This is part 2 of our four-part series, "The Creative Shift," which explores how creative practice enhances our leadership by reconnecting with our essence, transforming limiting beliefs, developing focused action into a practice, and building authentic connections with others.
In our previous article, we explored how creative practice reconnects you to your essence and provides physiological benefits that enhance your leadership capacity. Now we turn to how creativity transforms your mindset.
In this complex and often overwhelming world, I regularly encounter leaders who are exhausted from trying to control everything in their path. They see global challenges, organizational constraints, and technological disruptions as opportunities to do more, harder, faster and better, and above all: have the answers needed to move forward; only to find themselves depleted and frustrated when reality doesn’t match with their plans.
"I'm working harder than ever, but nothing seems to change," one executive confided recently. "The more I try to control things, the more they seem to spin out of my control."
This mindset, this belief that leadership means controlling outcomes rather than influencing systems, is perhaps the most depleting pattern I encounter as a coach. And it's precisely where creative practice offers its most profound gift.
Your creative expression isn't just about making beautiful things or finding moments of joy (though these are valuable in themselves). It's about fundamentally shifting how you relate to challenges, constraints, and your own capacity to influence rather than control.
The Creative Pathway from Control to Influence
The second pillar of the Shift approach focuses on the beliefs and mindsets that shape how we see the world. Our beliefs—formed through our upbringing, experiences, and the stories we've internalized—create the lens through which we interpret everything around us.
When these beliefs limit us ("I must work harder," "I should have the answer," "The harder I work, the more results I'll get"), they constrain not just our thinking but our very sense of what's possible.
This is where creative practice becomes transformative. It opens pathways beyond our limiting beliefs by giving us direct experience of our innate capacity to influence. Creative expression returns agency to our hands.
When you write, paint, cook, or build, you become "the god of your own little realm." You experience your capacity to bring order to chaos, to manifest your vision, to make tangible change.
There's a profound irony here: the more we attempt to control outcomes, the more helpless we ultimately feel when reality resists our grip. Conversely, when we focus on influence through creative practice, we discover genuine agency. This counterintuitive shift—from control to influence, from helplessness to agency—transforms how we approach every challenge.
This experience directly challenges the limiting belief of helplessness that pervades our collective consciousness. Rather than remaining trapped in what psychologists have called "an epidemic of meaninglessness" or seeking escape through addiction to technology and distraction, creative practice offers a different response: meaningful engagement with the world on your own terms.
Each creative act serves as evidence that contradicts the belief that you are too small to make an impact. Each poem written, meal prepared, or garden tended reminds you of your intrinsic power to create change. This is not just psychological comfort—it's a profound mindset shift that ripples through every aspect of your leadership.
One leader I worked with—a female engineer overwhelmed by leading a team of men from diverse cultural backgrounds, where women in authority were viewed very differently than in the West—found that weekly walks in a botanical garden, with the scent of jasmine and the gentle rustling of leaves around her, followed by reflective journaling, transformed her leadership approach.
"These moments immersed in natural spaces gave me the time I needed to slow down and refocus. And the journaling helped me process that experience into coherent thoughts that turned into goals and intentions for the week," she shared. "That’s how I stopped focusing on everything I couldn't control and started seeing the possibilities within my influence."
This shift from exhausting control to meaningful influence is not just personal—it's contagious. When you approach challenges with creative confidence rather than frustration and even resignation, you inspire others to do the same. Your creative practice becomes a demonstration of possibility that ripples outward, challenging the collective limiting beliefs that hold us back from meaningful action.
The Invitation to Shift
I invite you to consider: What creative practice might help you shift from a mindset of helplessness to one of agency? What form of creation could help you experience your own capacity to bring something new into being?
The Shift I'm inviting you to make is from seeing creativity as a hobby to recognizing it as a powerful practice for transforming your mindset and relationship to challenges.
What if you approached one frustrating situation this week as a creative opportunity rather than an obstacle? What if you gave yourself permission to experiment with solutions rather than striving for immediate perfection?
The world doesn't need more leaders trapped in reactive thinking and limiting beliefs. It needs leaders who can see possibilities where others see only problems, who approach constraints as invitations to creativity rather than barriers to progress.
What mindset shift might be waiting for you on the other side of a creative encounter with a challenge you're facing?
In our next article, we'll explore how the agency you develop through creative practice translates into focused action—the ability to transform vision into reality through sustained attention and follow-through.