So, hi, everyone. Thanks so much for joining this session is called the Practice is the outcome. My name is Casey Lathrop. I currently work at Cisco as the strategy and operations lead for the employee experience organization. Outside of work.I spend most of my time creating teaching and thinking about how people create and learn today. I'm gonna be talking about the relationship between learning creativity and what I think ties them together. Fear. What I hope you walk away from today is that you'll feel empowered to learn what you want and more capable of getting over your creative fears. I'd love to start off with asking you guys a question. Feel free to write your answers in the chat. What is something you really want to learn? This could be anything you had all the time in the world? No boundaries. What would that thing be? Now? Often when I ask this question to people, the responses I get are things like learning a new language, learning how to play a musical instrument, learning how to cook, how to draw, learning how to take better pictures. All these incredible things. Now, I want you to think about the emotions you associate with learning these types of things. Often the feelings that come up are feelings of anxiety and nervousness and anticipation and self doubt.

But why is it that we associate these negative emotions with learning these incredible things to understand this? Let's look at the example of learning a new language. When you learn a new language, there really is no finish line. So how do you know when you have truly learned it? Is it when you can speak full sentences have deep conversations? Some people say when you dream in the new language, but if you've learned a new language, you also know that despite what level you're at, it might still feel like the finish line is moving further away. Often when we think about learning these, let's call them big things. It feels really daunting. It's like you're standing at the bottom of a mountain, getting all the way to the top seems impossible because we tend to think about learning as a linear process. We start finding excuses as to why we can't climb it. It's too high. It's too rocky. I don't have the right equipment. I'll be too tired. I might fall once I get up there. What will I do to get down? So then what do we do? We tend to just justify our excuses and say, forget it. Maybe climbing a mountain is just not for me, this is us focusing on the outcome, but what if we thought about things differently? Let's think about other things.

We learn, navigating a new city, learning to drive, learning the tools we need for a new job, learning how to not kill your house plants to potty, train your dog how to make coffee. We don't always think about these smaller things we learn, but they take just as much time and patience as those more abstract things. What they show is that we can learn difficult things that sometimes feel very difficult or even impossible. In the moment through the pandemic, we've collectively learned how to bake bread, make whipped coffee, learn tiktok dances, how to mail in our ballots, how to run virtual meetings and conferences. We are successfully learning things all the time so we know we can. So why is it when we think about learning these bigger abstract things we tell ourselves we can't when I was a little kid, like many kids, I loved being artistic and I spent hours sitting down and just drawing and coloring and painting. I actually had dreamt of being an artist. And in fact, one time I told a high school counselor that I really wanted to be a playground designer. Um I didn't know that information was going to be sent to my parents. And so when my parents found out, they were not thrilled about this idea and they told me that it wasn't an option and I needed to pursue something more traditional, that would lead me to a more lucrative career.

And so being a designer, let alone a playground designer seemed completely out of the question. And then eventually, along the way of growing older, I stopped finding time to draw and being artistic seemed unnecessary, took away from activities that I, I thought I should be focusing on like hanging out with my friends and deciding what I should wear next the next day for school and looking at social media in general, I think it just became uncool.

And if I wasn't going to pursue being an artist, then why would I devote any time to being creative? Despite that deep down, I had this tiny voice whispering that I wanted to be in the creative field. I could see myself being a designer and I secretly wanted to study art and design, but that just seemed impossible. So I followed a path that was more comfortable and I studied linguistics and I eventually became an English teacher. Now I love teaching, but something was missing for me. And as the years moved past that tiny voice got louder. I really wanted to draw and animate and write my own children's stories and make my own animated short films. I wanted to just have the ability to create what I imagined in my mind. But again, it just seemed impossible. Everything felt so final, I was told what you study in undergrad, puts you on a track and you do that career until you retire. There's no flexibility, no space to explore. Not to mention all of that fear weighed so heavily on me and I didn't feel strong enough to swim upstream to change that trajectory. I was becoming more and more miserable and apathetic. I had no mental energy, no interests or no or passions. And then a light bulb turned on and that tiny little voice began screaming. I realized I was letting fear guide me.

And I knew I needed to take ownership not only over my career, but my general happiness if I continued on this path, where was this going to lead me? So I made a change and I decided to go to graduate school at New York University to study design and emerging technologies. And there I discovered the practice of 100 days of making 100 days of making was a class offered and still offered at NYU. And the concept is very simple. Uh You choose a topic or a theme and you create a new piece of work every day. For 100 days. I knew I needed this class because I had come to terms with the fact that I am not a fast learner, but I am a persistent one. I am a classic kinesthetic learner. I need to get my hands dirty. I need to break things and I truly only understand by doing. I knew that if I wanted to have animation be a part of my thesis and secretly pursue this dream of being an animator. This seemed like a great opportunity. But the idea of just picking up animation and learning a tool like after effects was overwhelming. But this framework gave me space and freedom to try and learn in very small increments. The process was amazing for me.

I finally had the space to explore, to break things, to make really bad things and be OK with it. One major part of the 100 day process is posting your work. Yes, this means posting really bad unfinished work for everyone to see. It's meant to teach you how to be vulnerable and fundamentally how to forgive yourself a way I like to think about it is the difference of making one really big thing that you spend a lot of time on that you don't really love versus making a ton of small things that allow you the chance to explore and discover new things and new ideas.

Since that 1st 100 days of making project in 2017, I've completed 10, 100 day projects with focuses on animation, coding, drawing, writing, and painting. The two main questions I get from people about my practice are how do you find time for this and why do you do this? So for the first question, how do I find time? Well, I create time when I started this practice, I started to notice tiny pockets during the day where I was just scrolling on Instagram going into Wikipedia rabbit holes watching youtube videos. I realized that I actually did have time for this practice. If I made time for it to answer the second question, why do I do this? Well, I'd like to invite you to think about creativity as a mental health practice and think about our creative practice. Like we do with physical exercise. We all know the benefits of working out. We also know that we won't see physical results immediately. It takes time and consistency. We don't go to the gym once and suddenly have an incredible physique. We also know that exercise goes beyond the body. It gives us time for ourselves. It's a way for us to unwind to clear our heads. Also the physical strength that you acquire when you're working out often mirrors the mental strength. A creative practice is no different. It's just a practice of a different part of our brain. It allows us a moment to for ourselves to show up and create something that didn't exist before.

Now, let's move into learning what is the relationship I continued to do 100 days of making because it allowed me to learn new skills in a safe fail fast, no pressure environment. After completing my third project, I wanted to share that feeling of empowerment. First, I shared with my design team at IBM. And two years after graduating from NYU, I began teaching 100 days as an adjunct professor, I didn't realize it at the time, but I was teaching it in a very militant way. I tried to force its value on my students. I entered on day one and I basically said this project changed my life so it will change yours. I didn't give my students the space to understand it for themselves and develop their own perspective and own process. I taught it again in 2020. But this time along with an NYU design professor and founder of the class Catherine Dillon, and together we designed a curriculum based on the themes that we discovered and were emerging through our own practice and through teaching it, these themes are focus, habit, forming creative blocks and boredom and posture syndrome, finding and staying inspired and reflection.

We also reinforce the rules of 100 days of making. We talked about the importance of choosing the right project for the right time, producing completed work each day, the difference between completed and good work and being intentional about the way that you design your project.

What this did was switch our class time to looking at the inner workings of their projects and how to apply these themes. Well, when the pandemic hit halfway into the semester, just like everything else, a new shift happened, it became less about my students finishing their project and more about how can we use this practice of creating every day as a way to help them get through this difficult and unexpected time and truly use this as a mental health practice.

If I focus less on making sure my students were falling in love with the 100 day process and focus more on how to help them better understand their creative tendencies and optimize their own creative practice. I let my students love hate and question their projects and I try to help them see that when their work is bad, that doesn't mean they're bad together. We made space to be vulnerable, give each other advice and identify our own patterns through my own 100 day practice. I've learned how to animate and draw two things I've always wanted to do, but I never thought I would be able to. So this past winter, I picked up a new skill that terrified me even more painting. Painting was something that felt so impossible and so far away from me. But I also knew that if I was able to learn to draw freehand in my thirties, then I could learn to paint. This helps me also realize the core truth and learning, which is that it's not really the skill, that's scary. It's just declaring that you're gonna be really bad at something for a while. This also helped further strengthen the relationship between creativity and learning both equally vulnerable processes that force you to admit that you don't know something this made me think about about more about why people stop being creative.

We've seen variations of this type of iterative work like 100 days throughout history from people like Joseph Albers, homage to the square. And more recently, people's everyday projects, online projects such as the 100 day project or October have existed for years and completed by thousands.

It is clearly something that we crave. There is also a big element of community which makes learning less daunting. I recently had a student that said, I started noticing that I'm focusing too much on the outcome and it's making me want to have a consistent theme. I'm so focused on what the end will look like. This is a common issue that I see in my classes and we also see throughout um the process of being creative and how do we stop thinking about that final result and actually focus on the smaller joy of creating every day perspectives like this help me transform how I see a practice like 100 days of making.

I realized it's more of a tool and a framework to use to learn something new and get over your fears of being bad. If you focus so much about how bad something might be, we tend to become paralyzed by that fear and then we aren't even able to start and create altogether. But what if we focused on the practiced instead of the outcome and give us space to and freedom to knock down those limiting beliefs and that we create on our own and are developed by comparing ourselves to others. Learning a new skill and developing a creative practice is like jumping off a diving board. I remember as a kid climbing up, being so terrified looking down and sometimes getting so scared that I embarrassingly had to climb back down past all the other kids going up. But on the times that I did actually jump, it would happen so fast that by the time I landed in the water, I would be so regretful that I spent so much time worrying about what the fall will be like instead of just enjoying it. This is us. This is the practice of learning to fall and learning to surrender. I illustrate the highs and lows in an emotional journey. You start off really nervous and excited.

It's kind of like your honeymoon stage of creativity and then suddenly the high stops and you're feeling frustrated, you feel like you've reached the wall, you can't move on, you get sad, maybe even angry you wanna give up, but you just keep on going and eventually another shift happens, you discover something new and you love your project again.

And this high and low kind of continues. I had originally made this to normalize the highs and lows of learning. Not every journey will look the same. And often just because you reached the finish line or the top of the mountain, there's no special event that happens. This past year, I started to integrate this as an ongoing assignment in my class, I asked my students to illustrate their emotional journeys with a goal for them to see and celebrate the different experiences of their classmates. What I didn't expect is how personalized they would get with their journeys, incorporating things like their mood. The time of the day that they worked, the tools they used, it allowed me to observe and share their habits and also see how their habits affected their identities.

One thing I noticed was the shift of language from the beginning of the class toward the end, they moved from saying I'm not an artist but to because I am an artist, e essentially using their identity to empower their habits. This further inspired me to think about how each of us needs different things in order to be creative, just like learning. We don't learn in the same way. So why do we expect to create in the same way? Let's think back about standing at the bottom of that mountain? Everything looks so big and scary, right? But when we break it down into small chunks and celebrate the small victories along the way, it becomes much more manageable. We also know that in reality, we won't climb straight up to the point just like in learning the process of climbing up a mountain is not linear, there are twists and turns, not to mention falling rocks. What if we just accepted, it's going to be hard and just started climbing. Being creative and learning are two incredibly vulnerable experiences. Both require you to admit that you don't know something that or just be really bad at. The more we practice, the practice focus on each day, stay present in our own journey, the more I believe we'll be able to accomplish you might think.

Well, what does this have to do with the skills I need to do my job or how will having a creative practice help me move up in my career? Yes, it is true that painting won't be a part of your annual performance review, but having the ability to be ok with discomfort as organizational changes happen, the mentality that you can adapt to new processes or even the resilience to bounce back from a low performance will help you be a better employee, colleague and leader.

I hope you leave with today today knowing that all it takes is to start listen to what you want and focus each step of the way. Stop telling yourself you can't and start listening to what you want. I'd love to leave you with this quote from Brene Brown. Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen. The willingness to show up changes us. It makes us a little braver each time. Thank you so much for being here and listening and I'd like to give a special thanks to my students of this past spring semester, who allowed me to share their emotional journeys and help me better understand the practice and better understand how to share it with everybody.

Thank you so much.