Today’s episode focuses on what can sometimes be an unpopular subject. Failure.

Before you decide to skip this one, know this: failure is a key part of playing games.

Play is our most valuable learning strategy. Play is how humans, throughout time, have learned to do things they don’t yet know how to do.

The way we level up is to experiment, fail, learn, and then find a new answer. No matter what kind of game you’re learning to play, the more open you are to failure, the faster you will be able to test theories and learn. In this episode, we’ll look at failure through a prism of perspectives. We’ll acknowledge that it is both hard and helpful, and brainstorm how we might make the most of failure experiences as a tool to push onward in our creative work.

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Fail Forward and Level Up Guided Activity

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Whether you enjoy visualization, or it’s a stretch for you, our exploration in this episode will help you see more clearly how to put this skill to use in your creative thinking.

Whatever kind of writer or storytelling artist you are, being able to “see” the world of your story in your mind will multiply your effectiveness in many ways.

Today, we’ll focus on how this skill will help you play games more effectively, whether they are intended to help you reflect, ideate, revise, learn, or collaborate.

Ready to play your way to the page with me?

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Do you prefer to personalize your approach or stick exactly to prescribed guidelines? Either way, by starting with a simple recipe, you give your creativity a play space in which to innovate.

In Season Two of Creative Lift, we’re putting the discoveries from Season One’s Hero’s Journey to practical use. In today’s episode, we’ll explore how to use the simple recipes in improv and other similar games to jumpstart creative thinking.

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Reflect Playfully: The Five Whys

Ideate Playfully: Build a Scene

Revise Playfully: The Shape of Words on a Page

Collaborate Playfully: Make the Most of Feedback

Learn Playfully: Profile Three Experts

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As an improv teacher, one of my very first goals in a workshop is to unlock the power of “Yes, and…” in our classroom. “Yes, and…” is what allows players to actually have fun while improvising. Working with writers, I’ve discovered that developing this mindset is equally important. No matter what kind of storytelling artist we are, we need to say “Yes and…” to our own hunches, and also to external clues like prompts, new information that shows up with unexpected serendipity, or even to feedback from caring collaborators.

In Season Two of Creative Lift, we’re putting the discoveries from Season One’s Hero’s Journey to practical use. In today’s episode, we’ll explore the “Yes, and…” mindset, and its variations, that each play their own roles as part of the creative process.

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Wikipedia – Neils Bohr

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Do you remember playing make-believe as a kid? Maybe you had an ongoing world you would step into, where the story was always waiting to sweep you away. Whether you played long-form make-believe or just popped into imaginary worlds now and then, I wonder: What was your doorway in?

In Season Two of Creative Lift, we’re putting the discoveries from Season One’s Hero’s Journey to practical use. Knowing that play is important and actually playing as part of your creative practice are two completely different things. And while a general openness to play will be valuable in all aspects of your life, play can become a reliable creative tool when you have a couple elements in place. So, what are those elements? And what impossibilities might play make possible?

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In order to share our stories, we must shape them into stories. We find the unifying thread, choose the meaningful details, and let the extra questions and loose ends fade into the background. Just as when we write stories, when we live them the theme is more likely to be a question instead of an answer. The question is your call to adventure, and the story we live through is the nuanced answer.

In Season One of Creative Lift, we’ve experienced a Hero’s Journey. We answered the call to adventure and have been exploring how play works in our creative process, and how it might not be working quite the way we hope. Today we’ll bring the story we’ve been playing through in Season One to a close and explore the question: What makes a satisfying end to a story?

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Creative Pep Talk Podcast featuring Brian McDonald

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What if we, as adults, celebrated milestones and transitions in the way we encourage kids to do? What might the equivalent of a 5-year-old holding an “I just graduated from kindergarten” sign be for an adult? While the moments of “graduation” might not be so tangible, so much growth and change happens in our adult years. How might we mark that growth in a meaningful way?

In Season One of Creative Lift, we’ve experienced a Hero’s Journey. We answered the call to adventure and have been exploring how play works in our creative process, and how it might not be working quite the way we hope. Last week, we experienced the climax of our story and came away with a specific gift. Today, we’ll explore how you might claim that gift more fully, and mark the important growth you’ve achieved in this process. 

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Like developing our creativity, developing our inner strength is both a little bit harder and also a whole lot easier than we make it out to be.

Harder because to meaningfully build inner strength, we need to intentionally practice. Strength does develop quietly in the background, but it can also atrophy. If we leave it up to chance, it’s easy to find ourselves in need of strength that just isn’t there. Maybe you’re wondering: How might we practice strength? It’s a great question. Practicing strength isn’t as tangible as practicing a one-handed cartwheel.

When a skill is hard to see or measure, that’s when story becomes such a valuable tool. In fact, the story we’ve been playing through in this first season of Creative Lift has been designed for this very purpose—to build our creative strength.

In Season One of Creative Lift, we’ve experienced a Hero’s Journey. We answered the call to adventure and have been exploring how play works in our creative process, and how it might not be working quite the way we hope. In today’s episode, it’s time for the climax of the story, when we face off with our dragon and see where the moment takes us. Sometimes a dragon is vanquished in one encounter, but often the result of standing face to face with them is that we renegotiate our relationship and find a more workable relationship for our ongoing creative health.

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Do you ever find yourself with cheeks aflame, heart thumping, even shouting at someone who’s only trying to help, “You don’t understand! I can’t do this!!”

When I leave a conversation like that, completely unsatisfied, sometimes I’ll realize … I just fought fiercely on behalf of my limitations. And we—my limitations and I—we won. What if we could tap into this powerful strength of conviction, energy, and passion, but use it on behalf of throwing doors open rather than slamming them shut?

In Season One of Creative Lift, we’ve experienced a Hero’s Journey. We answered the call to adventure and have been exploring how play works in our creative process, and how it might not be working quite the way we hope. In today’s episode, we enter the third trial which focuses on naming the obstacle that we’ve begun to see as we’ve been playing our way to the page. If we were to envision our fear, memory, expectation, belief, or emotion as a dragon, what would that dragon look and feel like? What is its essence? What if that dragon is actually trying to help us … and if so, how might we rework our relationship with it so that we can coexist more effectively?

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