How can entrepreneurs tap into their creativity to become more well-rounded and successful? In this episode, Marcia sits down with Susie deVille, speaker, author and Founder & CEO of the Innovative & Creativity Institute. Building a business is hard work and Covid certainly didn’t make things easier; deVille offers insights on how to navigate uncertainty, make bold decisions, and build self-trust. Drawing from her own experiences and her book "Buoyant: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Becoming Wildly Successful, Creative, and Free," deVille emphasizes the importance of connecting to one's innate creativity and redefining the traditional notions of hard work. Through practical strategies and the power of inspiration, entrepreneurs can find success and freedom in their journey. Susie deVille's impressive background in anthropology, publishing, investing, and coaching (just to name a few) is the perfect foundation for her discussion on creativity and entrepreneurship. Having faced personal and professional challenges, deVille has learned firsthand the limitations of the prevalent advice given to entrepreneurs. She challenges the notion that success can only be achieved through constant hard work and hustle. Instead, deVille presents a new approach based on creativity and self-expression. In this episode, deVille introduces practical strategies for entrepreneurs to tap into their creativity. deVille also introduces the concept of the five M's: morning pages, meditation, movement, moments of inspired learning, and making something. By incorporating these practices into their daily lives, entrepreneurs can unlock their creative potential, make bolder decisions, and foster success in their endeavors. This episode serves as a guide for entrepreneurs and angel investors looking to embrace their creativity and harness it for greater success and fulfillment in their business and personal lives.
How can entrepreneurs tap into their creativity to become more well-rounded and successful? In this episode, Marcia sits down with Susie deVille, speaker, author and Founder & CEO of the Innovative & Creativity Institute.
Building a business is hard work and Covid certainly didn’t make things easier; deVille offers insights on how to navigate uncertainty, make bold decisions, and build self-trust. Drawing from her own experiences and her book "Buoyant: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Becoming Wildly Successful, Creative, and Free," deVille emphasizes the importance of connecting to one's innate creativity and redefining the traditional notions of hard work. Through practical strategies and the power of inspiration, entrepreneurs can find success and freedom in their journey.
Susie deVille's impressive background in anthropology, publishing, investing, and coaching (just to name a few) is the perfect foundation for her discussion on creativity and entrepreneurship. Having faced personal and professional challenges, deVille has learned firsthand the limitations of the prevalent advice given to entrepreneurs. She challenges the notion that success can only be achieved through constant hard work and hustle. Instead, deVille presents a new approach based on creativity and self-expression.
In this episode, deVille introduces practical strategies for entrepreneurs to tap into their creativity. deVille also introduces the concept of the five M's: morning pages, meditation, movement, moments of inspired learning, and making something. By incorporating these practices into their daily lives, entrepreneurs can unlock their creative potential, make bolder decisions, and foster success in their endeavors. This episode serves as a guide for entrepreneurs and angel investors looking to embrace their creativity and harness it for greater success and fulfillment in their business and personal lives.
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Marcia Dawood:
Well, Hi Susie. Welcome to the show.
Susie deVille:
Hello. I am so delighted to be here. Thank you for having me.
Marcia Dawood:
Well, Susie, I am so excited for today's episode. You know, building a company is a tough job under the best of circumstances. And during COVID so many entrepreneurs, they struggled financially, mentally, emotionally. So this episode is for both entrepreneurs and the angels who work with entrepreneurs for really it's for anyone. So we're going to talk about how entrepreneurs can have a higher tolerance for uncertainty, build the musculature for making bold decisions, and foster more self trust, which in turn will magnetize your marketing, drive higher customer engagement, and foster sales success. So, Susie, why don't we start by having you tell the listeners a little bit about your background.
Susie deVille:
Sure. So I grew up in a very small town in the mountains of western North Carolina called Highlands, which is where I live now. And I have a background in anthropology, and I have a master's in entrepreneurship. I have a work background in academic publishing, nonprofit leadership, real estate and real estate investing, and business coaching, entrepreneur coaching. And I have been studying innovation and creativity since 2005 and finally put all of my experience with my own personal heroines journey and trek through the fires of hell and my research and my work with clients. And I put all of that into a book which was published last year, and it's called Buoyant the Entrepreneur's Guide to Becoming Wildly Successful, Creative, and Free.
Marcia Dawood:
I love that. Okay, so let's dive into this. What is it that can make entrepreneurs wildly successful and free?
Susie deVille:
Well, the first thing that I think is worth pointing out is that the prevalent advice that entrepreneurs and creators are given is broken. And it generally is based upon some sort of formula of how to hack your way to peak performance or to success through doing more, getting more things done, through more discipline, through more hard work, whipping yourselves forward, burning the boats, you can sleep when you're dead, all of those things.
Marcia Dawood:
Right.
Susie deVille:
And I will say that you can absolutely dig a tunnel with a teaspoon. It is possible. It's not the preferred way of doing it. And I can tell you, I used to subscribe to the notion that digging the tunnel with a teaspoon was good because I used to equate hard work with my own personal value. And I think that that's where this cultural lie and lore tends to snag a lot of us because we are preconditioned to believe, okay, I have to prove my worth. I have to prove my value. I have to prove that I deserve to take up space and oxygen here on this planet. And so there's a very sort of seeming allure and sexiness to working harder, getting that next certification, getting that next evidence that I have some sort of level of expertise. And so when my life completely fell apart after the markets crashed in 2008, I realized that my way of moving in the world was not going to work anymore. And it was really divine intervention, frankly, because I would have continued on that path and I would have never discovered this beautiful blend between success and freedom and having agency, which is based upon connecting to one's innate creativity. Now, I know that your listeners are going to be wanting to run for the hills when they hear me say things like, everyone is an artist. Doing things that bring you alive is your path to getting everything that you want to have happen in your life. That you are innately a creative being and that tapping into it is something that is easy to do and very fun and rewarding. And that you can restructure how you approach your work and you can restructure how you approach your life in a way that completely connects you back to who you truly are. And that is what magnetizes you to the marketplace. And that is what gives you the courage and the willingness to take bold action and to tolerate uncertainty, which we entrepreneurs deal with on a daily, hourly, sometimes minute by minute basis.
Marcia Dawood:
I could not agree more. Wow, that was a lot. So let's go back and talk a little bit more about these details. I love this idea of you can't dig a tunnel with a teaspoon. I mean, our entrepreneurs so often are trying so hard to do things and be what we call scrappy. We're always like, oh, no, you be able to basically make $10,000 out of a dime and worth of things. And so how do they do that? So they just keep working harder and harder and harder, and they aren't necessarily getting success or seeing success. So I can totally see how you're putting this together toward creativity, but can you give us kind of an example of how creativity could play into that?
Susie deVille:
Oh, absolutely. So let's start first with where people tend to be, and you mentioned impostor syndrome right out of the gate, and let's talk about what tends to hang out with impostor syndrome and why it's so destructive. So this belief that I'm not enough or that my work is not going to be good enough sort of follows us around like the little rain cloud that followed Charlie Brown. Right. So it's with us all the time. When we have a belief like that, our brain will look for evidence that that thought is true. So if I'm believing I'm not enough, my work's not enough, the first example that I get when I start my day that that's true, my brain is going to go, whoop, there it is. More evidence that I'm an imposter. This is going to throw me into a mode of, as you said, trying to work hard, trying to effort my way out of this chasm that I'm in. But it also makes us very pessimistic and very sort of controlling perfectionistic. And we're so paralyzed by this sense of self judgment and the judgment, potential judgment from others, that we can just get completely stuck or blocked. Then we try to overachieve our way out of this burnout state that we're in. And that was what my first instinct was. When my life imploded in the middle of 2008 to the end of that year, that was my first instinct. I'm just going to work my tail off to get out of this mess, and then I just sort of collapsed from exhaustion. And importantly, I was completely disconnected from the creative, problem solving, juicy part of my brain because it had completely shut down through anxiety, through this being blocked and stuck and this sort of gerbil wheel of thinking that I was on. So what I propose to help solve this, pull somebody off of this emotional mental gurney, is to first of all, believe that success and freedom are absolutely possible. I mean, we have to have a willingness to believe that change is possible for us. And honestly, if you believe that, I can get you to exactly where you want to go. But if you won't start with a willingness and also this kind of suspended sense of suspended belief about what you think play means or what you think creativity means or what you think being an artist means, you have to kind of be willing and then also go, okay, I'm going to suspend judgment here and I'm going to try some things. Because once you try it, you see how it completely starts to work on you. Like a fine, grit, spiritual sandpaper. So let's talk about what those specific elements are. First, you need to literally inspire yourself. And this is an idea that I got from Paolo Cuelo, who wrote a bunch of books, but one of my favorites is The Alchemist, and he talks about inspiration from the perspective of literally breathing in things that bring you alive. So for me, that's beauty, being in nature, art, world travel, being with people I love, connecting with things that inspire me through poetry or music, breathing in those things first, because that gives you fuel for the next phase of the journey, especially if you're very depleted and burned out and exhausted. There needs to be a period of rest and renewal and inspiration before you set out to go on this sort of creative rebels voyage. Once you've topped off your tank, then I suggest what I call the five M's to people, and those are morning pages. Meditation, movement, moments of inspired learning and making something. And again, let's suspend judgment here as I go through these, because I know everyone's going to have a preconceived notion about some of these. But morning pages is the brainchild of Julia Cameron, who wrote The Artist's Way, which I highly recommend. And that's three pages of longhand writing every morning, and it's just dumping out the contents of your brain onto paper. It doesn't have to be prose, doesn't have to be punctuated, it doesn't have to be perfect. It's literally whatever is on your mind. And sometimes I write three pages about a dream I had, or three pages of trying to solve a problem, or three pages of celebrating something or just ranting and raving about something that I'm annoyed by it's, whatever is just sort of gunking up the bandwidth of your brain. Meditation does not have to be an hour, doesn't even need to be 20 minutes. You can have five minutes of quiet in a room with no special technique required and just sitting and being quiet and in the dark and noticing your breath. It is enough to reset your central nervous system and return you kind of to this centered, calm place that feels like the home center of you. The next movement, any kind of movement that you enjoy doing is great. And it doesn't have to be hours in the gym or whatever, I love to take a morning walk or go hiking in the woods, but it's whatever you enjoy. And again, it can be dance around your house. Yes, perfect. I mean, even combining music with dance is fantastic because that is going to get actually two of your M's, because moments of inspired learning can absolutely be listening to music that you love, but just moving the body, connecting back to yourself physically. And then moments of inspired learning can be music. Listening to poetry, reading something out of a book, a page out of a book that you find inspiring, and the last making something. And that literally can be anything. Where you're moving your hands, you can doodle, color sketch something, do collage, paint something, you can cook, do something with sewing or whatever. As long as you're moving your hands and you're doing it for about five to ten minutes or so, that sends your brain into a completely different state. And you have access to what I call your creative back channels. This place where your ideas are born. And they're not forced, they just seem to arrive like a beautiful package on your threshold. I have had some of the most incredible ideas when I have been painting something. And just like there's a pipeline to the clearest and best thinking, it opens up your intuition, it opens up your imagination, your ideation. And most importantly, perhaps art making and making in general is the process of becoming yourself. So if you have kind of gotten off track, if you feel like you're in a period of transition or you've gone through something that was terribly disruptive to you emotionally or physically or financially, this is a beautiful way. Again, just a few minutes a day to start to reconnect you back to your authentic self. And once you have alignment back to your true self and you are leveraging inspired action through doing the five Ms, then everything starts to change. And it's a process I've seen people take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months where their transformation is absolutely mind blowing. And even though I've experienced it myself and I've taken hundreds of people through it, this just happened actually a couple of days ago. It's completely flooring. To see how the power of doing these things literally changes the trajectory of how you think, how you feel, who you are inside your own skin, the opportunities that you start to attract, the way that your brain works completely differently. All of a sudden we are giving ourselves access to our brain and we're able to manage our mind in a way that keeps us taking the next step, no matter how scary it is, and leveraging that tolerance for uncertainty into sort of the cherry on top, which is self trust.
Marcia Dawood:
Yes. And I like how you were talking about how it can magnetize things to you that you don't necessarily think would happen. So, for example, I know a lot of entrepreneurs, they struggle because they're trying to fundraise well, they're trying to build their business and they're trying to fundraise at the same time, which in a lot of cases can be two full time jobs that they're trying to do. And they get very wrapped up in the hard work discipline thing that we've been talking about. And they're not necessarily attracting the right people to come into their life, even though they think they are, because they're doing all the things on the list. They're making the network connections and they're writing the emails and they're connecting with people on LinkedIn or whatever they're trying to do. But just the idea of opening up your brain like you're talking about and letting thoughts flow freely, letting your creative side come out, that can really start to magnetize and attract the kind of people that you need in your business.
Susie deVille:
1000%. And I'll tell you what's completely fascinating to me is that someone can be a brilliant presenter or a pitch master and can walk in the room in a designer outfit with their entire pitch deck on point and blinged out to the max. Right? And they can completely turn off all of the potential investors in the room if their energy is out of whack.
Marcia Dawood:
Yes.
Susie deVille:
And what we don't understand, and I've experienced this firsthand, actually tell a story about this in the book. We don't understand typically that it's not about the end result. Yes, results are important, but where the five Ms and especially making something are so important, is that it teaches us that it's the experience that we go through. It's this transformation that we experience in that five to ten minutes that we do this or however long we're engaged. That is the point. It's the journey that we go on in that moment. It's not the sauce that we make or the dance that we do or the painting that we do that's the point. Now, we may love all of those things. We may love all of the creations, but the real mystery and magic is in this thing that happens where our hands are moving. Ideas are coming from our head, down our shoulders, through our arms to the paper and back up from the paper, traveling up through our arms and shoulders and back into our brains. And artist and author Linda Berry talks about this two directional process. When we're engaged, and so when we're really firing and passionate, and we're completely aligned with what we are so desperate to get out into the world, the problems that we are so eager to solve. And you can sit in a room with someone and feel them before they even walk through the door. We know this person is alive with this mission, with this venture and the graphs and the charts and the sales performance and all of that are great. But if I don't believe that founder, if I don't believe that team, I'm not going to invest. And if we are not connected to that part of ourselves which is so passionate and alive in our essential nature, no one is going to connect with us. Not the right people, as you point out, right?
Marcia Dawood:
Yeah. Wow, this is really fascinating. I know that there are so many things that we talk about in angel investing world and entrepreneur world about what we can do to make pitch decks better and what we can do to help build the business and how do we get the marketing out? And how do we get customer feedback? And how do we make sure customers are engaged and that we're going to increase our revenues? But people aren't really talking about this as much as they should be.
Susie deVille:
Well, and the thing is that and this is where everyone's going to start throwing wads of paper at their computers or their sound system in their car or their house when they hear me say this. But the real thing that's going to close a customer, first of all, the real thing is to attract the right customer and to attract the right investor. And you want those people to be as devoted and as compelled and to share your values and to share your passion to the same heights. Because with that level of alignment and connection, there's no problem that can come your way that's going to knock you off your horse. It's so much easier to build revenue. It's actually almost effortless. And I'm going to say that with quotes around it simply because, yes, you have to suit up and work every day, right? But we don't work in the way that most people work. I'm a huge believer in taking lots of time off. I'm a huge believer in getting a ton of rest and to refueling your inspiration tank literally every single day. And those things that seem just gargantuan to us when we're in the shower when we're overworked and burned out and we're in the shower and we're freaking out because the investment didn't come through or we don't have enough sales for this quarter or whatever it is that we're completely derailed by. We don't have access to how to bring them in in the best channels. And so most people who are enormously strategic will default to using that part of their brain, which is very important. I love my strategic mind. It's very keen at being able to project paths forward. And the other part of us, those creative centers in our brain, when those are firing and we now are working with our whole brain, that right brain is going to and I know that there's a lot of research that says not just the right brain, but just for sort of conversational sake. There's the part of the brain that we're using that lights up when we're doing things connected to creativity into inspiration. And that's the part of us it's almost like if you're trying to get a teenager out of bed in the morning and you start to cook bacon, you can go in and yell at them and throw flip flops at them and beg them to get out of bed. But if you are just in the kitchen and you're cooking and you're not saying a word, you're going to get them out of bed so fast. And this is the same kind of signal and I'm being silly with it, but I want people to sort of get the metaphor when we're firing on all cylinders creatively, that signal goes out into the marketplace and is so compelling and resonant, it's irresistible. You will have people asking you how they can support you. You will have customers who want to work with you. You will be a heck of a lot happier and healthier. And you will also have that elusive sense of freedom that we're all craving, that we're all after. And it's not defined by the things that we tend to define freedom by. It's how we feel, this sort of lightness of being and a happiness that we might not have felt since we were a child.
Marcia Dawood:
I love that. And you know what? Your message is so important and I'm so glad that we were able to have you on the Angel Next Door podcast today. Thank you so much for coming. And we will make sure to put in the show notes, all the links to how people can find your book and how they can get in touch with you and maybe even work with you. So thank you so much, Susie, for coming.
Susie deVille:
Thank you. It has been a delight. I really appreciate.