Why Creativity Is a Leadership Superpower

When was the last time you paused? Not for strategy. Not for solutions. Just to imagine.

For many leaders, creativity is something we relegate to the marketing team or the innovation lab. But as my recent conversation with author and strategist Natalie Nixon reminded me, creativity isn’t a “nice to have.” It’s the very skill that will define the next generation of leadership.

Natalie is the author of Move, Think, Rest: The Human-Centered Operating System for Optimizing Work and founder of Figure 8 Thinking. She’s spent her career helping organizations unlock the power of creativity as a competitive edge.

And if you think creativity is about painting or poetry, think again.

“Creativity is our ability to toggle between wonder and rigor,” Natalie told me during our interview. “It’s not about artistry. It’s about problem-solving with relevance and novelty.”

Why This Matters for Leaders

We’re leading in a landscape that’s more volatile, more complex, and more ambiguous than ever before. The models and playbooks that once offered stability? They’re now outdated before they hit the printer.

That’s why pattern recognition, and the ability to unlearn old responses, is so critical.

Natalie calls this unlearning, and it’s one of her top leadership practices. “We often think unlearning is negative,” she says. “But it’s actually a skill. It’s about making room for a new frame of reference.”

When leaders get stuck in outdated frameworks, they limit innovation and slow down decision-making. But when they embrace creativity, when they toggle between wonder and rigor, they create space for transformation.

The Science Behind the Shift

Neuroscience backs this up. The default mode network, the part of the brain responsible for imagination, daydreaming, and creative problem-solving, is most active when we allow space for rest and reflection. Yet, our current corporate structures often value productivity over pause.

Natalie’s Move/Think/Rest framework is a direct response to that imbalance:

• Move: Get your body in motion to disrupt routine thinking and improve cognitive flexibility.
• Think: Allow space for deep focus and intellectual processing, what Natalie calls “analog thinking” time.
• Rest: Prioritize intentional rest, not just to recharge, but to allow the brain to integrate and connect ideas subconsciously.

It’s simple, but radical. Especially in a world where burnout has become the norm.

Action Steps You Can Take This Week

Here’s how to begin applying Natalie’s creativity framework to your own leadership:

• Audit your schedule: Are you over-indexing on “Think” time without enough “Move” or “Rest”? Try adding walking meetings or creative breaks.
• Unlearn something: Identify one habitual leadership move that’s no longer serving you. Name it. Then choose a different path.
• Start with wonder: Before jumping to solutions, ask a curious question. One that begins with “What if…” or “Why not…”
• Create space for reflection: Block 30 minutes this week for what Natalie calls “analog thinking”: no screens, just pen and paper. Let your mind wander.

As Natalie said so powerfully: “The currency of creativity is time. And yet, we squander it. But it’s the leaders who learn to protect and repurpose time who will shape the future of work.”

Final Thought

The most effective leaders aren’t the most efficient, they’re the most creative. They know how to move with agility, think with intention, and rest with purpose.

If you want to lead teams that thrive in ambiguity and shape what comes next, start by reclaiming your creativity. It’s not a distraction from leadership, it is leadership.

Want to lead with more intention, and less instinct? Explore Susan’s Enneagram Applied program to discover the hidden patterns shaping your leadership.

Episode Transcript

Susan Drumm: You’ve heard of the horse whisperer, right? Well, my guest today is known as the creativity whisperer to the C-suite — a leader who helps organizations reframe their futures by applying foresight, wonder, and rigor to amplify growth and business value. I’m Susan Drumm, and this is The Enlightened Executive, where your personal evolution sparks your leadership evolution. Each week we spotlight cutting-edge strategies to help leaders and entrepreneurs grow in leadership and in life.

And my guest today is Dr. Natalie Nixon, a creativity strategist and CEO of Figure 8 Thinking. She helps companies combine creativity and innovation to leverage and greatly increase their return on investment. Dr. Nixon is a top 10 global keynote speaker, and her new book, Move Think Rest: Redefining Productivity and Our Relationship with Time, was just released. Her firm, Figure 8 Thinking, was named among the top 20 women-led innovation firms in 2021, with clients including Microsoft, Salesforce, Comcast, and Bloomberg.

Okay, welcome to the show, Natalie. It’s great to have you here.

Natalie Nixon: Hi, Susan. Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Susan Drumm: Yes. So, you’ve got this new book out — Move, Think, and Rest. Tell us a little bit about your philosophy behind the book and what its message is.

Natalie Nixon: The Move, Think, Rest human-centered operating system is a methodology to help executives and managers — and even people who aren’t in that particular role — redesign work for three specific reasons: unprecedented burnout, new rules for how we work, specifically hybrid models of working, and ubiquitous technology. Those three drivers really mean that we are at a really incredible inflection point to redesign work that is very different from the first industrial revolution model that our work tends to be designed around.

So it’s a model that offers an on-ramp to build our capacity for creativity. And the reason that matters is because if we want to sustainably and consistently innovate, we actually have to start with creativity. We have to start with building our capacity for creativity as individuals, as teams, and as organizations.

And so the Move, Think, Rest, or MTR, system is a both/and model. What I mean by that is the ways we’ve traditionally thought about work, which are rooted in the first industrial revolution model — that old model needs to be put to rest because it’s an either/or model that’s only focused on speed, output, efficiencies, and only measuring what you see.

And what I’m offering in the MTR model is a both/and model. It’s really rooted in — instead of asking ourselves, “How might I be more productive this week?” or “How might my team be more productive this quarter?” — we might ask a different question: “What might I cultivate this week? What might my team cultivate this quarter?” Cultivation values the solo practitioner and the collective. It values quick spurts of growth and appreciates slow.

And it also realizes that yes, we need to measure what we see, but we also acknowledge that there’s so much happening when we say we need to sleep on it, when things are percolating during dormancy phases. So that’s what I mean when I say it’s a both/and model — again, all to build our capacity for creativity so that we can consistently innovate.

Susan Drumm: That’s so fascinating. I’m kind of wondering — I know so many people feel the pressure that work is overwhelming, right? And you mentioned the burnout, and it is about how can I get more done, because the pace of change is so high and the demands on me are so high. So what will this new philosophy require people to do? How do they need to think differently about that?

Natalie Nixon: Yeah. So, it’s not just a philosophy — it actually is a very proactive, prescriptive way of working that helps us shift away from only focusing on quantity to also focusing on quality, away from only focusing on output to also focusing on impact. And the truth is that we now have automation, AI, robotics that can and will increasingly replace basic tasks. So it’s not up to us anymore to focus on quantity. It’s up to us to level up the speed of answers and results that we get, and leave time for the spaciousness, for critical thinking, for deeper collaboration, for the sort of conscious work that only humans can do. So those are the shifts that we need to be thinking about, and it’s really an opportunity right now.

There’s a lot of overwhelm — you know, we’ve been referencing the burnout. The latest statistics have estimates, at least in the United States, of up to 70 to 73% of people self-reporting burnout. And there’s a $300 billion cost to burnout for US businesses. That cost is because of absenteeism, higher turnover, lagging productivity, low engagement, and higher insurance costs that come with all of that. So there actually is a business case to be made for incorporating the Move, Think, Rest proactive human-centered operating system.

Susan Drumm: You know, it’s so interesting — I imagine that some people would say, I love the idea that you’re putting rest in there. Can you share a little bit more about the rest part?

Natalie Nixon: Yeah, let me actually back into that. The 30,000-foot view of the MTR framework is that when I talk about movement, I’m not just talking about going to the gym. I’m talking about movement hygiene.

So we are actually designed to move. The spinal cord is an extension of the brain — it’s an extension of the medulla oblongata. And if we’re hunched over our laptops — actually, Dr. John Medina, who’s written a great series of books called Brain Rules, says that we shouldn’t be sedentary for more than about 30 to 45 minutes maximum. The more we’re hunched over the laptop or computer, we are restricting blood flow to the brain, which means we are reducing oxygen to the brain, which means we’re not doing our best thinking. So movement hygiene is what I mean by movement.

Thought is about heightening our critical thinking and our cognitive, quick analytical thinking by engaging in what I call backcasting and forecasting. Backcasting is the role of memory, reflection, metacognition — why do I think the way I think about things? This is not just for individuals but for teams and organizations to be putting on these lenses as well. Forecasting is all about dreaming, inspiration, and curiosity, and we need to spend more time in those backcasting and forecasting modalities in order to do our best critical thinking.

And then rest is about intermittent resting. It’s about making sure that we design micro-breaks into our day, that we have policies in our organizations that incentivize those breaks. I interviewed almost 60 people for Move Think Rest. One of the people I interviewed is Brendan Boyle, who is a toy designer — he teaches a course on play at the Stanford d.school. So I flew out to Stanford, interviewed him, sat in on his class, and he talks about how play is engagement. Play is actually kind of the end-all-be-all version of the MTR movement, because when we are at play, we’re thinking very differently — we are resting and taking a break from that kind of intense neocortex sort of thinking.

So that’s the rest part, and we often are not sedentary necessarily when we are at play. The rest is about micro-breaks for us during the day and during the week, but also about the role of sabbatical. Some of the people I interviewed work for tech companies, work for nonprofit organizations that actually offer sabbatical. For a lot of tech companies, if you have at least five years of employment, you are eligible for sabbatical.

The challenge is that not everyone takes the sabbatical, but those who do — what’s really counterintuitive — it doesn’t lead to people not wanting to return to work. They actually are more vested in the organization, in the company, because they feel seen and heard. They’ve had time to recharge and to reflect on how they want to contribute differently and more generatively when they return to work.

Susan Drumm: And I was going to ask you more about your background, but this is so fascinating — I want to delve into each of these pieces a little bit more. I want to get a sense of what a leader might think about doing differently in each of these pieces. So let’s start with the move piece. What’s the recommendation — you mentioned something about every 30 to 45 minutes you should be moving. What does that look like for the typical person who is at an office?

Natalie Nixon: The first thing to do is figure out whatever is the trigger that is going to help carve out a different neuro-synapse pathway in your brain so you can form new habits. You need to do that. For me, I literally have to put a timer on my phone, or I literally write buffer into my calendar to step away from the desk.

I have the privilege to work from a wonderful home office. It might be going downstairs to empty the dishwasher and then coming back upstairs. Right now I’m talking to you from a standing desk — it’s not really a standing desk, it’s a contraption that I can either lower or raise. So going back and forth between standing and being sedentary, and also making sure that you actually are doing movement, if you can build in walks.

Now, what I’ve found is that a lot of times people aren’t walking more because they feel like, “Oh, I don’t have 30 minutes” or “I don’t have 60 minutes.” You don’t need that much time. I literally have walks timed that I know will take me 3 minutes. I have a walk timed that I know is going to take 9 minutes. And if I’m feeling really luxurious that day, I can take a 30-minute walk. But the benefits of walking are incredible.

I start each chapter with a quotation from someone who said something really interesting about the topic of the chapter. For the chapter on movement, I quote St. Augustine, who apparently said, “It is solved by walking.” I love it — it’s such a beautiful, simple, discreet declaration, and it’s true. How often have you been stumped by something or upset about something and just needed to reframe—

Susan Drumm: The energy, right? The environment?

Natalie Nixon: Yeah. Yes, yes. And let’s take those walks without listening to a podcast — you don’t need your earbuds in. I’ve written about this on other platforms, and I incorporated it into this book — you’re already seeing the blurred lines between the move, think, rest framework. It’s not: first you move, then you think, then you rest. It’s not siloed.

I’m about to reference micro-retreats. One of the types of micro-retreats you could take is a walking retreat — a listening sort of retreat — going to a neighborhood or community that isn’t your own, in your city or town, and just observing and walking. But you could do that in your own neighborhood too. It could be more aurally oriented — listening to the brakes of a car, or birds, or the sound of your own feet on the pavement. This helps with pattern interruption.

One of the things that’s really interesting about taking a walk, for example, on a trail versus on cement, is that the serendipity and unexpectedness of where my foot is going to be planted next is actually really good for our brain cognition. It’s really great for our awareness — it keeps us much more present. So all those sorts of things are things we can actually do that don’t consume tons of time but have exponential value for helping our brain synchronize ideas.

I call those neural synapses in the other regions of the brain — the recesses of the brain — that happen when our default mode network gets activated. The default mode network gets activated when we tap out of the world, when we are in an engaging conversation, when we are reading a great book of fiction, when we’ve had a great rest, and as we’re waking up, when we’ve had a shower — we have those lightbulb moments. That’s not coincidental. We actually need to disengage on a periodic basis so that our best thinking can happen. I call that the juicy, sexy bits of productivity — that’s actually where our best thinking comes from. Those are a few examples of movement.

Susan Drumm: And I think — look, I deal with so many executives who are essentially marathoners, and they’ve been rewarded for this ability to just go at it and grind it out. And I think there’s a belief that if I just grind it out, that’s what it’s going to take. But all the neuroscience says that you actually need these types of breaks and to step away — if you want more output, you don’t get it by keep grinding it out, right?

Natalie Nixon: Um, and I remember exactly — yes, why I thought, gosh, you’d be so good on this podcast, because everything we talk about is about pattern recognition and pattern disruption.

Susan Drumm: So this is what we’re really talking about here — deep-seated patterns that we’ve created over time, ways of working, and—

Natalie Nixon: That’s right — really shifting those requires undoing habits that have been ingrained when we have back-to-back meeting schedules and we don’t have time to do this type of work. There are simple things you can do — I mean, why did we become a slave to the 30-minute or 60-minute meeting?

Susan Drumm: Yeah. Says who?

Natalie Nixon: Says who? Start booking — make all your meetings 50 minutes. You’ve got then 10 minutes.

Susan Drumm: Right. We’ve got to first of all, biologically, take care of things, right?

Natalie Nixon: That’s right.

Susan Drumm: But — taking that time, or 30-minute meetings become 25-minute meetings—

Natalie Nixon: That’s right. I’ve seen a lot of success for leaders doing that type of work.

Susan Drumm: Is that also the type of thing that you’ve seen be successful?

Natalie Nixon: Yes. One of the people I interviewed is the vice president at Atlassian, which is a 100% remote global organization, and they started with the OG of organizational artifacts, which is the meeting — the almighty meeting. So much about organizational culture is based on when meetings happen, how long they happen, the cadence of the meetings, who gets to lead the meeting, how they are ordered. Starting with meetings is a beautiful place to begin to launch what I call MVE — minimal viable experiences — that help you, as an organization, as a team, start to interrupt the patterns and challenge the assumptions you may have about what creates the best output of your greatest work. Talking to Annie Dean from Atlassian was really enlightening and informative. But the meeting is a really great place to start.

The other part — you started by referencing the executives you coach. They’ve kind of gotten oriented into the grind, and pushing through, and a lot of executives and leaders have been rewarded for — what’s the answer? I needed the answer yesterday. Not falling in love with process. And the truth is that in our daily work there’s a lot of gray, and we have to educate increasingly in a way that’s much more experiential in nature, and that helps learners fall in love with the gray and with the process.

And so, as a result of that pushing through, what we don’t talk about a lot — but which I delve into a lot in Move Think Rest — is the role of emotional recovery. A lot of executive leadership coaches spend a lot of time talking about physical rest. The big-time leaders, of course, are going to the Mayo Clinic, and you need to make sure that your leaders and executives are super healthy physically. That matters, right? We want to make sure that cognitively they’re sharp. It’s the emotional dimension of how we show up as leaders that is often forsaken.

There’s so much emotional labor, especially in economically uncertain times, when there are layoffs, when there’s all sorts of bad news to deliver and manage. How are you dealing with the emotional recovery as a leader? The Move, Think, Rest — the MTR framework — really is an antidote to that kind of burnout.

Susan Drumm: Well, ultimately it’s the emotional capacity where you start to see the patterns live. So in the work that I do, I think many leaders need to notice the emotional patterns that they get into — whether they be patterns of frustration or anger or sadness or anxiety. And I think what people don’t see is that they’re actually patterns. If I go back into their history, there is a pattern of responding in a certain way — things are not fair, I’m not safe, right? It’s these underlying beliefs that keep creating that emotional pattern. And without the time to really reflect and step back and notice that, that is really where I think the opportunity is for many leaders on this topic.

Natalie Nixon: I agree with you. That’s the backcasting, the forecasting that I discussed in Move Think Rest. It’s essential to hit the pause button and think about the examples you used — I feel scared, I don’t feel safe, I feel anxious, I feel worried, I’m ruminating. These are not safe words to use if you’re a leader — you’re not allowed to say that out loud, right?

Susan Drumm: Yeah.

Natalie Nixon: But one way that I advise my clients about how to be more transparent in their leadership model is to lead with curiosity. And the way to lead with curiosity is to start with self-inquiry. That tends to be a safer way to dip into the pond — if you want a team that asks better questions, you have to model the ways that you are asking those questions, and the way that you’re starting to reflect, like: “That competitor we said we would never work with again — I’m starting to think, maybe what if we revisited that. I’m wondering if there’s a way we could explore a model of co-opetition, right?” Being able to share that kind of inquiry does wonders for leaders to be more respected, more relatable, and approachable.

Susan Drumm: Yeah, I think showing the questions of themselves in addition to questioning their team — I mean, just simple things like how much time are you talking in a meeting versus asking your team questions in the meeting. A very simple thing you could start paying attention to. But so many times people think, “I’m the leader, so therefore I need to manage, I need to talk, I need to share vision” — all of these things, whereas the most powerful leaders I see actually just sit there and ask questions, or observe, or encourage dialogue between team members, not being sort of a hub and spoke.

Okay, so what about — tell us the most important piece about think. What does a leader need to know about that piece?

Natalie Nixon: Well, I think we’ve kind of started touching on it. I think the backcasting and the forecasting — the grounding of being able to backcast, to engage in reflection, memory, metacognition — the value of forecasting, foresight, and curiosity.

We spent a lot of time — especially, we saw a lot of things in the popular culture, on LinkedIn and in the business press, about empathy and empathetic leadership. And empathetic leadership is essential, but the antecedent to empathy is curiosity. You cannot empathize with a soul if you cannot first frame a question and pause and wonder: well, why do they do it that way and not our way? How come? Why do they sit over there and not over here? What if we tried to do this in twice the amount of time? What if we stretched it out? What if we decreased the amount of time? Why do we continue to approach it this way?

So that, to me, is a really important place to start. And I talk about how one of the reasons we don’t have richer cultures of inquiry is because we actually are really out of practice. We’re really great at it when we’re little — when we’re toddlers, when we’re first learning. But sadly, our educational systems kind of guide us to err on the side of certainty versus curiosity. But it’s actually curiosity that puts you at the precipice of discovery.

If you really want to be innovating, you have to check yourself when you begin to get super certain and secure that you have all the answers, and that — well, we’ve always done it this way, and why should we change? Well, what if you don’t change? What’s at stake if you continue at this? What’s at stake if you don’t shift? What’s at stake if you don’t start to go to a conference that’s totally in a different sector? If you work in tech, go to a conference in the fashion industry. If you work in fashion, show up at a communications industry conference. Because in design thinking, we call that lateral thinking, and you learn from near and far adjacencies.

One of the things you learn is, huh, we do something similar, but we call it blank, and this is an interesting twist on that. Or, we’ve never approached that sort of problem that way — what might that look like in our context? So from the thinking domain of the MTR framework, I think starting with curiosity is really a theme, and how we can get better at backcasting and forecasting.

Susan Drumm: So speaking of curiosity, tell me a little bit about your journey and what’s helped you the most in your experience of becoming more and more conscious about your own leadership.

Natalie Nixon: My journey is very diverse. I have a background in cultural anthropology and in the fashion industry. I worked in fashion first as an entrepreneurial hat designer, and then I worked in global fashion sourcing for a division of The Limited Brands, which took me to live and work abroad in Sri Lanka and Portugal, and travel throughout Asia, making bras and panties for the Victoria’s Secret brand.

The fashion industry taught me a lot. I’ll say this — people who’ve never worked in fashion think it’s either frivolous or glamorous, and it’s neither. It’s not frivolous and it’s not glamorous — it is a business, a multi-billion-dollar business. It really equipped me to learn about business, about supply and demand, about supply chain, about the role of technology.

The other thing that specifically working in fashion helped me appreciate is that fashion is outstanding at integrating the value of beauty, desire, and aesthetics in building consumer confidence and consumer insight. There’s a whole body of my work — a portfolio of work — called fashion thinking, helping organizations outside of fashion understand how to think more like a fashion designer to innovate. Fashion also equipped me with the value of trends and foresight.

Anthropology is the gift that keeps giving. With anthropology, I studied cultural anthropology — I learned how to ask questions, how to be deeply observant, how to really engage. Later, when I did my PhD in design management, I grew as a qualitative researcher and got those skills.

I was a professor for 16 years. The first 10 years I taught the business of fashion, and the last six years were at Thomas Jefferson University, where I was the founding director of a strategic design MBA program — an MBA for hybrid thinkers. We called it the best of design school meets the best of business school.

In the middle of that portion of my academic career, I gave a TEDx Philadelphia talk where I was proclaiming, “The future of work is jazz,” and here’s why and how. It was basically my doctoral research in plain English. That talk catapulted me into getting invited into companies to help them design more improvisational ways of working. I was getting so many of those invitations that my husband, John, said, “Babe, this is a thing — you should formalize it.” I was like, “Okay.”

So I created Figure 8 Thinking as a little side hustle. I woke up a year later and was having more fun with my side hustle, and decided to leave academia after a wonderful 16-year career, and have been building my business, Figure 8 Thinking, ever since.

So I’m a creativity strategist. All of the work that I have done has converged into helping me help my clients dream big. I do that through proprietary frameworks I’ve developed to help them understand that creativity is not something only artists are great at. It’s the wonder-rigor model I’ve designed — creativity is your ability to toggle between wonder and rigor to solve problems. If you begin to think about creativity that way, then you realize that the best CFOs and attorneys and physicians and farmers and teachers and plumbers and artists are super creative when they’re doing this toggling between wonder and rigor.

And for me, as a leader, my greatest lessons have come from my mistakes. They’ve come from my own personal burnout moment. I was probably about 15 years into being an academic — it was my dream job, my passion project, I worked so hard to get to where I was, and I was also burning the candle from both ends.

To reconcile with how I was feeling, how I was doing, getting comfortable with the ambiguity of not knowing what was next, learning to ask for help — these are all the tools I gathered the courage to use, and to realize that I don’t have all the answers. I don’t need to know all the answers, but I better get good at asking questions — questions that help me take the next step, and then the next step.

The other thing I’ve learned as a leader is the value of being a bit more personable. I’ve definitely fallen into the certainty trap. A lot of times it comes out of insecurity, or how I fear people will perceive me — that I have to be doubly prepared, all my i’s dotted, all my t’s crossed, I can’t afford to mess up. But when I am more personable, I am more relatable. And when I am more relatable, then — you know, I’m a nerd — all of the theories and the frameworks and the stuff I want to help my clients incorporate into their businesses, into their companies, that becomes something they buy into a lot more.

But I did not know that eight years ago, when I first started building Figure 8 Thinking. Over the years, through the feedback I’ve gotten, I realized that actually is an asset, and that’s something I lean into.

Susan Drumm: Yeah. Well, something that struck me about your career is this ability to delve into different disciplines and find a way to bring it all together, and that’s something that I think naturally curious people do. But you also made the leap when you needed to make the leap, even not knowing what it is — just getting curious about it.

I mean, I know from my own background — I went from law school to management consulting to marketing and business development, to then getting a master’s in acting, right? I didn’t know how that was all going to play out in the work I do today, but I got really curious that there was something here, and I couldn’t see it at the time. So the staying in wonder, staying in curiosity about — gosh, why is there this strong pull here? There must be — and I didn’t know how I was going to use the acting career, right? But yet it’s all factored in so much into the work that we do today. So I love how you’ve tied that in, and your own life is a reflection of that.

Natalie Nixon: Yeah. You know, I like to say that if you’re 50% exhilarated and 50% terrified, you should leap — because if you’re 100% terrified, you’ll have analysis paralysis, and if you’re 100% exhilarated, you’re not going to be focused on the details. But that exhilaration keeps you optimistic and buoyant, and that terror keeps you rooted in making sure you dot your i’s and cross your t’s to make that leap.

But I also really have to credit my parents, because when I was a sophomore in college — around the time you have to declare a major — my parents sacrificed a lot for our education. I did not want to disappoint them and wanted to make sure I got a good job at the end of a very expensive education. I called home, beating around the bush — this was in the ’80s, so my mom was on the phone in the bedroom, my dad was on the phone in the kitchen — and I said, “Well, I guess there’s economics I could study, even though I almost failed economics, and I guess maybe political science.” I went to a liberal arts college.

They said, “Well, what are you interested in?” So I kind of confessed — I love these courses in cultural anthropology, oh my gosh, there’s these African studies courses, they’re so multidisciplinary, I can learn philosophy and econ in a different way. Almost at the same time, they said, “That’s what you should study.” And I said, “Say what?”

And my pop said, “Natalie, if you study what you love, you will have to turn down opportunities, because no one will have to tell you to stay later, get up earlier, work harder.” This was a pretty radical piece of advice from two African-American parents who were not looking to be able to hand over to me a trust fund when I hit a certain age. But for them to encourage me to follow my heart — it was like this load lifted off my shoulders, and it was just this permission slip to follow my intuition.

But that’s where the rigor comes in, because that’s only part of the story, right? There’s the inspiration and the intuition — to pause and tap into that, and it’s very energizing — but it’s the rigor to figure out: what do I need to have in place to get that done? Who do I need to learn from? What job do I need to work meanwhile, until I can do XYZ? So that permission has been something I think I can credit for my ability to pivot, to pause, to listen to that inner voice — something’s got to give, this isn’t quite right anymore.

Susan Drumm: Yeah. And underlying all of those are important curiosity questions, even within the rigor piece.

Natalie Nixon: Yes.

Susan Drumm: I really appreciate you taking the time. Where can people learn more about you and your work?

Natalie Nixon: Well, thank you again for having me. The best place for people to go is the figure8thinking.com website — that’s the number eight — and they should sign up for the Wonder Rigor newsletter for sure, and also follow me on LinkedIn.

Susan Drumm: Fantastic. Well, thank you. And if you liked this episode, you’re not going to want to miss my interview with Jacquette Timmons, a Wall Street veteran with an MBA in finance, who discusses the blind spot that almost cost her everything and what leaders can learn from a financial wake-up call. Let’s lead the way.

Hope you enjoyed today’s episode, and I’d like to point you to the next important step. Hit the subscribe button and the bell to get notified when we release new content. I’ll see you on the next episode of The Enlightened Executive.