Willing to Fall: Leadership, Creativity, and Play

 

This may be the most important collection of things that I hear this week.

A creative effort that I’ve been following since my wife turned me onto it, is something called The Work of the People. It is an independent ecumenical platform that produces and publishes multimedia to stir imagination, spark discussion and move people toward discovery and transformation. Recently, I was turned on to a video of Brené Brown speaking on leadership, creativity, and the importance of play. Here are some quotes that are sticking with me.

“You can’t lead people if you don’t understand your emotion in yourself, or in other people.”

“There is no one more dangerous than a person who is willing to fall in the pursuit of doing what they love, because they’ve learned how to rise.”

“Creativity is how we integrate what we know into what we are.”

“The opposite of play is not work, the opposite of play is depression.”

Stuart Brown said, “Play is when you lose your inhibitions. You lose track of time. You feel like yourself. You don’t know how to stop.”

“We don’t play in our culture because [of] exhaustion and work. What we produce is who we are, and exhaustion is the status symbol for that. ”

Here is the video:

 

 

As I thought about this, I was thinking about how the mentors who left the largest impact on me, were the ones who encouraged me to be creative and to take risks. The result of that, I believe, is that I want to encourage those whom I mentor to do the same thing.

I’ll be thinking more about this, but here are some questions to consider:

What are you passionate about? What do you ‘love’?
How are you bringing your faith and knowledge of God into the creative process?
What does play look like to you?