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Susie deVille
202 Plays3 years ago
Susie deVille is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs build wildly successful businesses by rediscovering their creativity and leveraging the power of their true nature. An author, coach, and entrepreneur who built and sold a highly profitable real estate firm, she has been researching innovation and creativity since 2005. She is the founder and CEO of the Innovation & Creativity Institute and trained as a coach with Dr. Martha Beck. Her first book, Buoyant: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Becoming Wildly Successful, Creative, and Free, will be published in September of 2022.
Innovation & Creativity website:
https://innovationandcreativityinstitute.com/
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:02
Speaker
You are listening to something rather than nothing. Creator and host, Ken Delante. Editor and producer, Peter Bauer.
Passion and Community Intersections
00:00:17
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Four steps that occurred in my head is like, okay, cool. It's interesting. I think the more
00:00:30
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I get out into the world and meet people who are doing the work that they absolutely love to do. It's really interesting. As I do that, I'm meeting more people who are doing that. And then we always find these interesting intersections in experiences that we have had, people that we know, circles of
00:00:57
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communities that intersect in all kinds of interesting ways. It's really fascinating. Yeah, it is. It's organizing and creating groups and creativity.
Guest Introduction: Susie Deville
00:01:13
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Susie, let's launch into the show. I'm with Susie Deville and we've already been talking and talking and talking. So we wanted to bring the listeners in to be able to listen to our conversation. Susie, welcome to something rather than nothing podcast. I'm so thrilled to have you on the show. Thank you. I am delighted to be here.
00:01:40
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Yeah, and I know when I was looking at the things you think about in your creativity that
Susie's Creative Journey Begins
00:01:48
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there'd be like just a whole bunch of ways to go about asking you the big questions and learning about your work. So we'll probably just ease into all that. But I wanted to introduce you and to tell about folks that Susie's an author. She's a coach. She's an entrepreneur. She's writing a book. And I encountered her work from
00:02:16
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a guest on the podcast, David Varespe, who's a wonderful photographer and a friend of mine from the University of Rhode Island and made the connection over to Susie. And she just does such incredible work. I wasn't quite sure how to start, but I know for you, Susie, it's been a bit of a journey for like where you are now using creativity and connecting to that. Could you just tell a little bit about how you arrived to where you're, you know,
00:02:46
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writing a book and it transformed yourself and your thinking? So I was definitely one of the folks who believed that I was not artistic or creative growing up and certainly believed that up until as recently as probably seven years ago.
00:03:12
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And I had this very narrow definition of what creativity actually is. I believed that if you were able to draw or paint something in a realistic manner that actually looked like the subject that you were trying to capture, that meant you were artistic. And that was the very narrow focus, very narrow lens through which I viewed it.
00:03:40
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Which is strange because I grew up in a family with very creative, very artistic people. My father was an artistic entrepreneur and engineer and everything he did was creative.
00:03:56
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My mom is a retired school teacher and I watched her create lesson plans and activities for her kids all throughout my childhood. My brother and sister are enormously creative, highly intuitive, imaginative people and we played
00:04:18
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all the time outside creating all kinds of little imaginary worlds so for me to arrive in my forties still believing that i'm not creative was kind of an interesting thing and it just shows you how pervasive that cultural teaching is in us and so i
Inspiration from IDEO's Design Process
00:04:43
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entered into the world of creativity through a door when I was in a innovation and creativity class, which was a part of my master's program. This was in 2005, 2006. And my professors showed us this episode, which was an old Nightline episode with Ted Koppel, and they were featuring the Palo Alto design firm called IDEO.
00:05:12
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And this presentation, it was probably no more than 15 to 20 minutes of a clip showing how this firm went about the process of redesigning an everyday object. It happened to be a shopping cart, but they showed their design thinking process as well as the culture inside the organization.
00:05:35
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and their values, which was to encourage wild ideas and that there's no bad ideas and that the group succeeds over the quote unquote genius of the single person, the lone genius.
Transformation during the 2008 Crisis
00:05:54
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And when I saw this, my whole system just kind of went into an electric
00:06:02
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reaction. And I was completely enamored with the company, with this whole concept, with their culture. They were also blending ethnography into their field work, and I was trained as an anthropologist in my undergraduate.
00:06:20
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Education and so I thought oh my gosh. This is incredible and it set me on this path of Researching everything that I could get my hands on in the world of innovation and creativity so That was approaching it through The way that I moved in the world, which was this very left-brained intellectual linear thinking logical person
00:06:48
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And I was just gathering information and writing about it and working I began working with clients and I was I would take what I was learning and finding out and infusing it into the coaching work that I was doing with individuals and teams and it was enormously exciting and satisfying and it wasn't until I Went through what I lovingly referred to as my nuclear winter and
00:07:14
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Um, which was when the markets crashed in 2008 everything in my life was Just on fire. Um, I was in real estate at the time Um, so I began my real estate career in 2001 and i'm still a licensed
Paris and the Birth of a Book
00:07:32
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broker. Um But at that point it was one of the main um ways for us to to make a living and my
00:07:42
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ex-husband was a contractor. So we had the double whammy to the household finances because everything just stopped. But my marriage also stopped at that same time. So it was this point of just sort of sitting in this
00:08:02
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unrecognizable life and What it gave me was this incredible opportunity to try new things so I Made the decision to launch my own real estate company in the middle of the great recession and also began really pursuing my own path to creativity and
00:08:32
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At the end of this trying time, which was around the end of 2013, I began traveling again, which I had done. I had traveled around the world, and I had traveled all over Europe and Asia, and I had stopped when I got married and had kids.
00:08:58
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I was sort of relaunched into the world. I started traveling again, and that put me even more closely connected into this passion that I have for the world of art and art making. And Paris was the linchpin there, and it really just woke me up in a new way.
00:09:22
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And then I began taking art lessons and developing my ability to sketch and paint and do collage work and mixed media and photography. And then I started writing and started sort of pouring out of me this process that I had been through. And it wasn't until about two years ago that I started to put all of that together into a book.
00:09:52
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And I started with about 130,000 words. And it was this giant, drippy, gloppy mess of clay. And I began working with a wonderful mentor, editor and mentor and publishing genius who helped me shape it into a good manuscript. Wonderful.
00:10:22
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What is the timeline for the book? Has that been set as far as the book? Yes. It is going to be released on September 6 of this year. So we're in the final phases of copy edit reviews right now, and then it'll go off to the printer.
00:10:43
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Yeah, congratulations on that. I'm so excited about a lot that you had to say. I guess, you know, a couple of things that I would mention. I really connected what you were saying about the
00:10:59
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You know, this narrow definition of artist and how predominant. I mean, I found it kind of wild how you and how you ended up with kind of the narrow, you know, for your own mind. And, you know, I've been around a lot of environments myself where I should have had a more expansive idea.
00:11:19
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Well, I think previously but it's very similar for me as far as self identification with creativity and being artful and being an artist is really just been for you know, the last five six years of my life and you know, I'm 49 so it's a small sample and again being around
00:11:43
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where it feels like you should know better or reject more just out of hand and you don't shows how pervasive it is. I had a particular question I had to do about creativity in the example you put about
00:11:58
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I think you were pointing to this collective work group process and the creativity that went around that. And it sounded so strange because it's not what we have in a lot of our environments to problem solve and to create. What do you think is the reason for the very narrow focus on
00:12:27
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solving things like in work or productivity and why is the creative kind of, it seems to be marginalized.
Creativity in Work and Education
00:12:37
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Why do you think that dynamic exists? Well, one of the things that I became involved with when I moved back from London to Highlands,
00:12:55
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I was thinking about becoming a teacher following in my mom's footsteps and I got the idea to go volunteer at the school to just make sure before I went back and got another piece of paper that this was something that I wanted to do and I had all of these
00:13:15
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wild ideas of all this creative writing work that I was going to do with these kids in high school. And the teacher invited me in, and we started to have our first lesson and lecture. And I learned very quickly there were a lot of kids who were not on grade level for reading. And so I scrapped that whole plan, and long story short, ended up starting a literacy council in Highlands.
00:13:44
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And what I learned was that this was my very beginning understanding of how the world is structured and how people learn and what their preferred channels for processing information are. It was my very beginning foray into this whole world. And what I discovered was that the world is set up for left-brained people.
00:14:13
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The educational world in particular. So if you think about how a classroom typically looks, everybody's sitting in rows, you get directions that are given to you and it's one, two, three. This is how you do the work. You put your name on the upper right hand corner of the paper. And that works great for people like me. I'm wired to be left brained. I was an ace in school. I loved being in the classroom.
00:14:43
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And I was very successful, but there were a lot of kids who don't process information that way, don't learn that way, who have a very different holistic mind and process information in a spatial relationships way. They think more whole to part rather than part to whole.
00:15:10
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And those kids are reached. So the left-brained train sort of drives the agenda, in my opinion, of our earliest experiences. And if you're not fortunate enough to be in a school where the arts are heavily
00:15:37
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introduced and infused into the curriculum, you just exit that world. You exit at the other end of your 12 years and you don't have those sensibilities introduced to you and made a part of your everyday life. So I think it starts very young. And then I also think that there are these notions that
00:16:03
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Creativity is not a path that has promise. It's riddled with boogeymen and briars and poverty that you won't be successful if you do XYZ. And I know I have so many clients in their 40s and 50s who are
00:16:28
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products of being told their entire lives. They had a passion for some kind of creative desire and they were told, no, you don't want to do that. You're not going to be able to.
00:16:43
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to be successful. Nobody makes a living doing X, Y, or Z. So there are lots of reasons why I think that people tend to latch on to the idea, oh, I need to get the thing. I need to do the sure thing, which is ironic, because if you hate it, how successful are you going to be at it?
00:17:11
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The chances of us finding success in the thing that we hate versus the thing that we love is vastly different. So I think that our tender hearts have been walled off in some ways from the world of creativity and art.
Art as Transformation
00:17:38
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And in fact, one of the things that I talk about in the book are what Brene Brown refers to as these art shaming incidents. You know, when we did try to create something and then either a friend or a peer in the classroom or a parent or a sibling made so much fun of it that we never dared try it again.
00:18:02
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Yeah, and uh, those those those are powerful, but I think I i'm glad for our conversation to be able to tap into the like What that what that is, you know and open up that? Open up that area because I know that's where a lot of your work in in energy is. Okay. I want to ask, you know, uh A big a big question it's from two different directions one is You know, um
00:18:32
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kind of your experience in seeing maybe art around the world and come in contact with that, but also how we define what art is. And I wanna ask that question of you because I think it seems to be really important connected to creativity. For you, what is art?
00:18:56
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So art to me is not only the product of our creative expression, the things that we make, but it's also, importantly, this process, which I think is more important than the ultimate product. And I know that it is, of course, we want to see paintings and we want to
00:19:23
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read poetry and read books and we want to go to performances. Absolutely. But for the art maker, I think the most important aspect is this moment in the act of creating. And that's where we scooch up to the threshold
00:19:47
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And if we get on the other side of this resistance, Pressville talks about the inherent resistance that we have to creating. If we get on the other side of that, pierce that veil, and we get into the work, and we get lost into the work,
00:20:05
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We have this moment or these series of moments of transformation where we feel something in our bodies and in our, with every sense that we don't feel otherwise, that we don't experience otherwise. And there's also something happening to our awareness when we're making, to our courage muscles. We have such
00:20:28
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greater ability to surf the waves of uncertainty because we're going into the unknown when we go into this process whether we're at a typewriter or a computer or a piece of paper there is this creation of something from nothing and that is magical and mystical and
00:20:55
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so much fun, once we get over the sort of the mind funk of, I'm not good enough, I can't make this, I'm an imposter, all of those kinds of thinking. But it's, to me, art is this journey, what I call a creative rebel's voyage, it is this process of taking your inspired action
00:21:22
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and entering into this crucible where you take something abstract, an idea, and you make something out of it. And you are transformed in the process. Dang. I don't have the mic drop noise. It's an independent podcast here in Oregon.
00:21:51
Speaker
um, a well and and and thank you because I I think one of the things I What i've heard and kind of gets me excited is is the energy is like some sort of breakthrough is some sort of radical juncture of of a way to exist That is disruptive in a radical like you said a move from
00:22:15
Speaker
know, the mundane in existing in that. And I'm really, I'm really interested. I want to, in this particular question, Susie, and you talking about the creative act of writing. So I'm, I'm, you know, English Lit major philosophy guy, consume books in a very, you know, intense manner, audio and reading.
Journaling and Blogging Insights
00:22:40
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And I've
00:22:42
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Done some writing but never extensive and never in the big manner that I feel like doing so I'm probably most fascinated by The transformation in writing or what writing does in that process how it impacts you in and how you create your thing and
00:23:07
Speaker
what what with with writing yeah with writing for you what what what happened well i always loved to keep a diary when i was a kid and i don't know if you know the book harry at the spy so yeah she was she was uh a role model i mean just the the
00:23:34
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not the spying part, but the paying attention part and the jotting down of notes. So that part I had as a child, but it really wasn't until probably into my
00:23:51
Speaker
Well, right around the time my son was born, I began to write in a journal. And I didn't know it was morning pages a lot, Julia Cameron from The Artist's Way. I didn't know it was morning pages, but that's what I was doing. And I was processing my basic, my fears over
00:24:13
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I didn't know if I had the right stuff. I was so anxiety-ridden. I thought, I don't want to mess this up. And I had all these jumbly thoughts. And so I thought, I'm just going to start writing all this down.
00:24:30
Speaker
And it was enormously cathartic and helpful to me. And I could just get up in the morning and write several pages of all of this gunk that was in my head, get it out on a piece of paper, close the notebook, and then I could give Adam all of me. He had my full attention.
00:24:55
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my best self. And so after several years of doing that, I became very much a believer in the power of journaling. And then when I read The Artist's Way and saw how doing morning pages, which she refers to as three pages of longhand that you write every morning, and it's just a collection of your fears,
00:25:25
Speaker
frustrations, your triumphs, the things that excite you. It's just a way to get everything out of your mind and move on. She used that as a way to explain how you could link that to creative recovery. That switched something on in my mind because then I realized I'm not just
00:25:50
Speaker
doing kind of a brain dump here of what's happening inside of my heart and in my mind, I'm opening myself up to something else. So it wasn't just getting it down, it was also getting something in. And I thought, hmm, so I started really devoting and practicing and being consistent with morning pages
00:26:19
Speaker
And that was my bridge to beginning to write blog posts about creativity and these ideas that I was having from the research that I was doing around innovation and creativity and the work I was doing with entrepreneurs and creators. I was starting to pour that into something that looked and was much more cohesive and into these
00:26:47
Speaker
short pieces because I still couldn't quite figure out how it all fit together, but I just started writing blog posts that were from the same energetic stance of morning pages. I wasn't worried about it being great. I wasn't concerned that it wasn't complete.
00:27:17
Speaker
was happy to prototype it and get it out there and put it up for the world to see it. And so that was kind of the progression. And then it wasn't until a couple of years ago where I really got clear after having my own experience in the world of making art myself,
00:27:40
Speaker
Then I started putting the missing, all these little skips of the record that I had around how everything fit together started to make a lot of sense to me. And that's when I transformed my writing of these little blog posts into a new framework for how to think about creativity. Yeah. Yeah.
00:28:10
Speaker
I like to hear about how you allowed yourself on the blog just to kind of extend some of the way you were writing before, just like not perfect, the piece isn't done, but it's almost like bumping to somebody up on the street, right? Like it's not all rehearsed and everything. Like, hey, here's what's going on with me. Here's what's happening. And allowed for that, yeah. Well, and for me to come from the world of academic writing,
00:28:39
Speaker
It was a big change. And for me, a recovering perfectionist, it was a big change. But what was interesting to me was even though it wasn't complete, quote unquote, it resonated so well. I had so many people write to me and say,
00:29:05
Speaker
that you've just described my own experience, or this is, I feel the same way, or I'm worried about XYZ2, or I don't understand this about my own creative journey. So I started getting immediate feedback that I was onto something deep and profound with the human experience, and it was okay if it wasn't.
00:29:32
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completely dialed in. It was okay if it wasn't perfect because it had an accessibility to it that also gave people the sense and the confidence to reach out to me. Their ideas weren't fully formed either. So it was a really nice confirmation
00:30:01
Speaker
that these little breadcrumbs of ideas and thoughts were accumulating into something really interesting. Yeah. And it probably felt very human to a lot of folks, not this object to respond to as a way to interact and converse,
Influences of North Carolina's Beauty
00:30:26
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right? Yes. Yes.
00:30:31
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I really thank you for taking the time on writing. I've actually had a couple writers on recently and I get on these writing jags. I adore writing and I adore the written word. Susie, so many different things to talk about, but I wanted to ask another big question.
00:30:59
Speaker
And it has to do with, you know, who you are. The big question I have is what or who made you who you are now? Well, I grew up and I'm biased, of course, but I grew up in one of the most beautiful places in the world. So the landscape of the mountains of Western North Carolina, these old, rolling, worn
00:31:29
Speaker
nurturing mountains influenced me greatly. And I spent a lot of time as a kid out in the woods playing in the woods, creating
00:31:43
Speaker
these imaginary worlds and talking to trees and appreciating the beauty of this place. So I was tuned from a very early age to understand the power of nature and beauty on how I felt.
00:32:06
Speaker
and how I thought. And I also was alone. I mean, even though I had tons of friends and a brother and a sister that I played with all the time, I also spent a lot of time in nature alone. And it let me hear myself think and understand how I saw myself in the world and get clues about what it was that I loved.
00:32:34
Speaker
and a lot of important self-knowledge and understanding of what I dreamt about and what really brought my energy up came from this landscape. So it was hugely impactful. And of course, my parents and my brother and sister influenced me tremendously, always
00:33:02
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The sort of messaging in the household was kindness and tolerance and love and the appreciation of art, whether it was man-made or from Mother Nature.
00:33:20
Speaker
And also a spirit of giving back and being a good citizen, those values were hugely influential on me. And then also, of course, my good old nuclear winter and my own
00:33:40
Speaker
Creative rebels voyage my own path to discovering my creativity and also my son Adam he is Such I used to call him my little Buddha because he would teach me the most amazing things unintentionally and Especially when he was a teenager
00:34:04
Speaker
But he still does it. He's 22. But I was reminded by Adam to reclaim my playfulness and to not work so hard and let go of expectations and ideas of what something should be. So he has this incredible way
00:34:34
Speaker
of encouraging us to stay into the heart of who we truly are, which is fascinating to me because that's what my whole book is about. So in many ways, he is both my ideal reader and the inspiration for the book. Wow, that's powerful. And I think even I got even tripped up listening to how like you are getting good
00:35:01
Speaker
Good advice from your son during the teenage years. It's that flip, it's that radical flip, right? Of like, yeah, you can learn, you can learn. Oh, I was routinely schooled. But in a beautiful way.
00:35:21
Speaker
I love it.
The Institute for Creative Entrepreneurs
00:35:23
Speaker
We're talking with Susie DeVille, author, coach, entrepreneur, and Susie. I want you to tell me, to tell the listeners about your
00:35:36
Speaker
Innovation and Creativity Institute. What's that? What goes on? So it is the home, which is currently online, but I hope to create a physical space and studio. And my work is with entrepreneurs and creators, and my passion is really to help
00:36:03
Speaker
entrepreneurs and creators create aligned exceptional enterprises by reclaiming their inspire creativity and leveraging the power of who they truly are. So I created this framework to coach clients and I learned that
00:36:29
Speaker
Could get people to their end desired feeling state which for the most part people are really looking for freedom Success yes, but that's also you could say that's also roped into freedom and I learned that if we can inspire ourselves and go through this process of
00:36:55
Speaker
we get to the places where we want to go. And it has absolutely nothing to do with more productivity, which is what we're taught.
Inspiration, Action, and Freedom
00:37:04
Speaker
It has nothing to do with getting really great at management and strategies, although that is important, certainly, as a part of the creative and entrepreneurial path. But we need to do what Paulo Coelho talks about, which is we need to inspire ourselves, literally breathing in,
00:37:26
Speaker
beauty, passion, what it is that we love, time and nature, being with the people we love. We need to fill ourselves with all of that first, so inspiring ourselves. Then we have the ability to expire, which is to create.
00:37:46
Speaker
And so many of us get caught on this gerbil wheel of, I gotta do more, I gotta do more, I'm not doing, I'm looking over here and I'm seeing this person do this, I'm seeing these people do that, and I think I need to be doing all of these things, working harder, buckling down, discipline, and those things take us much further away from what it is that our heart wants and what it is that we want to have happen.
00:38:16
Speaker
So if we take inspired action and we then begin to create and make art, the process of creating then is the vessel or the bridge over the moat of self-doubt. And to me, when I think about all the things that have kept me back in the past, which I used to label as just fear, I learned that
00:38:46
Speaker
It was fear, but it was fed by a healthy diet of self-doubt. So interestingly, it's the doing, it's the creating that gets us over that and into a place of where we trust ourselves and we have agency back in our lives. And once we're there, we can then get back at the helm of our own lives and our own creative
00:39:17
Speaker
passion and our own passion projects. And from there, it's a matter of protecting and fueling our creative energy, making sure that we're continuing to restore and replenish, have good boundaries, manage our energy well.
00:39:40
Speaker
And at the end of this cycle is what we're dreaming about, which is experiencing freedom in a way that we only thought was possible for a few people, but never certainly ourselves. Yeah. And you said, Susie, you said a big
00:40:04
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A couple words that stuck out for me is trust yourself, right? It's trusting yourself in that. How do you get folks to the point where they're there? Like they trust it. They trust themselves. Well, it's that magical moment of crossing the threshold, of approaching the work, approaching the project,
00:40:34
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approaching the creative act and going forward. So it could be for an entrepreneur, it could be launching or creating a new product, let's say, or a program.
00:40:49
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And all the self-doubt talk, which is I don't have what it takes. I don't know all the steps. I don't have all the technical stuff figured out. I don't have the resources. Who am I to even think that I can even possibly do such a thing? And what we don't know is that you're qualified in the doing.
Embracing Uncertainty in Creativity
00:41:17
Speaker
It's the process of going into it and not knowing, being willing to not know, to not have all the pieces, to not be able to see how it's all going to play out. How is this all going to fit together? Is it going to all fit together? So it's the willingness to start and the heart to keep going even when
00:41:46
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you're in the woods and it's completely dark and you can only just keep your feet from getting tangled up in the roots that are all around you or the rocks that are all around you. You're only able to just not trip. But that's enough. And we're unaccustomed to being in so much uncertainty.
00:42:11
Speaker
That's where art making is so brilliant and so fulfilling and so transformational because it builds the muscles for us to stay in the place of uncertainty and just keep making the next step and doing the next thing and understanding that. Nobody knows what the heck they're doing. If somebody says they have it all figured out, they're fibbing.
00:42:42
Speaker
But when you embrace this uncertainty and surrender into it, all the universe starts to conspire on your behalf. It's amazing what happens. You get ideas. Support comes to you. Connections come to you. Understanding of a new idea that you can try and prototype and give something a go. All of this starts to happen. There is a magic in the doing.
00:43:13
Speaker
And if we're willing for it to be ugly and to kind of like Bambi on the ice of like out of control looking, out of control feeling, if we're willing for it to go through these leggy teenager awkward phases, we're going to be just fine. We're going to make something amazing. We're going to learn a ton.
00:43:40
Speaker
we're going to be changed in the doing. And the thing will, you will create it, you will make it, even though when you start, you can't see how that's even remotely possible.
00:43:56
Speaker
Yeah, and I heard a lot of, it's not two different ways, but two different components as far as that transformation and the individual and how they go through the transformation. I've also been really intrigued in comments that you've had around the general environment such as where you are.
00:44:20
Speaker
You know Western North Carolina you talk about I haven't been to that particularly area but you describe the environment and and and where you are creating and Prior to going to a couple big questions right at the end here. I wanted to ask you Susie about about the just the in the environment you found yourself in the physical locale environment for which which is a
00:44:45
Speaker
helpful for you when you talk with folks who talk with clients and discuss this is is there something that somebody who's Needs to be in the right space the right spot to create is is there something people should be considering? Well, I think that Beauty is something that We all need much more of in our lives
00:45:15
Speaker
and how you infuse it into your daily existence is in and of itself, I think, a creative act. But if you don't have maybe the woods to scamper off to, or the beach, or some other scenic spot, we can create
00:45:44
Speaker
beautiful moments and beautiful energetic exchanges, beautiful states of mind. One of the things that I talk about in the book is curating a beautiful mind. And very intentionally, like you're a museum,
00:46:07
Speaker
director, and instead of putting beautiful things on the walls of the museum, you're putting beautiful things on the walls of your mind. So that's dissolving, limiting beliefs. That's having intentional thinking. That's using the power of meditation. That's using your creative acts.
00:46:32
Speaker
to bring beauty into your body, into your mind, into your daily life. And just one practical thing that people can do is just to create a place in their home where
00:46:51
Speaker
It's filled with what, what they love. If they have one corner that has a few special things for them that connect them to what it is that brings them alive, that has a unique power in and of itself. And if you start there and then you branch out to be more
00:47:17
Speaker
of an adventurer on beauty's behalf. And you look for it because you can find it in the most incredible ways once you start to pay attention. One of the things that sketching taught me was how routinely closed off from the world that I was.
00:47:36
Speaker
And I understood after being forced how to see again, see in a new way, I started to see lines and shadow and shapes in the world. Even standing in line at the grocery store, you can be moved if you let yourself see with a completely new set of eyes. And if you're seeking beauty,
00:48:05
Speaker
Definitely find it. Our minds tend to look for evidence of what it is that we believe to be true. So if you believe that the world is beautiful and filled with beautiful things, you will see them everywhere. And that to me is a very powerful and transformational way to live. Yeah, thank you. And there's such incredible power within that.
00:48:34
Speaker
I found myself in the unenviable role of like, I find myself listening to you because I'm captivated by what you're saying. I'm also hosting a show so I start to relax a little bit more and be like, okay, I'm learning. But I do have to I do also have to run the podcast.
00:48:57
Speaker
Okay, Susie, big question. And I think you have some insights into this. Why is there something rather than nothing?
The Drive of Consciousness to Create
00:49:08
Speaker
Well, I believe that consciousness wants to create.
00:49:16
Speaker
And with my very rudimentary thimbleful of knowledge about quantum physics and how it works is that I understand that when there is a wave, an energetic wave, and we put our attention and intention on it, it becomes a particle.
00:49:46
Speaker
We have this incredible ability to create something from nothing with intention and attention and this force that's in the world that Dylan Thomas and his poem said
00:50:13
Speaker
that it's the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. That's the force of creativity. That's consciousness wanting to create. And we're filled to the gills with it. And the universe is filled to the gills with it. And therefore, acts of creation
00:50:43
Speaker
are happening all the time on every kind of quantum to macro level. And it is the driving force, I think, of the divine and of life itself. Life wants to exist. Consciousness wants to create. So I think that
00:51:14
Speaker
All these little slices of potentiality become something through love and compassion and through our curiosity and joy and also through our pain and through our trauma. All of those things, those little slices of potentiality are transmuted.
00:51:43
Speaker
through the acts of our own creating into something. And those are things that move us and take us into our hearts in new ways, heal us, heal others, and engage in this incredibly interesting energetic exchange that defies time and space and
00:52:12
Speaker
reaches shores of unknown destinations. When we put these little messages in the bottle and we drop them into the sea of consciousness, we don't know who's going to pick those up and what they're going to think when they read it or experience it. But we're bonded together.
00:52:40
Speaker
Regardless, I may never know who picked up the bottle and what impact it had on their life, but we are now quantumly entangled through this act of creativity. And that to me is amazing. Yeah, it is. That really is amazing.
00:53:03
Speaker
I appreciate your answer as well. I, you know, asking this question over time, you know, physics, philosophy, the mundane, the profound. I really appreciate your
Connecting with Susie and Her Work
00:53:21
Speaker
thoughts. And I really appreciate talking to you, Susie. I mean, I like I kind of I kind of mentioned, you know, listening and learning, but just
00:53:30
Speaker
There's some themes in my show and many things that I've learned. I've learned so much, but the integration of healing, of healing to creativity, of expression, things like freedom and comfort and health, you keep really getting into that. And those are just so important to me as part of why
00:53:58
Speaker
I explore these questions and explore them with you. Before we let you go, I wanted to open this up. I know you do a lot of incredible things. We talked about the book and we talked about the institute.
00:54:17
Speaker
But I was wondering if you could kind of let listeners know how to connect with you or what you do in a way that's comfortable for you as far as what you have.
00:54:29
Speaker
how you interact with artists and creators and others. Sure, sure. The easiest way to see what I am up to and connect with me through social as well as you can sign up for my newsletter or you can take a look at my website. That is just to go to imetsuzy.com and that's S-U-S-I-E.
00:54:58
Speaker
So I met Susie.com. Also, I would love it if people would take a look at my book, which is called Buoyant, The Entrepreneur's Guide to Becoming Wildly Successful, Creative, and Free. Take a look at that. You can pre-order it now. I would love for folks to see that. And also, I think the best way for me to describe what it is that I do
00:55:27
Speaker
is to say that when I work with entrepreneurs and creators, I am really in a support role in their wild season of becoming.
00:55:42
Speaker
And I use what I have learned over the last 15 years in terms of research in my own experience, as well as my entrepreneurial experience and my own creative rebels voyage to be
00:56:00
Speaker
a Sherpa on the journey and to help entrepreneurs and creators really reconnect with who it is that they truly are and leverage that to be at their highest and best to do the work that they came here to do. Yeah. Yeah.
00:56:24
Speaker
I really appreciate what you do, Susie, and I find it... I'm particularly moved by the ideas that I engage on this show and I really appreciate really a lot of very helpful things that you mentioned and just kind of ways of looking at things and getting right at the crux of
Reflections on Creativity and Healing
00:56:45
Speaker
things. I've enjoyed receiving your newsletter and your materials and it's actually really helpful for me a lot of times to
00:56:54
Speaker
dislodge some deep patterns and like my daily live life that I need dislodge to do
00:57:05
Speaker
The bigger stuff, the stuff that makes me feel like I'm free and expressive. Yeah. That's the key. Sometimes I refer to myself as the chiseller in chief, meaning I'm all about getting that concrete off and setting people free to enjoy this lightness of being.
00:57:29
Speaker
this sense of freedom. And in that place, it's the ultimate playpen for whatever it is that you want to create. Yeah. All right. Susie, as I mentioned, and as you can probably guess, it's been a great pleasure to talk to you. And thank you so much for coming on to the podcast.
00:57:53
Speaker
It's I've learned a lot and that's one of the big reasons I do I do this show and I'm sure the listeners did as well. So everybody check out Susie Deville and that book buoyant Pre-ordered the book. I'm very
00:58:13
Speaker
I'm very excited. And I know Susie had mentioned, you know, working with a great editor and a great creator at the same time. I'm sure it'll be very helpful for folks. But Susie, thank you so much for coming on to the podcast and truly hope to talk to you soon. It was a absolute pleasure. Thank you so much. I had such a good time being with you, Ken. Thanks, Susie. And you take care. You too.
00:58:42
Speaker
This is something rather than nothing.