Whenever I tell people what I do for a living—helping people bring storytelling and creativity into the workplace—I’m met with immediate interest. “Wow! Cool! That sounds like so much fun.” It is! And not just fun, but useful. The ability to craft and tell a good story is oh-so-valuable to any business. My livelihood depends on [...]
How To Be Creative is a theme that surfaces again and again when I sit down to write. Not because people flock to me asking, “Oh Beth, you creative wizard, will you please publish your wisdom?!” Nope, that’s not the spark that lights my blog-posting flame. Most of the time, my creativity-focused posts begin from a [...]
Each holiday, my wife puts out HoliDog. This cute little bit of fluff gets gussied up depending on the holiday. Last month it was a pumpkin for Halloween. This month it will get a Santa's hat and a red bowtie. You know you're at our house when HoliDog greets you at the front door. I love seeing [...]
Video. When I watch myself in a video it's sort of an out-of-body experience; is that really me on the screen? Do I look like that? Why do I keep doing that weird thing with my eyebrows? We are forever critical of ourselves and our presentation to the public. So many of our students are nervous [...]
As the holidays approach, I’m refining a new party trick. Let me try it on you, right now. “I bet I can guess the slide headlines on your most recent presentation.” “No way,” you say. “You don’t even know what I do for a living. You don’t know who was in my audience, and you have [...]
When people ask me what I do for a living, I say I’m a creativity consultant. The obvious comeback is, “Huh?” And for that, I have an answer: “I show business people how to use creativity and storytelling to communicate and get things done at work.” This explanation generally elicits one of two comments, one I [...]
Have you see Flippy, the robot designed to manage the fryer in fast food restaurants? It's pretty amazing until you watch it for a few minutes and realize how terrifyingly human it seems. It's "artificial intelligence" or AI, and is supposed to help cook french fries better, faster, and safer. It solves several problems, like finding restaurant workers. [...]
When Jill and I started our Story Mode program, we easily landed on our motto/tagline/hashtag: Refuse To Be Boring. This phrase is our “way.” It’s our constant reminder and also an apt description of how we think, act, talk, create, work, relate. It’s how we live. We spend so much time refusing to be boring, we [...]
A decade ago, I accidentally invented a brainstorming rule. Scratch that. The only “rule” in brainstorming is that no idea is a bad idea. Otherwise, no rules. So, what should we call this thing that isn’t a rule? Is it a concept? A theory? A principle? A technique? A strategy? ^^^ That right there is exactly [...]
The best writers--creative and business--understand the importance and power of time I’m waiting for the plumber to arrive. Ever since our revered plumber/friend Larry retired, our plumbing issues have either been ignored or a fix has been attempted by me. Never a good idea. There is mold making itself at home on the caulking around the [...]