 Okay, can everyone just breathe with me so I don't feel like I'm the only one that ran a marathon just now? It's like the time that I was in, thank you, it's like the time I was in university and I was asked to sing the National Anthem for a volleyball game that I was playing in. It's like, oh say, can you say, okay, yes, it totally didn't work very well, I didn't plan to paint with my arm but the music was just that good. Okay, if you haven't noticed, I'm not your typical speaker for the day and that's why you're going to love me and we're going to have a lot of fun in the next, all my minutes, help me out or else I'll just keep talking. So today I'm going to be talking about creativity and authenticity and I was so pumped in the other sessions when other people have analog hearts like me because my notes are on paper. Anybody else just love analog life and have an analog heart and are grateful for the technology but at the same time just love that heart to heart that you can have with analog living. Okay, I'm almost there, my cardio, just give me one more second. Just take a deep breath, we all need oxygen. So like they said, this will be auctioned off later. I've never done this painting before, never tried it. I love the thrill of just painting and not having a clue how it's going to turn out and just feeling the music and the vibe of an energy in the room. Normally I do paint with a larger sized canvas. However, I was thinking about the look on the Uber driver's face when you attempted to get in with a larger sized canvas and for your own safety and security, I thought I'd just spare you the details of what it looks like to put in a 1.2 square meter canvas into the back of an Uber. Keep it simple. Sorry for the blonde, I know it's really confusing in this photo. Two weeks ago, that's what I looked like for the most part and then my wife and I were watching a movie and the actress had black hair and was really cute. And she looked at the screen and looked at me. And I was like, we're going to Priceline. I was like, what? All my branding is in blonde. But she's the boss. It's okay. Creativity is a born talent. Authenticity is a daily choice. For the past two years, I have been speaking on how we're all born creative. That every one of us has a hundred million brain cells and we're all just born creative. And I was proven wrong when my wife looked at me and said, Sarah, for the past two years, you've attempted to be funny. And your kids and I don't find you funny at all. Yeah, you keep trying, but we're not laughing. I'm born funny. You're not just accepted. And so I was really, really bummed, but at the same time I just understood the fact that, okay, maybe there is some truth to that. She's way funnier than me and you'd probably have a lot more laughs on stage if she was standing here rather than me. But I know aren't they cute. I was swore when I was watching documentaries and speakers throughout my life that I would never put my own kids on screen because I think everyone's really lame when they do that. They're a bit older than this now. Shoot me if they saw this photo, but it was a lot cheaper with copyright laws these days for me to just insert their picture instead of googling something else. I realize that it's probably really difficult to take someone serious when they're wearing this with statistics. Statics, thank you. I've been studying all that work for 20 years. And so instead of you trying to look at me and go, oh my God, a wiggle is trying to give me information. And I do realize that the human brain can only retain two to three bits of information in a like a cautious way. And it is three o'clock in the afternoon and you've had more data thrown at you than any time, probably on a Monday in quite a while. I will just spare you too many statistics. Did I get it? Great. And we'll just have some fun this afternoon. So good. Okay, you're awake. Yay, someone had four coffees. Fabulous. So apparently the one stat I will share with you is in 1968, George Land did a study and they researched a group of five year olds, 10 year olds and 15 year olds, 1,600 of them. And what they found was that the five year olds, like you see behind you on anyway, rated 98% in the genius level of creativity. Whereas the 10 year olds, 30%, the 15 year olds, 12%. And what that research showed was that as we age, we lose our ability to think divergently. Because when you're a kid, sure, a nappy box is like the coolest costume ever. And your thoughts are free flowing and instead of thinking why, they're thinking why not. When they hear a question, they have a billion different possibilities of answers. If you were to hand them an object and say what do you think this is, they'll come up with stuff you've never even thought of. Whereas the older we get, we're in school and what do we taught in school? How to think convergently, right and wrong. We're given exams and even when it's an essay type exam on a poem, that they say, oh just give us your personal input. Yet they still have a red pen telling us what we did wrong with our personal thought process on a poem. And so what the researchers decided was yes, convergent thinking is important. But the power of not losing that divergent, fun, childlike way of living is vital to being creative. And CEOs these days are placing more and more emphasis on creativity. And we've heard that throughout the whole day, you're hearing it constantly. It's like the buzzword, creativity is a stepping stone to innovation. We need more of it. And they'll like outfoot their offices with playrooms and all this stuff. But if you ask most employees, are you given enough time to actually play in those playrooms? Do you feel like you're given enough time to be creative? Most of them will say no. There's a bit of a crux between what's needed and what's said and what's really happening. But I think, and you probably agree with me, is that thankfully the steady shift and the pace at which we're seeing more and more people being embracing of their creativity and that time being allowed is steadily improving. I do team building, so I can see this in my day-to-day work as well as companies are actually hiring me more and more to do painting sessions with their employees. Now it was really funny recently, I did one with one of the top building property owners of Sydney and they had their accountant there and everybody there, it's like 50 of them, so I hired some professional artists to help facilitate. And I gave this accountant a piece of watercolor paper and she carefully did it. Guess what she painted? A calculator. So I gave her another piece and a glass of wine. It's like, okay, just unleashing her child, have fun. Here, have another glass of wine, let's just take this up a notch, come on, come on. And she wrote Tax Act of 1996. I was like, okay, we got somewhere, you didn't write just numbers, we were like, okay, we're just getting there, we need a few more sessions with you. But she had a whole lot of fun. And so what we're just seeing is that more and more people are placing a beautiful emphasis on embracing your creativity. This one was taken when I was painting in Vietnam with some students and it's just amazing because throughout the different parts of the world, creativity is seen in different ways. Sometimes it's embraced more Western societies. I'm finding that there is a wider embrace of it in a way when it comes to school and education and parents being encouraging them that. I was grateful that my parents let me have an art degree whereas a lot of my classmates were like, my dad not supportive of my dreams because he doesn't think I could make a living. And there I was in 2003 with this beautiful BFA in studio art and I looked at my art friends and I was like, did we learn how to make a living with this degree? All of us became waitresses. And after about six months of waitressing I thought I'd rather starve to death painting than serve one more plate of food. And so I went to a venue and I said, look, I've never heard of this, I've never seen it done before but I really like entertaining people and I like painting. So how about the next time a musician's in town, I'll just paint off to the side while they sing and see what happens. And they go, well, I've never seen that done before. But okay, they took a risk on me. And it was the best thing that ever happened to me with 4,000 people at my first event. I just about shot myself. So you can imagine I had three huge canvases and no clue what I was doing. It was one of the most exhilarating things, kind of like skydiving, had no clue who was going to work or not. And it gave me this adrenaline rush and I just share that with you because a lot of people go, well, how did you get into it? And that's how I did. I had no clue what I was doing. I just went from that to bars, to schools, to universities, to corporate events and it just has steadily grown and it's been a wild, wild ride. Now, the left and right side of the brain. For years and years, people have been talking about how there's, you know, people are more right-sided or left-sided and blah, blah, blah. Thankfully, science has caught up to the fact that it actually has debunked this theory and it takes both the left and right side of the brain in order to make a thought. For instance, let me just check my stats before I get this wrong because that would be really funny. The left side of the brain is where speech is but the right side of the brain is where intonation goes. So they connect and oftentimes in order for the scientists to come up with their really great equations, they have to connect with the other side of the brain in order to make that happen. So you can no longer use that excuse. It's been debunked. So if you've used it before, just stop. Be like, don't keep leaning on this excuse that you're not creative because yes, there are people that are more born creative but it can be kind of like a garden. It can be grown and cultivated in bits and pieces. They went into this test. Have you heard of this? Anyone heard of the spaghetti marshmallow tower experiment? It's hysterical. You have 18 minutes. You should try this with your workplace and you get 18 pieces or 15 pieces of spaghetti, a yard or meter of tape, of string, and a marshmallow. And with that 18 minutes, you and your team have to try to compete against one of their teams in your office and build the tallest tower to support that marshmallow. Now they did this with people that had just graduated with PhDs in architecture and stuff, and they also did the test with kindergartners. Which one built the tallest tower? Kindergarten. Why? Because the PhDs were so focused on having the thought process talked out of what will work and the stats and how it will be, and they spent 12 minutes talking it out, trying to figure out what would be the best way. Whereas the kindergartners, they don't know what the crap they're doing, and they just start building and building, and they make about five or six structure attempts to the one of the PhDs. They just keep playing. That art of playing we've heard throughout the day is so vital to being creative, curious, and brave. So be like a kindergartner. Try to overanalyze everything. If I have five minutes and overanalyze this, I'd still be standing in front of a blank canvas. Part of the fun about speed painting is I don't have time to think and analyze if I did it right or wrong. It gives me that freedom to think diversely. To go, will blue work here? Does it mix with this color? Oops, no it doesn't. Learn in the process. Now there's over a hundred definitions of creativity, but my absolute favorite one in the whole world comes from Elizabeth Gilbert. You might have heard of her from Eat, Pray, Love. She also wrote my favorite book, which I had written called Big Magic. Has anyone else read that one? It's fantastic. And in it, she breaks down the definition of creativity to basically the relationship between a human being and the mysteries of inspiration. It's that simple. We try to complicate it, as to a separate part of society, as to the Da Vinci's and the Michelangelo's and the Banksy's, Lady Gaga's. But it's really you, yourself, and just those moments of daydreaming and wonder. One time I walked into my daughter's bedroom and she was about five years old, and I said, hey baby, you want to come in? And she interrupted me. I'm daydreaming, I'm just go away. And I just laughed. I felt like, okay, parenting job is done. And I quietly closed the door. And still to this day, she's nine now, and she just gets in these own little quiet spaces and I just let her be. And it's beautiful because her backpack she'll come home and in her lunchbox there's pebbles and rocks and twigs and ants and God knows what type of science project she's trying to create in her backpack, after school holidays, let's not go there. If you don't check the backpack, it's gonna be really bad. Check it before school holidays start. And then Elizabeth Gilbert goes into, probably something that is, might as well be tattooed on my skin, I think about it daily. And that is a creative life is one where we're driven by curiosity rather than fear. My career began thanks to me being curious. And I decided I was going to take a leap of faith and not let fear invade it, which made an incredible career. And soon you'll hear how that didn't lead to the greatest personal life because I made fear-based decisions rather than curious-based decisions. Living a life of curiosity, living a life where you're brave is your motto and where you're not afraid to fail, means we often have to step out of our comfort zones. Renee Brown, I love the way she has taken that question where we've often heard what would you do if you knew you could not fail? And she tweaked it and she says, well what's worth doing even if you were to fail? What do you have such a passion for that you don't care if you fail or if you succeed? Richard Branson, he has more success than just about anybody I know, and I bet on most of our bucket lists it would be to have a cocktail with him on his little island. But he had over 600 businesses that failed. 600! Most of us would give up after two or three. I'd be like, oh screw it, this is too hard. And he's like, nope, they're learning lessons. It's kind of like the famous painter that calls his mistakes happy accidents. That's what I find my little stuff. People are like, what do you do on stage when you mess up? I just pour some more pain over it and just keep going and make it look like it was supposed to happen. It became a cloud, it became a tree, and now we're completely changed altogether. So, curiosity. I don't know who else was an 80's kid but I was really into Alice in Wonderland. And curiosity often leads to trouble. Was the phrase that we'd hear over and over again and it had like a negative kind of twang to it and it was a fearful thing but thankfully that definition was changing. I did this painting in 2017 when I was going through the most tumultuous time of my life. For 20 years I had been living a lie. Simon Sinek says, if you are a different place at work than you are from home then in one of those two places there's a liar. And for 20 years I had, in my personal life, lived a fear based life. I'd allowed my family and my culture and my society to tell me I couldn't be who I was or I would burn in hell. Yes, I was born in the buckle, I was raised in the buckle of the Bible Belt in South Carolina where there's more Christians and there are people. And I was told to be gay. I would be, basically, my life had no purpose or meaning and I couldn't do it. So me trying to do the right thing, convergently thinking, I spent 20 years of my life denying who I was, married a man, had children and was wanting to blow my brains out every single day. I wondered why my business wasn't thriving, I wondered why my speaking wasn't taking off I was trying to separate the two. But when you're miserable at home and when the kids are fighting and I would open up the fridge door and hide behind it and grab the bottle of wine and drink half of it as fast as I could to cope. I'd smoke weed to try to get into an alternate state of mind to handle being in a straight relationship. Within a few years I was diagnosed bipolar and they just threw some more meds at me which made a great cocktail between all the drugs I was doing and the alcohol. It was very difficult to be present. But then thankfully I had a few friends that said, Sarah, guess what? It's 20% you live in Sydney, Australia and it'd be better to be a gay mom than a dead one. Fair enough, right? So the main crux, the main trigger for me to step out and finally be brave and be free was me going, well, what if? What would my life look like if I wasn't afraid to fail? A failed marriage, failed mother, whatever my family would say that I was failing at. And I watched the movie The Greatest Showman on December 26th on Boxing Day when it came out. And my husband at the time and my two girls watched it. He saw a completely different movie than I did. He saw a creative couple with two beautiful girls living their creative dreams. Guess what I saw? I saw the bearded lady and I saw her sing on stage with a big smile on her face, this is me. And she wasn't afraid or she wasn't ashamed of who she was. And I thought, huh, you have the bearded lady to get on stage and not be ashamed of who she is. What's stopping me? And I listened to that soundtrack over and over and over and within about six weeks I met a woman and I just knew how to hold my spirit. Everything just knew. And I went to my husband and said, I don't want to cheat on you. I met my wife. I love you. Bye. And it was... I had dreamt of this moment for 20 years of being me and it was the most exhilarating thing. My psychologist was so confused. She's like, maybe it's just like a... you know, your bipolar thing and I don't see brain. I'm not suicidal. I don't feel like I need a shop. I'm fine. I'm not like up and down like the world went. It was incredible. I was able to jump in the ocean and not feel the cold water like I used to. It affected every part of my life. I was able to drive in the city of Sydney which normally scared the shit out of me because my American brain was still kind of like, can't we just turn left on red? Yeah, I didn't know that was a rule here for about four years and you just stop and turn left, right? Nah, it's amazing what rules don't apply to both countries. And fear left me in every aspect of my life and within a few months I was on the news with my story and then my painting started the auction for 20 to 50 grand and I was like, oh my god! The power of authentic living is unbelievable when you are who you are at home and in work you don't have to try to guess who you are you don't have to weed through the lies you're able to be mindful and be present your brain doesn't race I was talking with ladies at the lunch and we're always talking about how busy we are my life has completely changed since then at night, guess what I do? I turned my phone off and I sit on the bed with my kids and wife and we just chat we just talk until I'm about to pass out and ask the kids to go to sleep because my mom wants to go to bed at 9 o'clock but it's so incredible when you're present and when you really are who you are so I just want to share just a few things on authenticity and just have you think about it whether you're flying back home or whether you live here whatever industry you work in there's nothing more powerful than just kind of sitting and thinking about who am I really I mean, when we are on our deathbeds are we really going to think, oh man I wish I'd gotten more presentations done I wish I'd done some more events I wish I'd ticked a few more things I got a few more trophies we're going to be thinking about all the relationships we wish it we had invested into we all know this but how often do we really kind of just stop the crazy windmill of life and go no, I'm really just going to be present I've never done less in my life than I do now and yet my life is like 10 times more successful when I could be working, I'm like wait it's sunny, I'm going to go to the beach what a concept I've never just taken that time for myself, I've always had my worth and my value was placed completely on my productivity is anybody else like that or is like your self-esteem is based on how much the to-do list, like do you do the to-do list and check it off and then if you do something that wasn't on the to-do list you add it just so you have an extra box to tick as anybody else like that in the room I am so like that okay, I'm the only asshole in here the Brené ground she also says authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day it's about the choice to show up and be real the choice to be honest the choice to let our true selves be seen when I finally wasn't ashamed of who I was and I didn't care if I walked down the street with my head held high and just being proud of my sexuality and I was allowed to be vulnerable I let myself be vulnerable with people it was unbelievable the responses I got I had people emailing me from around the world saying I've heard about your story I'm in the same situation I'm in a marriage I shouldn't be in I've got a couple kids and you'll be surprised at how much you living your life true to you will open the door for somebody else to be themselves it's just like one door after another it's like this I think there's this I don't know about you but I feel like the snowball is happening throughout society where people are going wait, we have seen enough bullshit we have seen enough people faking life enough of the whole like life what's it called when you take a photograph and you tweak it to make it look really good take away the wrinkles Photoshop we have photoshopped our lives so much that we don't even recognize who we are and I think if we just take some time and just go you know I'm just going to rest I'm going to figure out who I am I did this painting it took 100 hours for me that was a lifetime it took me forever the process of doing about 30,000 dots of energy and just life and love that's how I found who I was it was right after I finished this painting that I left when I married you became me is what I needed so you think about you what would you need to do to just kind of cultivate and figure out and weed through all the layers of lies or layers of excuses or layers of guilt, layers of shame whatever it is it could be small it could be something so tiny but it's hindering you from living your best life you can go to all the conferences you want you can listen to all the big speakers in the world you can listen to all the podcasts I love Oprah Soul Sessions how about you you can do all the mindfulness techniques at the end of the day if we don't actually use the information and use what the world is we're blessed with having all this technology all the podcasts and YouTube and all the stuff that we just still wake up the same way we do every single day will be freaking miserable part of the power of living a life with curiosity is just tweaking your day and doing something different usually I end the day with a movie laying down, chilling with the puppies on my lap you know that sort of night and last night my wife was like let's play cards, listen to Italian music and eat fruit loops and she was like cool we've never done that before and it's just so much fun to just throw a little wrench in your normal day do something you've never done I mean I haven't had fruit loops in like 10 years and she found that there's this new box called Unicorn Fruit Loops and I felt like I was 7 years old and it was great what was some of you haven't eaten in forever where's a place you haven't been when was the last time you went somewhere and put your phone in your pocket and got lost so I figured out by asking questions and talking to strangers talking to strangers is one of the funnest things to do on public transport if you haven't taken a train in a while give it a go the other day I was sitting next to a guy named Jimmy he was about 80 years old and he was like the ladies love my new teeth and he was telling me about what it was like to grow up in Redford in 1940 where you could buy a land like an entire acre for 25 quid 25 quid for an entire hectare of land he was like oh my gosh and now it's what a billion it's wild so authenticity I'm just going to give you 4 simple steps just take photos because I know your brain can't retain one more bit of information but let's just go with this ok so reconnect re-establish a bond with yourself go for a walk in the woods or in the sand and go barefoot it's called grounding just stand in the earth and feel nature pulse through your body hug a tree I know it sounds really lame but it's just it's amazing what happens when we reconnect with nature and just sit in it that's my daughter at a Japanese garden recently and she didn't even pose for it she like literally just walked over to it sat down and did that and I captured that moment and had to laugh my head off because she loves things like karate and when she was four I said oh by the way it's a stupid kid question you could ask a kid but I asked him that because let them what do you want to feel when you grow up what do you want to experience when you grow up don't ask them what they want to be ask them what they want to just or do you know ask them what they want to feel and those experiences that will help side note little parenting tip there but anyway she back then she was like I want to be a ninja scientist what? she was like oh okay cool she wanted to be like literally she wore the turtle shell and everything forever it was great secondly rebalance is it restoring the correct balance to how many is your life completely off balance silver and gold are not the highest commodity in the world it's time time is the most priceless commodity we have and yet if we tell our loved ones that they're the most thing we love the most and yet our time reflects otherwise we can say what we want all we like but if we're not spending time with them and doing things that make our soul come alive we're completely out of balance and just completely lying to ourselves I recently got a a paddle board and I'm almost 40 and I'm not I used to do back hand springs on balance beams when I was a kid because I was really crazy like that and it's amazing how the slightest wave when you're almost 40 you can just tip you over and I almost whacked my head on a pole but it was really a lot of fun and I highly recommend it realign the third way to find your authenticity I don't know if you've ever been to a chiropractor but um I went to this one that was called the upper cervical I didn't want all the snap crackle pop happen to my spine so I just went to this one that says okay I'm just gonna adjust your C1 and your C2 and that will align the rest of your spine a lot of times we try to align everything at once and you might hear me speak and you're going okay I'm gonna go home and I'm gonna focus on my family and you're gonna do this and do this and do this and it's a bit overwhelming so just think about the C1 and the C2 just think about what are two things or one thing in your life that just it's a little bit of tweaking and then get the next one and you'll find that the rest of your spine, the rest of your soul the rest of your spirit will start to align bit by bit by bit lastly to tap into your authenticity is to refuel my daughter has, this is my eldest she's Sela and she has dreamt of going to Japan for about five years now because she read a book when she was about eight and it had cherry blossoms from Japan and this year in high school they offered it as a trip and now she has sold about 18 boxes of chocolate to start her way to Japan, I'm so happy for because it's like her soul is coming to life with this dream that she's had for years of going to Japan and it's just it's so exciting to watch the next generation tap into this thing of going I can do and be and live the life I want to live and I will come up with creative ways to do it even if it's selling chocolate during my lunch break so what do you do to refuel some of you might just need to listen to music, go to us when was the last time you had a massage oh my gosh I had a facial the other day and I was like oh my god I feel like I'm 29 again this is fantastic and they're like you can use more vitamin C oil to look that good like come on you're going to need a little professional help to get rid of 10 years of wrinkles think about what makes you come alive I loved how I heard from some of the delegates today that they listened to the breakout session with Christopher Kai and it was all about who told me I can't see any of you so it's really kind of funny but you're saying how it was about being vulnerable and coming back to telling a story it's so powerful because a lot of us have lost that story a lot of us will ask each other what we do and we're not really asking each other about our life and I love how at this conference they really embraced that and focused on that and said hey let's really like get down to the nitty gritty and just be real be present I was performing at a conference and this guy comes up to me and he's like I'm the biggest such and such of this company and it's like the biggest one in Australia he goes I feel like I'm supposed to talk to you tell me why what would you say to that I was like so overwhelmed and so I just talked to him for about 10 seconds and then he teared up and he said my father died this week I told three other people in the room and they didn't bleak an eye and just kept talking like I said nothing and I gave him a hug and just let him have a cry and just connected to him what he saw on me was a human that wasn't so wrapped up in the banking industry event but was just someone he could discuss with his life, his father and he told me how he was there at the death bed I thought oh my god I'm so grateful that I'm not so caught up in work that my heart is more to connect with you each on an individual level and just make you come to life and feel creative and feel the purpose and authenticity pulsing through your veins so when you go home I want you to leap around not just watch your kids do it not just observe everybody else living their best life as they watch the podcast and come to life or the speakers, I want you to do it you jump with them yes I used to have long hair jump with them feel alive and that interprets to you and I just wanted to thank you all so much for letting me be here today I really really appreciate the time, the focus your energy is beautiful and I can see a lot of you have taken photos I don't really have any friends with me here at the moment so if you tag me on Instagram I'd really appreciate it so I can tell my kids why I kind of miss picking them up for school and they had to take the train today it's been a pleasure remember to breathe, be yourself and throw all the paint you can on your campus of life I love that, that closing note throw all the paint you can on the campus of your life that is awesome, what a great note to finish our main part of the knowledge program today on