Can You Imagine? 2 Exercises to Strengthen Your Creative Practice

Well, hello, my friend, and welcome back to another episode of Artworks for Teachers. I’m your host, Susan Riley, and I am so thrilled to be with you today. We are going to do something that we haven’t done in a while today. It’s just you and me, friend. It’s just you and me, and we’re going to be digging into mindset and a book. This is, we haven’t done this in a long time. I’ve interviewed people who have had books on the market and we’ve kind of been talking about their books, but we haven’t really talked about mindset in a long time. And I haven’t really been able to dig into a book that I have read and my interpretation of that book and just kind of how they pieced together for a really long time. And I thought I’d bring it back. So I’m excited about the material today.

I want to start though with a story that I found as I was researching some things for this episode that I found fascinating and also a little scary. In 2016, Mindvalley creator Vishen Lakiani, I have trouble saying his last name, and ex -Prize founder Peter Diamandis sat down to dinner. And Peter shared the following story at dinner with vision. And he said, between 2000 and 2016, the world has seen as much change as between 1900 and 2000. I mean, just look at what happened in those 16 years. The destruction of retail stores as a result of Amazon, the Wall Street financial crisis, the launch of the iPhone and Android app stores, and the rise of Netflix. And if you are my age, my friends, pause, you will remember all of those things and it will seem like just yesterday. Continuing. In 16 years we saw 100 years of change and we’re just getting started. He continued. From 2016 to 2022 we will see an equal amount of change now compressed in just eight years. Now remember he was saying this in 2016 so I want us to think back in the last from 2016 to 2022, all of the things that evolved that happened in that eight -year period of time, including a pandemic, a global pandemic. And then, he said, we’ll see another equal amount of change between 2022 and 2026, 100 years of change in just four years. So do you see what he’s saying? How how rapidly we’re seeing 100 years of previous change happening at exponentially smaller and smaller periods of time. And we’re right in that band of 2022 to 2026. And just think about as we’re sitting here at 2024 with two more years to go in that band between 2022 and 2026. And the fact that we just had the advent of artificial intelligence really kick off.

At the end of 2022, can you imagine where our future is headed and what is coming?

So many people that I talk to are scared of what’s coming in any time after 2026. They can’t see that far out anymore. You know, the most common job question that we used to receive was, where do you see yourself in five years? And anybody who went on a job interview in the last five years previous to now, can attest to that question, but you know, I don’t think that that question is relevant anymore. Because quite honestly, I don’t know that we can see a world past the next 18 months. And even that might be a stretch. And so I get the honor and the privilege of being able to speak with a wide variety of people in lots of different careers. I get to speak with educators. I also get to speak with a lot of entrepreneurs.

I get to speak with lots of people in different industries like healthcare and beyond really, and in all kinds of industries. And everyone is seeing this change. It’s not just education. It is truly everywhere because artificial intelligence is rockin’ everybody’s world. And everybody has the same nerves and fears about what is coming because of this rapidly evolving technology. If you go to conferences in any profession, but particularly in education in the last year, and even in the last three months, almost all of the sessions are inundated with some form of AI that has been developed. And it is still being developed, right? Even for us in our upcoming summer conference, we’re gonna be talking about artificial intelligence and what is available to you now, what’s coming up, what you can anticipate, how it’s changing things. And I’ll let you in on a little secret. I’ve been working with a lot of different publishers at taking a look at writing a book about steam and upcoming challenges with AI. And quite honestly, I don’t think I can write it. Because every time I sit down to write the table of contents, map out the book, I don’t think I can write something that won’t be irrelevant by the time it hits your bookshelves. Because from the time it takes to get it published to the time it takes to get to your bookshelf, whatever I tell you about it or about artificial intelligence is gonna be irrelevant. It’s gonna be something new has evolved in that time span. It is happening that rapidly. It is evolving that fast.

And that has consequences, my friends.

And as I tell you this, and I’m sure you can already feel it, it feels scary. It feels nerve wracking, right? And so when we think about this, and because our brains physically end in every capacity, cannot imagine and cannot hold that kind of uncertainty our immediate response is fear. And when we are fearful, we start to make decisions that are not necessarily the best decisions, right? Put on top of that all of the other things that are coming to us and put on our plates, right? The fact that students are still a grade level behind because of the gaps that COVID caused. Put on the table that we’re still dealing with a lot of emotional trauma that COVID left us in its wake. And we’re still dealing with a lot of high emotions on dealing with communication issues between parents and educators and administrators and a lot of miscommunication going on across the table. Right? We’re dealing with pay issues. We’re dealing with so many other burdens on top of all of this rapid change.

So how in the world are we supposed to wrap our heads around any of it? Okay? So as I was thinking about all of this, I’m also reading this book called The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. And if you haven’t heard of it, I highly, highly recommend that you go get it. It’s been receiving rave reviews, not just from artists, but from all kinds of folks who have been reading it.

And we’re going to dig into this book today for a lot of different reasons. I actually wanted to title this episode, that creativity is the superpower of the future, because I really do believe that. As I’ve been writing or reading this book and working on our vision as an organization and thinking about, you know, part of my job as the CEO and founder of our organization is to cast the vision for where we’re headed. And that’s really hard when you can’t see more than 18 months down the road. Part of my job has always been to think about five years down the road, three years, maybe minimum, right? Well, 18 months is about as fast as I can go now. And so I’m really like chugging along with this idea that creativity is the superpower of the future because at this point,

I’m of the belief that creativity and caregiving are really the only two things that AI is not going to replace. And I think that’s a pretty bold statement, but I also believe that it’s a pretty true statement. And I think I need you to be able to imagine that before we can go any further today and this book is going to really highlight this for you.

When I say that creativity and caregiving are the only two things that AI is not going to be able to replace, I’m not being facetious. I actually mean that. If you go Google, and actually I challenge you to do this, go Google, what are the top jobs that AI cannot replace? Okay, you’re going to find things like artists, sculpture, class blower, therapist, nurse, doctor, lawyer, judge, scientist. Things that require critical and creative thought, things that require discernment, things that require caregiving of others, being able to emotionally or physically care for another human being, right? Or to put those two things together, you’ll find professions that fit into one of those two categories. And so what I find incredibly ironic in our educational system, what are the two categories where we spend the least amount of time educating our children? Creativity and caregiving. We spend very little time on working with emotional well -being, caring for others. You know, we talked about social emotional learning. I know that for many people, SEL is an abbreviation or social emotional learning is a set of words that has been banned from your vocabulary and if you say them, you could lose your job at this point. I know that’s a reality for some of you. And for that, I am so sorry. But it is not… just a set of buzzwords. It’s a practice of being able to care for one another and learn how to emotionally regulate ourselves as humans and how to care for one another. That’s a skill set that we need to learn, right? The same is true of how to creatively think and critically think and be able to create and critically think together.

We have to be teaching these skills because it is the only thing that AI will not replace within the next 20 years. 20 years! Now that’s not to say that it’s not important for our children to be able to learn how to mathematically think, how to be literate human beings. I believe it is important to teach our students how to read and how to be mathematically literate and understand those components, understand how to scientifically think as well, how to understand our history. Of course, we want to teach our children all of these things, right? I’m not saying throw out the facts for facts sake, but I am saying that we no longer need our students necessarily to memorize facts just to memorize facts, right? Not when you have an AI, you know, bot that can do that for you and can recall that information very quickly. What’s the point in having your brain do that when something else can do it for you and you can take your brain space to do something that that bot cannot do to create or care for another human being, right? And I think this is really, really important because in the future, as we’re looking at it,

There are other things that are going to evolve in addition to AI. It’s not in isolation. So it’s not just our jobs that will evolve. It’s also our societies and the reason for our jobs that will evolve. So as I’m learning more about this and as I’m looking at more futurists who are talking about what this could look like and what could be in store for us, the more I’m looking at education thinking, we’re not teaching them the right things at this moment in time. And we are far, far behind and we need to get on the right page here. But in order to do that, we have to shift our own mindsets, our own thinking around what it is that makes up a quality education for a student in a world that we are now in with artificial intelligence. So what does that look like?

And how do we shift our own mindsets to do that? Right? So that’s where the book comes in. So in his book, from Rick Reuben’s book, The Creative Act, Rick shares that the first way that we can all begin to start to shift our mindsets is to begin to explore the creative process ourselves. And the easiest way to do that is to simply be open to creative inspiration. Right? And if people are nervous about creativity because they feel that they themselves are not creative. Rubin denies that. He’s like, no, every human on the planet is creative in their own right. Every human has an urge to create. I wholeheartedly agree. And so he talks about the easiest way to do this is to simply become aware of everything around us. And the easiest way to do that is to just notice, just to notice things, right?

And so as he puts it look for what you notice, but no one else sees and this idea of noticing This is why the I noticed cube strategy that I share the see think wonder Strategy that we share a lot that these thinking routines that we share as arts integration strategies That’s why these are so easy to begin to use and explore as a way in to creative thinking because they’re non -threatening and all it takes is just to stop and to notice the things that are around you. Right? And so I love how Ruben puts this, that you look for what you notice, but then what no one else sees. So this is your first exercise today. Okay. I’m going to give you two exercises this week so that you can begin the process of exercising your own creativity so that you can begin to shift your mindset and be thinking about how you can begin to bring creativity and more of the creative process into your classroom for your own students. Okay, so exercise number one is to look for what you notice today that no one else sees and then document it in some way. And how you document it doesn’t matter.

So if you prefer to sketch it or write it or I don’t know if you’re a musician and you want to compose it, however you want to document it is up to you. But you just have to document it in some way. You have sticky note, that’s fine. But whatever it is that you look for something today, whatever you notice that no one else around you noticed, I want you to write that down.

And it’s great if you could do these exercises for seven days in a row. And this exercise, look, this exercise is not going to take you very long, right? I mean, I could look out my window right now and notice something. For example, there is the beginnings of a bird’s nest right out here in this rhododendron bush that I know nobody else is looking at right now. And nobody else in my family is going to see that because nobody else walks out the front door.

And I could write that down right now. It’s taken me all of 10 seconds to notice that, right? It doesn’t have to take you a long time, but just stop, pause in our very busy lives and notice something that nobody else has noticed today. It’s a secret for you and write it down, document it somehow. Okay. That’s number one. Now, what I also appreciated about this book was how Rubin wrote it. I resonated so much as an artist with how he described being an artist. And so for me, how he described the highs and lows, how he described the insecurities that artists oftentimes feel, and the need, the constant need to create this pull to create felt very much like he understood how I operate in the world, which was helpful for me. But as I was also reading it from the lens of a teacher’s lens, as someone who may not be someone as an artist, right, but as someone who is an educator. I also tried to read it from that lens. The language isn’t like poetic and flowy to the point where you can’t really understand what he’s trying to say, right? There is a point behind it and also it makes you think so that you can access it on your own terms. And I wanted to give you an example of that today and also use it as an exercise that you can pair with exercise number one. So exercise number one is to look for something that you noticed today that nobody else could see, right, or saw.

And so here’s a quote that would be a good example of what I’m talking about. Rubin writes, all art is a work in progress. It’s helpful to see the piece we’re working on as an experiment, one in which we can’t predict the outcome. Whatever the result, we will receive useful information that will benefit the next experiment. If you start from the position that there is no right or wrong, no good or bad, and creativity is just free play with no rules, it’s easier to submerge yourself joyfully in the process of making things. We’re not playing to win, we’re playing to play. And ultimately, playing is fun. Perfectionism gets in the way of the fun. A more skillful goal might be to find comfort in the process, to make and put out successive works with ease. So you see what I’m saying? It’s not like, flowery language. It’s very practical and you can apply what he just shared in so many different ways. I looked at this from a lot of different angles. As a business owner, this really spoke to me at a time where I was really struggling with experimenting with something new and I thought, well, what the heck? It’s an experiment. If it fails, it fails. And I can look and learn and not necessarily look at it as a failure, it’s play. It’s something I can learn from, right? And I pick up the pieces that worked and I try something different the next time. And if it works, great, then I can build off of that. But as an educator, we can certainly look at that with a lesson that we’re developing, a unit that we wanna try to switch up. We can share it with our students when we’re working on their growth mindset and oftentimes when our students struggle with perfectionism or hitting a specific grade, we can work on that with them. So there’s lots of different ways to apply what he shares in this book about creativity in classroom settings as well as in our own professional practices. Now here’s where this becomes helpful as an exercise. So exercise number two is to make something today that has no purpose other than to simply engage in the process of making something set a timer for five minutes and simply create. So I want you to pair this with exercise number one. So you’re going to document something that you noticed that nobody else noticed and then set a timer for five minutes and create something. If you want to sketch out whatever it is that you noticed for five minutes, if you want to make a sculpture of something, if you want to work on a long -term project that you have in mind, and you just want to, you know, put five minutes into it. Just work on it for five minutes. Maybe you don’t have an end goal. Maybe you just want to color. And there’s no purpose behind it other than to just color. That’s okay. Sometimes there doesn’t have to be a purpose, right? Sometimes just the act itself is the purpose. And so these are the two exercises I want you to try this week.

And if you can try to do them every day. Look at it as an experiment in creativity and see how you feel at the end of the week. See how did this affect you in any way? Did it impact your mood? Did it impact how you look at creativity? Did it have no impact on you at all? But either way, I’d love to see how these experiments

change or not your impression of creativity moving forward. Because either way, I promise you this is coming. This is coming whether we like it or not, that creativity and caregiving are going to be the two essential components that we need to teach our students before anything else and alongside of all of the other skills that they’re going to need. These are going to be the biggest two because AI is gonna be able to replace almost everything else that we can do. So this is gonna be really important for us. And I think dipping our toes into how we can begin to look at this process is gonna be really important for us. So I hope that this episode was helpful for you. For your downloadable this week for your freebie, I have a documentation sheet for you for exercise one and two.

So if you don’t want to have a sticky note and you have something to document for yourself for the next seven days, I have that as a free download for you. Just head over to artsintegration.com forward slash artworks and you’ll find a copy. Thanks so much. And I can’t wait to be with you again next week.