Episode 10: Make Art Now.

In our final episode of the season, I talk with Harris III, who shares his unexpected journey as a professional magician, storyteller, author, and the director and curator of Story Gatherings, an international conference on storytelling. We talk about misusing our imaginations, the importance of wow and how, and the lifesaving power of art.

Tricia: [00:00:03] Hey there. I’m Tricia Rose Burt, and I want to ask you a question. What creative work are you called to do but are too afraid to try? Are you in IT but dream of doing standup? A PR exec who longs to write a screenplay? Did the pandemic change your priorities and you want to leave your fully funded PhD, M.D. program and go to New Mexico and paint? Or maybe you’re like I was in my early career, trapped in a lucrative but soul crushing corporate job when what I really wanted to do was tell stories on stage. In this podcast, we’ll hear from artists who took an unexpected leap and found the courage to answer their creative call so we can inspire you to answer yours, because this is no time to be timid. [00:00:51][48.6]

Tricia: [00:00:52] Welcome to the show. In this episode, our last one of the season, we’re going to explore the 10th principle of the No Time to Be Timid Manifesto, “Make Art Now.” So I went back and listened to what I said in the Prologue at the start of the season. If you haven’t heard it, go back and listen if you get a chance. And I talked about how podcasting was a new medium for me and how I’m never wild about being a beginner. But if I was going to encourage you to step into your creative selves, I had to do the same thing. And let me tell you, there were some moments during this season when I thought, whose idea was this? But the name of the podcast was NoTime to be Timid, so I had to keep going. I kept the manifesto posted on my studio wall. Every artist I picked, every episode I produced was as much for me as it was for you. [00:01:55][63.2]

Tricia: [00:01:55] Recently, my creative coach, Mark McGuinness, who was my guest on Episode four, said something very wise. He said producing season one of a podcast is like putting the wings on the airplane while it’s going down the runway and you’re getting your pilot’s license at the same time. But then he said with season two, the plane’s sitting on the tarmac and it’s ready to take you wherever you want to go. I think that applies to any medium or project that you’re just beginning. It takes a while to find your groove and then you can soar. [00:02:29][34.3]

Tricia: [00:02:30] One of the other things I mentioned in the Prologue of this podcast is how making art saved my life. It did, and it continues to do so, which is why I encourage everyone to make art now. It is food for our souls. And in this episode, our guest Harris III vouches for the life saving power of art as well. He’s a magician, a storyteller, the author of the book “The Wonder Switch,” which was lauded by both Krista Tippett and Seth Godin. And he’s the director and curator of the Story Gatherings an international conference on storytelling. I’m just delighted he could join us. [00:03:12][42.8]

Tricia: [00:03:12] Okay. Harris, tell me, what was your first act of creative courage? [00:03:26][13.4]

Harris: [00:03:27] Hmm. Probably at nine years old, I got a magic kit for Christmas from my grandmother, which was not at all what I wanted for Christmas that year. I know this sounds crazy, but even at nine, I thought magic was kind of cheesy. Most kids love magic. But my only experience with magic tricks around nine was like just seeing this guy come to my school, and maybe there’s a part of me that actually thought it was cool now that I’m telling the story, I’ve not thought about this before. I’ve been thinking a lot about how bullying as a child shaped me in the way that I saw the world. And now I’m even wondering if I actually thought the magician who came to my school was actually cool but because the older kids around me, I was in a very small school with just a few kids per class, they were like, Oh, that was so cheesy. That was so dumb, blah, blah, blah. And they were making fun of him. So I was like, Oh yeah, totally. That wasn’t cool. But long story short, I learned this magic trick at my grandmother’s house in the bedroom I was staying in. I think to myself, this is not at all what I asked for for Christmas this year. I get this magical kit. I develop the courage to like go perform this first trick from mom and dad thinking it was going to be dumb and they thought it was going to be dumb. And then I walked in and like, mom and dad gather around. Here’s what Grandma got me for Christmas. I put a little red ball in a cup. I covered up with the lid. I took the lid off. It, disappeared, put the lid back on, waved my hands, magically it reappeared. Their chins dropped. Their eyes widened. They were like, Wow, what just happened? How did you do that? They were genuinely amazed. Now that I’ve actually studied the neuroscience of awe and wonder, I realized that wonder was contagious. Now I understand what’s happening, but in that moment my mind was blown. I couldn’t believe that I just done something to impress someone else. And it was the first time that I ever remember someone else being amazed by something that I had done. [00:05:15][108.0]

Tricia: [00:05:16] Oh, that’s so fantastic. And I also I love the part that you said about being bullied because I was reading a lot of your work and about who can crush our wonder and crush our enthusiasm to be creative and be an artist and be different and do go down the path we wanted to go down. And so I like that that realization of like, well, maybe I actually did think it was cool, but I was trying to hang with the other people, you know? [00:05:42][26.6]

Harris: [00:05:43] Yeah, you’ve got me thinking. I need to go process that some more. [00:05:45][2.3]

Tricia: [00:05:47] I know you were a practicing magician still. So how many years have you been a magician? [00:05:51][4.2]

Harris: [00:05:53] Depends on when you start counting, because there’s not really a clear, defining moment where I was like, Oh, I’m going to be a magician now. It’s just I did way more magic shows at 12 than I did at 11. I did way more magic shows at 13 than I did at 12. But I specifically remember sitting down with my parents at our little kitchen table when I was 15 years old, and them explaining to me at tax time that I had made more money doing magic shows that year than they had made through both of their minimum wage jobs combined. [00:06:19][26.3]

Tricia: [00:06:20] Wow. [00:06:20][0.0]

Harris: [00:06:20] It just kind of snowballed. And so there was never this clear time where I’m like, I’m going pro. And so it’s hard to kind of calculate how many years I’ve been professionally performing magic, but I got a magic kit for Christmas 30 years ago this month. [00:06:33][12.8]

Tricia: [00:06:34] That’s hysterical. And also, just how those things can happen in our lives. We have no idea what trajectory it’s going to put us on. No idea. [00:06:43][8.8]

Harris: [00:06:44] Yeah, I certainly didn’t imagine it. [00:06:45][1.3]

Tricia: [00:06:46] Yeah. So I was fortunate enough to go to your Story conference in September, and I got some of the story firsthand from you. And I want you to tell a couple of pieces of that, because I’m like you, a spreader of the gospel of story and yours was incredibly powerful. [00:07:02][16.8]

Harris: [00:07:03] Yeah, sure. I mean, I performed on a cruise ship for the first time when I was 16. I was touring professionally. I dropped out of high school after my freshman year to go tour full time. My parents called it hotel school. It was like a home schooling program, basically, that I did on the road. But I remember absolutely nothing that I learned after freshman year. It was full, undivided attention to touring professionally as a magician. And I mean, it’s pretty ironic. You think about, you know, as someone who from an early age was trained in the ways of deception, like how to trick people for the sake of entertaining them. And along the way, I was being tricked and deceived myself. By the time I was 21, I’d made $1,000,000. But one, no one had taught me how to manage money very well, and that wasn’t my parents fault, they never had money to manage. My mom worked as a housekeeper on a college campus. My dad cut out foam that went inside of furniture at a factory. And so performing these minimum wage jobs didn’t give them lots of resources, so they didn’t have any practice managing money. And even if they did, I have a feeling, knowing what I know now about myself, I wouldn’t have listened to them anyway. Right? I was like, I’ve got it all figured out. I’m going to travel the world, I’m going to get rich and famous. So I’m making all this money. I’m just keeping up with the Joneses. I’m believing all these lies about myself that aren’t true, that were fed to me by thousands of messages in advertisements today. And I’m just consistently reaching for the illusion of more. And so it doesn’t matter how much you have. I was making good money at 21. It doesn’t matter how much you have. It’s never enough if you’re constantly reaching for the illusion of more. And so keeping up with the Joneses led me to make some really bad financial decisions. I racked up over $300,000 of consumer debt. We’re not talking about mortgages like to buy a home that didn’t include the mortgage on my home that I’d just built. That’s just bad consumer debt on just stuff trying to impress other people so I could manage their perceptions of me and somehow control the narrative that they had about who I am and how I wanted them to see me. And so that led to everything kind of coming crashing down at 22, not knowing who I am or what to do with my life, or how to dig out a mountain of debt. [00:09:04][121.2]

Tricia: [00:09:05] That will get your attention. [00:09:06][0.6]

Harris: [00:09:09] There’s obviously more to the story. I’m now 39, but that’s what led to that that moment that you referenced. Yes. [00:09:15][5.9]

Tricia: [00:09:16] There are those moments in our lives. It’s like, okay, so there’s that. And now what I do with that information that’s in front of me, with that story that I have now told. Tell the moment, please, if you will, the part in the story where you had a moment that puts you on a different path. [00:09:32][15.5]

Harris: [00:09:33] Yeah. You know, coming out of that experience, I never actually filed for official bankruptcy. I just. I had to sell my house. I sold one of our cars. We moved to the opposite side of our town. My wife and I got invited on this artist retreat down in El Salvador, and I interacted with poverty for the first time. By that point, I’d performed in multiple countries, I’d done tours in Europe and even some parts of Southeast Asia, but had never actually gone into communities and interacted with poverty, interacted with people that were living in a one room shack, struggling to figure out where their next meal was going to come from. Meanwhile, I’m whining and complaining about how difficult my life is back home in America. And so you start to have these wake up moments. You’re like, what am I doing with my life? What I did know is that I didn’t want to be on the path that I was on. I just wasn’t sure what where to go from here, right? What to do next? I knew what I didn’t want to do. I just didn’t know what I wanted. But the only thing I knew how to do was magic shows. And so I was just kind of just responding to these random invitations. If you wanted a magic show, I would go do it. Some of it felt, I was a little bit cynical towards it. And one of those things was performing in schools. You know, every now and then I would do an evening show at a theater, which I kind of enjoyed more than going into a school gymnasium. Right? Like, I like the theater. It’s a better stage, better sound system, better lights, a lot of glamour, not quite, right? [00:10:54][81.0]

Tricia: [00:10:55] A lot of glamour in a school gymnasium. [00:10:56][1.0]

Harris: [00:10:57] Yeah, exactly. So I remember walking into the school in the state of Michigan, and all I was there for was to try to sell some tickets to a show later that night. And I walk in and the principal goes, You’re the magician. Mmm huh. And he goes, Well, you know how to trick people, right? I’m like, I mean, what do you say that I guess that’s what a magician does, right? And he goes, Well, you know, instead of just going out there and doing magic tricks for those kids, can you, like, help them understand how they’re getting tricked into making the choices they’re making? I was like, Excuse me? What? He’s like, you know, you travel around the world. I read your bio. I bet you’ve learned a lot. Not not knowing anything about my story or what I was, you know, this mountain of debt I was trying to dig out of. He’s just like go share some of your story. No one had ever asked me to do that before. I had presented messages, right? Like, Hey, here’s this company event. This is our theme; present this message. Or you’re at this church event, present this message. You’re at this school event. Talk about bullying. No one had ever said, tell your story or whatever that story is. And so I’m like, I don’t, in my mind, I’m like, I don’t I don’t think I’m what you’re asking me to be. He starts describing it and I’m like, sounds a lot like a motivational speaker. And that was as cheesy to me as magicians when I was a kid. So I’m like, I’m not gonna do that. [00:12:09][71.9]

Tricia: [00:12:09] As magic at nine. [00:12:09][0.0]

Harris: [00:12:09] Yeah, exactly. Long story short, he’s like, I believe in you. Gives me this pat on the back, goes out, introduces me, right? I walk out of this gym floors like a thousand teenagers. I do some magic. I don’t remember all the tricks I did that day. I do remember I got out of a straitjacket. That was the last thing that I finished with a la Harry Houdini. Couple of students strapped me inside of it. I get out of it. That’s usually the part where I’m like Ta Da! I got out of a straitjacket. Everyone collapsed, and that’s the end. And I look over as I’m getting out of the straitjacket, and this principal is like giving me this thumbs up. Like, come on. Like, this is the part, like tell them your story, right? Yeah. Yeah. And I. It’s like a home video etched into my brain. Like, I remember looking at the straight jacket, looking up at the audience, looking back at the straitjacket and thinking, that was really hard. Like, it’s hard to get out of a straitjacket. It’s even painful sometimes. I pulled a lot of muscles around my shoulder trying to get out of a straitjacket, and I just remember thinking like, gosh, I’ve had a lot of straitjackets in my lifetime, metaphorically, so I’m just going to talk about some of those and opened up for the first time about the bullying, even abuse in my childhood from a family friend, to addictions that I struggled with throughout my teenage years, to making $1,000,000 and then wasting $1,000,000 and then feeling like I had the straitjacket of debt that I was trying to dig out of, just straitjacket after straitjacket after straitjacket. And ironically, I didn’t have any answers. There was no like motivational speech at the end. It was just, here’s my story. And I know people like me when they come and speak to people like you, high school students, we’re supposed to be like, so here’s the principle and here’s the thing, and here’s what I want you to go do with your life. Here’s what I want you to believe. And I was just kind of honest and raw and vulnerable, was like, I don’t I don’t feel like I have all the answers. What I do know is I’m here today in this moment doing something I love and like, magic tricks, for all of you. And I don’t have it all figured out. And I think you guys have the pressure to have it all figured out all the time. But look at this journey that I’ve had and I’m still standing. Keep going. There’s always hope. And there was like, this smattering of, like, golf clap across high school students. [00:14:16][127.1]

Tricia: [00:14:16] What just happened? [00:14:17][0.5]

Harris: [00:14:17] Yeah, they all file out of the gym except for this young lady, and she walks up to me with tears in her eyes, and she’s just like, Hey, Mr. Harris, I have something for you. I’m like, What is it? And she said, Hold out your hands. I cup my hands out in front of her. She reaches in her pocket, pull something out, drops a razor blade into my hands and said, That’s my straitjacket and I don’t want it anymore. But you’re the first person to ever make me feel like maybe my life matters or the first person to ever give me hope. And then she turned and walked away. In that moment I never even got her name. But obviously you don’t forget an experience like that from seeing the scars on her wrists as she walked away. And I saw her sort of sheepishly put her hands into her pockets to the feeling of like, what just happened? Like, I can’t just leave the school and go over to the theater to start setting up to perform the show that night like that messes with your head, right? And I became obsessed with trying to understand why would someone do that to themselves? Why? Because I had I I’d had some rough experiences, like, you know, when you experience abuse as a child. We’re not talking about just words in the form of bullying, like actual abuse. That’s that’s hard. That sucks. But it never led me for some reason, to the point of, like, self-harm or thinking about suicide. And so I had never interacted with someone who had hurt themselves like that. And I just went down the rabbit hole of research to try to understand why. And that’s what led me back to not just these different principles of deception that make magic tricks work. But I became a little less interested in how magic tricks work and wanting to understand why. That helped me discover narrative and the power of storytelling and the role that storytelling and storytellers play in the world. It made me become disenfranchized with the idea of entertaining people and making money. It made me far more interested in creating meaning in the world because that was addicting, right? In a healthy way. I was like, Well, I want more of that. I want less of signing autographs. And Harris can we take a selfie? Less of how did you do that magic trick? Can I guess? And you tell me if I’m right or not. And more, Hey, that story you just shared changed my life. That story you just shared gave me hope. Hey, your willingness to be vulnerable today changed the way that I see my world. Still see the world and my place in it. I wanted more of that. So that whole experience of sharing my story turned my life upside down in the best way possible. [00:16:41][143.8]

Tricia: [00:16:42] Yeah. Yeah. And, I mean, it’s a really powerful testimony to the power of story. And we’re not encouraged to be vulnerable in this world at all. And when we are vulnerable, there’s just seismic shifts that can happen with people, you know. And when someone encourages you to God bless that principle, whoever he is, you know what I’m saying? Who said, hey, your story matters, Harris. Let’s hear it. And then you have this snowball effect of changing so many people. Yeah, but I want you to close that story loop about the young woman who handed the razor blade to you. [00:17:14][32.8]

Harris: [00:17:15] Yeah, sure. Like ten years later. To be honest, I had this photo of me getting out of a straitjacket, which I hadn’t done in a long time. And it was sent to me by a photographer who was at an event that I was speaking at, is like, Hey, look at this cool shot of you holding up a straitjacket. I feel like you just conquered the straitjacket and you’re, like, holding it up in the air in triumph. And I’m like, That is a cool photo. Maybe I’ll post it on Instagram. I go to post it on Instagram, and I started with the photo first before the caption, and then I went to write the caption. I was like, What do I say about this? And so the first thing that came to mind was, let’s just tell the story about the young lady that dropped the razor blade in my hand. So I told that story. I said, Hey, a lot of you write about the story in my book, The Wonder Switch, you know, blah, blah, blah. I just kind of recapped it a little bit and then like less than 24 hours later I got a DM. I see it and I’m like, What is this? And it was a young lady named Jessica Lynn who said, Hey, you know, ten years ago you came to my school. I’ll never forget it. This was the year. This was the time. I walked up to you and dropped my razorblade in your hand and never picked up another razor blade again. I basically graduated from high school, made some big decisions in my life, ended up going to get to get my degree, got my masters. I’m now a child and family therapist helping other women and young kids who are struggling with the same stuff that I was struggling with when you came to speak to me, my school. And I don’t know if I’m the same girl that you were talking about in your post, but if I’m not, it just means you’ve helped so many others. I mean, I was like, Oh, my gosh, it is you. It is you. And so we had a chance to reconnect, virtually, got a chance to talk to her. And then we just met for the first time this past September since that moment. So fast forward all these years later, I got to tell the story at Story conference in front of some of the most powerful and influential storytellers in the world. And then we got to bring her on stage to say, hey, this, the vulnerability and the act of courage on Jessica’s part to come up and talk to me that day, there was like a, it was like a series of courage dominoes, right? So like the courage of a principal to say, hey, go tell your story, the courage on my part to hold up a straitjacket and get vulnerable for the first time. The courage of Jessica to come up and drop that razorblade in my hand. The courage of me to get curious around why would someone do this and do the research? And then it shift my career towards something that’s more meaning driven, even if it meant making less money for a while. Right? There was all these acts of courage that eventually led to Wait. If storytellers are this powerful, why is no one gathering them together to have a conversation about the collective power that we have as vocational storytellers? And I couldn’t find anyone who was doing it quite like the way that I was envisioning, which is why we started doing Story conference seven years ago. And so long story short, it was a cool way to bring her up on stage, say, hey, we’re all sitting in this room. You may not realize this, but because of this moment of the courage of this young lady that led to me asking questions, that led to me doing this conference, which led to all of you being here benefiting from all the other speakers you heard from over the last two days. It was really cool. [00:20:16][180.5]

Tricia: [00:20:17] It was wildly moving. I mean, this was my first conference I had been to. And because I’m a storyteller and I’ve had those moments where people reflect to me, Oh, this is what your story meant to me. And it’s incredibly moving when you hear that, you know, it’s cause, and it also is a storyteller, you go, I have to be really responsible for what’s coming out of my mouth because people are listening, you know? Yes, people are listening. And I want to be sharing those things that are hope and hopeful and and really. Yeah. Add meaning to the world. But when we all saw her come out on stage and heard the story, I mean, I don’t know that there was a dry eye in the house. Mm hmm. And also, the most wonderful thing you did was apparently she was getting married the next month. Yeah. And it just. I was like, people are good. Because you had said that the QR code up on the screen and said, give her a wedding present. And we’re all like donating money to Venmo like crazy people. It was just this really I mean, it really is this like hope in humanity thing happening there when you can just buoy someone along all because of courage, all because of story. It just, it just makes such a huge difference. [00:21:27][70.3]

Harris: [00:21:28] Yeah, that’s awesome. Well. [00:21:32][4.1]

Tricia: [00:21:38] We’ll get back to the second half of our conversation in a moment. But right now I want to tell you about our sponsor Interabang Books, a Dallas-based independent bookstore with a terrific online collection. At Interabang, their dedicated staff of book enthusiasts will guide you on your search for knowledge and the excitement of discovery. Shop their curated collection online at interabangbooks.com. That’s Interabang I N T E R A B A N G books dot com. Stay with us through the end of the episode to receive a special online offer. [00:22:13][35.2]

Tricia: [00:22:31] Harris, I have to tell you, you are the finale guest in our first season. [00:22:35][4.4]

Harris: [00:22:36] Oh, gosh, I’m honored. [00:22:37][0.8]

Tricia: [00:22:37] You know, we have this No Time to be Timid Manifesto. And you sort of check every point off the manifesto in the life that you’ve led. But we started out the Prologue with this quote from Mary Oliver, “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power, restive an uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” I just love that quote. [00:23:04][26.2]

Harris: [00:23:04] Yeah, I love that quote. I think it kind of it’s it’s similar to Maya Angelou when she said that there’s basically no greater burden than carrying around an untold story inside of you that’s meant to be told. That’s a paraphrase. I butchered it. I’m not as poetic as she is. But yeah, we don’t we don’t do well as human beings when we know there’s potential inside of us and we aren’t fulfilling it. Yeah. [00:23:24][19.9]

Tricia: [00:23:25] I really love this idea of the misuse of imagination. I love the idea that we’re imagining things as kids, but we don’t think we have an imagination as an adult. I mean, when I went to art school, I thought I had no imagination whatsoever. All my creative energy was being spent on how I wasn’t creative as opposed to going and making something. You know, I mean, I was just, this total misuse of it. [00:23:49][24.2]

Harris: [00:23:49] Totally. [00:23:49][0.0]

Tricia: [00:23:50] And there’s something connected to that Mary Oliver quote of just using this imagination, using our energy to limit ourselves, as opposed to saying, what happens if I do this? Which is the question they taught me in art school to always say, just ask yourself, what happens if I do this? You know, so I want you to talk a little bit about this whole idea of misusing imagination and how you’ve seen it sort of unfold in the work that you do and the people that you work with. [00:24:18][28.3]

Harris: [00:24:19] Yeah, sure. We actually did, my friend David Paul and his company came in to story a few years ago and we actually did some research by asking some of the again, some of the best storytellers in the world, you know, questions around what they are in fear of, what they worry about, how anxiety informs their creative process. We learned a whole bunch of really cool stuff that just kind of confirmed this way of thinking, and that is that worry and anxiety and oftentimes irrational fear, they are just simply misuses of imagination. And a lot of that came out of me getting frustrated because I was hired by all these companies to come in and talk about creativity and innovation. And, you know, we love to use the word creative as a noun, like, oh, I am a creative, or they are the creatives. Creative oftentimes in many organizations is a department down the hall. And so you have a leader who’s bringing me in going, Hey, can you talk to these people? They seem to have lost their sense of creativity. They’re not thinking in innovative ways. I’m like, Well, no wonder. They’re trying to outsource creativity to the office down the hall because they are the creatives, not them. And if Creative is a label that we use for a certain type of person or a group of people, well then that means it can’t be used by everyone. If someone if you are creative, that means maybe I’m not. Yes. Or if you are the creative or a creative. Right? And it’s really easy to sort of then use that as a scapegoat. Well, I don’t have to get creative. I can stay stuck in my ways. The best way to understand this is to actually think about story as an operating system. In our work, we call it the Story OS. Essentially, narrative drives behavior. We are storytelling creatures. We walk around all day long making up stories to make sense of our world, to make sense of our pain, of our experiences. We even go to bed at night while we are physically sleeping, our brain stays up all night long, telling more stories or doing some sense making around the stories we experience throughout our day. And so if we are these storytelling creatures, it is the stories that we tell ourselves, these narratives that we adopt as true regardless of whether they actually are true, which is a huge caveat. We could spend hours talking about just that, for better or for worse, these narratives that we adopt as true they are what drive all of our thinking, all the choices we make, the way we behave, the way we think, even the way we see ourselves in the mirror. It does not take more than a few magic tricks to prove that seeing is not believing. But we live as if what is true is equal to what our senses perceive. Like I’ll believe it when I see it. It’s common saying, right? Mm hmm. I can make a table levitate on stage. I could cut lady in half and put her back together again. You saw it with your own eyes. It doesn’t mean it was actually happening. It was not real. But what the science supports is that we as storytellers, these narratives which drive our belief systems, those beliefs actually inform what we see, which is why Jessica could stand in front of the mirror. And even though everyone around her, like her parents, saw a beautiful young lady who had amazing potential to be successful and could connect with others and was super likable, the lies that she had believed had turned into narratives. Those narratives were changing the way that she saw herself in the mirror. So she saw someone that wasn’t good enough, that wasn’t thin enough, that wasn’t talented enough, that wasn’t perfect enough. You know, fill in the blank with whatever enough you want, it’s there, right? And so if we’re storytelling creatures of narrative drives behavior, that means we’re always fast forwarding. Story is the operating system of our brain. My phone runs off of iOS, my brain runs off of Story OS, which means we’re fast forwarding in every single situation, all these different scenarios, your brain is simply fast forwarding in the story. We are all curious. You can’t turn curiosity off. It’s what we do as human beings. But when someone comes up and says, I’m not creative, we just look at the stories they’re telling themselves. We realize, Oh my gosh, you’re writing a like an Oscar worthy screenplay in your head. It just happens to be a horror film instead of something hopeful and optimistic. And so that is creative energy. We are creating these stories about the future all day. We are recreating stories from our past all day. It’s all creative energy, which means every human being on the planet is constantly creating from a place of curiosity. We are just misusing that creativity. We are misusing that imagination by allowing it to be consumed by negativity, pessimism, worry, fear, anxiety. And all we’ve got to do is practice a reallocation. And by reallocating, yeah. [00:28:46][267.2]

Tricia: [00:28:47] You talk about the idea that I may have wonder and one area of my life, but not another. Like I may be able to do it here. Like I’m really good at business. I’m a great parent, but I couldn’t be creative. I couldn’t excel there. Whatever the word excel means. [00:29:02][15.0]

Harris: [00:29:03] In our coaching work, I was we were working with a client who was incredibly creative and innovative. Their wonder was thriving in their professional work life, but not in their relationships. So it’s like, Oh yeah, let’s try it this way. We could totally do this and disrupt this thing and recreate the way this has been done forever. This person desperately wanted to be in a marriage relationship, but then just was not taking the action necessary to pursue any relationships. And that’s when I realized, okay, there is not a one huge overarching narrative. We have these sort of subplots in our lives. We all have a political narrative, a family narrative, a financial narrative, a religious narrative, right? We could go on and on and on. And so the presence of wonder in our lives is connected to whether that narrative is broken or healed. The thing that breaks the narrative is trauma, obviously, just like any other story. And so this particular person had a lot of trauma that was unresolved and unhealed in their relational narrative, in the romantic narrative, but not in their work narrative. Their work narrative had been absent of trauma and had only been awesome, right? And so wonder was present which gave birth to curiosity because I think curiosity is just wonder in action and one type of curiosity in one narrative, a different type of curiosity in the other. [00:30:21][78.1]

Tricia: [00:30:21] Yeah. You know, what’s also interesting is you were mentioning about when our wonder can get crushed and who can crush it and then who can flip it back on. I can remember when I was in art school and I was really proud because of instead of painting strokes, I had used stitching, right? And I was doing all this type of stitching on a canvas. And then this one assistant said, Well, that’s kind of a cheap solution, don’t you think? I mean, it just floored me. I was just reeling. And then a couple of weeks later, I had another teacher go, Well, what a good idea that is. I was like, okay, I’m back to you. But there are these influential people in our lives who, with one comment, can instead of saying, Oh, I want to go take that television class, they’ll go, Why would you do that? And you sort of scurry away. It’s that wet blanket that comes out and you just run away. [00:31:17][55.3]

Harris: [00:31:17] Yeah, well, you are a meaning maker because you’re human. And so when he says that, you have to make sense of that experience and so even he even if he gave you that short sentence, you as a storyteller have to turn that into a story to make sense of the pain or that whatever feelings you felt. And so oftentimes you make up the story in that scenario of, well, gosh, am I lazy? am I untalented? Am I trying to take a shortcut? Am I even cut out for this? And you start questioning your entire existence as an artist, right? [00:31:43][25.5]

Tricia: [00:31:43] It’s totally like I should not get out of bed. [00:31:46][2.1]

Harris: [00:31:46] Exactly. But that happens to us from a very young age. A teacher questions us or calls us out. You know, a coach has a bad day and you’re out on the basketball court and overcorrects you in a way that’s too extreme in front of your friends. And, you know, when we’re not equipped with enough emotional intelligence to make sense of those painful experiences, we have to do it by way of storytelling. And so we make up these stories. These narratives come jelled, and we go our entire lives, not realizing that we’ve got enough agency to take back that pen, sometimes even from ourselves, and just rewrite a new story. Yeah. [00:32:23][37.2]

Tricia: [00:32:24] You’ve been making me think about magic in a very different way. And I like, you have a line of the creative process of the magician. And in my very small brain, I was like, Magicians do magic tricks. It never occurred to me that they had to create the magic tricks. I don’t know where I thought they came from. But talk to me a little bit about the creative process of a magician. [00:32:46][22.1]

Harris: [00:32:47] I would say what makes it most unique is that we live in the land of impossibility, right? Like anything is possible with magic. I don’t actually have the ability to make a car appear in the middle of nowhere. And David Copperfield cannot actually make the Statue of Liberty disappear, which means if he can’t actually make it disappear, it is our job as magicians to reverse engineer a way to create the illusion that it disappeared. For me, to create the illusion that a car appears right? Making a car appear on a stage in a theater is far more complicated than making a car appear in a basketball arena on a gym floor. Right. Why? Well, if I’m making a car appear, it’s not materializing from nowhere. I’m probably moving it from somewhere and putting it in place. Or I’m removing a cloak that made it an unvisible, not invisible. Because that’s not possible. [00:33:40][52.4]

Tricia: [00:33:40] Oh yeah. [00:33:40][0.0]

Harris: [00:33:41] But not visible to you to reveal it at a certain time, right? And so there’s all these different principles of deception that we can layer in. But essentially what’s happening is that we’re starting with something that is genuinely impossible, but yet with magic, the principles of magic. The art of magic. There’s always a way to reverse engineer a path of possibility towards creating that illusion of the thing that we thought was impossible actually being possible. And I think there’s a lot of principles and ways that we can be inspired and learn from that regardless of what we’re doing. Far too often we dream and create within the realms of what we conceive as possible, and that sort of puts us in a box and puts these parameters. And when I talk about this, a lot of people get sort of cynical and roll their eyes and they’re like, Oh, sure, sure, sure. Like, anything’s possible, blah, blah, blah. And it’s not that anything literally is possible, but magicians are a great proof that we can’t actually do the stuff for real that you see us create on stage. But we don’t let that get in the way. We created the appearance that it was. And not having that that constraint of having to operate within that realm gives us the ability to find ideas that otherwise we would never be able to find. Like, what if the car could come from the ceiling? What if we could cut a hole in the middle of the gym floor and raise it up from the bottom? What if we brought in a bunch of, like, chimpanzees that ran around during a part of the magic trick and people were so focused on the monkeys, they missed the part that we we covered the car in, like, hardwood gym floor veneer and just drove it right behind the curtain. So when the curtain dropped, you’re like, where did that come from? Right? There’s so many options. But we start in the world of anything’s possible. [00:35:21][100.3]

Tricia: [00:35:21] Way out of the box, way out of the box. [00:35:24][2.1]

Harris: [00:35:24] We most often skip over what I call the wild part of the creative process, because most of us are looking at what’s possible through the lens of how, right? Magicians start with Wow, what’s the wow moment we want to create? How is like a completely separate meeting, right? But companies do this, individuals do this. We combine the wow stage and the how stage and then all the how people end up howing the wow people to death like, that won’t work. That won’t work. This isn’t possible. We don’t have enough money. We don’t have enough time. Right? And if you just simply change those those declarative how statements into questions, it allows creativity to continue. Right? I’m a wow person. My wife is a how person. Her skill set and superpower is essential or I would be bankrupt again in a ditch somewhere dead, right? Because I see nothing but possibility, right? Yeah. Yeah. But if a how person says that won’t work, that shuts down creativity. If a how person says, Well, I’m leveraging my superpower and I’m able to fast forward in this story and see what if this happens, how would you respond to that? Well, that’s just a curious how question. Yeah. And now by shifting the language and putting a question mark at the end, it allows my creativity to continue and it gives me gratitude for the how part of the process, because I can say, oh, well, I didn’t think about that because I don’t I don’t see all those terrible things that might happen like you do. But now that you ask, yeah, let me think about that. And then now I can to continue creative, creating, innovative brainstorming, to come up with a solution and go, well, I guess if that were to happen, this is how I would respond to it. Okay, well, what would you do if this happens? Well, that’s I hadn’t thought about that either and I’m back to the drawing board again. So we have to let Wow breathe. And if we’re undisciplined in this regard, I just recommend separate wow and how to two different stages of your creative process. Have a time for a wow and then have a time for how. [00:37:13][108.5]

Tricia: [00:37:13] Exactly. Hey, before we wrap up, I want to ask you your question. What are you working on right now that’s scaring you? [00:37:20][6.6]

Harris: [00:37:22] Oh. I’m realizing that what, the short answer to the question is, I’m realizing that most people in the world think what they need is content. By that I mean if I just take this class or if I get access to this course or whatever version of content, I will be able to DIY my life. And what I’m actually realizing is what people need is not just the right content, but the right coaching, the help of a mentor or a guide. And yet even that falls short if we don’t do in the context of connection and community. And there’s this really beautiful relationship with the right content, with the right coaching in the context of the right community. And so we’ve been building something over the last two and a half years that I’ve been really quiet about, called the Poetics. It was inspired by a thought from Aristotle about what he feels like is the way of making things. What I think storytellers make is culture. And so I’ve been excited to step into building a community of storytellers and artists and creators and entrepreneurs who can leverage performing what I call their wonder work to reshape and repaint the future. But to do that comes with putting myself out in the world in some ways that I have cynicism towards. Like, even when you say the word coach or when you say the word community, these days people are just like, Oh, another one of those. Yeah, yeah. [00:38:49][86.3]

Tricia: [00:38:49] Yeah, yeah. [00:38:49][0.2]

Harris: [00:38:50] But yet we I really feel like we’re leveraging some groundbreaking science and research in our approach to how people change. And I’m excited about the team of people that we’ve been building to shape the future together. So it’s the first time I’ve said the word Poetics in a public conversation, like a podcast interview. And so even just saying it out loud is simultaneously exciting and like whoo! This is a new endeavor. Yeah. So let’s see how it goes. [00:39:16][25.8]

Tricia: [00:39:16] That’s fantastic. Well, we’re very excited about that. We’re really excited about that. Harris, thank you so much for joining us. I’m so glad you took the time to do it. And yeah, we’ll keep an eye out for everything that you’re doing. [00:39:26][10.2]

Harris: [00:39:27] Oh, it’s an honor and privilege. Thank you for what you’re doing. You are a part of the stories that need to be told to give people the courage and the curiosity to step back into a place of wonder. Wonder gives us permission to believe. And so I think of every single podcast episode, it’s another chance to give people just a little bit more permission to believe. And if seeing is not believing, but believing is seeing, then your permission to believe that you grant to people, gives them the opportunity to change what they see in the mirror, in themselves and the world around them when they perform their creative work. So what you’re doing is essential. Keep it up, please. [00:40:03][35.3]

Tricia: [00:40:03] Thank you. Thank you so much. Take care. [00:40:06][2.4]

Harris: [00:40:06] You too. [00:40:06][0.2]

Tricia: [00:40:16] Well, like every single guest I’ve had on the show this season, Harris makes me think about the choices I make and what I want to accomplish with my creative life. Here are some questions for all of us to ponder. Are you misusing your imagination and creating an Oscar-worthy horror film about your life instead of creating something positive? What stories are you telling yourself about your creative potential? And how could you create more meaning in the world? Think about telling your own story. [00:40:49][33.1]

Tricia: [00:40:49] And make sure to follow Harris on Instagram at Harris the third, which is Harris and three lowercase I’s. And check out this episode’s shownotes for more information. If you haven’t had a chance to download the No Time to be Timid Manifesto yet, make sure to visit my website. triciaroseburt.com. And while you’re there, please reach out and give us some feedback about the show. We’d love to hear your thoughts. And if you feel like this is no time to be timid in your own life, then maybe I can help you with that. In my private coaching practice, I help my clients to tell and live better stories. Some of them are artists and creatives who want to express themselves in a new medium. Others are leaders who want to motivate groups to take action. And many of them are business professionals who want to better communicate with their customers and employees. You can reach out to me at triciaroseburt.com. And make sure to follow me on Instagram @triciaroseburt. [00:41:54][64.8]

Tricia: [00:41:54] Once again, our wonderful sponsor Interabang Books is offering a 10% discount on books we recommend on the show so you can stock your creative library. Since we talked a lot about the importance of telling your story this episode, we’re going to recommend The Moth’s new book, How to Tell a Story. Remember, when you tell your story, you never know whose life you might change, including your own. Buy the book at interabangbooks.com and receive a 10% discount when you use promo code, Not Timid. Again, that’s interabangbooks.com, promo code Not Timid. [00:42:40][45.7]

Tricia: [00:42:40] Thanks for listening to our inaugural season. We’re already hard at work on season two, so stay tuned. Most importantly, subscribe to the podcast so you’ll be the first to know when season two launches. Until then, remember, this is no time to be timid. No Time to be Timid is written and produced by me, Tricia Rose Burt. Our executive producer is Mia Rovegno, and our sound engineer is Adam Arnone of Echo Finch. If you like what you hear, please spread the word, subscribe to the show and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. No Time to be Timid is a presentation of I Will Be Good Productions. [00:42:40][0.0]

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