Leslie Grandy | From Fear To Flow: Building Creative Confidence With AI | Ep57

We explore how creativity works as a skill, not a trait, and how to use flow, inversion thinking, and AI to navigate uncertainty with more confidence. The talk blends personal stories, practical tools, and simple habits that help turn fear into forward motion.

• redefining creativity beyond art and innate talent
• Leslie’s path from film to product leadership
• AI as a private ideation partner with discernment
• building creative agency by challenging outputs
• finding flow through small, protected pauses
• inversion thinking to prepare for failure
• habit stacking for clarity and energy
• measuring progress with self-assessment and scaffolds
• emotional regulation for better problem solving
• practical steps for job searches and narratives

If this conversation resonated with you, you can learn more about Leslie and her work, including her book, Creative Velocity, propelling breakthrough ideas in the age of generative AI. We'll link everything in the show notes.
And if you're enjoying these conversations, be sure to follow or subscribe to Delay the Binge wherever you listen. You can also watch the full episode on my YouTube channel, PamDwyerSpeaker. And if you're there, leave a comment and let me know what part of this conversation made you pause or think differently.

Check out Leslie's website and book at LeslieGrandy.com

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© 2025 Pam Dwyer. All rights reserved.
Learn more: DelayTheBinge.com

Storytelling that transforms. Healing that lasts.
From bestselling author Pam Dwyer (PJ Hamilton).
Books + speaking: PamDwyer.com

Chapters

• 0:00 Creativity As A Trainable Skill
• 2:45 Leslie’s Path From Film Sets To Product Leadership
• 7:20 Redefining Creativity Beyond The Arts
• 11:00 AI As A Private Ideation Partner
• 16:40 Creative Agency And Challenging AI
• 21:10 Flow States, Pauses, And Mental Space
• 28:20 Failure As Feedback And Forward Motion
• 36:50 Emotion Regulation And Better Decisions
• 43:10 Practical AI For Everyday Choices
• 48:30 Simple Practices: Inversion Thinking And Habit Stacking
• 55:00 Measuring Progress And Using Scaffolds

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome to the Delay the Binge podcast. I'm your host, Pam Dwyer. Today's discussion is about how a lot of people believe creativity is something you're born with. You either have it or you don't. But what if creativity is actually something you can access, especially when life is feeling uncertain, overwhelming, or unclear. Today's guest is Leslie Grandy. Leslie has spent more than 25 years building products at the intersection of technology and human behavior. Working inside companies like Apple and Amazon, T-Mobile, Best Buy, and now supporting leaders and teams through her consulting company called the Product Guild. She's also the author of Create, well, let's see if I can get this right. It's a long one, Creative Creative Velocity, propelling breakthrough ideas in the age of generative AI, a book built around a simple but powerful reframe. Creativity isn't reserved for artists, and it isn't something you're either born with or not. It's a skill. A skill you can build, especially when life and work get uncertain. Leslie, I'm so glad you're here. Welcome. Thanks for having me, Pam. I'm looking forward to the discussion. Well, me too, me too. So for anyone meeting you for the first time, how do you usually describe what you do?

SPEAKER_01: 1:30

Well, um, one of the things that I do now, I mean, I spent uh, as you said, a decades-long uh career building things. And over that period of time, uh, I learned a lot about where people get stuck when it comes time to uh break through a log jam or face an unexpected challenge or uh grow in dynamic conditions. And sometimes the pressure in those jobs really creates a situation where people feel narrow in their thinking and lean into biases uh or uh whether they're their own around how they get things done or whether they're their leaders' bias, and they kind of fall into how leaders think. And then really it just becomes a sort of self-fulfilling cycle. It doesn't really create any breakthroughs, it doesn't really uh bust the log jam, and it doesn't really allow for business disruption. And so right now, what I do is I I take all those years of learning and I try to coach people in industries, especially where they think they are less capable of exercising their creativity, maybe it's a highly regulated uh climate, or it's a very old school kind of business, been around for decades and has a hard time transforming. It's really important for people to set up the conditions for people to experience their most creative self at work. And so I really try to inspire people to do that, not because it's fun and everyone should brainstorm and and and have a chance to generate ideas, but because creativity in a business can come from anywhere if people feel permission to access it.

SPEAKER_00: 3:13

Yes, I love that so much. Uh, my team and I, for my company, when we go into a new client's office, they all think they're ignorant that they don't know anything about what we're trying to do for them. But once we start talking, they seem to pick it up. They seem to think, oh, okay, we understand this. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 3:33

So there's a ha ha ha aha aha moments that you can happen that can happen when they're focused on someone trying to open those doors for them. And that's obviously what you do.

SPEAKER_00: 3:43

Yes, yes. And so for a long time, I didn't think I was creative either. I mean, so did you I think I've heard you say a few times on a few interviews I was researching um that you didn't think you were creative at all. Where did that belief come from?

SPEAKER_01: 4:00

Well, as a child, I was really fortunate. I have to be clear, I was raised by highly educated parents. My mother was a professor, my father was a physician, my mother was a painter, my father could play the piano without reading music. And so my parents supported the arts and they uh took me to museums and concerts and things. And so they were encouraging me to kind of tap into that, and they paid for a lot of lessons, but I was bad at everything. I was I took drama lessons and singing lessons and uh acting lessons, you know, with uh uh, you know, different types of coaches and different environments, and then I took uh music lessons and different instruments, and my piano teacher at one point told my mother to stop sending me because we weren't getting anywhere. Like it was throwing good money after bad. And I was so discouraged because the the effort was there. Like I tried to be an artist, I tried to access some talent, but it really um took a toll on my self-esteem that I couldn't find that lane, that I couldn't find a way to express myself. And I didn't really want to have a career in math and science, and I was good at math and science, but it didn't kind of speak to me the way that I thought art would, that it would free something. And I always wanted to make stuff. That was the one thing. I always felt like what could I make? What could I build? What could I do? Like, so I had a maker's mindset, but I just didn't have a talent I could lean into. And in my senior year in high school, I did an independent study project, and it was to make a film. Uh and uh for no reason that I can explain, it won a public television award, a young filmmaker's public television award. So I thought, oh my gosh, that's the earth telling me, you know, that this is your path. Follow here, you know, go here. And uh so I uh went to school. I wanted to go to school in California and be a film major. My parents wouldn't let me. They didn't think it was a good idea. They didn't think being in film was actually a career. They always thought of the arts as a supplement to a career. And so they weren't encouraging for me to pursue it. So I went to school in Northwestern because I had a film program and it was a good school and it met both criteria, theirs and mine. And as soon as I graduated, my father knew I was going to move to California and he gave me a$500 check for graduation. He said, Good luck, my work is done. And I moved to California and I didn't know anybody, and I had no connections, no family, no idea how to get a job. But I just didn't want my parents to be right that I would fail. And so I pushed through and I figured out what failure looked like, and I did everything I could to avoid it. And in a couple of years, I was able to qualify for the Director's Guild of America. And I realized, though, that the jobs I was getting in the film industry while I was working a lot, I wasn't getting what we would think of as the creative jobs, like stylist and set designer or camera person or director or writer. I was the person people always hired to figure stuff out. Uh it I just wanted to know how things worked. I love to learn how things worked. I thought every problem had a solution, and if I didn't find it, somebody else would. That was my attitude. And that attitude got me hired time and time again. You need to film on top of a decommissioned aircraft carrier, a Kleenex commercial. Okay, I'll go find one and figure out how to do that. You know, I'll there's gotta be a way to figure it out. And so that skill I was able to carry over after I got my MBA into the corporate world. And that also kept me hireable at all the places that you mentioned, because who doesn't want somebody on their team who has the spirit to figure things out? A strategy. That became sort of my aha moment, which was I have a creative skill. It's a creative thinking skill. It's not necessarily an artistic skill. I have an appreciation of the arts, but I'm not an artist. And that skill has only gotten better the more crazy problems I've been forced to solve or had to look for a solution for. And so my confidence has grown throughout all of that. And that way I'm able to deal with ambiguity, deal with rejection, deal with the possibility of failure, all the things that keep people from venturing into that zone of creative thinking.

SPEAKER_00: 8:23

That fear of failure. Well, it sounds like creativity wasn't missing at all for you. It's just it it didn't look the way you you were taught.

SPEAKER_01: 8:31

Exactly. Or I think in some ways, uh, I thought art and creativity were synonymous. And while creativity can include art, uh I learned and and and through a lot of research I did for my book, uh, the cognitive version of your brain as a creative machine, a creative engine, can materialize that creativity in a lot of different ways.

SPEAKER_00: 8:53

So it's like a I think I've heard you reference it as a muscle or like a skill.

SPEAKER_01: 8:58

Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of people don't know that they uh may have tamped it down inadvertently. They may not even believe their job lets them be creative. I'm a lawyer, I'm an accountant, I can't be creative. But some of the most creative people I've worked with in the jobs I've had have been lawyers who've come up with new business models with me or helped us create a patent application. And the idea that people in all fields at all levels in all roles have this power, but they just don't know how to tap it was the aha moment for me in terms of why the book.

SPEAKER_00: 9:32

So when you see people um realize this, so I mean, what changes for them? What how does that affect them overall when they finally realize, okay, I can learn creativity?

SPEAKER_01: 9:46

It's such a great question because it is the real joy in this work for me. It is that moment where I actually see the light come on and they think, I never would have done this or thought this way, never imagined this. So I teach a course on Maven, uh, Maven.com, an online course, and I it it allows me in real time to watch people do projects using the frameworks that I teach. And then we talk about what was unexpected and what didn't they, what didn't they think they could do beforehand that they can do now, like how they think about. And most people just realize through that process that their tendency is to go to a place where they're comfortable and what they know, and that gives them confidence to make decisions. When they're in that ambiguous place, they don't like to venture there. And what I've taught in my class is that AI allows you to do that very safely. You can have these crazy improv sessions of ideating and exploring an idea without a room full of people judging you. And you can look and ask questions for the about things that you might not know anything about, but because of the vast uh data sets it has available and its pattern recognition, it can give you insights that can spark an idea. I'm not looking for it to tell me what to do, but I'm looking for places to look for an answer that I might not have thought of because of my experience is limited or my bias is in this area. But I don't know anything about, for example, I don't know anything about uh natural science and biology and how certain things work in nature um by design. But AI can bring that back and say, hey, here's a model of how nature allows this to happen. Is there some way we can replicate that in your system? You know, so we're looking at different things that are within reach for me, but places I probably wouldn't go myself. And so now all of a sudden the buffet is bigger.

SPEAKER_00: 11:39

I love AI so much. I mean, it if you use it as a tool, you know, and work with it to find clarity. Because, you know, as as a writer and a speaker, you know, a lot of times I can go around and around and around with this idea. Yeah. And it doesn't make sense to anyone listening because it's all coming out of my head, not making sense.

SPEAKER_01: 12:00

Yeah, totally. I think the thing that's so great too is, you know, when I'm in a brainstorming session at a company, I see people who hesitate to speak up, even though it's supposedly a safe space or it's possible to put any idea out there, but you know, it's hard to watch your idea not be the one that gets picked up to move forward. So people just sort of they know it, but they just don't engage. If you're in a private office or a cube and you've got AI as that person that isn't judging you, that isn't it it isn't uh correcting you, right? But is expanding your thinking, you're probably more than likely to access things that you wouldn't have in that brainstorming session. I think people got really into that post-it note brainstorming session approach to idea generation. Hanging it all on the wall. Yeah. And that idea generation is still limited by the biases of the people in the room. And those include, hey, if my boss thinks that's a good idea, I probably should think that's a good idea. Right?

SPEAKER_00: 12:56

And so that that kind of dissension doesn't happen. Well, and do you find that this fear, right, of them even raising their hands, is that one of the um the everyday signs that that they are creative, but they just don't see it yet?

SPEAKER_01: 13:13

It may be that that their fear uh dampens their capacity to express it. That's the thing that I think. People start to narrow their um field of conversation around things they feel authoritative about. And if they have an idea but they don't necessarily feel confident in it, uh, they're less likely to push it forward, right? They're less likely to take it through that moment of resistance. And so one of the other things that I teach, and I think this is especially true with AI, is that you have to have creative self-confidence enough to have agency over the output. You have to know what's a bad idea that AI is offering. You have to understand what's a good idea and why, or what your customers might like. You have to also challenge it to explain why they why the tool suggests that idea. And that takes some amount of confidence and agency, which is the same version as raising your hand in a brainstorming session to actually challenge AI and say, wait, I have a different opinion, or why do you think that's true? And I feel that that's something people don't think they should do either, because they assign an authority bias to AI, just like they do to their boss. And so that creative agency is the other thing I try to teach, which is you have to not you have to ask open-ended questions so it's a conversation. And part of that conversation is to ask, explain to me those recommendations in more detail.

SPEAKER_00: 14:34

Yes, it does make you think of how to ask better questions, you know. Exactly. And and it does challenge you that way. From one writer to another, I heard the most nightmarish thing the other day. I have to share this with you. But there was a book published, and the writer, all the chat GPT notes were printed with his book. And he didn't he didn't check it or anything like this. But the book was published with all that in there.

SPEAKER_01: 15:05

Wow.

SPEAKER_00: 15:06

Can you imagine?

SPEAKER_01: 15:07

Oh my gosh, Heartburn. You know, it's but I it when you when you say that, you know, it's funny. I as I was writing the book, um, I thought, because I'm trying to teach people to partner with AI, that they would put a lot of the content in the book, uh, into AI, especially the exercises that are there. And so I would run the exercises that I created to see what AI would tell them as the answer so I wouldn't be unprepared. And uh I had this logic puzzle, and it had like uh 15 facts. And then the the thing is you're supposed to assess all the relationships between the facts to come up with the answer of the puzzle, like who lives in the red house or whatever, right? And uh because I built the puzzle, I knew the answer, but I gave it to AI, and I tell this in my class too, because I think this is really uh an aha moment for me. I gave it to AI with here's the puzzle, solve this puzzle for me. That was it. And it came back with an answer that was wrong because it took the first answer it came to after using only 12 of the 15 facts. I didn't say it had to use all the facts, so it didn't. And so that moment said to me, Oh, I have to either specify that or I have to double check right why they came up with a wrong answer. And it was it was funny. So I said, okay, rerun it again. This time it picked two different facts. I still didn't until the third time say, you must use all the facts. Did it tell me the actual answer that I wanted? And so a lot of how people prompt can take them down a rabbit hole that's a little a few degrees off center because the question isn't necessarily well framed. But on the other hand, we've been taught to do prompt engineering and so we over-contextualize our prompt sometimes to get a narrow answer and run with it. And so that's kind of the other end of the spectrum, right, of not being good at asking questions is that you are so precise in your questions, you limit AI's capacity to sort of break the boundaries of your thinking.

SPEAKER_00: 17:05

Exactly. I love that so much because um when it actually I feel I feel like I've been going to some type of school, learning how to ask questions better, be more thorough. It's even helped me in my speaking because you know, I'll I'll utilize AI for that, just saying, you know, and it can listen to me practicing and it'll tell me, you know, you're speaking too fast, you need to start stop saying uh all the things, but it's so helpful. It helps you flow. It helps and you've talked a lot about flow when clarity isn't. I mean, you're returning to flow when clarity isn't immediate. What what tends to pull people out of the flow the fastest, do you think?

SPEAKER_01: 17:54

Um, well, definitely uh um a task-based mindset where the uh next thing on your agenda is the only thing you can kind of focus on. And we get there because our meeting calendar looks like eight to five is full back to back. And so we run this loop that's very much in the present moment and doesn't allow for the subconscious to surface. And so one of the things I I ask people to do is to find their flow state by figuring out where is the place their mind does the most entertaining and expansive wandering. For me, it's taking a hot shower. I could stay in there and solve world hunger. I feel like I come up with ideas in the shower because it's it's such an easy place for my mind to wander. It used to be that I wandered in bedtime, but for me, that would keep me awake. And so instead, I I try to shut down and bedtime and use the shower as my flow state. But for other people I've talked to in the book, it's running 10 miles. It's doodling, right? It's it's knitting, it's whatever is the thing that keeps you busy enough to stay in the moment, but not so busy like a full meeting calendar that uses up all your mental capacity. Because there has to be room for the subconscious to kind of surface and help you connect the dots. And the things that you know that you haven't used in a while need to be accessible by not blocking out that capacity to wander through some things and say, Oh, I hadn't thought about that. Or maybe I should try that. And a lot of times I'm surprised by the idea that I have in the shower only because I thought, wow, that would never have come to me in any other place.

SPEAKER_00: 19:31

Well, that's what I was gonna ask you. So you answered my question ahead of time. It's just that how do you actually stay grounded? It's obviously in the shower.

SPEAKER_01: 19:39

Honestly, I know it's not something people say, oh, you don't need to take a shower today. I do. It's my five minutes of private thinking time. It's the time I feel I can solve things. I feel like I'm rejuvenating, re energizing because it's all about me in that little shower. It's not the phone ringing or what's on my computer or even on any device. And I see a lot of times that people say they get in a flow state when they're not using a device. Now, there is some research that says that scrolling can give you a flow state, but it also has the risk of introducing a negative thought, right? A sad story, a negative thought. Um, and that can shake you back out of that state, right? That can create that moment where you're not as free-flowing in your thinking. So while I know that people do do that as a way to sort of um separate from the moment and they go into their phones and they scroll, I I've seen this happen enough myself that I think, oh, why did I go here? Because now I have to deal with this piece of news that was posted or this sorry story for a friend of mine and their health problem. And it's not that I don't want to know that stuff. It's just that's not a flow moment. That's not a moment I can count on being in a flow state. Because I care too much. And so you have to find the places where you can carve that out. For some people, it's like baking, it could be anything. The thing doesn't matter, but it has to be the thing that gives you the opportunity to access your subconscious.

SPEAKER_00: 21:08

Well, we teach our listeners a lot about the pause, right? About taking a pause before you have some unhealthy habit or urge. And a lot of times it's not just food, right? It's scrolling, it's overthinking, over pleasing, overworking, all those things. And you have to disrupt that flow. I personally do it. I don't, I haven't thought about the shower thing because I do pretty much veg out in the shower, but I do what's called a brain dump. Like every night before I go to bed, I journal. But I just literally everything in my head, I'm just writing words. And it literally clears out my brain so I can rest. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 21:48

And so journaling is another one. I think there's people different people respond to different ways of opening that space. And so it's a non-judgmental thing to say, oh, for you it's doodling, really. No, I would never say that, right? Whatever whatever the thing is that gets you there, it's the thing that will remind you you have the capacity to look at things beyond what's in front of you in that moment. And that's where that transformative thinking happens.

SPEAKER_00: 22:19

And they don't force it, right? I mean, a lot of times we try to do things that don't really comfort us or take or that comes natural to us. We try to force it. Right. But clarity, clarity is more uh easily received if if people stop forcing forcing it. Don't you agree with that?

SPEAKER_01: 22:40

Or yeah, I think that again, I think um that's why I don't think the brainstorming works. I'm supposed to be creative between 12 and 1 today. Wait a minute. You know, my car didn't start this morning. Uh, you know, my kids had homesick, or you know, like there's so many other things that just because you scheduled a brainstorming session doesn't mean I'll be in that place at that moment. So finding your pause is a great way to say it doesn't need to be more than four, four minutes, you know, five minutes, but it has to be genuine to you in how it actually activates that part of your thinking process. And uh I I I really, you know, I'm I'm a firm believer. Uh when I was writing the book, I was in flow all the time because it was just like I didn't know what time it was, I didn't know how how much progress I'd made. You know, I I figured I'd go back and clean it all up once I got it all out, you know, and then that would be not a flow state activity. Cleaning it all up wouldn't be a flow state activity, but getting it written down was. And it was just the thing I loved the most about writing was that that place is so comforting. That place where you can just be inside your own head connecting dots and putting thoughts together is just great.

SPEAKER_00: 23:55

Well, and I really, really love, we'll we'll shift perspectives. I really love how you frame failure as feedback because we talk a lot about that on this show about failure and is it really failure? No, it is not because our mantra is um your past doesn't define you, it prepares you. No, I love that. I I saw that and I was like, oh, I love that. I mean, enjoy I totally love that. We use it, right? We use it for purpose, we use pain for purpose, you know, from our past and you know, step struggles or step we use as stepping stones, things like that. But did that ever that shift on viewing framing failure as feedback, did that ever happen for you at at one particular moment, or did it just happen over a period of time?

SPEAKER_01: 24:42

Don't I don't think it was a moment. I think what I noticed was uh the way I rebounded from failure was uh intentional, right? The idea that I can't live in that state because I can't succumb to you know considering it a loss or a failure. I have to kind of uh uh launch from it into something. So when I started my film career, I didn't know it was gonna work. And I did a bunch of stuff that probably added no value to the journey except making it possible for me to pay my rent, which was fine, right? But that kept me alive, right? Like that kept me going. That, you know, that move, though, those bad moves didn't hurt me because they still had income that was at the baseline the way I was gonna pay to stay in LA, the way I was gonna be able to stay in LA. So when I think about uh my response to failure, it's to fix it quickly. It's to figure out why did what did I miss, how did it happen, and how can I launch forward from it? Because sitting in that place of failure uh projects failure to anybody you're looking to hire you or you're looking to notice you. People don't gravitate to people who wallow in failure. And so if you want opportunity, you kind of have to launch from it, right? Whether it's a lesson learned or not, you just have to be able to say there's a way to move forward. It's either because I understand the lesson or I put it in context. As I got older, though, what I realized is launch forward, learn later, because a lot of times the hindsight, the distance gave me the hindsight. The hindsight just didn't come automatically in that moment. Like I wasn't able to say, oh, that if I'd only done this, that wouldn't have happened. It sometimes took more context, more time for me to realize the failure might have not all been in my control. The failure could have been wrong place, wrong time.

SPEAKER_00: 26:31

Yes.

SPEAKER_01: 26:32

And and that distance really changes my perspective on failure overall. And so I think as I got older, it just became more acceptable to sort of think about the learning as not something in the moment I can actually understand, but I can move forward and put distance from it, and then I can see it in a bigger context. And so it's not denying it as much as allowing it to sort of age and then using it as more of uh an understanding. And so many times I took things, these failures personally, and I thought I was less than or less competent than or less worthy than. But with distance, I was like, really, that was going on in the background? There's no way I would have survived that. That's not you know, and so I've been a little bit more forgiving of failure in that moment because I know the distance will give me perspective.

SPEAKER_00: 27:21

Man, I love that so much because I've lived my whole life with that perspective. Because when my son was in third grade, he's 36 now, but when he was in third grade, his teacher called me in and said, I need to talk with you. I asked the class, how do we learn? And Kyle, my son, raised his hand and said, By messing up. Good for him. Wow. That's when I realized I thought, wow, they really do listen sometimes.

SPEAKER_01: 27:46

Yeah, head of the class. That's I mean, that is a lesson that I think was more, again, a lesson of hindsight and maturing than really accepting. Because I was very hard on myself for those failures before. And I assumed those failures were all mine, and I had took a lot of ownership and accountability for them, which is good in some ways, but it doesn't leave room for there being other explanations, other perspectives of how that could have gone.

SPEAKER_00: 28:12

Right. And moving on and using it, you know, moving forward with that. Man, so um why do you think we're taught failure, failure to free to fear it? Why are we afraid of it?

SPEAKER_01: 28:27

Well, I think there's a uh kind of going back to the thing that we had said before, there's a public judgment, whether it's of an idea or of a failure, the public judgment of the people that we work with, our community, our, you know, uh, our family, um it's hard sometimes for us to accept, right? That failure, I think, in front of people we care about makes it uh difficult to navigate for a lot of people. The emotion of acknowledging that moment. And even with caring people, uh, there's a reaction sometimes that of disappointment. And you don't want to disappoint, you know what they were counting on you to be successful at this thing, and what happened? You weren't. Um I I think the the the really important thing about failure is that it isn't about you or a defining principle of who you are, but so often we see it as a piece of gum that gets stuck to us and that we carry forward, right? And that and it's a and and and therefore that bruise or that moment is kind of visible to other people. And and that failure you have to explain in a job interview, or you have to explain why you weren't promoted because you had a night uh a business idea that didn't work out. And so it's hard to talk about art failures as badges of courage, but that's what they are.

SPEAKER_00: 29:50

They are there, it's progress, and progress often comes from um we talk a lot too about small intentional steps rather than big overhauls. Yes, exactly.

SPEAKER_01: 30:00

And so from my perspective, uh failure takes courage. And I think for a lot of reasons, it's hard for people to exercise that courage. And work is the hardest place to exercise that courage. Sometimes around long loved ones, like I have a really supportive husband, and he never sees my failures as something he's gonna lord over me, right? He's gonna wonder if I make the same mistake twice. He's gonna definitely wonder what I did why I didn't learn from it the first time. But he's not gonna think that a failure is a failure on me, right? It might be an effort that didn't succeed for a certain reason that maybe we don't understand now, but it's not, it's not a judgment on me. And so having a supportive husband, having a supportive family helps me. But I also have to be okay that people at the office may uh consider it an act of courage they can't, they can't bring to bear. They don't have the the stamina for or the uh equanimity to accept it. And so they'll lean back rather than lean in to an idea that is ambiguous or challenging in some way, because the risk of failure is that embarrassment, that disappointment.

SPEAKER_00: 31:12

Well, and also I I did want to circle back to something you said about sometimes you just have to do it, you know, without thinking about it. You just first and I love that so much because I'm a firm believer that motivation, right, doesn't happen before the act. I think motivation happens after you just jump out there and do it.

SPEAKER_01: 31:34

And then you're I think I think intrinsic motivation is a it is a personal personality trait. But a lot of people I think uh again kind of tamp that or bound that inside them for the things that they really care about. And maybe sometimes they think about their job as something they have to do, but not something that binds them personally. So they may be less intrinsically motivated to take the risks at work, but they could be a huge mountain climber and taking big risks in their personal life, right? As an adventurer, because it's a different environment, different judgment, different expectations around failure than it would be where there's a uh a compensation component of failure, you lose your job, or you don't get promoted, or you're judged in some way as being less than. So people may be curtailing uh that uh enthusiasm towards proceeding in ambiguity, right? That intrinsic motivation may be hard to activate in those, but it might live in their passion areas at home, right? Whatever it is they love to do, travel or adventure, hiking, things like that.

SPEAKER_00: 32:42

It's so the brain is such an amazing thing, isn't it? I the more I research, you know, the results of our actions where the brain is concerned, I'm just I'm fascinated by the lower brain chatter, so to speak, you know, the fight or flight part of our brain versus the frontal cortex, like the thinking part of our brain. And how do we bring that back online when the lower brain chatter is in charge?

SPEAKER_01: 33:07

Absolutely. And I think emotion is one of the biggest factors in what you just described, all right? The way that you control your emotion, the way you react to things, whether you have equanimity or whether you're you're kind to yourself, kind to you yourself for not being uh not on your game on a particular day. Right, that the emotional balance brings those two things together in a really healthy way. But when you have that sort of uh emotional reaction, uh those two things get actually further separated from you know cognitive synthesis, right? Right? It's fight or flight. That's in one place of your brain, you know, that's what you're gonna do. And so your reaction to certain things, it's really hard to pull them back closer together. I I like to tell this really fast story. Uh I have a uh engagement ring that I've had I had for 20 years, but it's attention set. And the diamond inside has been in there for 20 years. I never had a problem with it. And all of a sudden, one day I was putting away my laundry and I looked down and my ring had no diamond in it.

SPEAKER_00: 34:11

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01: 34:12

And you could just imagine the emotion of it being that piece of jewelry, too. It's not just that it's a diamond or a piece of jewelry. It was that piece of jewelry that for 20 years has not left my finger and it it was missing a diamond. Now, in my, you know, emotional state, I could have totally started to freak out, called my husband, and created this, you know, uh instant scenario where all hands on deck, we gotta find it. But instead, I thought, I'm gonna check the drawer because I just put something in there. I don't know if what I did in some way caught it or whatever. And I opened the drawer and it was sitting right on top of the clothes I had put in it. And I walked downstairs and I said to my husband, You'll never believe this. For some reason today, this came out of this. And he said, Oh, great, now we get to buy you a bigger diamond.

unknown: 35:02

Oh, no.

SPEAKER_01: 35:03

And I thought to myself, that never would have been his answer if I had taken the other route. Like that never been what he would have said, right? We would have gone into this frenzy of searching for it and panicking. And so instead, it was like I made it easy for him to react in a positive way because I brought it to him after not letting my emotion overrun my experience at that moment. And I think that's a really great example of you get your emotions trigger things in other people. And and that emotional regulation makes it hard for them, if you can't put it together, to connect the dots in their head, right? Because they're reacting to your panic. So I think what you said is really important, right? That that connecting the dots in the brain so you can get the maximum potential for your cognitive capacity is is it's not trivial. It's in a really important and intentional thing people need to do.

SPEAKER_00: 35:54

It is. And the more I I research, the more amazed I am by it. And and the more aware I become, you know, the better I am at living just life and instead of just numbing out, ignoring what I'm really feeling, you know. Yeah, absolutely. And it's a constant practice.

SPEAKER_01: 36:09

I don't know that people ever get perfect at it because there's certain new experiences that trigger new emotions, even to this day for me, that I had never experienced. Um, so I really do kind of go back to the stoic, what can I control? What can't what what is my fault? What is the thing that I can learn from it that I can control? And I try to keep reminding myself that the benefit outweighs the the feeling I feel when I release that emotion, right? And that I think is what's really is managing it rather than releasing it into the world is a much more productive way of getting to that outcome.

SPEAKER_00: 36:47

Well, I'm wondering, since we're talking about emotions and stuff, what's your take on AI? Like, what do you think we should never outsource to AI? Is there anything? Well, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 36:57

I I I I want to teach people, and this is why we talk about agency earlier, discernment is really important. I think being able to discern what's valuable and meaningful and purposeful has cultural context, has community context, has personal context, right? Yeah. And so you have to be able to ascribe those things to an answer because AI has none of that. Even if you say, this is for my high school reunion, they don't know what that was like. They don't know what that means, right? There's emotions for what you were like in high school. So you're gonna bring all that baggage, but they won't have any of it. And while that's good in idea generation, it may also give you an idea that doesn't suit the moment, that doesn't suit the audience, that doesn't serve the customer. And so discernment is really required in order to make sure there's value, meaning, and purpose in AI output. And so that's that agency. The only way you can get to exercise discernment is to demonstrate agency and say, this is an interesting answer, but won't work in this culture or won't work for this circumstance. So that's the first thing I would say. I think the second thing I would say that you really have to sort of bring to it is uh that that curiosity that allows you to say, how did you get to that answer? What are your sources? What are what were the things you put together? Because I don't want just the answer, I want to learn where you looked for it. I want to learn why these things connected for you and why this matters as a solution that I should consider. And the learning process of it is one you should not forfeit. You should not forgo that moment of this is where you looked for this. Okay, this is how you got there. Because I don't want to keep outsourcing my thinking to AI because then my job or my value in that moment is really deferred. Right. And so as a as a contributor at the at the office, as a contributor in my family, I like to talk about what I find there. Uh my dog ate something funny. I'll go ask AI, tell me what I should look for, tell me if I should panic, tell me when to call the vet, right? And then I'll talk to my husband. And my husband's like, I'm not sure, let's wait another minute. And then I, you know, I but again, we're in the moment. AI is on the computer taking my words and making a best guess answer, right? And so that discernment and curiosity is really important.

SPEAKER_00: 39:14

Well, and it's it can be taught in and how we need things. Like I've taught my AI how to to understand the word glean. So when it gives me an answer and I want to study and research and figure it out too, where it came from, how did you get that information? I just type in the word glean because I used to say, I need to glean more data from this. Where did you find it? So now I just put glean and it gives me the whole rundown.

SPEAKER_01: 39:41

That that kind of learning just it it's so wonderful. I just applaud you for that because I feel the idea that you would consider not only doing that, but training it because it's something that you know you will do all the time shows that you're, you know, you're you're not just trying to take an answer and run with.

SPEAKER_00: 39:58

Right. Right. Whatever they Spit out, you know, we're gonna take it. But which comes to the next question I have for you, how would you explain what we just discussed with someone who's not technical at all? Like they just don't, they don't either use it AI at all or they don't, or they're afraid of it, or have heard bad things, or they just don't want to go there. My husband uh does not.

SPEAKER_01: 40:23

He's uh he's a Luddite. He does not take new technologies. Well, I always tease him because I remember when he was like he moved to online banking, and I thought, oh my god, hell did freeze over. Because I think that's what you said, that you would never do banking on your computer. You know, like okay, well, you can get he'll get there eventually. But he knows now we get value from it, and he sees it like uh when my dog ate the raisin. Uh raisin is raisin is bad for any dog, regardless of size, and it doesn't have to be two raisins or five, it can be a raisin, and and raisins are just super toxic. And so I knew that horrible. And I saw I caught my dog eating one, I don't know where she got it, but then I realized I don't know if she ate one and swallowed one. So I I really gotta go figure out like how bad this risk is if I don't know. And so then I told him, I'm gonna ask AI, and I asked it, I said, what should I worry about? And they're like, but like, you need to do something within two hours because after two hours it'll be too late. So I think you like it real, like it told me, and I said, I'm gonna call the emergency hospital. And the emergency hospital said the same thing. You need to come in now, and and then I said, Well, uh, should I do this? Should I, you know, should I try to do this? No myself. It was a puppy. She said, We don't know. Let's get let's get the puppy in. And my husband was sort of like, we don't want to go to the emergency room if we don't have to. That's gonna cost a lot of money. I'm like, dude, we don't want a dead dog, because that's the other option if we were wrong. Drove up to the emergency hospital, half an hour and$500 later, they came out and said, Yep, there was a raisin there. Really good thing that you came. All of that would have been hard to put together through search. And I sort of had like this somebody who was in medical school but not really graduating, type of feedback from AI. And my husband has started getting more comfortable. Like he'll say, What does AI say about that? It's like another voice in the room, right? It's another voice. And I think that's the thing that a lot of times when you're writing your book or writing a speech or something, it's nice to put your stuff in there and get another voice. And just brain. You don't have to take it. Right. And you don't have to take it, but it's nice to get some perspective that isn't yours to get outside of your own head looking back, yeah, and and then make a judgment about what to do. Again, show the discernment. So now it's like, have you asked AI? What does AI say? And he sees it sort of as like a living encyclopedia, I think.

SPEAKER_00: 42:48

Well, we reached out to some of our listeners, you know, we we reach out through our community, and I was just excited about talking with you. And so I asked, you know, if anyone had questions for you. So there's two two questions that came up quite a bit. One was, um, what's one simple practice that helps people build creative confidence? And the other one is um, what should people stop doing if they want more clarity and energy?

SPEAKER_01: 43:19

Well, the first one, um, one again, I'm I'm a huge advocate of uh of this one because it's how I, like I said, how I launched my career in the film industry. Uh, I think that if you look at contradictory thinking, if the thing that you want to happen is the thing that you believe in, what would happen if your assumptions were wrong or if you have the wrong goal? Like what would it take for you to fail? And so I teach this one, which is how might I fail? Because if I think about how I might fail, I can bolster my plan to be stronger and more likely to succeed. So when I move to Hollywood, how might I fail? Well, if I can't pay the rent, that's failure. That's you know, I didn't define it as if I don't get a job in the film industry. I defined it as if I can't stay here long enough to get a job. So part of defining the problem um is in this, in this approach, this inversion thinking approach, you're actually asking, what would I be doing to contribute to my failure? You're thinking about the things, you're right. And and in that sense, uh, I think that's where a lot of people really have the aha moments of, wow, I don't want to think about the bad stuff because then it'll happen. I say, no, think about the bad stuff so you can prevent it from happening. And that moment, that moment where you think failure looks like not being able to pay the rent means I'll take a job, I'll take a job that's maybe adjacent to where I want to be, so maybe I can meet people and it's a half step towards the job, but I'm staying here long enough to convert that network into something because I'm getting my rent paid or my carns are right. And so the idea that failure was defined for me as not being able to stay in LA, not not getting a job. I just knew it was going to take time. And so the same thing I think I talked to people in my class about uh their job search. And I my point is not to say failure isn't not getting a job. Failure is not getting the job you're qualified for and really wants. That's the thing you have to think. What happened in that case? Why did that happen? Because failure not getting a job, you may not be qualified for it, and you probably shouldn't have gotten it. But failure for something that you are that is attainable, right? That you is something you want and you're qualified for. That can happen. We hear it all the time. The stories of people got laid off but then can't get rehired. They're competent, they have the experience. Why aren't they getting rehired? Well, maybe their narrative doesn't really say who they are and what it is, not what their skills are. How they bring those skills to bear on problems, how they lead, right? Their resume may be just giving a list of accomplishments without telling a narrative. And so you think about failing at that job search for a job you're qualified for, you probably didn't position yourself as effectively as you think you did. And so you start re reimagining how you could do that better. And so for me, I think inversion thinking, what's the worst that could happen is actually a preparedness moment, just like preparing for failure. How do I prepare that that may be a case? Well, preparing for failure is to see what it looks like and to reduce the uh opportunity for it to occur. Inversion. I love I even love the word. Yeah, it's great. It's so great. It's it's a classic uh stoic philosophy to think about what what could challenge your success because the Stoics believe the thing you don't think about is the most likely thing to cause your failure. The things that you avoid thinking about are where all of the risk lives. Wow.

SPEAKER_00: 46:43

Okay, so the second question is um there are two questions. Uh what should people stop doing if they want more clarity and energy?

SPEAKER_01: 46:55

I think I think the stop doing is booking themselves end to end and not finding even five or ten minutes in a day where where they do something that gives them joy, that releases them from an obligation in that moment. To me, uh I think uh one of the techniques that really works well is uh uh habit stacking. So if you tend to do your email on the train to work, you've just extended your workday. Uh when I lived in New York and I would commute on the train into Grand Central Station, it was a 30-minute ride, and I refused to do work on the train because that was my time. When I got home, I had to cook dinner. When I left the office, I was working. I carved out that time to read what I wanted to read or to watch a dumb television show that would relax my brain. But that time was intentional and I stacked it on the habit of commuting. I was still commuting, but I instead of stacking an email uh task or uh you know responding to some memo, I'm I'm sitting here in this moment thinking, this is my time. And so that sense that you give 100% of your time to everyone else is a recipe for disaster, uh, cognitively at the very least. Um, you will not say that moment for yourself to allow your brain, right, to flourish.

SPEAKER_00: 48:20

Right. And it's not selfish, it is just being proactive with your mental health.

SPEAKER_01: 48:25

And picking judiciously. Like I didn't add another thing to my day. I just stacked it on something that I was doing already that I could have used for a different purpose that wouldn't have been as healthy. And so that moment, right, of saying, I'm going to intentionally use this half hour. Maybe it's not the half hour going into the office because it ramps me up to go into the office to check email, but certainly on the half hour going home before I walk in the door, I use that moment to make a gear shift, an intentional gear shift for 30 minutes. And then I'm back in the house talking about what happened at home and making dinner, what are we doing, and what are the, you know, what's in the mail? And all of a sudden now I'm back to my task list. But for that moment in time, I've given my brain a rest.

SPEAKER_00: 49:05

And you can be more present when you do get home. Absolutely. So that's I have my personal question is how can someone tell they're making progress even when results aren't obvious yet? And is that does that include patience?

SPEAKER_01: 49:21

Yeah. So uh one way, I I actually do have some creative self-assessments that people can do. Um, and one of the things I tell people when they do them, this is not like Myers, Briggs, or some other personality test, this is where your brain is at this moment in time. If you're honest with yourself, you can actually look at whether or not you're feeling you're accessing your creativity or you're not through a list of 11 questions. That's all it takes. And in this assessment, uh, you see if you have moderate, low, or high creative self-efficacy, which is confidence, and moderate, low, or high creative agency. Because those scores need to be in a certain zone, at least moderate on those things, in order for you to be able to continue to move forward with your creative education, your creative journey, um, your willingness and openness to access it has to exist before it will actually develop. So to build that muscle and to test whether that muscle is possible, you need to know what your starting point is. And even people who score high on this in my in my workshops, they're still surprised by how less creative they were than they thought once they do the brainstorming with AI. They're like, wow, I thought it was really creative. But then this discussion introduced four ideas I'd never thought about. And and and now I realize that there's so much more creativity for me to still access.

SPEAKER_00: 50:46

Well, I guess they can easier. I mean, like, how would you define success now compared to people that like before you do the workshop, say? You know, how do people re do they do they see that they're more creative or less creative? I mean, how does it affect their careers too?

SPEAKER_01: 51:04

Well, they tackle challenges more confidently. They have a path, they have a framework, they have methods, they have sort of scaffolding. So as they're learning, they can kind of go back to these techniques, this this framework, and then say, all right, I'm stuck. I'm not feeling creative, but I know this is a good framework for me to start to get some ideas and spark some imagination. And so I can't access it myself, but these tools, whether I do them myself or with AI, will help me spark some thinking. They'll ask the better questions of the problem space to help me make sure I'm thinking about it the right way. And so they I I call I say they're scaffolding because they're trying to keep you moving forward in some framework that it doesn't allow, doesn't incline you to wander aimlessly the landscape, right? This is saying there's a way to navigate this ambiguity that will get you to an answer. But we can't jump to the answer right away. We have to kind of go through this technique to make sure that we're looking at the problem space right, framing the problem correctly, and then considering all possible solutions.

SPEAKER_00: 52:07

So when someone is facing um uncertainty and doubting their creative abilities, what do you what do you most want them to remember? Like what's a what's a easy aha moment for them to remember from this?

SPEAKER_01: 52:23

I think that it's up to them to activate it. They are not a victim of their lack of creativity or uh a star because they're more creative. It's a it it ebbs and flows over your life. If you're in a tri I would bet uh if you were dealing with some health crisis in your family in a particular moment, you are not the most creative person that you have ever been. And if you and if you're sitting on the beach uh on vacation, you could solve, you know, uh cancer. I'm just like the idea is you have to put yourself in the space, in the mindset. And we don't always have control of that. But at the same time, knowing that this is a time where I'm not as creative, I need to trigger that more intentionally. I need to use frameworks to remind me how to approach these problems because I'm not as open to the way I might be thinking about this problem as if this other thing wasn't going on. My thinking wouldn't be as narrowed by that. And so I want people to know that they should go take the problem and the framework and sort of knit the two things together to navigate their way through that. While they don't necessarily feel particularly confident they know where it's going to go, they feel like they have a partner in that journey.

SPEAKER_00: 53:34

That is amazing advice. I can't wait for everyone to hear it. For anyone listening who felt seen in this conversation, which it may very well be all of us, what's the best way for them to stay connected to your work?

SPEAKER_01: 53:49

Well, uh, I have a website called LeslieGrandy.com, not surprising. And there's all sorts of information there about my courses, my book, how to reach me if you need to. Uh my Substack is listed there. So all of the avenues where people can follow me are available on LeslieGrandy.com. And uh I'd love to have uh, you know, I'd love to have people reach out if they have further questions after this. And and uh I'd be happy if you want to direct message me on LinkedIn or or message me on Substack, I'd be happy to have the conversation continue.

SPEAKER_00: 54:21

And be we'll we'll be sure to have all those links in the show notes, y'all, so that you can find or easily just click on it and and and check it all out. Leslie, thank you so much. Man, it was wonderful. This has been grounding, I'll use that word, generous and deeply needed, I think, for myself and for my listeners. So thank you so much for sharing your genius.

SPEAKER_01: 54:45

Ah, that's so kind of you. And I really enjoyed the conversation. It's a uh it's uh a great way that you talk about what you do and how that kind of meshes to what I do, and so it was a really natural conversation, and I appreciate you.

SPEAKER_00: 54:58

I enjoyed it so much. Leslie, thank you so much for this conversation. I love how you remind us that creativity isn't about having the perfect idea, it's about learning how to stay open, steady, and curious, especially when things feel uncertain. What really stayed with me is this idea that creative confidence isn't something we wait for. It's something we build through practice, feedback, and trusting ourselves enough to keep going even when the path isn't obvious. Thank you for the work you're doing and for sharing it with us today. If this conversation resonated with you, you can learn more about Leslie and her work, including her book, Creative Velocity, propelling breakthrough ideas in the age of generative AI. We'll link everything in the show notes. And if you're enjoying these conversations, be sure to follow or subscribe to Delay the Binge wherever you listen. You can also watch the full episode on my YouTube channel, PamDwyer Speaker. And if you're there, leave a comment and let me know what part of this conversation made you pause or think differently. Until next time, remember you don't have to change everything. Sometimes it's just about one thoughtful pause. See you next week.