In this Stories of Gold interview I’m joined by Talia Dashow. (This post is the first of three.)
Talia Dashow has been using creativity to heal, learn, grow, and connect all of her life – it’s how she’s wired. When Talia was little, she believed she was worthless and that the only way she could be worthwhile was to change into whatever her parents wanted her to be. Over the years she’s used creativity, especially where it intersects with spirituality, to love herself just the way she is. (It turns out that was what her parents wanted, after all!)
Along the way, Talia has earned a BA in English at UC Berkeley, a certificate as a volunteer mediator, and a certificate to lead Lego Serious Play workshops. With decades of experience in transforming her own life, Talia has expert tips and tricks to share with you to help you quiet your inner critic, and find your inner guidance.
How did your interest in creativity begin?
I’ve been making things all my life. I used to collect cardboard and boxes in my room, and my parents hated that. There was always a mess. I would make little models out of cardboard. I made dollhouse furniture I put on a shelf because I didn’t have a dollhouse.
I’ve always made stuff, but I didn’t think anything of it until I took this course, maybe 10 or 15 years ago, with some very, very smart people who said, Everybody has something that they do that is as natural as breathing, that no one else does quite like them. Many of us don’t value it because it comes as naturally as breathing. We reason, it can’t have any worth, becaue only the things that we work really hard for have any value. Their point was no actually what you do automatically is your gift.
What I uncovered in that course was that I bring play creativity and community building, to everything I do.
I started researching how I could make a living with my gift. That’s when I learned about Lego Serious Play and got certified in it.
That sounds fun! How did Lego Serious Play develop?
The story is Lego serious play was developed when the people in Lego corporate said, our company is all about play but our boardroom has nothing playful about it. We need to do something about that. So they hired some really smart people to study brains and hands and play and all this stuff. What they learned is that there is this really direct connection between the hands and the brain.
When you’re using left and right hands, you’re accessing right and left brain. You get the whole brain that way. When we evolved out of the trees, our hands started to change, to adapt to being able to grasp tools and make make things with fine motor skill. Our brain had to evolve to accommodate this. Our vision also changed because we’re no longer just in the canopy we had to be able to see farther away.
Our brains changed in response to our hands. When you use your hands, you access parts of your brain that you don’t get to, if you’re just talking or writing.
Then on top of that, if you build your idea out of Lego, you can hold your idea. You don’t have to hold it in your head. When someone else is talking, you can be confident that your idea is still held there. You don’t have to say this is what I’m going to say, it gives you space in your head to be able to hear other people. You get to listen with your eyes because you get to look at the models other people have built. It gives you a better understanding of what they’re trying to say.
How did the serious part of the play come in? Did they use that methodology in the boardrooms?
There’s actually a lot of serious work that can be done with play at its most basic level, such as team building. My favorite was working with teams that had been two separate teams and were now merging together to build one team.
We considered what they liked about their team culture, before the merger, and how we could keep those things in the culture. As well as bringing in the things from the other team that they liked from their culture and put them together to make a culture that’s going to work for everybody. It’s so easy to blame the other side and not trust people. This process really gives people a chance to be on the same page, or the same Lego plate.
As you’re saying that, I’m thinking about how writing and speaking use similar processes. You know, as I write, I grab something from here, and I grab something from there, and I see how they come together.
One of the things that you said about taking a little bit from here and a little bit from there. I think that’s kind of how creativity works. Many people think creativity is like this bolt of lightning. It hits you, or it doesn’t. You’re creative or you’re not.
In my experience, creativity thrives on having lots of different pieces of input to connect with other things. Oh wait, if I take something from over here and something from over here I put them together in a way that maybe other people haven’t done before.
In fact, I’ve talked to that happening in the when people were looking for Legos like I need a piece to fit into this model I’m not quite sure what I’m looking for, but I’m going to look on the table and find that, look at the pieces and figure out which pieces go here to make this thing and sometimes you get happy accidents in this connection you didn’t expect.
How can you use Legos to overcome imposter syndrome?
I use creativity as a microcosm, to look at the stories in our heads that come up. I would have people sitting around a table, or building a tower. One person is like, Well mine should be taller. The experts is like, How could they build so fast. Somebody else is like, I need to sort all my pieces before I can even think about building and wait we’re done. There’s a lot of stories that people end up comparing themselves to other people and thinking they should be.
Those are the stories that I’m interested in looking at, however they come up, whether it’s with Legos or drawing prompts. Sometimes I tell people, okay, you’ve got 30 seconds to draw your neighbor. Go in. Okay, now show your neighbor.
Continue to part two.