Creativity, Hobbies and Leadership: Recharging Your Leader Within

Hello everyone and welcome back to Everyday Leader podcast, Shannon along with Conrad here, exploring leadership questions, topics, our world. Today's topic is the spaces we create, or creativity. Some would call it hobbies, or recharge, or recreation. As leaders, what's important about that? What is it, and why does it matter?

What do hobbies and interests, extracurriculars, things outside of paid work, have to do with leadership? Why does it matter?

I feel like the easy answer is: of course expressing your creativity is important. There are just so many ways to do that. I like working on houses, remodeling. I enjoy nature walks, hiking, cultivating, planting. You and I share a love of plants. Maybe it's about connecting to what's simple and essential for me as a human.

Yes. In our leadership framework, that is all about the leader within, our capital S Self. Feeding that, fueling that, finding ways to get present with it. Creativity is a way to do that. When we are really tapped into that capital S Self, we can lead in a lot of different contexts, in service of a lot of different things. It's like our home base.

So the gift in hobbies, doing something creative with your hands, is that it gives us greater access to that capital S Self and the resources within.

Yes. Part of me that said, what if hobbies have nothing to do with leadership, is because when a hobby or an interest is no longer in service of us, it just feels like work. And that's not what we mean when we're talking about leadership. We're talking about the way we show up in the world in service of our world.

What it's evoking for me is a distinction between something I get to do versus something that is calling me forth. The hobbies are the recharge, the refreshing of the leader within. And then the leader within is called to do something meaningful in the world. So there's an output on one side and an inflow, a recharge, on the hobby side.

There's a quality in the things you genuinely get to do that makes them the type of input that flows into your capital S Self. It's not necessarily what everybody else is doing. You have to figure that out and find it for yourself. We know these are the things where you start doing them and you lose a sense of time. You don't have a whole lot of expectation around a particular outcome. You get a lot of satisfaction and fulfillment in the moment as you're working on whatever you're creating.

When you're in that state of hobby or creative energy, you can't help but be present.

This year I finally made a list of things I've always wondered about, like backpacking, and I'm going to try them and decide if it's a go or no go. I'm done thinking I should be a camper or a knitter. I'm definitely not a knitter.

I will return the crochet and knit gift I got for you. For those listening, what would be the inquiry for that list? I love the idea of experimenting and feeling into: is this recharging me, or is it depleting me?

I think the question is: do I have the capacity for this right now? Do I have the capacity to start this in one small way? What would that look like?

Our invitation is to create your hobby and recharge list. Ask the question: is this right for me right now? Then try it on, experiment, and see what it gives you in life and in your capacity for the leader within.

That's great. We love to hear from you. Until next time.

Be well.