Thought leadership of Leading Through Challenging Times focuses on emotional intelligence. Want to influence through tough times? Learn to manage emotions.
Stop branding. Start leading.
By Aaron Templer
Brand management and leadership share a common space: Influence. Can a brand share characteristics of a good leader? Or must it?
Process vs. Product
By Aaron Templer
I’m interested in the business-minded pursuit of understanding creativity. I’m not sure what to do with it, but I’m interested. One thought that keeps coming to mind: The creative processes that I’m most familiar with don’t start with outcome. I can’t help but wonder if this is why businesses are tripping over the concept and have such a hard time integrating it into their working environments. Business, by its nature, solves a problem for someone. If there’s no problem to be solved, there’s no market. No market, no money. The creative processes that business minds are trying to learn from start in a very different place. A place of expression, not fixing. Exploring the problem, not solving it. If you […]
A Social Contract For The Holidays
By Aaron Templer
A social contract is, by definition, up to all of us. Those of you with kids you know the situation. The daycare is closing, you white knuckle it during rush hour to pick them up (Why does my boss insist on dropping stuff on me late in the day! A 3:00 email about that—really?). You’re not the only working professional struggling to get there on time. You arrive to a line of idling cars, tensions can be high. Think about it from the daycare side for a moment. Late pickups have costs. Overtime for the staff, delayed hours for the janitorial crew, tired staff need to manage hungry, tired kids… it’s an issue. So what would you do if a daycare center came […]
A one night stand with Ignite Denver
By Aaron Templer
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 […]