 show from the American Creativity Association's Austin Global Chapter on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Phyllis Blyse. Joining me today from Vancouver, Canada is Dr. Haley Simons. She has received international acclaim for her talent as a classical pianist and she has traveled the world with her musical talent, achieving a doctorate of music and certifications as a life coach and an arbitrator. What brings her to the show today is her longstanding and deep dive into the world of creativity. She co-founded Creative Alberta and she coaches people on accessing their own creative code. We learn about that on our show entitled Stop Killing the Prodigal Creative. So let's meet Dr. Haley Simons. Aloha Haley. Aloha Phyllis. Well, welcome. And just to kind of get a running start here, I should let you know I just watched your performance of Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme from Paganini in 2007 with the entire Edmonton Symphony Orchestra as your backup. And I was just enthralled. You are so talented, you are quiet, you are passionate, you are deep, you are light and I hadn't watched you perform before. And I was really delighted and the viewers can find that easily on YouTube. So you've had several lifetimes in your one body and I wondered before we get into today's show and all the killing parts, could you tell us how you got to that moment on stage? Oh, that moment, I remember that moment on stage. Well, that was actually one of the highlights of my performance and playing with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra and dear friend of mine conducting George Blondheim who's passed recently, sadly two years ago. And that moment was the culmination of so many years of piano lessons. And of course it starts very young, starting at three years old. My parents were, I was so fortunate that I had such supportive parents and supportive family. And as I was going through school, piano was my thing. And even though my parents were divorced and I was raised by my mother, single mother and we didn't have much money at all. We lived in below rentals across from the refinery and Edmonton, Alberta and the entire time even though we didn't have a lot of money, my mother made so many sacrifices. I had private piano lessons and I also had private art lessons. And I remember the art teacher coming to my house and we would have private lessons. So I never suffered. She always valued the artistic training. I went on after that to university. I stayed in Alberta, I went to the University of Alberta and then I was really fortunate to meet one of the most amazing musicians. I have had the pleasure of knowing in my life, John Perry and went to Texas actually to study with John Perry at Rice University. And after that came back to Alberta to finish my doctorate degree in piano performance. So there was a lot of piano studying going on behind the scenes there. That particular performance, it was probably one of the highlights of my career, I would say. And it was from that moment, shortly thereafter that things started to change for me quite drastically. Well, I mean, you're not a classical pianist today professionally, that's not your primary calling. And we're really interested in how we got to the killing part of today's show. And so there's some history and some story between then and now. What happened? What were some of the key events in your life that brought into your skill set and your field of awareness ways that we could access our own creativity? So let's start with the events. And then I wanna ask you a couple of questions. I know the audience wants to know what's a prodigal creative and are we killing them? Who are they? So that was a lot. So if you just give us a little bit of the history then between why you're now teaching creativity pretty much full time. Actually, when I was performing I was always teaching. So it was a simultaneous profession for me. And I remember teaching these wonderful students. And for me, it was never about teaching the nuances of a Mozart sonata. It was always about relating with the student. And I would have these gifted, wonderful, bright young people sitting on my piano bench lamenting their schooling. And we would talk about that. And there was really no opportunity in their education for any kind of creativity. They were very focused on academics. They were focused even their piano training seemed to be an accoutrement was just a side activity. And they were fortunate. These were the fortunate kids. And I started thinking about what the less fortunate kids were enduring going through school and not having the benefit of private art lessons or private piano lessons. And that led me to pursuing advocacy efforts to try and make sure that at least these kids were engaged in school. I mean, that was the least we could do as a civilized society, I thought. And I was lucky enough to have a series of events happen very closely. I was introduced to and shortly thereafter met Daniel Pink when he came to our small community. So tell us some of those books, you wanna share them who Daniel Pink is. Well, Daniel Pink is a well-known celebrated author and it was his book, A Whole New Mind that talks about left brain and right brain. And finally, I found somebody who is understanding exactly what I was going through and what these kids were going through and dealing with creativity in the one side of the brain and how it's been neglected. And of course, this now seems so long ago. It was shortly after that that I met Sir Ken Robinson's group and especially Susan McAlmont from Creative Oklahoma was such an inspiration to me. And I decided, well, this is a really cool group to start hanging around with. These are the folks who know where we need to be headed in our society. So I decided to start a nonprofit of our own and we started Creative Alberta. And we wanted to essentially mimic what the advocacy efforts were that Susan was doing in Oklahoma and we advocated government and education systems for creativity. And that became all-encompassing for a while and really for me, really rewarding. And it was that that I thought I was going to be spending the rest of my days pursuing the advocacy efforts. It felt like that was my purpose. And- So let me have you pause there for a minute because I wanted the audience to know how troubled you were when we were first preparing for this show about what really you told the story that for your whole life that there were these litmus tests to identify the gifted and identify the creative and that it became more about labels and about being. It was more about doing than being. And that you felt like the creativity in people was ignored or beaten down and sort of lost in this rush to be identified as creative and get the labels. And you even said that chat GPT recently had passed some well-known creativity tests that in our world and the creativity world have been noted for identifying people who are creative. Chat GPT passed it. So, and I heard, and I was just listening a couple of days ago that it's also passed the SATs and the LSATs for people applying for college and law school in the United States that Chat GPT has passed those tests, so those standardized tests. So talk a little bit too about your feeling angst around how we're nurturing and bringing out the creativity. And I know you have some stories to tell us about people whose creativity is not nourished have actually committed suicide. So I know we have a robust set of stories for you to share with us today. And just wanna, which ones that we have time to have you cover? Sure, oh, there are so many. If we start with the creative a burden, the creative Oklahoma and the national creativity network, that network of people, I was really quite enamored with Sir Ken's TED Talk, our schools do schools kill creativity. Still the most watched TED Talk, 75 million viewers. And today all of those 75 million viewers have been operating with this understanding, this definition of creativity as Sir Ken said, it's the process of creating something novel and a value. And for me, it formed almost an existential crisis because I thought I had identified as a creative my entire life. I started very, very young. And then with that definition that everyone seemed to have adopted, I felt actually out labeled from being a creative. I had never created anything new or a value that I could remember. I was just mimicking. I was the translator of some long past European, usually male who wrote something on paper and I would translate it and I never created anything new in my life. So it was a moment for me when I had to really reexamine, well, maybe I'm not creative. And I felt like an outlier in all of those areas anyway. I didn't belong to a government agency. I had no authority with the education system. And so my advocacy efforts started to feel a little disempowered and a little disingenuous. I could recognize creativity as valuable but I couldn't find the appropriate definition and I felt excluded. So I felt like an outlier on many fronts. And about that moment where I was having that crisis, I was also having a personal change and I suddenly found myself as a single mom and a single mom trying to support two kids with an artist schedule is not very conducive to mothering. So I made a career shift and entered the field of law. I was very fortunate to have a family in that field and they generously gave me a position knowing the situation I was in. So I had a complete 180 shift in my life. And all of a sudden it was like being hit by a cement truck because when you enter that field, it feels like nobody is really operating with the same creative background. Nobody wanted to hear a story. Nobody wanted to connect. There was very little human interaction. I remember, Phyllis, in one of your past interviews you actually talked about when you went through your law school training and you'd said that you all came out as machines. And I found that after we were talking actually quite ironic because everyone and you're very creative and you came through the school process feeling like a machine and yet we have this machine, literal machine now the chat GPT in the artificial intelligence that's able to pass in the very, very top percentile of the Torrance creativity testing. And the Torrance testing was traditionally or earlier given in the 60s to schools to try and identify whether a child was creative meaning gifted or not. And that kind of labeling happened. Then well now we have chat GPT feeling very, very creative indeed and all of these really creative very intelligent individuals coming out of school feeling like machines. So that's a stark contrast as well. If we were to then segue and talk further about this legal industry, which as you know it's probably one of the most dangerous occupations apparently after all of the research and studies through even the American Bar Association and the T lab information that we spoke about earlier. And it hit home that I wasn't alone that actually there are people in this industry who might be feeling the same way I'm feeling which was not very comfortable at all. In fact it was really uncomfortable and very, very dissonant. Let me reframe because you're talking about the law the profession of law and a lot of people would think that's a quintessentially creative services industry and but then you talked about it feeling oppressive and I know you told me stories that you had two or three colleagues 27 years old and the last year that committed suicide and they're in. So there's this talk about dissonance. There's a complete disconnect or maybe two realities going on and one is winning out that you're feeling desperate and unhappy and sick and miserable. And what did you do when you found yourself in that you talked about it being toxic. You said it was literally toxic to me. And are you still in that industry? Are you still working in law firms? What happened if you aren't to get you out of it and what do you see as a solution to the toxicity that we're finding and maybe all of our professions or our day jobs? Wow, yeah. Really big question. I'm going to say almost at the pinnacle of the stressful climb for me. I was in one office that we had two young people working in our office and they were both young in their 20s. One was 27, the other might have been 27 as well. They both tried to commit suicide. They both attempted suicide. Sadly, one succeeded and it was devastating. It was devastating. The shortly after and yeah, shortly after that was within one month, two other 27-year-olds I know who I was close to who are also artists and the one 27-year-old whose life ended was just an amazing, sensitive, beautiful talent, lovely, lovely young woman and clearly unable to survive in that situation. And then two others within one month. So it was shocking, it was startling and it was almost too tragic at the time to even try and make sense of it. I mean, how can you make sense of it? Eventually you have to say, well, why did this happen and to what end are we entering this industry if this is what it's doing to us? And I know we've prepared one of the slides. When talking about it, there had to be a cause and even if there were no answers to it when you start looking at the statistics and the divorce rate in the legal profession being 27% and the 36% substance abuse and that's from the American Bar Association, the Betty Ford Foundation study, 36% in the average in all highly educated professions is 6.8. So it's startling. The mental health is an issue, 28% of legal professionals suffer from depression and then probably the most startling and well, close to home is 11.5% have at some point in their careers had suicidal thoughts. So 11.5% of people wanting to end their life because of a career, because of a job, because of the system that they find themselves in and to me, that's a tragedy. That's not why we're here. So whether it then informed some other existential crisis in myself, at least it caused me to ask the question why are we here? What are we here for? We're certainly not here to be producers and consumers and there has to be some larger answer. I know I'm not the first to ask this. I know there are long lines of people through the centuries asking this same question but there has to be an answer. So is this where the product, because we have this question, what is the prodigal creative and are we killing them? Who's the prodigal creative? Are we killing them? And can you help us get ourselves out of that? Maybe we could, we've got a slide here. It's kinda, I don't know quite what it means on slide five. Michael, maybe you could speak to this and let us know on slide five. Now what are we seeing here? Is this the person who's in crisis? Talk to us a little bit. I'm just wondering if those people that are going through crisis, are they the prodigal creative like in us? Are they the ones we wanna invite to come back home? If we follow the parable, do we need to invite them back into our lives? And if so, why and how do we do that? Well, for me, the moment came with this self-reflection and actually reexamining this shift back to creativity. I left the legal profession relatively recently. I escaped, I believe with my life. I remember one day walking through the door and it was so stressful. I turned around and unbolted the door again, just in case the emergency personnel needed to come back in if I was having a heart attack because I felt that constriction around my neck. I remember thinking I'm really fortunate to live across the street from the emergency department in Vancouver. And that for me was a full stop. And it was one small return to a creative activity actually through a beautiful online course with Kat Koroi and learning about Canva and learning about who we are and our sole essence that made me think this is me and it's not just me, it's who we all are and that perhaps all along, this definition of creativity needs to expand into not something we do, but something we are. We're just born creative. And that is my philosophy. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in that. And then I realized that it is really like returning to the talents and the parable of the prodigal creative, of course, squandering the talents. I felt like I had squandered my talents. I felt like I had squandered the time and completely abandoned everything I was doing before, whether it was musical or creative, went off on a different path. And then it was me reclaiming that. And this time I felt very proud to reclaim it. And I felt this was something who I am fundamentally as a person, this is, I called it my holy shift. So. So let's show because we've only got maybe three minutes left and we're gonna be pointing the audience to your websites and you're starting a course this fall and how they can reclaim their creative self and save their lives. We've got in slide six, we've got some of the benefits of reclaiming your creativity. You can speak to that Haley. You've got four categories there that greatly benefit when we reclaim our prodigal creative. There are creativity stats. I mean, I can read those really quickly. We have improved brain function, 73% improved brain function, emotional resilience, stress reduction after 45 minutes of even very, very poor creative activities results in the 75% lowered cortisol level. We all know stress is killing us. Stress is one of the, not the largest killer, but 63% less likelihood of acquiring your creativity than acquiring dementia. This is, these are startling statistics. I'm not sure why everybody isn't really, really grabbing onto this. And I know this is about the creative life and these statistics are not my own. They are well researched. This is certainly nothing new. I thought if only I can try and help people, help them reclaim who they are in this world, which is creative beings. I believe we're all here to create, create first, consume second. And it's that creator that I want to reacquaint people with, which is basically themselves. I think that's going to be the key to empowering everyone. So in less than a minute, if we could show slide seven, there's a creative code that you've developed that you're going to start teaching this fall. We can leave that in the crib notes that go with the show's library, but this is the basics of your creative code. So you want to go through that with us, just to put a teaser out there to what you're going to spend, what nine, how many months will you spend going over these four steps? Actually, it's a very short, these are four of eight steps. It's a short eight step program, an eight week program, but it will exist in an online platform so you can redo it over and over and over and over again, but it's intended for. So instead of just having a book, and I have lots of wonderful books that have all been very inspiring to me, but after I read them once, essentially they stay on the shelf. I want, you know what, going to have to leave it there actually. So we will let the audience slow it down and look at the music of the spears and the imagination. Viva Voce and Amor Fate reprising our guest, Joss Kites Love of Amor Fate. So you'll learn more about that with Haley's work that you can find online and you have been watching The Creative Life from the American Creativity Association's Austin Global Chapter on Think Tech Hawaii. Today we've been talking with our guest, Dr. Haley Simons, to learn how to stop killing the creative protocol in all of us by using our own unique creative code. So mahalo, Haley, for joining us. Mahalo. Nui loa, Phyllis. That's it. And mahalo to our viewers for chewing in. Our hearts are, of course, going out to those that are rebuilding from the fires in Maui. We're very aware that this precious life is just that. And I'm Phyllis Blyse. We'll be back in two weeks with another edition of our show, The Creative Life. Aloha.