The whole Mudra crew was in a funk. Having just wrapped a 6-show run of Gyaan, a major production that dealt with heavy themes that we all put pretty much everything we had into producing and performing, we were down like Charlie Brown. Anyone who’s ever performed anything knows what kind of loss the day after the last show is. You might be glad the grind is over but there’s a big hole you now have to carry around where purpose, community, and satisfying creative expression used to be. Our hole was deep. It was like being dumped. So when Ignite Denver called with the news that one of their speakers had dropped out sick two days before their event, […]
Storytelling the Three Over Four Way
By Aaron Templer
I had a terrific time working with The Colorado Medical Society this past May. The President of the CMS had a great idea to interweave storytelling techniques for leaders throughout the entire conference. His thinking was that we all leave these conferences full of energy, armed with new information to make changes in our society, businesses, or communities. But we’re missing the tools to actually do something about it. So I was brought in to help by way of providing techniques for leaders to tell stories. Storytelling being, of course, one of the more effective way to engage and move people. We did a few things to bring storytelling into the conference. (This is an environment which, incidentally, isn’t exactly […]
Speaking at CBCA’s Leadership Arts
By Aaron Templer
The Colorado Business Committee for the Arts is a terrific organization in here in Denver. They’re a true advocate for the creative industry as an economic power in our society. They’re the ones that perform and publish the creative industry economic impact study. They run a great six-month leadership program called Leadership Arts. It’s for people interested in serving on arts boards and I’ve been presenting Leading In A Social World at this program for years. It’s the perfect space for me: that intersection of arts and businesses, people with a desire to use their business acumen to make arts organizations stronger. Check out CBCA, and consider joining their Leadership Arts program if you’ve considered serving on an arts board.
Digital Marketing. Or, Marketing.
By Aaron Templer
A friend, mentor, and professor of mine was a leading voice in southern poetry. He wrote profoundly about many things, most notably about the martyrs of the civil rights movement and white privilege. So it made more than a little sense when the chair of his department asked him to teach a class about multiculturalism in American literature. He refused. And his reason why will stick with me forever. He told me “I told them that the history of American literature is multicultural. The entire damn American narrative is about our multiple cultures. I can’t see how we can teach any American literature course without it dealing with multiculturalism at its core.” At the risk of inflating my self importance […]
Getting over ourselves
By Aaron Templer
Thinking beyond yourself when you’re a teenager is as difficult as understanding #talklikeyourbestfriend as an adult. Relationships were limited because we weren’t chemically capable of thinking beyond ourselves. There comes a time, of course, when it becomes clear that relationships are more meaningful over the long haul when we put someone else’s needs on par or ahead of our own. There are more returns and deeper significance. But it requires us to think beyond ourselves and care for the other person in the relationship in ways that we were (or at least I was) incapable of as a teenager. (And yes, for me now. This is something I don’t have to tell most of you—mainly just myself. But it’s a […]
Not the viral you were hoping for
By Aaron Templer
Don’t you love the surveys like this one that pit congress approval ratings against things like lice and (worse) replacement refs? (Congress looses in a landslide in case you were wondering. You may now thank me for not using the phrase “Spoiler alert.”) They’re funny because they use the device of surprise. When you say something unexpected or place an element outside its usual context it makes us uncomfortable or jarred, and we laugh. The other response to an unexpected element is revulsion. Like the way a body works to expel a virus. It’s working against the system. It doesn’t fit. Kick up the heat to try to kill it, ‘cause it’s gotta go. This is what’s happening to marketing […]
Three things artists knew before you did
By Aaron Templer
Have you ever worked with someone who considers him or herself an artist first and a working professional second? You know, the ones that refer to the pursuit you consider a career as “my day job” or “my side thing?” They’re easy to spot if you haven’t looked. Bleary eyed from late-night gigs. Paint-stained finger nails. Less time to go out with the work crowd for a happy hour (I have an audition tomorrow). They leave work at work. They have a better music collection than yours. They’re everywhere actually. And believe it or not, their minds are hard-wired to understand things that the blogosphere and FastCompany literature are falling over themselves to get at. And I’m not just talking about how […]
Practice helps understand influence
By Aaron Templer
To the creative process, practice is critical. I’ve long been intrigued by the notion that artists (like athletes) spend 95% percent of their time practicing to execute well in the remaining 5% of their time. In business, it’s the opposite. There’s very little practice time in business, and we’re expected to execute all the time. There’s the occasional executive business program, leadership retreat, coaching session, or sabbatical. But those are rare, and some working professionals may never have the chance at any of those perks. There are many ways to practice and many techniques go in to practicing for various outcomes. This post from FastCompany Design got me thinking. Maybe we should talk more concretely about practice. Take a look […]
Extraordinary expectations. Or none at all. Whatever.
By Aaron Templer
I play percussion for a South Asian dance troupe. Many of the dancers are young women with such high energy and expressions of optimism and glee that it’s as if their life is accompanied by abundant exclamation points and OMG’s hanging over their heads wherever they go. Sometimes I’ll walk into a practice studio or a room filled with these dancers and their energy hits me like I’ve splashed down at the end of a water ride into a sparkly-pink, fruity perfume pool. It’s taken some getting used to. I thought of this when I read Kevin Kelly’s interesting piece about Extraordinary (clipped in this Farnam Street Blog post, where I found it). The gist: Because we are exposed so […]