that's sort of neurotypical and conventionally, they have
some smarts that can be done and test in class.
But I literally, I mean everyone.
Everybody.
Yeah.
And I think that's what makes me a creative genius inside them.
(16:11):
Yes.
That is uniquely theirs.
They've got something they bring to the planet that nobody else is ever going to.
So how do you know what that is and how do you tap into it?
I take people through quite a journey to feel into it, to find it, you know, because
(16:34):
in the book, "Spontaneous Brilliance," I have a whole chapter on uniting our two selves
that basically, you know, if we're the character, right, that is being played by this soul, right,
we tend to forget that there's this intimate relationship between the actor and the character,
(17:00):
you know, and there's this symbiosis going on in any performance.
But what we tend to think of as human beings is that we got to this planet and we're here
and we're doing our thing and we've been born.
And so the soul is just hanging out and waiting for us until, you know, it'll check in when
we're dead and see if we did it right, you know.
(17:21):
And I equate that to this weird picture that we get where we're almost like an airplane
that thinks the pilot's just along for the ride, you know, so I will say to my clients,
let's look and see who's flying the plane, you know, let's pay a little attention here
to what is it that your heart, your soul is trying to communicate and manifest in as and
(17:47):
through you, just as an actor plays a character, you know, when we go to play a character on
stage or even in a game, you know, everybody can relate to playing, you know, video games,
even if they can't relate to being on a stage.
And a lot of times, you know, one of the one of the acting rules that I tell people is
(18:12):
embrace the obstacles because that's where the fun is, you know.
And usually when, you know, people like embrace the obstacles, are you kidding?
I want to get rid of all the obstacles.
That's what makes life happy.
But no, actually, if you think about it, nobody wants to go play a character in a game that
has no challenges.
(18:33):
Nobody wants to play a character in a play that has no challenges.
That's boring, right?
Too boring.
We grow, we have fun through bumping up against those emotional, you know, issues, the challenges.
Because we grow, that's what we feel as, that's how we feel success, that's how we feel empowered,
(18:57):
that's how we feel, you know.
But we don't know until we try, you know.
We don't know until we push up against that.
And it's the pushing our muscles against that obstacle is what makes us emotionally stronger,
creatively stronger, right?
And brings our passion to the forefront.
(19:17):
And most of us spend our lives blocking the obstacles, right?
Trying to stay away from them.
Trying not to experience them.
And that makes for a very mundane life, right?
Yeah, vanilla.
Yeah, yeah.
Another acting technique that I always share with people, or an acting truism, if you will,
(19:40):
is you've got to find the love.
Whenever an actor goes to play a character, instead of playing their concept of the character,
you know, especially if it's a villain, right?
You see people playing that sort of one-dimensional thing.
Finding the love is finding out what the character loves.
(20:01):
And then playing that.
And that is the answer to your earlier question about how do you tap into that?
How do you find that creative genius, right?
You tap into with each person, I go through quite a process when I start, you know, working
with somebody to really pull out of them what their real end goal level desires are.
(20:26):
What do they really, really want?
If they're not worrying about the how?
If they're not worrying about the obstacles of time, money, yada, yada, yada, right?
What do they really want to bring on to this planet?
What do they want to experience?
How do they want to learn and grow?
How do they want to contribute to the world?
And as you start to connect with those feelings, you start to go, "Oh, wait a minute.
(20:49):
I really want to do X."
And then the next key is to start doing it because in acting, feeling follows doing, right?
It's all about action.
It's about behaving as if it's true.
So that's that age old, you know, acting as if spiritual teaching is an acting truism.
(21:11):
How do you behave truthfully in the moment?
You behave as if it is true and that is what brings that successful performance on to the
stage.
Yeah, wow.
So you help people tap into their inner love, inner desire, what they want the most.
And then do you help them with that action?
(21:32):
Do you say, "This is the thing that you love.
How do we get you there?"
Yes, yeah, I do.
I do because I think, you know, the steps, a lot of times we just, we not only need that
inspiration, right?
And we need to attach to our creative imagination.
(21:53):
We need to take personal responsibility and we need to take inspired action, you know?
So if you get that inspiration, but you don't take action, that's how you end up in that
moment when you're watching television and you're going, "Oh, I can't believe that guy
invented that thing I thought of that 10 years ago."
(22:14):
Right?
That could have been me.
Could have been me, right?
Yeah.
But we don't, most of us, we don't take the inspired action even when we feel and know
the inspiration.
So the moment has to move us.
(22:34):
And so I say with my clients, when people are, you know, bringing me on as their coach,
I say, "Okay, we're going to have a considerable amount of compassionate accountability here."
You know?
So I will always be compassionate, but I will also hold you accountable to be responsible
(22:57):
to your dream, right?
Yes.
To be responsible.
And I always hyphenate the word responsible, you know, because I will say to people, "We
have 100% responsibility for our lives."
And we do.
Just like an actor has 100% responsibility for their performance, it's 100% on them.
(23:19):
Doesn't matter what the director told them, what some other actor in that moment does,
whether or not the light is bright enough, your performance is your job, right?
And so we, as human beings, performing on the great stage of life, we have 100% responsibility
for our performance.
And that means response hyphenability, the ability to respond as we choose.
(23:45):
We are choosing how we respond to every moment.
And so if we get that inspiration and we choose to go sit on the couch and eat Cheetos and
go and sell Cheetos and watch somebody else on television live their dream, right?
That's on us.
That's on us.
So there's obviously a downside to not taking that action once you figure out what is your
(24:12):
purpose.
Yeah.
What's the downside of not even getting to the point of figuring out what your purpose
is?
I think that brings, I mean, to me, that sounds really, really sad.
You know, that's a sad life.
Well, it's a sad state of mind.
(24:34):
We talk about mindset a lot in sort of new thought and spiritual conversations.
We talk about, and even business conversations, we talk about people's mindset, right?
And if your mindset is, "I'm not worthy.
I'm not good enough.
(24:55):
I'm not," you know?
Or if your mindset is, "My whole life is just about, get up, go to the job, do the thing,
come home, eat a pizza, go to bed," you know?
If you get in that train, then you have never asked yourself, "Where's the love?"
You have never taken the moment to treat yourself with the respect and the honor to say, "I'm
(25:23):
here for a reason."
You know, I'm trying to think of where the term originally came from, but I know Mary
Morrissey refers to that longing as divine discontent, right?
That if you have that discontent, if you're feeling like, "This isn't enough.
There's got to be something more.
(25:44):
There's got to be more."
That's because there is.
That is the divine in you longing for, stretching for something more.
That's the actor that wants to play the great role but is afraid to, right?
And so you can either go to the audition and go to classes and get better and keep on trying
(26:05):
and audition again and audition again and audition again until you find your moment
or you can decide to quit acting or you can decide to just stand in the sidelines and watch
somebody else or you can decide to just play a runner-up, you know, like the background,
like an extra in somebody else's story.
(26:27):
But none of us, none of us were born to just fill up the background of the stage in other
people's lives.
We were all born to play the lead in our own life.
And so if you're not, then you just haven't asked yourself the right questions.
And I always say that I'm helping people to be conscious creators because the truth about
(26:52):
creating is we are all creating 24/7.
Everything we do is creating our reality.
It's creating our life.
Everything we think, do and say, that is what is creating our life.
So if we're not taking responsibility for what we're thinking, doing and saying, we're
not consciously creating our life.
(27:14):
We're very creative.
So conscious creating is not just going along with the status quo, it's actually making
purposeful decisions about each creative act.
Absolutely.
Right.
Taking that inspired action.
Yes.
So it seems like there's kind of three parts to it here.
(27:35):
There's one is awareness because I think there will be people who go along in life who don't
even take the time to even be aware that they may not be that happy with their trajectory.
And so there's awareness.
Then there's the self-reflection of what is that love.
(27:55):
And then there's the action taking.
I guess people have to at least hit their awareness thing before they come to you, right?
Well, actually, no, they usually don't.
I usually wake them up to the awareness because they come to me when they're frustrated or
they're, well, not all of them, but some of them just come when they're frustrated, when
(28:17):
they don't know what they don't know.
They don't know why it doesn't feel like enough or they just want to come and play or they
just want to see what it might be sometimes.
The thing is that I call them presets.
What we get, our presets are our judgment, our expectations, our limiting beliefs, our
(28:45):
preconceived notions, those things that become our personal myths about what we can and can't
do.
Those are our presets.
And when we rely on our presets as the roadmap for our life, instead of our inspiration, our
(29:05):
imagination as the roadmap for our life, when we stick in the presets, that's when we can
feel it doesn't feel good.
It doesn't feel right.
It doesn't feel like enough.
And if you feel that there is something, which I would say to a person, we all do it.
(29:27):
Even if we think we're very active and creative in doing things, there's always another one,
right?
There's always another inspiration.
And even if we're that person that is just on the couch eating Cheetos commenting on
what the person on TV isn't doing, either the politician or the actor in the movie or
whoever they are, right?
(29:48):
That they are watching them and judging that rather than looking here.
That's usually because of fear.
And fear comes from our presets.
So when we are afraid of whatever that pain point is, whatever that failure might be,
whatever our presets from our childhood or whatever told us, ugh, you don't want to
(30:14):
do that because the crash and burn can look like that.
We have to get to the point where it's just like improv.
When something falls in improv, you make another offer.
When it crashes and burns, you make another offer.
It won't crash and burn if everybody is there for everybody else in an improv and in acting.
(30:39):
One of the other truisms is it's all about making the other guy look good.
So when your focus is too much on yourself as an actor on the stage and you're worried
about where's my foot, what do they think of me, do I sound right, is that what the
director wanted me to do?
Oh, is that person in the front row blowing their nose?
I must be boring.
Whatever it is that your brain is going to, when your mind is on yourself, you're not
(31:03):
totally present playing the character full out.
So the way to get fully present in that moment is to put your attention on the other players,
on the other people in this scene with you and make their experience as positive as possible,
feed them with offers and your experience will raise.
(31:25):
Oh, okay.
You're sort of bouncing off them and both of you can progress.
You're offering to them.
And even if they're blocking you.
Even if they're not accepting what you're throwing down, you keep finding the offer
that works and you keep accepting what they're doing as offers.
(31:47):
And I'll tell you one more spiritual truism in this metaphorical metaphysical guide.
In acting as in life, it's all about relationship.
And I've already talked about the relationship of ourself to our higher self, the player
to the character.
And in acting, it's all about as in life, it's all about these different relationships.
(32:11):
You can have a relationship to your environment.
You can have a relationship to other person, to yourself, to animals, to inanimate objects,
et cetera.
But there's a relationship that we tend to blame or put the responsibility for how things
are going on a lot.
And that is our relationship with the universe.
(32:32):
That thing to remember is that the universe never blocks.
So is this like when people go, "Oh, I'm so unlucky.
This always happens to me."
Why is this happening to me?
Why is this go like this?
Or it must not be meant to be.
(32:53):
What?
Right?
I always say, "What do you mean to be?
Not what is meant to be because nobody's meaning this except you."
So how are you meaning to respond to this moment?
How are you meaning to respond to this offer?
The universe is completely the best producer any theater company ever had.
(33:17):
We like to think when people come to the metaphor of this being the great stage of life, a lot
of times they'll think that God or the universe must be the playwright.
But that takes them out of responsibility for the story.
No, you're not only the actor, you're not only the character, but you are also the
(33:39):
playwright.
You are writing the story as you go along.
You are creating your life by the choices that you make and how you write the story.
And then people will think, "Oh, okay, well, then the universe is the director."
No, no, no, no, no.
Because the director is that person that holds the vision, that brings everything together,
coalesces it and gets it on a train.
(33:59):
Now, some people abdicate their role as director for holding that vision for their own life,
but you are the director, whether you realize it or not.
What you are not is the producer.
The producer in any production is that being that brings all the resources and provides
all the resources to make that production possible.
(34:21):
So if you think of it that way, the universe is providing whatever resources you could
possibly need.
It's a play with an unlimited budget.
Yeah.
So the whole world is super excited to be in that play.
There isn't a director, any theater company that wouldn't give their collective right
(34:41):
arms to be furnished by that kind of producer.
And we are.
We have no excuses in that universe, in that picture of the universe.
We have to accept that offer rather than looking at the broken bone or the change in relationship
(35:06):
or the thing that happens today or tomorrow or whatever, rather than looking at that as,
"Oh, that's a block, right?
That's the universe blocking me."
Saying, "No, the universe never ever ever says no."
It's offering you an opportunity to do something that your higher self, that player, as this
(35:29):
character is saying, "At some level, you really need this, right?
When those obstacles are there, there is something that you invited and the universe provided
it."
And so it may seem tough.
It may seem hard, but that's that opportunity for creativity.
You were talking about in the introduction, how do people find creative solutions?
(35:56):
You take the obstacle as an offer and you accept it and offer back.
And you continue offering.
Don't quit offering.
Don't quit offering, which doesn't mean stay in every circumstance until the end of time
and just keep throwing things into it.
It doesn't mean that.
(36:17):
But an offer is an offer into your life.
So that might be that the solution in this moment is to recognize that this problem that
I'm beating my head up against is not my problem.
And so since it is not mine, then again, we're going to find the love.
(36:40):
What's the most loving thing I could do right now?
I can move away from this.
I can make the offer into my own life that I'm going to change direction here.
Or I'm having inspiration.
Or I'm having frustration, which is that divine discontent, which is another form of inspiration.
(37:00):
It's you showing you where your offers might be.
That's very empowering, I feel.
You're saying that I'm like, "Gosh, I feel like if I could reframe every block as an
actual offer, as an opportunity to pivot, redirect, move around, change my thinking."
(37:27):
That's such an empowering thing.
Really, really is.
But I can imagine that it takes a lot of effort to end training and building that muscle,
to be able to, in that moment where you are thrown a block, something bad happens, to
(37:51):
get yourself out of that and go, "Actually, no, this is an opportunity."
That's a lot of work done, this sounds like.
Well, it's no more work than those people that walked into that imagination and spontaneity
class and stopped worrying about the grade.
It's the same thing.
When you step into your place and center stage and realize that this is your production,
(38:18):
this is your game that you're playing here, and you're going to make the choice to play,
to offer, that's all.
It's not saying that you're not going to make a mistake.
It's not saying that you're not going to have a bad day.
Of course you are.
People have bad improvs go, "Oops," all the time.
But it is never the end of the world.
(38:40):
It changes your perspective on quote unquote failure.
Lots of people don't create actively, intentionally, and consciously in their lives because they
are afraid of failure.
But in the words of Borden, Edison, and all those folks, there is no failure, only feedback.
There's only feedback as to a different way to try.
(39:02):
So if it's a game, and you say as this moment comes to you, "What's the gift in this?"
It looks like a big problem, but what's the gift in this?
It's no different than playing a strategy game.
It's no different than playing a character in a role-playing game.
(39:23):
We are here to live this life fully and completely.
And part of that is honoring this character by noticing what this character feels and
loves and wants and needs, and then going and taking action toward it.
(39:45):
I think that's great.
I think that if we could help more people get into that space, which obviously you're
doing through your coaching, it would be an amazing thing because it would help people
be more empowered, more engaged, and more conscious with the choices they're making
in life.
(40:05):
Which is why I wrote the book and why I'm just really on a mission to change the way
we think about thinking and the way we think about our behavior here, our purpose here,
what we're doing here.
So your book, does your book provide some of those practical tips that people can take
(40:30):
and apply in their own life to get into this space?
It does.
It goes into immense detail throughout the metaphor.
It gives you all of, helps you really understand not only fundamentals like offering, accepting,
and blocking, but all of the kind of metaphorical truisms from the stage that really start
(40:51):
to change the perspective.
And I take people through forgiveness and through taking responsibility and through all
of the different gratitude, just all of the different kinds of things that we normally
look at as kind of a spiritual pursuit.
But these are very practical, playful, simple ways to just reframe our thinking and become
(41:17):
real conscious creators.
There's also leadership tips in there too because you can't be a director without holding
a vision and bringing other people along to that vision.
And also recognizing your responsibility to your fellow players.
So it's a wonderful, festive way to start to be a conscious creator.
(41:41):
Love it.
And I can't wait to read it.
I'll pop the link to the book and to your website and everything like that in our show
notes for this episode.
But thank you so much, Sandra, for taking me through that.
That was such an interesting metaphor and I can see how it is so linked between life
(42:03):
and art and play.
It's amazing.
And it is loads of fun and that's what it's supposed to be.
That's what life is supposed to be.
And sometimes the fun is in overcoming those great big challenges.
Success looks a lot of different ways.
(42:23):
And so I would just encourage your listeners to recognize that wherever they are, wherever
they are in their journey, if they take a deep breath and really look inside, they can
see something, they can feel something that's calling to them no matter where they are in
the journey.
And when they feel that calling, write it down, look at it, play with it, let your imagination
(42:49):
visualize it and then start taking an inspired action step in that direction.
Beautiful.
I love finishing on a practical tip.
So yeah, thank you so much, Sandra.
And thank you to everyone who's tuned in to Creativity (43:04):
Uncovered today.
I really hope that this episode has inspired you to step onto your own stage so you can
be the main player.
And I also hope that it helps you summon your creativity the next time that you need it.
(43:24):
.
(43:53):
If you've made it this far, a huge thank you for your support and tuning into today's episode.
Creativity (44:00):
Uncovered has been lovingly recorded on the land of the Kabi Kabi people and
we pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging.
This podcast has been produced by my amazing team here at Crisp Communications and the
music you just heard was composed by James Gatling.
If you liked this episode, please do share it around and help us on our mission to unlock
(44:26):
more creativity in this world.
You can also hit subscribe so you don't miss out on any new episode releases.
(gentle music)
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com