Peter Himmelman

Learn to develop an instant trust that will make your team powerfully co-creative.

You need four things to grow your business.

• Better creativity
• Better processes
• Better solutions.
• Better products

The glue that holds any team together and allows these things to happen is trust. It’s trust alone that reduces fear and allows teams to become co-creative. The magic of Big Muse is that it allows you to quickly create trust.

I don’t need to introduce you to Marv, our acronym for: Majorly Afraid of Revealing Vulnerability®. If you’re human, you’re already well acquainted with him. He’s the voice of fear in all of us. We know from experience that Marv works too hard. He’s terrified of failure, shame and vulnerability. As our internal-critic, Marv’s job is to protect us from those “awful things”. (And he takes his job seriously!)

When Marv offers us his negative judgment, he’s only trying to help. But in doing so he stymies our growth and creativity. Taming him will lead your organization to greater competitiveness, adaptability to rapid change, and to greater productivity overall.

It’s axiomatic; if you can’t self-reflect, you can’t know yourself. If you can’t know yourself you can’t lead your own growth. If you can’t lead your own growth you can’t lead others. Learn to take control of your career and your life, so both you and your teams can perform better and lead more fulfilling lives. One of the keys to being resilient in these times of unceasing flux and disruption is not only to know your values, but to examine them, to write about them, and then… to make a plan to bring those values into every part of your life.

Words like courage, loyalty, honor, and integrity have sadly fallen into disuse. They are considered by many to be things found only in old movies and on Hallmark greeting cards. At Big Muse, we think about those words very differently. We believe that core values are what’s missing in today’s mercurial business climate; a sometimes, less than humane place, where many leaders appear to be clawing their way to some mythical “top” —in spite of the consequences to stakeholders, employees, and society at large.

(At Big Muse we’re not big on the word failure)

Experimentation is a necessary part of your path to success. Learn to treat it as a positive experience so that it becomes a catalyst, rather than an inhibitor to personal and professional growth.

Without the ability to try new things, employees become bored, and their boredom invariably leads to frustration. That frustration leads them to either, look for another job, or stick around to become a member of the aforementioned, 70% disengagement club, (or worse, the 20% company saboteur club)!

I know a young woman who works for a large international food chain. After hearing her speak about her frustration with having to deal with the company’s complex hierarchy and its intrusion into even the smallest decisions, I felt her pain. She admitted two things that stuck with me:

1.) She could accomplish so much more at her job if only she were given the opportunity to implement some of her own solutions to existing problems.
2.) She puts in only three hours of valuable work per week. The rest of the time she deals with a snail-paced, creativity-stifling bureaucracy.

In this important session, (primarily geared to upper management), we create conversation around both the costs and the benefits of allowing talented people to their creative muscles, to utilize their native creativity, and to put their innovative solutions to good use. Clearly, the way we see it, the benefits far outweigh the costs.

In this Big Muse session, we don’t simply talk; we create active scenarios in which leaders can safely explore their fears around experimentation. We create a lasting resilience to those fears so that they no longer stand in the way of achieving your goals of retaining talent, recruiting talent, and staying competitive.