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Ok, full disclosure, this concept is a bit unconventional.
You might be thinking: “So what does negative emotion have to do with creativity or innovation?” Or you might be quick to shy away from a topic centered around negative emotions.
I get it, and honestly, I am with you. Emotions, and negative emotions in particular, are not my favorite topic. I love logic and analysis more than anything. But my hope is to share my enlightened insights with you to help you unleash your greatest creative ideas and innovations.
Before I dive in, I want to take a step back and make an important distinction between creativity and innovation. Creativity is the process by which you generate ideas and original thoughts. Innovation is the outcome or the solution created by ideas. Innovations are born from creativity. Although creativity and innovation are interconnected, they are different.
Here’s how it all began… I was recently preparing for a speaking engagement a few weeks ago. Part of my framework involves a process to unlock creative ideas and generate revelations about new business opportunities. There was an interactive workshop component and I wanted to integrate creativity into it to give the audience a sample of the impact of this process. As I began looking at various ways to engage the audience to participate in creative activities, I am sure you can guess what kinds of activities rose to the top. Yes, you guessed it! Brainstorming, coloring, mindfulness, drawing. Lots of positive, thought provoking, and relaxing exercises to open our minds.
But, then I had another thought. Is there a way to help people engage in both left brain and right brain activities? I recently read a few articles of emerging research that showed creativity is in fact a skill that can be cultivated and it is most prevalent in individuals who are able to make faster connections between the left and right side of the brain. And I started to look at activities that could help the audience make that transition quickly and experience a surge in creative energy. However, I ended up discovering something that I didn’t expect.
Considering the audience members that I would be engaging with, I wanted to think about their pain points when they try to get creative and innovate. I consult with a lot of professionals in the nonprofit/social innovation industry which is challenged by a lack of funding and resources that perpetuates limited mindsets and belief systems. It’s all too easy for leaders and teams to get caught up in the cycle of scarcity and a limited mindset. I myself have gotten lost in it on more than one occasion. And to be honest, sometimes the challenges are too great to find the energy to tackle them and navigate internal red tape.
I often find that the clients I work with reach this Stuck Point when they come to me and they don’t even realize it. Typically, their goal is to raise more money, improve their funding strategy, and ultimately, achieve greater revenue growth. But, they inevitably get stuck somewhere in the process. I constantly see leaders lost in a misaligned vision with their teams taking actions that don’t serve their greater purpose leading to stagnant growth and unpredictable revenue results. No matter how small or how big an organization is, I see the same cycles play out. But then I started to see a similar pattern with leaders in businesses and startups as well. I was starting to make the connection that the Stuck Point was a universal leadership challenge. You can’t generate revenue or raise money without the right vision, alignment, and leadership in place. And by leadership, I don’t mean one person at the top. I mean everyone that is part of your team, your collective.
As I continued to unpack my thoughts about pain points, I wondered, “How does this keep happening? Is it a mindset thing? Is it just the nature of leadership or business? Is this how growth works?”
I am not alone in this thought. Data from PWC’s Annual Global CEO Survey showed that 45% of CEO’s don’t believe their company’s current trajectory will be viable in the next 10 years. That’s a lot of Stuck Points to overcome in the near future. The need for adaptability, resilience, and reinvention is critical now more than ever. And I don’t believe that it’s isolated to one person, or one sector versus another, as I’ve seen through my consulting work.
The more I researched, the more I couldn’t shake this curiosity that I had about the connection between your mindset and creativity. I wanted to make sense of it all. Here’s what I discovered: Like many people, I assumed that creativity and positive thoughts were all created on the left side of the brain where our positive emotions are also produced. As it turns out, I was wrong. Creativity actually operates in the brain’s right hemisphere where most of our negative emotions are produced. Emotions like fear, negativity, and avoidance are all part of the right brain.
How. Could. That. Be?! Isn’t creativity fun and lighthearted? Aren’t innovations positive, thrilling, and exciting?
Yes, they are. But innovation is a transformational and emotional process. The truth is, innovations, and the creativity required to produce them, are inherently rooted in the negative emotions that we experience in being dissatisfied with things as they currently are. We’ve been hardwired to experience negative emotion to protect us from harm. And as we’ve evolved over time, we also experience dissatisfaction with things we encounter in our everyday lives whether it’s people, a process, a product, a result, etc.
Negative emotion allows us to respond to our dissatisfaction and is the exact emotion that is rooted in the type of creativity that incubates ideas and creates novel concepts. More so than positive emotion. When you really think about it, there is always some level of dissatisfaction that we experience in order to create a new way, idea, process, or product. So our right brain thinking helps us respond to this signal of emotion with new ideas, pathways, and approaches that are the result of negative experiences. On the left side of the brain is where we filter through these ideas and validate them with our logic. The optimistic side of our left brain also helps us remain open to new ideas. That’s why activities like brainstorming, meditation, etc. are useful tools to help boost creativity. But the actual incubation of novel ideas and concepts sits on the right side of the brain.
If we look at some of the greatest products and business concepts of our time, they all began because of the negative emotions people experienced. Something was missing from the current situation that did not meet the needs of customers. Steve Jobs created Apple products to make technology easier for people to use and understand. There was some level of dissatisfaction with the technology that already existed to get to that point of creative invention. Another example is SPANX. Sarah Blakely reinvented shape wear for women because existing products out there didn’t fully meet women’s needs. So, she created shape wear products for women, by women.
The buzz word “alchemy” is relevant here as well. We are drawn to people with a compelling story who experienced something incredibly challenging in life and were able to alchemize it into something purposeful. That’s because their process resonates with us in a powerful way. We all want to alchemize something into existence even if we don’t know it yet. It’s just a matter of getting to that point and developing the bravery to dive into the negative emotion that’s a challenge. As soon as we avoid it, we ignore the possibility of exploring creative solutions and innovations. And it’s my belief that if more people could harness their negative emotions, and leverage them effectively, we would see tremendous opportunities in creativity, innovation, and growth in the world.
Creativity and innovation are part of a transformative process to move beyond the status quo. It’s an emotional journey. When we awaken ourselves to the emotion behind transformation, we become more conscious in how we lead and empower others around us to lead as well.
“It requires us to be open to learning during this time of transformation. This is where the real work of leaning into the emotions of anxiety, fear, and excitement occurs as your identity and status moves to the backburner.”
-Andrew White, Michael Smets, and Adam Canwell for the Harvard Business review
I always felt that being willing to dive into the depths of “problems”, and what is essentially tapping into negative emotions, was the anchor that dragged me down. But now I realize that it’s the anchor that has kept me grounded in creativity and innovation. Harnessing our negative emotions is the key to unlocking our greatest opportunities for creativity and innovation, if and only if we are willing to dive into them. Leaning into negative emotion invites us to respond with new ways of working and being, new ideas, new approaches, new strategies. To transform challenges into opportunities that build resilience and help us evolve. The Stuck Point is where we need to pay attention.
It’s an invitation to engage in conversation, reflect, and transform negative experiences into positive forward looking growth.
I’ve actually already seen glimpses of this process through my consulting work. When I meet with clients, in just one strategy session, I can see the wind in their sails start to fill back up again. During my sessions, I talk openly with clients about their goals for growth but also acknowledge the “rocks” and “roadblocks”. In other words, the problems and challenges they are experiencing. I also share the potential for improvements that I see based on my analysis. I don’t paint a rosy picture all the time because honestly, sometimes it’s not rosy at all and the outlook from where you stand seems impossible to get through. I dive into the depths of where they are now, however messy it looks. But, what I didn’t recognize before is that this kind of transformation is truly an emotional process.
I realize now that’s the essential key. That’s the greatest value and gift that I could possibly share with the world. It’s giving people an opportunity, and more importantly, the permission to lean into the gritty unpleasant parts of leadership and saying: yes that is a big challenge or no your team isn’t buying into your process, AND, hey you know what, there might be new opportunities over here that will shift that paradigm. Or, let’s look at some ideas that can help you evolve from that.
By now hopefully I’ve convinced you that negative emotions aren’t so bad and might be useful to help you be more creative and innovative. Here’s the catch though. We don’t love to acknowledge or express our negative emotions. In fact, we try to avoid them at all costs because it brings discomfort and uncertainty to us. Particularly in the workplace and business. And when we do acknowledge them, it often feels like we get stuck in a cycle of negativity which can be tough to break. Nobody wants to open Pandora’s Box and talk about emotion, let alone negative emotions. However, we forget that in addition to a great deal of problems, Pandora’s Box also held a great deal of hope in it too. That makes sense. Because hope is born from struggle. It’s filled with both problems AND possibilities because they are interconnected with each other.
Now that I’ve made this discovery, I’m on a mission to help leaders, teams, and even youth tap into the power of negative emotion to fuel their creativity, innovation, and growth. The goal is to help leaders create better connections with their team and achieve revolutionary growth. I am excited to see how this will evolve with an expanded focus that will involve collective self-discovery, team transformation, and aligned leadership support. I hope you found this read to be enlightening, inspiring, and insightful.
If you’re curious about what I'm up to or want to get involved, I invite you to chat with me in a virtual coffee sesh! I’m a big fan of collaboration. Also, if you found this article insightful, I invite you to LIKE, SHARE, and COMMENT.
If you are curious about data/research like me, here are some of the resources I used:
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