2165 - How Physical Activity Sparks Creative Expression with Sarah Rowan

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1:05with us right now it is artist sarah rowan our i almost called you artist uh you're uh you are australia's first e-note speaker slash speed painter your website is artistsarahrowan.com it's a pleasure to have you it's a pleasure to be with you josh well i didn't tell you this before we in our pre-interview chit chat uh the first question i'm going to ask you is what stuff are you into lately non-business related so are there any shows you're watching any movies any hobbies that you're into that are not painting as well even though that's normally a very recreational fulfilling thing what do you do in your free time my obsession the past year and growing by the day is hapkido which is a korean form of martial arts uh the longer we're alive on this planet the more we realize the importance of growing our bones and our strength and our mental health especially as an artist a mom and so four times a week i'm learning how to punch and kick and grow and strengthen my body so i can do better as an artist and a mother.

2:18So what is it about Hapkido that makes it different than other forms of martial arts? Like, can you describe it? Well, it's walking distance from my house, which is the main, the main thing. But for one, it's a community, like you just, when you're an artist, and you work from home, for the most part, and you are an entrepreneur, and you're alone, it's really nice to have a community of people to be with. The way it's different from most, it's really very disciplined and mentally, physically challenged in your mid-40s. It's like, oh my goodness, what have I gotten myself into when I've been sitting on the sofa for too long?

2:58Way too many Netflix episodes. It's like, I need to get my butt off the sofa and get moving again. But so like from traditional karate or something like that, Like, is it? It's not so much like katas and those forms. It's more punches and self-defense maneuvers, just building confidence. And my daughters do it with me, so it's fun because they can beat my ass. Okay. All right. Well, Sarah, tell us about, so you do a lot of speaking. Would you mind maybe sharing a little bit about what it is that you're sharing? Like, what is your message? My message is reconnecting humanity to their creativity.

3:43Corporates, for the most part, are very burnt out and exhausted, and they have lost that connection to their creativity. So I bring a message of how to, but more so not so much the steps, because there's steps and tricks and tips everywhere in the world. But it's more at a cellular level and help people be reminded of how much that they've all these doors they've locked up in their life because a society said I shouldn't open this door. My parents said I should close this door. My friend said I should close this door. And by doing so, we become so blocked and can't move fully as a creative being.

4:21So by helping people recognize that they've locked up these doors, it doesn't take$20 ,000 in psychotherapy or 50 bottles of tequila to open them. It's like literally just recognizing, oh, I never did yoga because someone told me it was woo woo. And I really want to try moving my body like that. Oh, someone told me I shouldn't do cross stitch because it's girly and I'm a man. like the stereotypes when it comes to our gender. And it's just, I feel like we're so exhausted and so suppressed that it limits us in our workplace. It limits us in our home life. And so when I help show people that I have literally grown men writing me back and they'll do a DM because they're too embarrassed to come up to me sometimes after an event, though some do, and blokes love a good hug.

5:12They find that hugging a lesbian is a lot easier than hugging a straight woman. I don't know why. I just give them a good old bear hug. And men definitely need to laugh more. They like only laugh eight times a day. Oh my goodness. So I try to bring laughter and humor into it while speed painting, which is really funny because when you hear someone doing like a professional keynote while they're speed painting, it can be a riot, especially when it's going bad. But the fun part is when I get these DMs of especially gentlemen and saying, I was holding back tears while you're speaking. I feel more alive.

5:45I'm going to reconnect. And then three months later, they write me and they say, I've lost eight kilos. I've never been happier. I'm connected with my family, not just focused on work. And that's what I want. I want people to come more alive because when we're just focused on work, what's the point? Like if we let our kids go to the wayside, if we don't even recognize when our partner walks in the door, our kids walk in the door because we're so focused on our phone, so focused on our devices of getting the word out there about what we do and why we do it. Like, why are we here? So just trying to bring that balance back into the workplaces.

6:23Why? So Sarah, imagine that we're now, you're in a room in front of a couple of hundred CEOs and you're seeing some skeptical looks out there. And these are all leaders. These are all decision makers. And you're like, okay, I mean, yeah, I mean, this all sounds nice and stuff. But why should I, as a leader of people, I have so many other responsibilities and so many other things that I'm worried about right now in terms of making sure that our company is successful and so forth. Why should I pay attention to this? Why should I prioritize this over other things? I find that people's mental health has been really impacted, especially since COVID.

7:07and when you embrace creativity a bit more, and it doesn't have to be like this huge world makeover in your life. It's, I love what Elizabeth Gilbert says about creativity, where it's basically choosing a curious path rather than a path of fear and just doing things a little bit differently that will elevate your innovative thoughts. Like we need problem solving. Corporate CEOs, they need quick problem solving. they need to be innovative, but how can they do that when they aren't operating from that place on a regular basis? It's kind of like, what's your baseline? And if your baseline is a place of being curious, if your baseline is a place of being ambidextrous with your brain and your movements of your body, you will come up with the ideas faster.

7:59One of the points of a book that I've just written. It's called The Creative Cycle. There's a point, the fourth point, the fourth step is called hold your ideas like potato chips. And when I was a runner back in high school, my coach would say, if you don't hold your hands like you're holding potato chips, you're going to get cramped up. You're going to be exerting too much energy. If your hands are just loose and flopping around, if they're too tight, you're going to draw all this oxygen and blood to your hands and you're just going to cramp up in your body. And I find that that so applies to the workplace because if you get ideas and you hold them like potato chips, you will be open to ideas of other people to make your idea better because you're not gripping that creative idea so tightly.

8:49If you're holding your ideas loosely, you won't write them down. You'll get the idea in the middle of the night and you'll be like, I won't forget that. How many great ideas have been lost because we never wrote them down because it was too good to forget. If we hold them too tightly, we'll crush all the creative juices out of them. And so I think it's kind of like exercise. People can say, I don't really need that. I don't have time for that. But it will impact you down the line. Same with creativity. CEOs can say, I don't have time for that, but it will impact you down the line. Yeah. So listen, I can tell you that, and it was probably maybe about three years ago, my kids were getting older, starting to launch.

9:40And dad realized that he needed some more hobbies. Like I was like playing more games and watching more shows and I'm like oh you know this is just not jiving for me like I need I need creative outlets is what I was finding and you know I wish I had prioritized this a little bit more earlier on because now um what I can tell you Sarah um you know I've picked up the bass guitar I do a lot of artistry in the kitchen like I you know for the past three and a half years just been obsessed with cooking, you know, my plant, my garden, my herb garden, like all the plants and trees and shrubs, like everything that like, that's been like, I would consider that to be very artistic for me.

10:23But it's, it's just, it's a lot of, it's effort, right? So like in the bay, you know, when I'm playing bass, like, I'm not thinking about anything else when I'm doing that, like, I am just focused on creating music in that moment. So in that sense, it's meditative. Now, what I can also tell you is that, you know, there are other factors here, but I feel it's like I was my wife and I were just talking about this, like, because I have so many creative outlets, we were talking about vacations this year. And I'm like, you know, this is kind of weird, but honestly, like I'm not dying to take a vacation right now.

11:01Like I can, but I don't have to. Whereas in the past, I remember just like, I can't wait to get to a vacation. Right. And so I could do that. That is a beautiful point. Yeah. Tell me what's going on in my brain here. We crave vacations when we feel like we need to escape. But when we've created the vacation in our day-to-day life, there is no need to escape. For instance, I have created such a fun environment in my home that I never think about travel hardly. Even though I love travel, I grew up in Singapore for five years and we would travel all around the world. And there are places I want to take my kids.

11:41But for the most part, I've got my garden. Yeah, I love making pickles when those cucumbers, you know, come up. and I live 10 minutes from the ocean. So I'm very spoiled in Australia where I have access to about 10 beaches that are surfable. They're fun. So like the other day I was painting and I'm in an alleyway doing a mural and that sun came up right over my head. It was way too hot to paint in that alley. So I just popped my paints undercover, went to the beach for an hour because I had to wait, you know, Josh, I just had to wait for that sun to get out of my way. Darn, I had to go to the ocean as one of my hobbies.

12:20And I don't feel like I need a break from my work life because I bring joy. And, and it goes, you know, Google's in taking this on 3M took this on, they pioneered it where 15%, you do something different, you do something innovative on the side, and it allows you to have those little miniature vacations for your brain, your frontal lobe can shut off. When it's going all the time, there's no wonder why people just focus on when that vacation comes up in six months. You don't need that when you live it. Yeah. Well, and as a result, so think about this, leaders, you know, if you're encouraging a culture of artistic expression, if everyone's just happier, they're not burnt out, guess what's going to happen?

13:05You're going to get more productivity. You're going to get more output. but you're going to get, people are going to want to stay with you for much longer. They're going to be delighted to come to work because you know that they're well-balanced. All right. Yes. Sarah, how as leaders, what is something that we could do starting today to encourage more artistic expression in our workplace or among our people? Not necessarily in the workplace, but just like we want to create this as part of our culture. When you want to bring it into the culture and it hasn't been there, it's going to be like anything.

13:40It's going to feel awkward and it will be so easy to just push it to the side and go, this isn't the too hard basket. This is the future priority. But if you could introduce it in small little simple steps, one way could be opposite day where you encourage people to do things with the opposite hand. For instance, my coach made us do this in basketball for high school, and I also played in university and paid for my art scholarship. It was great. But I would have to use my weaker hand, which was my left hand, to do everything. Brush my teeth. I'd focus on dribbling with my left hand. I'd have to write with my left hand.

14:18You go to reach for things with your opposite hand. It's amazing how difficult that can be. and I still do this from time to time where I'll try to put a jacket on with the opposite arm first. You have to be present. You think, oh, that's so simple. No, all of a sudden where you are having 27 things in your brain, you're like, I can't put this jacket on. I look like I'm having a stroke. It's like your arms are just flailing around. And when you introduce little things like opposite day or have pieces of paper with crayons at a board meeting and textures have encouraged people to take 10 of their like a day or a friday pick a friday afternoon when everybody like in australia oh my gosh people clock off by two it's like drink time they just love their alcohol in this country but to have introduced fun things ping pong tables uh crossword puzzles just have accessing where people can just shut off their frontal lobe.

15:17Because you know, we get those great ideas in the shower. We get those great ideas when we're driving because that frontal lobe shuts off and allows that more creative brain part of the back of the brain to just activate. So people come up with great ideas when they're not focused on coming up with a great idea. It's not wasted time. Yeah. Okay. Well, Sarah, tell me about like how folks engage you. Like Like, tell me about your work that you do, specifically with organizations, with leaders. With leaders, with organizations, and I also do a lot of charity work where I'll paint live at events and they get auctioned off for charity.

15:54I'm trying to raise a million dollars for charity, and right now I'm at the$380 ,000 Australian dollar mark. How people engage me is I come into conferences where I'm often booked as the speaker after lunch or that final wow factor speaker. and I bring in the energy, the breath of fresh air, the creativity. And I find that people just absolutely love having a speaker that is not boring as batshit at a conference that is where people's brains are so overworked. So I go, I'm not here to speak to your head brain. I'm here to speak to your heart brain or even your gut brain, just to reconnect with you.

16:34And sometimes I come in and do team building activities where people can paint with me on large canvases or small individual ones and it's not a follow along with me paint and sip thing it's more of a let's awaken this part of you that is dormant and just have fun I also do murals and things for companies to help brighten up the atmosphere I think when you walk into a space I remember I was painting live at this big fancy building in Sydney that had just been re like the makeover had been done. So they're throwing a party and they had me in the lobby. And they also had these vibrant lights that were neon colored shine, shining on the ceiling in the shape of botanical flowers.

17:20And this CEO walked in with his face and his phone, his head down. And all of a sudden I watched him as his face looked up at the ceiling off of his phone. And he had the split second of wonder. And he walked over to me and he said, this is the first time I've had a reason to look up. It was a simple little quiet engagement, little moment, but we're not giving people a moment to look up, to look around, to be in wonder and awe. Create a space in your workplace that causes people to have wonder.

17:58Awesome. All right. Artist Sarah Rowan.com. We have the exact spelling for that. To our friend that's listening right now, just click in your podcast app right now. Stop what you're doing. Open up your podcast app. Click there so you can see a video of Sarah doing her thing on stage. If you've never seen a speed painter, you're about to. And you need to watch this video because it's amazing to watch. Artist Sarah Bowen, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for this. Thanks so much for your time, Josh. It's been a pleasure.

18:35Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from.

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