Michael Gelb explains the power of Qi Gong and how it relates to innovation and creativity. You can find out more n Michael’s new book: Creativity On Demand: How to Ignite and Sustain the Fire of Genius.
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Related Podcast: The Importance of Managing Energy.
Transcription of the Podcast
Joe Dager: Welcome everyone! This is Joe Dager, the hose of the Business901 Podcast. With me today is Michael Gelb. Michael is a leading authority on the application of genius thinking to personal and organizational development. Starting with one of his first books to his latest book Creativity on Demand and a dozen or so in between, Michael has covered that field for decades now I guess. I’m honored by your participation Michael.
Michael Gelb: Thank you so much. It’s great to be with you.
Joe: I will have to introduce you just a little bit further as a person that started myself and my sons on a juggling career that was probably responsible for more broken items in our house than just about anything else. When you were mentioned to my wife, she goes, “Oh, that guy…”How did you ever start writing as a career? I mean you’re a prolific writer, you’re putting books out every few years and how did you start that as a career?
Michael: Well I was working on my Master’s thesis many, many, many years ago, and I was very passionate about my subject. I was writing about the connection between the mind and body, and this is over 30 years ago, before everybody was talking about this. I was fascinated by the subject, I was passionate about it, but when it came time to actually write my thesis, I really didn’t know how to write. So it was fortunate for me that just at that time, I met Tony Buzan who is the originator of Mind Mapping, and I actually gave him juggling lessons, and he gave me mind mapping lessons. And I made a mind map of my Master’s thesis and ideas just started exploding from my mind, and I was much more creative than I had imagined. I thought of all sorts of ideas and had no trouble organizing them and I wrote it all out longhand, just to give you an idea of how long ago this was and then a friend of mine typed it up and sent it to my thesis adviser.
When I got my Master’s degree, my thesis adviser said, “I’ve never seen a student’s writing improve so much in the course of my academic career.” He said, “It’s as though you found your true voice.” That Master’s thesis got published as my first book, and it got translated into 16 languages and it stayed in print now, I think it’s been in print for 34 years, and I became a writer. In the late 70’s, I got invited to speak on a 5-day corporate retreat, and I shared my ideas on creative thinking and on how to learn anything you want to learn. I thought them all how to juggle. I shared my ideas on mind, body, communication and they liked it, so they invited me to be on their corporate seminars all over the world. In my 20’s I was travelling; I went to Japan, I went to Australia, all over Europe, back and forth to the US, down to South Africa teaching seminars on creativity. So I just kept doing that; I just keep writing book, and making up seminars, and traveling around the world, and inspiring people, and having fun.
Joe: One of your first books was the Alexander Technique, and now you’ve moved to ‘Qi’; has it always — the body played an important role in your work?
Michael: Very much so, very much so. I mean I work with corporations, and you say well they are totally dissociated from the body, but what does the word ‘corporation’ mean? Corpus means body. We talk about the ‘head’ of a corporation and I’m also working with the head of the corporation and trying to get the head in coordination with the whole body, with the limbs, with the metabolism and the energy is the metabolism of the organism which is oftentimes somewhat sluggish or just out of whack. So the body is actually a fantastic metaphor for working with an organization. But it’s not just a metaphor; the most important commodity in organizations today is energy.
About 20 years ago, every company sent their executives to time management seminars, and those don’t happen anymore because we realize, it’s not about managing time, it’s about managing energy. And it turns out that for thousands of years, the Chinese have been studying how do you manage your energy on a personal basis, how can you actually get more energy as you get older, what are the practices you need to do. So I’ve been studying this for many years and I’ve made the connection that in teaching my clients how to be more creative, whether individually or organizationally, I’ve always taught them about the creative mindset, the attitude you need and I’ve taught the techniques of the creative process like for example mind mapping, but that the missing link for most people is the energy.
And so that’s why I wrote this new book, and it has three parts: mastering creative energy, mastering the creative mindset and mastering the creative process. It’s called Creativity on Demand really because there’s such a demand for people to be creative. I try to help them meet that challenge by giving them the insights that I’ve developed over these many years on how to access the mindset, the process, and the energy.
Joe: In the very beginning there you brought up a great point, that you work with all sizes of companies and especially a lot of large ones and I really have to ask you, how is that mind/body connection perceived in large companies? I mean do you go to Jeff Bezos or something and say we need to connect your people better; we need to get better energy here? I mean sitting here thinking of that guy coming in there to the board room and discussing this, I mean how does that play out?
Michael: Well it’s a great question and it’s fascinating because I’ve been doing this for a really long time, and I’ve actually been teaching this kind of stuff in organizations for a long time. Now I’d have to tell you, there’s a disclaimer here that the people, who hire me, tend to be more visionary, more creative, more humanistic. I don’t get hired by the close-minded, scorch-the-earth, exploit-the-worker types and so there’s a bias. And the more creative people, more visionary people, more visionary, more positive people are the ones who tend to hire me. Having said that, if there’s an art to presenting this kind of material in a corporate environment and you know I don’t just come in and say, okay we’re all going to do these ancient Chinese exercises. I could textualize it for people and I also make it clear to them that they don’t have to believe any metaphysics, that if I ask them if they’re willing to try some very simple visualization, breathing and movement exercises that might yield the experience of having more energy, and that they don’t have to believe anything to do the exercise and if they don’t feel more energy as a result of doing it, they don’t have to do it anymore. So that’s a pretty good deal. Okay, invest a few minutes and see if you feel more energy. And they will say, “Oh my God, I feel more energy. That’s really great!”
Joe: Okay, so you do need it right? You need to practice not only let’s say med
Joe: When you think of it in sports, it’s become accepted through the years and you kind of visualize standing behind a golf ball, your swing, and if you think the water on the right, well guess what, it usually goes in the water on the right. But in business, that’s always been kind of taboo. You never really did that.
Michael: Yes, well you know it’s — how about if I just cut to the chase and say, “That is really stupid!” No, I mean, the detachment, the notion that somehow you are some kind of a disembodied mind. Yes, I mean just take it on this level, forget about performing on a more creative, more intelligent way. Just let’s look at in the context of healthcare. The biggest expense companies have, or one of certainly the biggest expenses they have is the healthcare contributions for their people. And when people actually get sick, obviously that’s not good for anybody and most of the illnesses in our world today are caused by one of the two things; either lifestyle, a lack of exercise, poor diet and fundamentally stress is the greatest contributor to most illnesses that people experience, and then the other big contributor is going to the hospital.
Iatrogenic illness is about 25% of illnesses in the United States, so between lifestyle and then the treatments for the lifestyle illness — you know I just met a guy on a plane, I just did a seminar out in Florida and this guy sitting next to me said he used to be really overweight, and he was out of shape, and he got some kind of sinus infection and he went to his doctor and the doctor put him on really heavy-duty antibiotics for 21 days. The sinus infection went away, and instead he got a yeast infection and that lasted for months and wrecked his life for a while until friends of him said, “If you keep taking drugs, you’re going to keep getting a reaction. You need to change your diet and start exercising.” So the guy lost over 100 pounds and he said it absolutely changed his life and the great thing is that he had no idea that there was a connection between his lack of exercise and his crappy diet and taking antibiotics, and the fact that he was way overweight, out of shape and prone to all these problems.
This is so simple, and yet we keep spending more and more money on various kinds of pharmaceuticals and people want a magic bullet. You’re responsible to a large extent for your health and for your level of energy and here’s the great news, people have been studying how to cultivate more energy for thousands of years, and this is not just anecdotal or superstitious. The Harvard Women’s Health Newsletter recently described this ancient Chinese art and said, “It’s not just meditation in motion, it’s medication in motion.” These are research-validated to help with so many of the common challenges that people face. Especially, this is relevant to you if you’re 20, 30, or 40. But if you’re 50, 60, 70, 80 or 90, the margin for error is less.
itation, but movement and body — how would you say that? The body movement, you talk about a lot, is part of a meditative state; would that be true in saying that?
Michael: Yes, yes it is. It’s just very simple. I mean the popular word today is mindfulness which just means paying attention to what the hell you’re doing, which is very hard for people to do today. I mean I was just — where was I? I was walking down the street in Miami, in a break from my session with a client and you’ve probably done this too, I watch cars drive by me, and I looked at the drivers and every single one was either talking on the phone or texting; I mean every single one. And you know we have an absolute pandemic of people being in more than one place at the same time, and besides the fact that they’re putting themselves and their lives at risk and the lives of other drivers at risk. They’re squandering this precious consciousness that we all are endowed with. And if you can develop your consciousness, if you can strengthen your basic awareness, guess what, that goes hand in hand with your ability to be creative, your ability to generate really new original ideas. There’s not too many really new original ideas that are being generated by people who are doing instant messaging.
Joe: Discover Qi, you talk about that in your book and ‘Qi’ has been called the — and I’m not sure you called it that but the ‘fire genius.’ Can you explain ‘Qi’ or ‘Qigong’ to me as it is in the book?
Michael: Sure! Absolutely. Well, first of all, the thing, we have to say, is that every traditional culture has a notion like this. In India, in yoga it’s called Prana, the breath of life. In Japan, it’s called ‘Ki.’ In China, it’s called ‘Chi.’ I guess in the West, the closest thing, we have, is ‘The Force’ from Star Wars. But it’s fundamental, vital life energy, and it’s not mystical. When food is fresh — if you go to the store, you’re going to pick the vegetable or the fish or whatever it is that’s glistening and looks to closer to alive. You can see, you can taste that it has more life force in it, and you can see that in people. Some people have more verve, more energy, more basic force emanating from their being; it’s pretty obvious. You listen to music; you look at great art. One of my favorites examples is Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. It’s not the brush strokes, it’s not the paint, it’s the energy that Van Gogh infused into this painting. Or if you listen to The Marriage of Figaro by Mozart or anything by Mozart for that matter, and it’s not just high art, it’s even popular culture. When I think about Michael Jackson’s moonwalk, to me it’s another great example of ‘Qi’.
So it’s this fundamental life energy; little kids have it, it’s our birthright. We come to the earth with amazing, super energy, and that energy is not surprisingly linked to the tremendous creativity and learning ability that little children have. But as they get sent to school and put through the mill, the energy declines and so does the creativity and then it tends to drain off with every decade. So what if there’s a practice, what if there’s something you could do to cultivate that ‘Qi’ so that you could experience a renaissance of your natural endowment of energy, creativity, and passion.
Well a ‘gong’ is simply the Chinese words means — the simplest translation is just workout and cultivation. And ‘Qi’ is ‘Ki,’ ‘Prana,’ ‘The Force,’ the life force, vitality, energy. So ‘Qigong’ just simply means working out your energy. We do workouts for our body, we do workouts for our muscles, for our cardiovascular system and that’s really good but for thousands of years in China they figured out, how do you work out your actual life energy? How do you strengthen it? How do you cultivate it? And the great news is, it doesn’t require any equipment. You don’t have to go to a class. You can benefit in 20 minutes a day; you can fundamentally change your baseline of creative energy.
Part of the inspiration for this book, I went to some of the greatest masters of ‘Qigong’ and also a few yoga masters, and Aikido masters and meditation masters and I asked them, “What is your most powerful practice that the average person can do in 20 minutes or less to raise their baseline of creative energy?” I put the best of those practices in the book, with illustrations so that people could actually learn the practices from the book and then we have free links on my Website so that people can go and see the practices in action. And what I love about this ancient Chinese system is it’s so simple; you don’t need equipment. I mean I just flew back, I flew from Miami and then I went to the seminar yesterday in New York, and then I flew back, got home at 12:30 a.m. and you know it could be pretty exhausting to slip around like this, but I did my ‘Qigong’ practice at Kennedy Airport at the gate. And I mean it’s not magic and I still need to rest and recover from this hard work but it just takes some of the edges off and I have a lot more energy than I would if I didn’t know this and it’s great that you can do it at the airport, or at your office. I was only moving around in different hotels; I did my practice in my hotel room before I gave my seminar and clients comment on, “You have so much energy and enthusiasm. You’ve been talking about Leonardo for all these years, but it’s like you’re giving us this talk for the first time.” Well, I cultivate my energy.
Joe: Well you know I think of Da Vinci having this energy and things, but then I relate to Einstein, and I just don’t picture the connection. Did Einstein connect with that energy, you think? Do you think he had that connection?
Michael: I do, and you can see it in Einstein, it’s manifested in his amazing sense of humor. Einstein was very childlike, very playful, very energetic. I mean we don’t think of him as the kind of amazing physical specimen that Leonardo Da Vinci was. Leonardo was renowned as the strongest man in Florence and with Einstein, we mostly focus on the hair. But Einstein had a fantastic sense of humor, he loved to make jokes. His theory of relativity came to him in a daydream, a positive conscious practice of daydreaming. He called them thought or imagination experiments. He imagined himself traveling on a beam of light out into the universe and discovered much to his amazement that he traveled forever in one direction and came back to the place from which he started, at which point he realized the universe must be curved and finite. So he had a lot of these kinds of qualities that were aiming to cultivate. In the Bible, even it says, “Become as a little child, and you shall enter the kingdom of heaven.” How do you do that? How do you maintain that child-like, playful, lively, imaginative quality? We need all the help we can get and Leonardo, how to think like Leonardo, Leonardo is a great role model for anybody who wants to cultivate those qualities.
I wrote about Einstein in a book called Discover Your Genius along with nine other geniuses, and then I co-authored Innovate like Edison, with Thomas Edison’s great, great grand niece. Edison was another very playful, super imaginative, unbelievably energetic guy. So I’m trying to give people as many different metaphors. Some people relate more to Da Vinci, some people relate more to Edison, some people relate more to Einstein, some people relate more to juggling, some people relate more to ‘Qigong.’ So I’m trying to give them a continually evolving menu for this nourishment of their creative being.
Joe: In your book, do you take and discuss ‘Qigong’ and how to apply it at a personal level, correct?
Michael: Yes.
Joe: Can a leader create energy in his organization through similar practices?
Michael: Great question and the answer is a resounding yes. Yes, yes, yes. I teach people the phases of the creative process. The first phase is preparation; you’re trying to clarify the nature of the problem that you’re working on. The second phase is the generation; you’re trying to generate lots of ideas without evaluation. The third phase is incubation; take a break, sleep on it, that’s when people get their best ideas — in the shower, at the bath or driving in their car and not in the workplace. Evaluation, you have to look at the strengths of an idea, the weaknesses of the idea, and then you have to make a decision. And then you come to the part where the innovation really begins which is an implementation, and these phases require different types of energy. They require different modalities. You need to put yourself in a very objective place to collect the data and analyze the problem and to make a decision. You need to put yourself on a very open-minded, playful, exploratory modality to generate new ideas and then you have to shift into a very analytical, critical mode to look at what could go wrong with those ideas. Once you make a decision, you have to shift into implementation mode which requires an action, orientation, overcoming obstacles and resistance.
So first of all, it helps people a lot to know that there are these different modalities and that you need to be flexible to move between each of them. But then, what if you could cultivate for yourself and for your team the energy that you need for each phase? For example, it’s important for all of us individually and organizationally from time to time to be able to shift into a neutral mode, let go of our preconceptions and prejudices, especially when we’re trying to make an important decision. There’s a practice, it’s incredibly simple but it’s thousands of years old, it’s for putting your energy into a place of neutrality so that you are better able to think in a clear and objective fashion. And if you’re in a meeting and you could just suspend ego and suspend opinion, and spend one minute with everybody practicing this simple, little exercise, think about how much clearer and better people’s decision making could be. Just to suspend that ego right and wrong mode and shift, not just shift your attitude but literally shift your whole, mind, body and energy, and the great thing is these are not weird things. They’re very simple movements, stances that you — it’s hard to explain in this medium but if people go on in my site, you can see these practices; they don’t look weird. I guess that’s what I’m trying to say is that they don’t look weird. It’s just normal, and they’re very effective.
Joe: I think that what you’re explaining are they’re kind of like rituals that we might have.
Michael: That’s a good way to say it, yes. Non-religious rituals, they’re energy rituals. For example, put yourself into a state that’s more neutral, less prejudiced and more open, and then sometimes you need to gear your energy up to do something really hard and challenging. Well, there’s ancient practices that warriors used to do that have been adapted for all of us to do when we need to summon the energy of our courage and our perseverance in the face of all kinds of resistance, which is obviously an essential characteristic of anybody who’s interested in innovation.
Joe: Is it just the Western world or is it something that we have just kind of ignored through the years? I mean why is this coming, mindfulness is coming to the forefront now and I think meditation is becoming more accepted now, where in the 90’s when you first started writing, it was kind of like, “those weird people over here…”
Michael: Check out this movie, it’s called Awake. It’s the story of Yogananda, the great yoga master coming to the United States in the 1920’s and giving these lectures on consciousness. And you see these scenes, this real footage of this enlightened yoga master speaking to these really stiff New Englanders and the culture clash is amazing, but he won over a lot of these people. They’ve never seen anything like it. And really up until about 50 or 60 years ago, with the exception of an occasional visit from somebody like Yogananda, you would have to go climb the Himalayas like a cartoon in The New Yorker to find out some of this kind of information. You’d have to go to some place in China where you couldn’t get to anyway, you wouldn’t speak the language, you wouldn’t know how to find this.
Globalization has changed everything and modern media has changed everything, the ease of transportation has changed everything, so this ancient wisdom, that has been passed along and refined over thousands of years, is readily accessible, and we’re testing it. We’re testing it Western scientific methodologies. So meditations, and these ‘Qigong’ practices, there’s a lot of research showing that they’re very helpful for the whole range of ailments, overcome the whole range of ailments, all those ailments associated with stress which is most of what we suffer from. There’s all sorts of upside benefits in terms of — well my favorite one is what they call perceived sense of well-being, which means people who meditate and do ‘Qigong’ are happier.
Joe: That’s probably the best one right there.
Michael: It’s my personal favorite, perceived sense of well-being. Thank you.
Joe: These are something that doesn’t have to take a lot of time either. Like before my Podcast, I really should just take two minutes before and put myself in the correct state for the Podcast.
Michael: Now you’re getting the idea; exactly, right. And you’ll find in the book, if you go back through it, that’s why I put in lots of different practices so that people can experiment and find what works best for them, and these are things that I actually do. Before I give a presentation and depending on the different presentations, where I am and who it is, I have a menu of possibilities to tune my energy to just the right state. And then after I give a presentation or after I travel, how to revitalize my energy, how to recover my energy, it’s good to have — everybody should have this kind of vocabulary of their energy states and ability to manage their own energy. It’s not something that most of us learn, but again that’s why I wrote this book. It’s something you can learn, it’s not hard to learn. It’s fun, and you feel the benefits right away.
Joe: I have to ask you, outside of your book, I mean when I want to learn about ‘Qigong’, or I want to learn about something along this, I type into Google and I get all these things. How do I distinguish the good and the bad? I mean there’s a lot of stuff out there, and I’m not sure.
Michael: Absolutely. Yes. I’d recommend the people that I interviewed because I did a lot of research, and there’s a lot of great teachers. There’s my friend Michael Winn who runs a summer academy, and he does 5-day retreats in North Carolina. There’s Robert Peng in New York. There’s Dr. Roger Jahnke out on the West Coast. Actually Roger and I are doing a seminar together at Esalen, on January 4th to 9th 2015. We’re going to explore the relationship between vitality and creativity and personal empowerment in one of the most beautiful places in the world, which also helps. So I put all these people in the book as recommended resources. In any of these things, obviously there’s always some pretenders, and some people are better than others, and some people can lead you astray, but the ones, I’ve just mentioned, are really superb.
There’s another guy named Ken Cohen; Ken is a phenomenal scholar who’s fluent in Chinese and an absolute master of ‘Qigong.’ I’ve had the great privileged to study with him, and he was one of the advisors for the book. So it’s great to go n a live seminar with any of these teachers, but you can also learn a lot from a book. You can order Ken Cohen’s video program, order Robert Peng’s video program, Michael Winn, Roger Jahnke; you can’t go wrong with any of these people.
Joe: There is ways that I can teach myself and then I can take it to another level?
Michael: Oh yes, absolutely. You can learn a simple practice in a couple hour sessions that you could just do every day, and you’ll just have more energy and you’ll feel better. The thing is when you learn that, you’ll say, “Well, what else is there for me to learn?” I mean I’ve been doing this for years. I started all this when I got my black belt in Aikido, and I went to my Aikido master, and I said, “Okay, I know all the moves but how do I get the inner power that you seem to have?” Because this guy had an amazing ‘Ki’ is what it’s called in Aikido. I mean he could hardly touch you and throw you across the room, and that’s why I’ve always liked martial arts because it’s not a matter of theory. If somebody can just throw you across the room, that’s ‘Qi in action. This guy was 5’-6” and 160 pounds and I couldn’t touch him, and he would just flick me all around the place, which is why he was my teacher. I said, “How do I get more energy? How do I get the kind of inner power that you have to go with knowing all the movements?” He said, “Study Qigong!”
I started training and just continued to evolve this over the decade, and then I just had this realization that this is just not the secret of martial power, that’ why Bruce Lee was so great, it’s the ‘Qi.’ It’s also the secret of healing, this is what’s acupuncture is all about, is removing the impediment to the flow of the ‘Qi.’ That’s what health is; it’s the free flow of ‘Qi’ along the meridians of your body. The realization, that inspired the book, was, okay the secret of martial arts is the secret of healing and health, and it’s also a secret, the missing link for many people of creativity. How do we unleash the flow of ‘Qi’ so you can live a more creative life? That’s what creativity on demand is all about.
Joe: I think that’s a great summary of it. How can someone get a hold of the book and get a hold of you?
Michael: Thank you. Michaelgelb.com. G-e-l-b. Michaelgelb.com. There’s a link to get the book. It has free articles. If you hunt around, you’ll find the links to the videos for some of the ‘Qigong’ exercises too. Michaelgelb.com.
Joe: That sounds awesome Michael. I would like to thank you very much. This Podcast would be available on the Business901 iTunes store and the Business901 Website. Thanks again Michael.
Michael: Thank you!
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