Build Your Creativity Capacity with Leadership Expert + Creativity Strategist Natalie Nixon
Show Snapshot:
Time to stop thinking of creativity as fixed or finite. Midlife is exactly the right time to build your creativity capacity and inject more wonder and audacious dreaming into your personal and professional life, says author and C-suite creative strategist Natalie Nixon. Natalie shares ideas to design our days for curiosity and champions the idea of giving ourselves permission to be a “clumsy student” to better cultivate wonder and creativity. We also explore burnout, the role of AI and ChatGPT on creativity, and how we can optimize imagination. If you are looking for new thinking on how to bring your creative, professional, and personal gifts to the world, this show is for you!
About Natalie Nixon: Natalie Nixon is a creativity strategist and global keynote speaker who helps individuals and organizations unlock creative potential and turn imagination into meaningful results. She draws on a background in dance, anthropology, fashion, and design to shape her approach to creativity and leadership.
Show Links:
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Natalie’s Book: The Creativity Leap: Unleash Curiosity, Improvisation, and Intuition at Work
Quotable:
Wonder is audacity, dreaming, really big blue sky dreaming, as well as the ability to be able to sit in all and to pause…it's really hard to wonder when you're going 80 miles an hour… if you want to become wiser and build your body of knowledge, you've got to design space in your life to be more curious, be more audacious.
Transcript:
Katie Fogarty 0:03
Welcome to A Certain Age, a show for women who are unafraid to age out loud. I'm your host, Katie Fogarty. Beauties, buckle up — we have a fabulous show today. We're joined by a guest who has worn so many hats over her life and career that she could open her own hat store. Natalie Nixon is a creativity strategist and a top-50 global keynote speaker. She is a PhD and an academic, and the author of the award-winning book The Creativity Leap: Unleash Curiosity, Improvisation, and Intuition at Work. She's lived in five countries, and her background spans anthropology, fashion, academia, and dance. She's a LinkedIn Learning instructor, a frequent media expert, and a force — truly a Renaissance woman and a one-of-a-kind creativity expert. She joins me today to spread her light and help us uncover how to bring our own creative, professional, and personal gifts into the world. Pour yourself a large cup of coffee or a piping hot tea — we're getting ready for a major dose of inspiration. Welcome, Natalie.
Natalie Nixon 1:10
Thank you so much, Katie. It's great to be here.
Katie Fogarty 1:13
I'm very excited — I've immersed myself in your book and all of your wonderful writing, and I've seen some of your speaking engagements online. I'm excited to explore creativity with you. I know you define creativity as our ability to toggle between wonder and rigor to solve problems and produce novel value — what some people call innovation. You wrote an entire book on how we can cultivate creativity, and we'll get into some of those ideas in a minute. But first, I'd love it if you could help us define wonder.
Natalie Nixon 1:46
Well, I think about wonder as audacity — really big, blue-sky dreaming — as well as the ability to sit in awe and to pause. And I remind people that it's really hard to wonder when you're going 80 miles an hour. Wonder isn't woo-woo; it's something very smart people throughout history have spent a lot of time thinking about and investing in. The more I've researched wonder, the more I've realized that if you want to become wiser and build your body of knowledge, you have to design space and time in your life to sit, to be more curious, to be more audacious, to pause.
Socrates, for example, said that wisdom begins in wonder. And the Jewish theologian and civil rights activist Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that it's wonder, not doubt, which is the root of all knowledge. So that's what I mean when I say a lot of smart people have paid a lot of attention to wonder.
Katie Fogarty 2:50
It's such a beautiful word, and thank you for describing and defining it for us. I think our culture tends to prioritize rigor over wonder — rigor requires less explanation. I know you help companies prioritize wonder and space for innovation. In our own lives, we're our own HR department; we set the agenda for how we focus our energy and our time. If someone is thinking, 'I want to create space for wonder in my own life,' what are some of your recommendations for incorporating this into our day-to-day?
Natalie Nixon 3:30
First, just to clarify — I'm not a coach. I'm an advisor to a lot of executive leadership teams and companies; I just wanted to clarify that. But in our personal lives, one of the best ways to cultivate wonder and creativity more generally is to be what I call a clumsy student of anything. When you're not the smartest person in the room and you put yourself in student mode, it really helps you be in awe of the little things in your life, to humble yourself, and to really build the curiosity that's fundamental to wonder.
For example, I did something this summer I'd never done before, and now I'm hooked. I'm a swimmer — I've never swum competitively, but I cultivated my skills as a swimmer as a young adult. Last summer, a friend of mine texted me about a program called Swim Trek. It's an English company that designs swimming holidays around the world. She said, 'You've got to try this,' because she and I had been on a work project together once in Northern California, where swimming came up and we discovered we both love to swim.
So, fast-forward: I went to Crete, in Greece, in July, and spent a week doing open-water swimming, which I'd never done before. I'd swum in calm bays a little here and there, but I'd never done 3K to 4K a day, which is what we did. And it was the most marvelous experience — I mean that in the true sense of the word. It was total immersion. I learned so much about myself, so much about nature and the beauty of being in rhythm with the water and the sea, and I connected with people I'd never met before. I was so full of gratitude every single day, living in these turquoise-green waters in southern Crete and doing something I didn't know if I could do. There's a funny story here before I put a bow on this part of our conversation.
Katie Fogarty 5:59
I love this — I love this conversation. Keep going! The first day…
Natalie Nixon 6:03
I went with a friend of mine from ballroom dance — another area where I'm a student — and I convinced my friend Tori to come do this with me. Tori is a scuba diver, so I figured she'd be open to it. Our flight from Athens to Crete was delayed, so we arrived a little later than the rest of the group. By the time we got to introductions, our guides — who were English — asked us to put on our swimsuits, saying we'd have a go at it, just a swim before cocktails and dinner on the first night.
Around five o'clock, we put on our suits. We were staying in this tiny village called Loutro, which is only accessible by boat or by hiking. We walked down to the pebble beach, where different families and tourists were staying, and they asked us to swim out and do three loops around two buoys that were about fifty to a hundred yards apart.
Everyone dove into the water, and I started to swim — and I panicked. I couldn't find my breathing cadence. I was gasping for breath. Everyone seemed to be faster than me. I flipped onto my back a couple of times just to calm myself down. I finished the first loop, and everyone else was way ahead of me. I was panicking, and I yelled out to one of the guides, 'I'm losing my breath — I can't breathe out my left side, I usually can.' She said, 'Oh, don't worry, I can only breathe out the right side of my face' — and this woman had swum the English Channel! Okay, so I tried again. I did a second loop, still not in the right rhythm, gasping for air. And I decided, okay, I'm just going to get out of the water — I didn't do the third loop.
So I'm standing at the shoreline, totally dripping and downcast. My inner voice is saying, 'I should have never come. This was a bad idea. I'm going to drown. I'm the slowest person in the group. Why did I ever do this?' Those are literally the thoughts racing through my head. Everyone else finishes the third loop, and they're all cheering, 'That was great, that was so refreshing, wasn't it?' And I'm like, 'Yeah, that was great.' I look down at my feet and I hone in on a pebble shaped like — I'm not kidding — a heart. I bend down and pick it up. I say to one of the women, whose name was Andrea, 'Oh my gosh, look at this, this pebble is shaped like a heart, isn't that lovely?' She's from Cambridge, and I said, 'This must be a good sign — I'm really hoping it's a great sign.' I talk to my husband that night, and he says, 'How's it going?' I say, 'Oh, it's fine' — but inside I'm thinking, I've got to do this every day, this is horrible.
But I get over myself. I get a good night's rest. I get up in the morning, and they announce the groups for the day. The groups are divided by the color of your swim cap: the fastest group is pink, the middle group is orange, and my group has yellow swim caps. So I'm like, okay, I'm in the slow group, it's fine, it's fine.
We get on the big boat — the guides are in smaller boats — and head out for our first full day. I have a great time, just swimming the way I swim, and it's beautiful. We have a two-hour lunch, and in the afternoon we swim some more. But I have to tell you, at different points during the swim, the guide kept saying, 'Natalie, slow down a bit, you're getting ahead of Heidi' — Heidi was the other woman in my yellow-cap group. So I'd slow down.
By the end of the day, we're all back at the hotel in Loutro having cocktails, and the guide says, 'We've had a chance to observe everybody today, and we've done a reorganization of the groups.' They hand out the resorted caps — and they hand me a pink one. I said, 'Oh no, no, I'm in the slow group, this is pink, pink is for the faster swimmers.' They said, 'No, no, you're pink.' I thought, how did I go from the slowest group in yellow to pink? And by the end, they'd resorted everyone into just pinks and oranges.
For the remainder of the week, one of the things I learned about myself was how to get out of my head and into my body. I also learned that the way I like to swim — long, extended, slow strokes — is exactly the way you should swim in open water. Open water is very different from swimming laps in a pool. There was literally a moment, probably around day three, when I felt myself swimming to the rhythm of the sea, and it was the most incredible feeling. I stretched myself physically, mentally, and emotionally, and I learned to be okay with not being in the lead, not being the fastest one. It has nothing to do with speed — it's very much a tortoise-and-hare kind of paradigm. It's much more about attunement — attunement with your body, attunement with the sea — and steady wins the race.
So that was my summer holiday adventure in Crete. Afterward, I went on to meet my husband and our daughter in Istanbul for a week, and that was also really…
Katie Fogarty 12:08
…cool! Natalie, what a beautiful story. As someone who's scared of both pools and open water, you've inspired me. You describe it so beautifully — I love that you talked yourself into getting back into the water and learned you were better than you thought, and that you stopped listening to that inner voice, the one that might have stopped you in your tracks if you'd listened to it the first time you got out of the water and back onto the boat.
We're heading into a break, but when we come back, I want to talk about this idea that we can push ourselves into experiencing wonder and creativity, and that it's not something accessible to only a few.
[Ad break]
Natalie, we're back. I know you just shared how you had to push yourself back into the water to swim, and how that ultimately became an incredible experience. In your book, you share that many people romanticize not just success but creativity as a sort of mystical, magical process that's only available to a few — maybe only to the people wearing the pink swim caps. Walk us through why that's not true, and why it matters that we recognize creativity is accessible to each and every one of us.
Natalie Nixon 13:25
The reason it's important to recognize that creativity is accessible to everyone is that we're actually hardwired to be creative as humans. We see that easily in small children — and if we reflect back on our own childhoods, it was really easy to get lost in our thoughts, to make something out of nothing. For example, my sister and I, when we were little, could play for hours after a rain making mud pies. She was typically the chef and I was the sous-chef, but still, we made something out of nothing.
While I define creativity as toggling between wonder and rigor to solve problems and generate value, a more common way to think about creativity is as the juxtaposition of elements — ideas, products, things people had never thought to put together before. It's all about the remix and the mash-up.
The challenge is really about the way we've been educated. We've been taught to value the solution and the answer over the process, and that's why so many of us believe we're not creative. But it's really a matter of investing in and committing to making time and space for wonder — and also for rigor. Rigor isn't something people like to associate with creativity; in fact, people think creativity is just doing whatever you feel like, but that's only part of the story. Creativity requires a tremendous amount of rigor. The choreographer Twyla Tharp famously wrote that before you can think outside the box, you have to start with a box — you have to know the rules.
So, before I could really relax into the sea in Crete, I had to get back into the technique of breathing while swimming. I had to relearn all the tips from our guides about extending from the torso all the way through the arms and hips, and the bit of torque the torso has to make, which actually makes your stroke more efficient. I would go back and forth between reminding myself of the technique — the rigor — to enhance the wondrous experience of getting out of my mind and into my body. Rigor is about focus, discipline, and time on task. What I find is that sometimes we think we're being rigorous when we're actually just being rigid. Rigidity and rigor are really different things.
Katie Fogarty 16:19
I love that distinction. Your book is full of wonderful examples of people toggling between wonder and rigor. One I really love is a woman named Céline, who's a perfumer. I'd love for you to share her story with our listeners, because I think it illustrates the concept so beautifully. Why is perfume-making a process that marries wonder and rigor?
Natalie Nixon 16:41
Céline Belle is French — she's from Grasse, the preeminent town of perfume in southern France. She's a 'nose,' a perfumer at IFF, the International Flavors & Fragrances company. I met her at a really cool salon experience — not a hair salon, more like an ideas salon — and later visited her at her place of work. I was really intrigued by the way she works and thinks about the role of scent in our lives.
At one point she said, 'My superpower is my ability to make real what no longer exists.' I thought, that's exactly why I love perfume — because when we smell something that reminds us of a time, a person, a place we can no longer access, that smell brings it all back. Old Spice aftershave will always remind me of my dad. The smell of baking bread and rolls reminds me of my grandmother and my aunts. And the original almond-cherry scent of Jergens lotion reminds me of being a kid. Scent is a sense we really underutilize and undertap.
The way Céline thinks about her practice as creative is that she merges chemistry, which is the rigor part, and intuition, which is the wonder part — and that marriage of chemistry and intuition is something she moves back and forth between every single day in her work.
Katie Fogarty 18:32
I love the way you described that, and the way she described it in the book too — it's so evocative. I totally agree that scent is such a powerful memory trigger; it puts you right back in a moment, and it's a wonderful example. When I think of creativity — well, maybe not you, since you've written an entire book on it — but when I think of creativity, I sometimes think of it on the surface level, like making art, having a conversation, or telling a story. But creativity is imbued in so many aspects of our life and work that we don't always recognize. That's one of the things your book really surfaced for me, and I so enjoyed that.
Natalie Nixon 19:17
Thank you.
Katie Fogarty 19:18
Natalie, I want to switch gears for a moment. We're talking about creativity today in new ways, and it's hard to think about human creativity without examining the role of AI. I know you've written about this — we have tools like ChatGPT creating words, articles, and books; we have AI imagery creating everything from art to LinkedIn headshots. I actually worked with a client recently who upgraded her headshot with an AI-generated one. You wrote an article recently for Fast Company about AI, which turned into a workshop you delivered at the Fast Company Innovation Festival — it's called 'The AI We Didn't See Coming.' I'd love for you to share with our listeners what you see as the role of human creativity in a world where AI is on the rise.
Natalie Nixon 20:10
I think the ubiquity of technology is something we have to accept — the train has left the station. But I don't have a utopian view of it, and I don't have a dystopian view either. My friend Galit Ariel, who calls herself a digital hippie and is an expert in augmented reality, calls it a heterotopian perspective — there's some good and there's some bad. The way I think we can think about AI as it relates to creativity is that AI shouldn't be the pilot, but it can definitely be the co-pilot. It can spark our curiosity.
If you've played around with ChatGPT, you know it's only as good as the questions you're able to frame. Even the coders and computer scientists designing the algorithms still have to be able to ask a better question — they need to be really good observers of society. The fact that we now have a job category called 'prompt engineer' — a job that didn't exist five years ago — tells you these are people who have to be really good at asking questions.
In the article I wrote for Fast Company, I wanted to help people understand that this is a time when, more than ever, our curiosity can be piqued. The need to be improvisational and experimental is stronger than ever. And what my next book explores is this idea: what if our most productive selves aren't when we're churning through email, on Zoom, or at the whiteboard, but when we step away from technology and engage in what I call 'MTR' activity — Movement, Thought, and Rest. Because in a time when technology is everywhere and getting more embedded in our lives and work, the opportunity is to lean into technology that amplifies what makes us uniquely human, and to do the work that makes us uniquely human — because basic tasks are being taken over. I mean, I love a good AI app. I love that I can dictate a text into my iPhone.
Katie Fogarty 22:41
Me too — if I can't find my readers, I'm voice-texting all sorts of nonsense to my kids, because…
Natalie Nixon 22:49
That's great — it offloads cognitive load from our brains so our brains can do other things. That's the beauty of it, in the ideal, optimal state, from my perspective. What I'm exploring in my next book is what kind of work can tap into our default mode network in the brain — that's where the best synchronicity of ideas gets juxtaposed and our imagination really expands. The opportunity is to really optimize our imagination, because technology, apps, robotics, and automation are going to handle the basic tasks. There's so much more left for us to do. I'll probably get the statistic wrong, but I think neuroscientists say we're only maximizing something like 20 percent of our brain's capability. So there's a lot more to explore creatively in the midst of all this technology.
Katie Fogarty 24:00
I absolutely love that — the idea of offloading some of the work AI can do to free up higher-level thinking, or imagination, or to create space for wonder, as you described. I've never heard the term 'prompt engineer' before, and you better believe I'm going to Google that, because it's so interesting.
Natalie Nixon 24:20
When you go to a website like Upwork, they actually have job listings for prompt engineers.
Katie Fogarty 24:27
I love that. I imagine prompt engineers are probably really good at something you describe in your book as 'asking a better friggin' question' — one of the hilarious chapter titles you have. You shared earlier that the way we've been educated, and the way society prioritizes solutions over wonder, kind of inhibits our ability to ask better questions. For a listener who's thinking, 'I want to get better at that' — what's a way we might approach our own lives to help us ask better questions?
Natalie Nixon 25:04
I also want to explain why I talk about curiosity and questions so much. When I was developing the wonder-rigor framework, it wasn't enough to tell people to toggle between wonder and rigor to solve problems and, off you go, be creative. How do you actually do that in a consistent, sustainable way? That's when I developed the Three I's — inquiry, improvisation, and intuition — which are how you can consistently toggle between wonder and rigor. Inquiry is curiosity; improvisation is about being experimental; and intuition is about following the heart, the nudge, saying yes.
But let's focus in on inquiry and how we can get better at asking questions. Part of getting better at asking questions is building the confidence to ask them, because so many of us have been question-shamed at some point — in our careers, our educational experiences, our upbringing. We got the message: don't ask too many questions, don't dare raise your hand, and maybe you were met with giggles, or worse, you were ignored. You quickly internalize the message that you've asked too many questions, and you only raise your hand when you're 100 percent certain you have the right answer — which really isn't the point if we want to truly innovate, because innovation is a messy process. It requires us to learn from mistakes and to probe more with questions.
One thing we can do is educate ourselves about questions. I love the work of Warren Berger, who calls himself a 'questionologist' and is the author of a great book called A More Beautiful Question. He believes, and I agree, that we need to actually teach people how to ask questions — we assume people already know how. A great place to start is understanding what I call a taxonomy of questions. There are divergent questions — questions like 'why,' 'what if,' and 'I wonder.' There are convergent questions, which are more tactical — questions like 'what,' 'when,' 'who.' And there are hybrid questions — 'how' can be a convergent question, like 'how are we going to get this done,' or a divergent question, like 'how might we.' Even understanding the distinctions between these types of questions is a great place to start practicing.
When I'm hired to advise executive leadership teams, sometimes we go into redesigning meetings so they incorporate questions in more interesting ways, normalizing asking questions. On a personal level, a great way to get better at asking questions is to become a clumsy student. I've studied ballroom dance more intentionally over the past three years, and there's no shame in my game, because I don't know it all — I have to learn from people who are better than me, from other students, from my instructors. And what begins to happen is you rewire the neural synapses in your brain. The more you ask questions, the more you're not shy about improvising or following that nudge, you're sparking those neural pathways so that when you return to your everyday work, you've normalized it — you're a lot more comfortable asking questions, following your intuition, and being more improvisational.
Katie Fogarty 28:58
I absolutely love that you're practiced in that. Something you said, Natalie, sparked a thought for me — about being a clumsy student, but also being a clumsy, work-in-progress teacher. I'm a parent of three children, and people often ask me for information now that I'm a podcaster. I've been trying to share what I know, within the context of only what I know, but it forces you to think through what you believe to be true, or useful, and how you want to share that information. I think being a student and a teacher is something that probably helps us ask better questions and get better information.
Now, I want to switch gears for a minute and take this conversation in a totally new direction. I know you recently celebrated a birthday — I know this because we're connected on Instagram, and I saw something you shared and paid attention to, because we both turned 54 around the same time, just a few days apart. On your birthday, you shared an Instagram post that I absolutely loved. You said, quote, 'I am becoming the woman of my dreams.' I adored this notion — it reminded me a little of Diane von Furstenberg, who talks about becoming the woman you were meant to be. I think this notion is so beautiful, and I'm curious: what does this look like for you? What does it mean to be the woman of your dreams?
Natalie Nixon 30:26
Whenever I start to feel a little less confident about my ideas, my work, or a choice I have to make, I recall a photograph — one of those school pictures where your mom picked out a nicer dress and made sure your hair was combed and ready for the public-school photo. My second-grade picture is one I just adore of myself, because I was wearing this crocheted knit dress that I proudly wore on special occasions, my hair was in two French braids, and I had on this little pendant necklace with my birth date on it. I was so happy — I felt so immense, though I wouldn't have used those words back then. Just confident. I was happy and pleased with myself. That's the self I hold onto — I believe that if we think of ourselves like Russian nesting dolls, that girl with that bliss and self-contentment is still inside of me.
For that girl, joy is being able to be helpful to people, being able to use her brain. I loved reading, and still love to read. When I was a girl, I loved how I could go into different worlds, different time periods, different perspectives — starting with my love of fairy tales, graduating to Nancy Drew, and on to Jane Austen in high school. I've always loved, loved, loved fiction.
So the woman of my dreams is a woman who's able to explore, who's able to be happy with the smallest of moments, and hopefully helpful to people. That's a work in progress, but I'm certainly closer to it than I ever would have imagined. Ten years ago, I would never have imagined I'd be an entrepreneur — I was still a professor at the time, and that was my jam, that was great, that was working for me until it didn't anymore. Being able to make that shift has been an incredible gift, so fulfilling that I found myself saying to people over the summer, 'It doesn't feel like work.' I mean, I'm working at it, but you get to a state of flow where you lose track of time, and you really enjoy this convergence — in my case, of all the very different things I've done in my career, where now they all make sense. They're all converging into one thread. That's what I mean when I say I am becoming the woman of my dreams.
Katie Fogarty 33:26
I love that. What role, if any, did aging play in this process?
Natalie Nixon 33:34
What role has aging played? Well, in—
Katie Fogarty 33:34
—the process of feeling like, with the Russian dolls, that you've returned to your core?
Natalie Nixon 33:41
I actually wrote an essay for a really cool platform called 40/50 that celebrates women and aging, similar to what you do, Katie. I wrote it two years ago, when I was 52 — it's called 'Why I Love Getting Older.' What I shared in the essay was that, because I was such an awkward Black girl, such a nerd, I never felt comfortable in my own skin. I felt like I only looked good in a leotard and tights. In my teens I was so skinny, with buck teeth. I went from being a tomboy to being terrified of boys and really nervous around them. I was a nice girl, I got along with everybody, I was a good athlete, good in school — all that stuff. But I can just imagine, when I was 15 years old, thinking, 'Oh my God, this has got to get better.' For some reason, I imagined that in my 40s I'd finally have it together — that I'd be happy with the way I look, that I'd be confident, that everything would just flow. So I wrote this essay about my theory of each decade I've lived through so far, and how, sure enough, in my 40s I really began to come into my own.
Aging, to me, is really about acceptance. It's about accepting what you can no longer do as well, and accepting all the things you can do. Aging is about the gift of perspective — the perspective I have now, at 54, that I didn't have at 44, and certainly didn't have at 14. To me, it just gets better and better if you acknowledge that part of aging is acceptance — that you can't do some of the things you used to be able to do, but there are so many other things you can do now.
Katie Fogarty 35:48
I absolutely could not agree more. I love the way you phrase that — aging is acceptance. I've had 156 conversations on this podcast, and you're the first person to say that; it's going to stick in my brain. I so agree — it's like a double-sided coin. You have to accept what's hard and challenging, but by accepting who you are, you become so free. There's so much joy, confidence, and contentment in that.
I love that, Natalie. We're nearing the end of our time, and I want to close with the speed round — I always enjoy hearing people's responses, and it's a high-energy way to end. I could talk to you forever, so this is just a way to get a little more from you before we go. One-to-two-word answers — are you ready? Let's do this thing. Okay: creativity requires wonder, and we've said that wonder requires time and space. What lifestyle hack or choice allows you to add space to your life?
Natalie Nixon 36:52
Sleep.
Katie Fogarty 36:54
I love that! Creativity also requires rigor — what choice, app, or hack provides rigor and structure for your ideas?
Natalie Nixon 37:03
The timer.
Katie Fogarty 37:05
Yes! Oh my gosh, my timer runs my days. You recommend nourishing creativity by choosing to be a clumsy student, a beginner. We talked about swimming — what's another new thing you've tried recently?
Natalie Nixon 37:21
I always go back to ballroom dance, because I'm always learning something new there. Right now, I'm trying to get much better — not perfect, there's no such thing as perfection — at West Coast Swing.
Katie Fogarty 37:33
So fun! What's the next new thing you want to try?
Natalie Nixon 37:39
Okay, I actually want to get better at attaching false eyelashes. I haven't mastered it — whenever I speak at keynotes, it's such a treat to get my makeup done by a professional makeup artist, and I learn so much from them. So many of them have tried to teach me to apply falsies myself.
Katie Fogarty 38:00
Oh my god, that's exactly it! I love it — it makes such a difference. I don't leave my house without mascara. I'm not a huge makeup person, but something happened to my eyelashes in midlife, so it's either mascara or falsies. I totally get that. All right, how about this: creativity is all around us — which creative thinker or artist always inspires you?
Natalie Nixon 38:32
There are too many! Twyla Tharp — we've already mentioned her. Ava DuVernay, the filmmaker. My dance teacher, Andrei, who's full of rigor. Any professional athlete — yeah, absolutely.
Katie Fogarty 38:57
I think it's so wonderful to have more than one answer to this, because that gives us so much inspiration. Okay, this one might be easier — finally, your one-word answer to complete the sentence: 'As I age, I feel ___.'
Natalie Nixon 39:20
Complete.
Katie Fogarty 39:22
Nice. Natalie, this has been such a pleasure. I so enjoyed this conversation. Before we say goodbye — how can our listeners find you, follow your work, learn about your thinking, find your book?
Natalie Nixon 39:24
Thank you again, Katie, for having me on your podcast. It was such an awesome conversation. Listeners can go to my website, figure8thinking.com — that's the number eight — and download a free sample chapter of The Creativity Leap. They can join the Ever Wonder newsletter; I share tons of content there. I also share a lot of content on LinkedIn, so they can follow me there, and definitely connect with me on Instagram as well, at @natwnixon.
Katie Fogarty 39:55
All of that is going into the show notes. Thank you, Natalie. This wraps A Certain Age, a show for women aging without apology. Before I say goodbye, a quick favor: I would love it if you could take five minutes to write an Apple Podcasts review. Do you feel more creative, inspired, or smarter after listening to today's show? Do you feel less alone, more connected to a tribe of amazing midlife women? If so, please take five minutes to rate or review the show over on Apple Podcasts — reviews help the show grow. Special thanks to Michael Mancini, who composed and produced our theme music. See you next time, and until then — age boldly, beauties.