The Talent Forge: Shaping the Future of Training and Development with Jay Johnson

Crayon Revolution: How Child-Like Play Makes Better Executives with Susan Hensley

• Jay Johnson • Season 1 • Episode 34

Share episode

What happens when a television journalist becomes an HR executive and discovers the transformative power of crayons? 

Susan Hensley shares her transformative three-career act from television journalist to HR executive to art journaling coach, revealing how each career phase built valuable skills that enhanced her effectiveness as a leader. Her expertise in developing teams, navigating transitions, and using creative tools for personal growth offers powerful insights for talent development professionals.

Meet the Host
Jay Johnson works with people and organizations to empower teams, grow profits, and elevate leadership. He is a Co-Founder of Behavioral Elements®, a two-time TEDx speaker, and a designated Master Trainer by the Association for Talent Development. With a focus on behavioral intelligence, Jay has delivered transformational workshops to accelerate high-performance teams and cultures in more than 30 countries across four continents. For inquiries, contact jay@behavioralelements.com or connect below!

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayjohnsonccg/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/jayjohnsonccg/
Speaker Website - https://jayjohnsonspeaks.com

Jay Johnson:

Welcome to this episode of the Talent Forge, where we are shaping the future of training and development. Today I have a special guest with a lot of interesting experience and background. Welcome to the show, susan Hensley.

Susan Hensley:

Thank you, Jay. I am so happy to be here. This is one of my favorite subjects.

Jay Johnson:

All right. Well, me too, and our audience too. So this is going to be really great. I want them to get to know you because you have got a lot of really cool things going on, Everything from I'm not going to steal your thunder. Why don't you introduce yourself? And then we are going to dig in, because I have so many things to ask you and I think this is just going to be a really valuable conversation. So tell us a little bit about yourself.

Susan Hensley:

Susan is just going to be a really valuable conversation. So tell us a little bit about yourself, susan Sure. So when I look back on my career I sort of see three acts and I'm in the third. There was a first career in television journalism. I was an anchor person, reporter, ran newsrooms, did that for about 11 years till that didn't fit. Any of your listeners who work in HR do any recruiting know when motivational fit stops you have a person who could do it. Their life doesn't fit, you get a big career switch. I switched at that point, ironically, into a training and development role at a global company. It was a really interesting case of sort of networking and leap of faith and really just jumped into that and did that, moved up through the ranks. I was ended as an HR executive overseeing all the centers of excellence, including L&D. Did that for about 23, 25 years.

Susan Hensley:

Then I got into a lot of executive and career coaching, which then morphed into navigating life transitions coaching, because it all sort of fits together, and with that I personally was using a tool and I know your listeners get this right. It's one thing to teach and coach. It's another thing to really use some of your tools, another thing to really use some of your tools. I had started playing with art and art journaling, which is about the process of expression through art, not about making art, so I feel like I need to just start there every time. This is not about showing anyone what you're making. It's very similar to a written diary, but really using that right hemisphere of your brain for play, for curiosity, for innovation, and I ended up writing a book about it. Now I teach workshops about it and it really fits nicely with the coaching I do about life transitions.

Jay Johnson:

So that's me in a sort of a one minute snapshot journalism, and so I have a background in communications and I actually studied public relations, crisis management, media relations, and it's actually really had an impact on how I think about training, how I think about connecting with an audience. Let's take that transition. So you move from Act One, where you're in that space, and you move into talent development. What were some of the things that maybe you were able to bring with you or sort of lessons that you had learned from act one that really went into that act two?

Susan Hensley:

So it's a great, great question, because one of the favorite things I like to do with clients and in a leadership development program we rolled out, we had people do their journey lines right it's that storytelling to understand the peaks and valleys. And one of the key things I brought with me from the years in media was sort of that no excuses mentality, right. When you're on live television, you're just on live TV and no one I will tell you, no audience cares. And it's where you get into the crisis communications. You are just working with what you have and so it's deep accountability and it's also what I think if you look at the competencies that lay within that it is action, orientation, orientation. There's a real curiosity dealing with ambiguity, you know, and almost a strategic agility that goes into it. And at the time I joined a development team, we were rolling out 360s and a whole comp. This was years ago in a competency-based suite and I found it so helpful in so much of the coaching I was doing where sometimes in organizations people want to say, if everything is not perfect, I can't. If everything's not aligned, if this doesn't make sense, I can't, I'm not accountable. And as we were working on goal setting.

Susan Hensley:

I found some of the stories, if you will, because people respond to stories and analogies about what certain experiences were like. It really resonated, no matter who the audience was, whether it was with an executive or line union employee. That sense of the camera goes on live and someone throws a snowball and hits you, which I actually had happened. But you need to work. Honestly, it's a crazy, crazy story. But you then start to work with where is your accountability in that moment? What are? How do you manage your emotions Right? Surprise anger.

Susan Hensley:

You know you want to go kill the teenager who thought that would be so funny, but that's not my primary accountability, right.

Susan Hensley:

So you talk about it led to so many rich discussions about, you know, staying focused, job at hand, dealing with the surprise, but not getting off track.

Susan Hensley:

A little bit of a long story, but that was really very interesting. It took me a while, right, I'm going A little bit of a long story, but that was really very interesting. It took me a while, right, I'm going to be clear, there's always that ramp up period when you go into a new job, but it was really really helpful as we were rolling out both 360s and a competency-based performance model to help people, because it's natural for people to poke holes and explain all the reasons why you can't to have those kind of stories. I was also at a company that hired a lot from the military. I actually relied very heavily on if I had people in the audience who were veterans and had served in the military, because there is, at least at the time, that sort of we have a mission, a little bit approach and we're not going to get sidetracked, and that helped as we were working on really an environment of excellence.

Jay Johnson:

You know it's interesting because strategic agility, as you said, was something I was like it's got to be. You gotta be bringing some adaptability in there. We had a conversation on this show, the talent forge with Dr Esther Jackson and it was all about like how training is adaptable. So I imagine that world from uh, you know the transition of who knows what's coming next, you know where's the next. Uh, you know what's going to happen in here. I wasn't anticipating a snowball, that was definitely a curve, but yeah. So I think everybody says everybody has a player, mike Tyson, everybody has a plan to get punched in the mouth or, I guess, now hit with a snowball, according to Susan.

Susan Hensley:

Much more gentle yeah no, I love it.

Jay Johnson:

And then you know let's get into that space. You were in the talent development space. I'd like to learn a little bit more about that. So you had mentioned you had worked with was it active military more veterans or what did that look like and how was that experience for you?

Susan Hensley:

So it was great. It was a. It was a very good hiring pool is what we found as a company. So definitely no active military right. We're a private, large, multi-international company. But we found in recruiting right Anyone who's ever run a recruiting function, depending on the jobs, as if you know, your skill set. For us there was a really good pool of people coming out through some of the big recruiting conferences that support the veterans and we found both on what I would call line manufacturing jobs and then in logistics supply chain right. Some of those employees just had gotten some really really great training that worked well in our culture, right, if, depending on where people's workforces are, you know, finding the right talent with the right values and mindset. When you miss it sets everything back, but when you can hit it and that was something I had discovered or was encountering that I thought, oh, that's so, so interesting. When we saw some of the competencies at least the people we were hiring came with and how well many of those competencies applied to certain jobs we had.

Jay Johnson:

Now so, and we had a great conversation with Barb Thompson, who's actually doing like assessments in the existing military and just some fantastic work with the active military. You know, one of the things that we talked about is when we think about, like the military sort of we're going to call it the mentality right Like, get the job done, don't complain or anything else, don't complain or anything else, and I'm assuming that as they had transitioned into being veterans and, you know, out of active duty, did you see a lot of that mentality of just like sort of go getter, get the job done, follow, follow the rules, and did that create any challenges? Cause it's not just the military that carries that mentality, it can also be some different sort of personality. You know types that really kind of lock into process, procedure, precision. What was your experience on that?

Susan Hensley:

Like most things, there's an overuse of skills that can occur, which creates the dark side, if you will. So in coaching, it's right when those skills that we just talked about that the accountability, get the job done are applied appropriately and at different levels, you can have it work better. Where you would get some of the dark side is as people move into leadership positions. If they didn't have strong emotional intelligence, if the mindset was overly hierarchical. We were also a very relationship-based company and we really, because it was a company that had extremely high engagement scores that we wanted to protect and long service records, which we also wanted to protect the coaching and interventions, if you will, at certain points, as leaders are developing in terms of understanding and valuing all perspectives on a team how to work with, say, people who may be overly analytical. Right, who are the folks who are going to frustrate that mindset the most?

Susan Hensley:

Folks who maybe get in an analytical mindset, people who are really good at pointing out problems or challenges that need to be surfaced Right. There's a time and way. So we came across the tool and I don't know if you've heard this or your listeners it was Belbin team assessments. It was part of our Lean Six Sigma rollout. I was part of that and that, for the organization I was in, was terrific because it was all based on observable behaviors people had of you and there were like nine team roles and we did a lot of work around why every role is valued, why we need to balance teams, teams with guiding principles and a lot of how we develop teams with very specific roles. That ended up being a really helpful tool that, as we rolled out Lean Six Sigma to have what do high functioning, synergistic teams look like and we had some really good training and partners. And then most of us in HR became certified in the tool and then really used it to help establish higher performing teams.

Jay Johnson:

You know it's funny you said the tool and I was like that sounds familiar. Why does that sound familiar? And as soon as you said Six Sigma you know I've done work with the industrial and systems engineering at Wayne State University and I was like that's where it came from, yep, all right, so all right, let's talk about that. Though. So you moved yourself up. You joined this and you said it was 23 years in this space. So, from that place to an executive level, what were some of the key aspects of your success? From developing the people, obviously, you brought in the agility. You brought in some of those other aspects of being able to be accountable to yourself. But at the executive level, how should our audience be thinking about creating the conditions for success in an enterprise, in an international organization?

Susan Hensley:

Yeah, because I think I had a helpful mindset I didn't recognize at the time because I didn't come in attached, deeply attached. I got hired into organizational development department and doing this, and they saw how the competencies I had a brilliant original boss would transfer that my competencies and descriptors of what I did when I ran newsrooms would translate to this current environment. The company that I worked at was very good and I think it's some very skilled people at understanding the competencies needed. That had to be demonstrated versus exact experience, and what I did when I got there is anytime. I was asked to take on a special project, I said yes, I would ask why, right, because it wouldn't be intuitive Led the deployment of Lean Six Sigma. And I do not consider myself an analytical person. My education is in communications and social science, right, and so I said why. And the answer I got was it was about change management and leadership. There were enough people with deep statistical analysis I could learn it, enough to get certified and to do a project.

Susan Hensley:

I worked with the sales force, not the manufacturing floor, right? So I got a break there. For a person who's not deep in statistics, always better to go work with the sales force, work on your people. You know, leverage what brought you your people skills. So I would take any role. I did a finance supply chain role in Asia. Even so, because the company was very willing to move people to create really well-rounded leaders, I just took every opportunity and I think not coming from a narrow background really helped me be very open to these opportunities and made me a more effective coach later. Because it's like why do you see that I could have an impact? What is it you're wanting me to bring? You know, I'm always really honest. I didn't have you know. In a finance role, I had to build a really great finance team and I had to humble myself and say this I'm not a leader who can do your job Right. I can, at a high level, understand it, but which isn't the ideal model.

Jay Johnson:

We sometimes like leaders who can go and do the technical side if they have to.

Susan Hensley:

Yeah, and it was a real stretch and we were also in Hong Kong. I'd moved my family. That was one of the harder rotations. But once again, I kept asking before I moved halfway around the world with the family and I advised people all this time why? And it was rebuild the team, Develop a stronger strategy right, we're going to expect you to understand the financials right, you can't not be there and not understand it. But we are going to allow that as an allowable weakness because of problem solving skills with ports and customs and logistics, and then an ability to build a team so that when the expat me in this case rolled back, we had a better local team than when was there. But very humbling and, I think, also important to get people to take those sort of risks in organizations, because that's where you get growth right. When you are on that edge of discomfort not, you know, full on meltdown, but you are uncomfortable every single day you get a lot of learnings.

Jay Johnson:

There's so much in what you said that resonates with me, you know, and I even think about it. Number one is that our shared background in communication. My first hire was to the industrial and systems engineering department at Wayne State University. I I my claim to fame was I deferred getting my undergraduate degree for two years because of the math proficiency examination and everything else like that. It was just like nah, just, I'm good, I'm fine.

Jay Johnson:

You know, I've learned a little math along the way but, to your point, I was able to thrive in an engineering environment because I was adaptable, because I was able to communicate, because, you know, being able to leverage.

Jay Johnson:

They made me project manager of a $3 million national science foundation grant for mathematics in high schools and it was just like. So that adaptability, that being able to kind of communicate and connect with people, it's just, it's so important. But the other thing that you said that I think is super interesting and I want to dig in just a little bit more. As you were going through this process and you're bouncing from one place to another place, to a different project to a different project, what you're gaining there is not just, obviously, experience, but knowledge of the entire business function and that's one of the things that I really highly promote to everybody in L&D is like don't get stuck in your department, get out there and learn what all these other departments are actually doing. Get in there, get your hands dirty. Can you talk just a little bit about what that did for you as a learning leader or as an executive, to really get your hand around all of these different experiences and all of this different aspects of the organization?

Susan Hensley:

Yeah, it's such a great question because I agree with you. Right, we're sitting here sort of in like violent agreement. You're talking like yes, yes, because credibility. I think sometimes in the worst case scenario you know any viewer ever saw the Office in the worst case scenario, if you are standing in front of a group and you are trying to get them to stretch, to try new things, to learn and how we approach adult learning, the more credibility you can have in the business, the more stretch you have gone through one. It makes you empathetic.

Susan Hensley:

You know how scary, how exposed you can feel, how vulnerable, and I think it's really important that people who are doing learning development fully demonstrate that sweet, if you will, of human emotion, because we're asking people to learn something new, to try and do something a different way to expose. Maybe they don't get it, maybe they're not doing it right the first time, what's going to happen if they don't grow right? It's important to understand all those fears that lay under this, versus having a person want to say this is the flavor of the month and I'm just going to hunker down and ignore you, and that's what I call the big fear you don't. And so, having done a number of different roles, having seen the business from sort of the ground up, not having always done the jobs, but really having seen how both horizontally integrated this business was, that I was working, I was very lucky created, I think, a little bit of a bond or some empathy, if you will, to try and create a safe environment to get people to stretch when we were together.

Jay Johnson:

So powerful. And thank you for going into that, because I really do think that the more that we have a broader experience, the more that we can empathize with those in the finance department, with those in the supply chain, with those in the production systems, those in the legal, and all of a sudden, when we get a bigger, brighter picture of the whole entity, it really gives us the ability to serve each individual component at a much stronger level. So I love that comment and I think it's a great takeaway for our audience here Now as we transition into Act 3, you move out of that position, get into some coaching and obviously take that to a whole new level. And part of that experience is also bringing in. And I want you to mention the title of your book so that way we can let people into that.

Jay Johnson:

But talk about because you said, art early on and I guarantee if anybody's out there like me, I'm like all right, my art is stick figures and anything. You preface this. You caught me right. I mean you predicted my behavior right then and there you know, for those of us that are not considered ourselves artists, talk about what this is, what this tool, how's it function and how do you deploy this in the coaching framework to be able to help people really kind of transform themselves?

Susan Hensley:

I'll give you a speck of the backstory because of who your audience is. At the time I got into this, I was overseeing all the centers for excellence and one of the people who was on my team was the head of learning and development and she had a side hustle. She's a fantastic artist and you know we're standing around as happens. This was pre COVID, when we were, you know, fully in the office and rest of us are saying you know, I can barely draw a smiley face. Right, I do hearts. My doodle is like a heart and a smiley face, which is true today. I want to just keep prefacing that. And she says you know what? I'll have a few of you come over on a Saturday. I'll show you the color wheel, teach you just a few things. It'll be fun. You know cheese and crackers, maybe a glass of wine. So about five of us head to her house, right, it was a very collegial place. I worked on Saturday it's two hours and she gave us some paints and I had a little piece of paper and she's explaining the color wheel. Well, I'm over there in the corner just with my paints and I truly ended up creating a brown mess. I found out the reason it turned brown? Because I was impatient. I learned that later from a person who knows art. At the time it was like ooh, mystery, right. But what I noticed and this is where all of the career coaching and different things that HR professionals do is it was a glimmer, it lit me up, it was fun. The inner critic was gone that two hours where I sat there just playing with I think it was like a maybe a purple and a blue or whatever. I actually took the soggy little piece of paper home, I hung it on the refrigerator and my husband and son are like, wow, what is this? Because once again, it's like a Rorschach test. You know the block test and I followed that. I'm a huge fan of the book Designing your Life. I don't know if anyone in the audience you've heard of it. So it was a glimmer and I'm committed to following those.

Susan Hensley:

So I started to just play with art. I had a younger child at home so we had some crayons. It's still in the house and I'll tell you right now that's the key to keeping it playful and to silencing your inner critic. I've been doing this seven, eight years. I have not advanced very intentionally beyond the art supplies you find in a Target, a Michaels, a Walmart, the kids section. Because as an adult and I teach this in my workshops when you are holding a crayon you are not taking yourself overly seriously. I have yet to meet an adult who's got like a blue and pink crayon and is like I am going to nail this right. Instead, it silences the inner critic. It opens us up to curiosity, right. It opens us up to some play, and that is where you know, in all the brain science, that's where the ideas, that much more holistic, creative place comes through.

Susan Hensley:

I started just playing at home, quite honestly, and I was enjoying it, so I kept doing it, even just a few minutes, while I was, you know, getting dinner ready, or I had a few colored pens. You know you're waiting in a school pickup line. You know in the car, instead of like scrolling on my phone, which you know still do want to fully own, that you know I can go down the that rabbit hole started to play with color collage. I love a Elmer's glue stick and the pandemic hit a couple of years later. I really gaveled down on it and using it to help process all the emotions and everything that was happening. At the time. The job got insane, right, because we had a split workforce. Anyone who worked in HR during that period just knows how much more difficult the job became, and really still is, because anyone who's managing a workforce who maybe doesn't want to be in person, right.

Jay Johnson:

There's still some difficult decisions and behaviors that are, yeah, absolutely.

Susan Hensley:

Yeah, absolutely using it. As for me, I, you know, wasn't sharing it but it did help me clarify during that period that you know. I said when COVID was over it's so funny that I was going to leave I had always planned on perhaps doing something else about five years later than I did and I realized I was as much as I still love the company and do consulting work for them and work for a few years sort of part-time after that role at that time and I gave 18 months notice. So I gave lots of notice just stopped fitting me and I was really using the art journal and that's where I recognized so much of my coaching.

Susan Hensley:

Although I still do a lot of career and executive coaching, the interest was much more in helping people with a much more holistic the whole person. I think really good career leadership executive coaches get under that and understand the why the North Star for that executive or that employee, because then it helps you align, it helps them help you align all the other behaviors. But there's a really great certification program on navigating transitions that I did. But it was the art journal that took me on a different path sooner than I thought and with greater ease and curiosity I became. I think I used to give lip service to the power of curiosity. You know, in Lean Six Sigma you learn the five whys. I think lots of people use that right. It's why, why, why, root cause analysis yeah.

Susan Hensley:

Yeah, that can sound right, very left brain, very linear, a bit accusatory sometimes, when you're asking it sort of of yourself like why does this feel good? Why am I enjoying it? Why am I telling myself I need to keep doing this? Is it a social construct? Is it my deep need to try and be perfect, to achieve? And I resemble all those things right? I still do a somewhat type A personality. I love lists and plans, but I needed balance. I think that's really what the pandemic helped me to see and art journaling helped me to see is I needed to balance, if you will, these various aspects of my personality into a little more joyful, curious, self-compassionate form.

Jay Johnson:

So I love this Susan and for many reasons. Number one, as you said, my favorite word balance, which is something that I really try to promote, and in every aspect. So during the pandemic I got a set of paints and I like creativity, so I am actually a very creative person. It does not come out very well in music or in art or anything else, but I painted the entire wall upstairs as a mural. It was like this sort of like environmental scene. It wasn't great, but at one point in time my ex-wife had come upstairs Ex-wife now at the time just with my wife, and looked at it and was just like, wow, you did that. And I was like I wasn't proud of it, but it was something that was just like. It was cathartic. I'm up there and I was just painting and it really did kind of feel like I was playing or I was sort of discovering or anything else.

Jay Johnson:

So I ended up doing a little bit of research on so my background's in psychology and neuroscience as well as communication, and I did some of the research. There's incredible research about how impactful art therapy can be for things like stress, anxiety, for even things where people have like and I've never had shyness as one of the things as my labels, but for somebody expressing themselves or being more expressive about their emotions, feelings, et cetera. So I'm really digging what you're talking about here. You're translating a lot of that really powerful science into a concept of art journaling. And I want to dig in on that on two different questions.

Jay Johnson:

One, what does that look like If you, if you were to even talk about the process of it, of, of starting right? Because I can imagine, I can imagine myself sitting there and going what am I supposed to draw? How do I do this Like, what am I thinking? Or anything else? That's a, that's a type, a personality in me that would be coming out. And then the second question is how do you overcome resistance?

Jay Johnson:

Because I know and this is true of any time play comes into adult learning in any way, shape or form. You've got people oh, this is silly, this is dumb, and it is that sort of ego protective measure of, oh, I'm not going to be, and in reality those are the people that ended up having the most fun once they get into it. So that's my two frames here that I'd love for you to explore a little bit. Number one is what would you even do to get started in some space like this. And then number two how did we overcome that resistance, that imposter syndrome or that sort of that anti-child that we all try to suppress at some point in time, god knows why?

Susan Hensley:

Okay One I love the fact that you did the mural. Thank you so much for sharing that, because everything I'm about to tell you, with art journaling, so much lower barrier than painting a mural on a wall. That is courageous, so good for you, that's fantastic. Uh, I'm going to answer the question by telling you an opening exercise that I have used at uh health spas and wellness retreats, where people are are coming to to my talk. You know labeled, you know how to use art to get in touch with yourself, life transitions, and I've used in corporate settings. So I'm just going to walk you through it, because it does both things. Have folks come in. I may introduce a few concepts. I give them all a piece of paper. It's five by seven. I pass around a bowl of crayons tape, say tape, two crayons, okay, so this is what we're going to do. I'm going to put on a song. It's last three minutes. During that three minutes, you're going to take your two crayons and you are going to fill this piece of paper. It's only five by seven, it's not even eight by 10. I don't care how you fill it Scribble, doodle but that's the exercise I've using.

Susan Hensley:

Taylor, I spread them out. So, particularly in the corporate retreat. I ended up being the first time I did it. I was the after lunch. It was a strategic planning offsite. I'm after lunch and you know all the hierarchies there, right, it's executive VP down to like maybe some directors, and so people are really focused. I'm like here's crayon. So I made them spread out.

Susan Hensley:

Everyone got their space, introduced, the concepts put on shake it off, taylor Swift song. I just played my Apple music to three minutes. Go Three minutes. End. Crayons down, don't show anyone. Tell me how you feel, just shout it out and I'm just writing on the board. Silly, playful. How did it go by so fast? Totally different, right, and I mean without fail.

Susan Hensley:

When I do this exercise, those are the words free, giggly, and then we debrief it more thoroughly. It's like how does your body feel right now? What's your breathing? Right? So I try and get them somatically to focus on what's really going on. Then I will step way back and introduce the whys.

Susan Hensley:

Right, the exercise works for your audience because it's constrained exercise. There is, once again, very hard for adults who only have two crayons and three minutes and are not going to show it to anyone. Like anyone who wants to throw it away, throw it away. No one throws it away. People save it. Some people give it to me afterwards Like I just want you to have this, like oh, I mean, I love that, it's really interesting. I will say, if you want to wad it up and throw it away, right, that was for you. That was a somatic play break that was completely sanctioned. I have been blown away. I did an online training that goes with the book about this but that highly constrained. You've got music. It doesn't have to be that song. If you look at your music on your phone there's either three or four minute songs. I would keep it as short. I'd keep it upbeat, because that really helps people. So those are the reasons. I'm hoping that demonstration of the exercise sort of answers your questions.

Jay Johnson:

It does, because it seems to me and obviously not being an expert in this space, but it seems to me what you've done is you've lowered the barrier by giving the permission, you've reduced the complexity of the exercise because you only have two crayons and there's not all that much you're going to be able to do. Complexity of the exercise because you only have two crayons and there's not all that much you're going to be able to do. You have given a guideline of fill this and it's small, so it seems like, okay, I've got three minutes to fill this, I can do that. That's an easy task and the brain probably lets go of some of its sort of barriers.

Jay Johnson:

There's a really great professor at Wayne State University, actually Dr Pradeep Sapori, who ended up studying and I worked with him. He was one of my graduate advisors at the time, but I'd worked with him on the concepts of play and the impact that it has on relationships, creativity, communication, and one of the things that we found was couples that play together stay together. So the fact that you're doing this inside of an executive boardroom really makes a lot of sense, because not only is it an individualized task where it's safe and they don't have to do it, but on some level they're still playing together, aren't they?

Susan Hensley:

Yeah, we talk about because after right after sort of an opening exercise, if you will talk about the whys right, people right, these are executives want to understand what's happened. We talk about the inner critic. I use research that I found to your point. In the last few years or before, there's been some great, great work. I referenced both in my book. I got really lucky. There's a terrific book out right now called your Brain on Art that explains both what we feel when we create and it can also include music, dance, right, it's like with big AR and I'm you know I'm talking about something on a page but also what happens in our brains when we observe it and listen to it and take it in, and it's just for the mental health challenges we are facing as a society, so helpful. So I try and introduce the why because executives want that. And then we start talking about the inner critic and the fact that most people and these are people who are in a boardroom, right Stop being creative. They got messages, research shows by about eight or nine. So I really ask people to go back to about five, four and five and be your own proud parent, right, depending on your folks, they're maybe putting stuff on the refrigerator and you're admiring that five-year-old artist work. That's inadvertently what I did. I tried to really disaggregate my own experience with that mess that brown sort of soggy mess putting it on my refrigerator following the glimmer. I tried to pull that apart, understand the science or research, and then the book is sort of done by chapters it's not a workbook and then some of the research, the online training and the workshops. I do sort of really lay out the how-to.

Susan Hensley:

And we talk so much about the inner critic and can you let that inner critic go for five minutes or 10 minutes? Right, it's a short period. It's almost honoring. You keep me safe and you help me a lot. You push me to be my best. I don't need this. This is just play, and anyone who's ever observed kids, little kids, on a playground, they have no trouble Like uh-uh, this is my swing. And I joke with adults, executives, like when you were a kid, how'd you say to another kid you don't come. That's what you're going to do to your inner critic before I launch them into you know their next exercise, because they're you know, by the time we hit the next exercise, they're ready for me, right? Their inner critics getting ready and the fight of this, even though they're having funds about to begin. So that's where I really try and do work around talking to that inner critic, acknowledging it, asking it to stand aside, that this is safe play right, this is not exposure, it's not dangerous.

Jay Johnson:

So you've used this inside of that space. Obviously, you've used this for your own personal transformation, personal development, and you wrote a book about it. And can you tell us a little bit about the book and what the audience would expect when they go get this, because I've already put it into my queue? So let's talk about art and sanity and go ahead and give the full title.

Susan Hensley:

Okay. So it's called Art for your Sanity. The subtitle is really how art journaling can manage chaos and unleash joy. And that's a really personal subtitle because that's what it did for me during the pandemic, during the life transition Book is. It's a simple, straightforward book. You can get it anywhere. You buy books, right? Amazon is also an e-version, but I tried to really lay out it in segments the case for play and why. The case for how it's a safe container for challenging emotions. We talked about sort of that space of art therapy. And then the inner wisdom and within that I have personal stories.

Susan Hensley:

I published which I never thought I'd do my art journal pages to show some of them. The extremely low barrier. It looks like a kindergartner did it? It still does. I mean there's one where I've got this little face screaming. I was extremely upset and it's, you know, a little emoji type face is screaming. It's like the famous painting the Scream. It's like shame, rage and all these slashes which at the time I felt. You go back and look at that and you have huge compassion to the person who was experiencing that level of emotion. But it's safe, it's on the page, it's dried. I mean even the act of turning a page is such a good reminder for how we are not our emotions. They are temporary. We are resilient. We can process these in a constructive way. It's not we don't feel them right. We feel them but we process and work with them in a creative, constructive way and then you quite literally can turn the page. You can go back and revisit and remember how difficult that day was in your life or that period.

Susan Hensley:

So the book sort of goes through that, as does online training that I've done and workshops. But that's the premise of it and I did it because in my coaching practice I was one-on-one saying to clients, along with different tools, give this a try. And I recognized a more efficient way to try and put it out in the world was to write a short book. You know, on the website there's a PDF, a free PDF, of like how to get started. Like I said, there's videos, the training, because it is so low barrier that if it strikes a chord, you know we're all different and different things hit us differently. I would love for people to try it right. I've given an exercise here. Just go do that right. You don't need to buy the book. If you're curious, do that three minute exercise I described and just see how you feel. Run your own internal audit and debrief and see if maybe this hits a chord for you.

Jay Johnson:

Susan, this has been incredible because I you know when, whenever you're in a training room or in a coaching space, you know, bringing play, bringing fun into it, can have a huge impact on memory, can have a huge impact on and even what you said there was so important, because a lot of times, if we're having that emotional moment, words may be escaping us, our cognitive capacity is down, but that doesn't mean that our emotions cannot be translated, and I really like that frame of being able to turn the page, being able to express it, put it out there, solidify it, just recognize it, that emotional impact as an appearance. And now I'm going to flip the page and I'm going to have a different emotional impact or a different appearance, you know. So I really, really appreciate what you've been able to share with the audience today and there's some incredible takeaways. If they wanted to get in touch with you, how might they do so?

Susan Hensley:

At easiest ways. My website, it's just susan-hensleycom and there's a contact me. I get all those you know. Just drop me a note.

Jay Johnson:

Beautiful, so we'll make sure that that's in the show notes. Susan, I can't thank you enough. This has been a really interesting conversation, everything from act one all the way to the crescendo of act three and being able to better understand your pathway and how you've brought those experiences along, but really the impact of being able to play and being able to silence that inner critic in a way that's meaningful. I just want to say thank you. Thank you for what you've shared with the audience here today.

Susan Hensley:

Oh, thank you. I love what you're doing with this podcast and your message and all of your background. It's been an absolute pleasure. I really appreciate you having me as a guest. Thank you.

Jay Johnson:

Thank you, susan, and thank you, audience, for tuning into this episode of the Talent Forge, where we are shaping the future of training and development.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Jay Johnson, CEO and Co-Founder of Behavioral Elements

Host