Creative Thinking To Find Confidence, Purpose, and Passion In Your Career

We’re not scripting this one, so we’ll see where it goes. We’re going to bring on the wonderful Charles Leon who joined us the summer at the, “I Graduated…Now What?” conference, the expert in creativity. And he will share a little bit of his story and how he helps people bring out the creativity in themselves. I think creativity is such an important part of life and many people downplay their creativity. And I think they misconstrue what the word means. Creativity can be a part of so many things in our lives, not just necessarily being artistic, which I know is definitely the first thing that most people think of.

Need a break from reading articles? Want to just listen instead? Below is a transcript of Episode 17 of my podcast, Stand Up & Stand Out. If you’d prefer to listen, head over to our website or find us wherever the cool kids hang out that do podcasts!

So without further ado, we’ll let you hear from Charles Leon.

Charles Leon: So my name is Charles Leon, and I’m a designer. I designed five-star hotels. I still sketch every single day and I hope to help people unlock their creative potential. And I’ve helped many people uncover their inner creativity and watched them just transform and blossom.

Now, creative thinking is the key to unlock human potential. It’s the differentiator between success and failure. The difference between a life with purpose and life without direction. Now I’m also running two successful design consultancies, but the one thing that I cherish above all things is working with someone when we hit creative flow. At that moment, time just completely disappears and you can hardly get your ideas down faster and feel this rush of adrenaline and joy throughout your entire body, ideas just cascade full of possibilities. To think creatively, you have to step into quite risky, uncertain territory and be prepared to fail. And to be honest, that’s probably why we quite often avoid it. But if you don’t try, I think to some extent you’ve already failed by default. And it’s meaning that you may create and it’s meaning that matters because meaning gives our lives purpose.

There are moments in our life. When, if you’re anything like me, you would ask yourself the simple question of Where am I going? What am I doing? Am I doing the right thing? Have I made the right decision? And what’s the point of it all, and where do I go next? So let me answer that by, slightly obliquely, by giving you a slightly different answer. If you set out on an aircraft, for instance, from Los Angeles to Tokyo, and then navigate to make it a 1% mistake on the course settings. Well, you could end up in the Philippines, you see mistakes aggregate a compound of distance in time, a bit like compound interest they build for better and for worse.

And this is what we call the 1% rule, the trickiest to know where you want to go and like the mountain to continually adjust your course to the elements and to the conditions to keep your mind fixed on the goal. It’s just one small step at a time. Now, if you’re aware of this rule, you will stay on course and you will find direction, purpose, meaning, and confidence.

I have to warn you though that there is a consequence and the consequences of course, of it’s addictive. Once you find your passion, you will look for it, absolutely everywhere, but I think it’s a price worth paying. So who wouldn’t want that?

I hope you guys were as inspired by Charles, as I always am. His drawings, his artwork, everything is just amazing and all that he’s accomplished and you guys can do it too. You heard from him and many of our other speakers throughout this season of the podcast that your path of your career is not linear. You don’t know how things are going to turn out. And creativity is going to be a key part of that.

If you don’t really get stuck in one path, you’re going to be better off. Although you may have an idea of what you like, of what you’re interested in doing, or the type of income you would like to have in order to have a lifestyle that you want to enjoy. Those are all great things but a lot of stuff happens, which we can’t control.

And I think that’s where creativity can really help all of us. Look at the pandemic, so many people were on a set path and something completely out of not just people in the U.S’s control, but out of the entire world’s control happened and we have to pivot. And now’s the time to think about those things. As you’re graduating school, or just starting to go to work, you may start to get into things and you’re like, man, this isn’t what I thought it was going to be.

So how do I use what I’ve learned so far to do what is actually going to make me happy? What is going to fulfill my passion? And that’s where creativity comes, I think, to play. For me, I know what many people think when they say creativity because it happened to me when I was younger, my grandfather was an extremely talented artist, he painted, he was a carpenter, he did architecture for years and all around our house we were surrounded by his beautiful paintings of Europe. And my brother was a natural artist. We would sit down at the table side by side. He’s four years younger than me and he would be able to draw things that I just couldn’t even imagine.

I had creativity. I had the imagination, but I just physically couldn’t draw the same way he could. And so I learned to adapt. I learned to figure out a way to use what I knew to get a similar outcome that was what I thought would be interesting. So I used to take magazines and coloring books and different things, and I would piece together pictures and I would trace them. And then I would color them in, of course, extremely colorfully, because this doesn’t just start with my hair color, this has always been something for me, and I made a new drawing. And so that became my creativity. And since then, of course, my family is incredibly talented and I’m surrounded by them all the time, which is always inspiring to me.

They are musicians, they are singers, they’re actors, they’ve played sports, they do all sorts of other crafts on the side they garden, they do pottery. You can’t even imagine the amount of things that my family does. And so I’m constantly in an environment where I’m pushed to do things that maybe I don’t know how to do and I have to take skills that I’ve learned previously to try to figure out how to make that thing my own. And that’s really what creativity is all about, right? Making it your own, even when you go to work and maybe you have a highly analytical job. Like I did, I worked in accounting, finance, numbers, spreadsheets, and, you know, sometimes if it’s not too sexy, maybe you’re an engineer by trade and you’re sitting all day looking at code. Those things may seem very analytical, but the end result can also be more creative. You can solve problems in creative ways by using your experience, your background in order to come up with new definitions of how to solve these problems.

This is the important part of when many people talk about diversity. And I really want to drive this message home to people because a lot of people think when they think of diversity, they’re purely thinking of what’s going on on the outside of what they can see about people. And that’s actually where a lot of us fall into mis-guiding and misjudging who people are, because the outside of us says nothing about the inside of us, about the experiences that we’ve had in life and about what we can bring to the table with our thoughts and ideas.

For I have six parents, I mean, we talked about that in Episode 3 when I did a little bit of an intro of myself, that’s not usual, but that can be a disadvantage and an advantage, depending on how you look at it. Some people may say, oh my gosh, you know, I had all these conflicting ways of growing up and I had different people telling me what to do.

Yes, perhaps that’s one disadvantage, but the advantages, I also had people with so many different life experiences that I was able to learn from them and they like to experience different things. My mom was from Southern California, she loved to go to Disneyland, I just got back from Orlando. I love Disney.

And then my other parents love to go outside and do outdoorsy things and go hiking and camping and fishing. My mom probably wouldn’t be caught dead doing a lot of those things because she doesn’t like being dirty, but I do. And so it gave me this really varied view of the world because I had so many different perspectives that molded me as I grew up.

And I want you guys to think about those things. Let’s try to think about the things that maybe at first may seem like a disadvantage of how you experienced life at a young age, or as you went through school and start to think of what good came out of it. There is a silver lining to things, and that’s where your creativity can be sparked.

That differentiating factor can really give you new ideas that may not be the way other people think. Because when you go to school, you get this set syllabus, you get this curriculum that you’re supposed to follow A, B, C, and then D. That’s where a lot of people get lost because that’s not the way life works.

You jump all around the alphabet, you throw numbers and sometimes calculus symbols, it gets crazy and you have to be able to adapt. And part of that adaptability is creativity. Lean on those experiences that you’ve had in life. Think about the ways that you can turn things just slightly to see them differently.

Take a new perspective on them and start to find that passion that’ll actually drive you towards new and exciting adventures. I think you’ll be surprised. It’s always sad to me when people say, “oh, I’m not creative,” because I know they think like I did when I was that little girl comparing myself to my brother at the table.

That’s not creativity. It’s so much more well-rounded than that. And it’s so much more important as we go into this new world. Change is inevitable. It will be the way of things going forward. As people continue to talk about the new normal and whatever normal might’ve been before, it was a normal to begin with. There are so many jagged things that are going on and divergent ways that things are going to move forward. Dive into them, don’t be afraid, don’t hold yourself back, don’t think like that little girl did that “oh, I can’t do this,” and stop from even trying. Whether that’s how you put together your resume, how you go to an interview and how you represent yourself on your first day of the job, that authenticity, that uniqueness of you is important.

It’s important to bring forward and that’s the thing that’s going to get you noticed. And that’s the thing that’s gonna get you moving along in your career path. Now, I know there’s a lot of introverts out there right now, who are probably having an anxiety attack as I’m telling them to put themselves out there. But let’s think about also adapting that message to who you are naturally when you are maybe more introverted and maybe not an extrovert like I am where I’m more willing to put myself out there physically and emotionally, you think about the ways that you are comfortable with doing it, the things that you’re proud of, your work.

I think most introverts do such amazing work and they’re often quiet behind the scenes and don’t get noticed, but I think that’s where you can take your step forward. Think about how you can make your work differentiated from others. Think about how you can do things slightly different and something that’ll make you proud of the work that you’re doing.

This is how you find your passion. I know we talk about, oh, hey everyone’s just quitting their job and moving onto the next thing. And then everyone worries, well, the grass isn’t always greener. It’s not so easy to just leave. A lot of times you do need to find happiness in what you’re doing. You need to inspire yourself and find a way to be intrinsically motivated.

And I find creative ways of doing things make you find that, it helps you along that journey. So I know there’s a lot going on here and there’s many more ideas on creativity to come, but I hope you enjoyed the speech from Charles Leon, follow him on Instagram. There’s lots of information on our website and in the transcript where you can check out his amazing drawings and the work he’s done in the British theater, and you know where to catch us at www.greenchameleoncollective.com/podcast for this and many more episodes.

Well, another awesome show in the books, I hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed making it. For video outtakes of the show don’t forget to catch us on TikTok you don’t stop at NikkiGreen678.

The full length shows are available on all the podcast platforms now, including Amazon music, Stitcher and Goodpods. The full video is available on Nikki’s YouTube channel and links to all of our social media, including info about our guests is available in our show notes and on our website. Thanks for listening and we will see you next week. Bye.