Latest news with #ZoranaIvcevicPringle
Fast Company
12-07-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
How to harness your emotions to fuel creativity
BY Fast Company recently interviewed Dr. Zorana Ivcevic Pringle, a senior researcher at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, on what it means to lead a creative life. In this essay, she shares one of her top tips for fueling creativity. Creativity is the powerhouse that differentiates good organizations from great ones. It goes beyond generating ideas. It is about the long process of developing ideas for more effective performance and the process of building abstract notions into concrete products. Creativity is full of emotions—the reputational risk of not knowing how an idea will be received by stakeholders, the frustration of dealing with constraints and obstacles, conflict about directions to take, and elation when you finally develop a product. Successful creativity does not depend on the kinds of emotions experienced. Rather, it depends on your ability to harness the power of emotions and manage them when they get in the way of progress. In my book, The Creativity Choice: The Science of Making Decisions To Turn Ideas Into Action, I write about how to use emotional intelligence to manage the creative process, regardless of industry or job role. Notice emotions to identify opportunities A traditional (and outdated) idea of professionalism demands that emotions be left at the doorstep. But that is neither possible, nor desirable. Emotions contain messages about the state of our minds and the situations around us. This is valuable information that can spark inspiration and help us identify opportunities ripe for innovation. Is something frustrating you? This might point to a problem that can be solved. Entrepreneurs are skilled at identifying opportunities by reading their own and others' feelings. Hate everything about the grocery shopping experience? Apoorva Mehta did not ignore this feeling, he used it to found Instacart. He created a way to shop for groceries from one's phone, which completely bypassed all the frustrations of going to the store, searching for items, and waiting in lines. Frustrated about the state of the beauty industry? Melissa Butler founded Lip Bar. Its products are vegan and cruelty-free and offer a wide variety of vibrant lipstick colors and complexion products. Innovators inside organizations do the same. For example, when a supervisor in a food services unit of a major hospital realizes his workers are exhausted, he's identifying a problem in need of a creative solution. As a result, the hospital redesigned the workflow, removing the need to bend or stretch to reach far away items. This reduced worker burnout and improved their accuracy on the job. Take advantage of thinking/feeling connections Emotion scientists have discovered moods boost different kinds of thinking. There are times when we feel positive, energized, and enthusiastic. These times are best for brainstorming and charting new ideas. At other times we are subdued or even sullen. At these times we are best at critical thinking. These moods make us see all that is wrong or not quite right. Creativity is not just a spark of inspiration or what we call 'feeling creative.' Inspired ideas have to be developed and improved upon. To optimize creative work, it takes skill to match different moods to tasks which benefit from them. Feeling playful? Come up with new ideas for a project. Feeling down? Review and revise. Generate emotions What if you have to attend an ideation meeting, but are feeling down? Remember that we have more power over emotions than we might realize. You can create the mood that is most helpful in the moment. Recall a past win. Put on a song that gets you going. Reach out to a colleague whose enthusiasm is infectious. Just as athletes pump themselves up or find calm focus when needed, you can find a workplace equivalent of getting pumped up. Another skill is generating emotions to communicate and inspire. Leaders skilled at communicating their passion inspire others and end up having workers who are clear about their responsibilities and goals. Similarly, when pitching creative ideas, those who project fiery determination are perceived as both passionate and well prepared. And communicating these feelings is related to higher funding pledges. Use emotional intelligence to build a climate for creativity and innovation Leaders set the emotional tone in their teams and serve as models for what is expected and accepted. A Yale study including more than 14,000 people across industries in the U.S. asked workers to describe how their supervisors act in emotionally fraught situations. Emotionally intelligent supervisors do four specific things: They are skilled at reading emotions and acknowledge them. They realize when people are upset or worried about organizational or industry changes. They inspire enthusiasm and model decision-making that takes into account both optimistic and cautious voices. Emotionally intelligent supervisors understand how their decisions or other events affect people. They are able to successfully manage their own emotions, and also help their team members when they are upset or frustrated. Employees whose supervisors acted in emotionally intelligent ways were motivated, challenged, and fulfilled at work. However, employees whose supervisors did not act in emotionally intelligent ways felt unappreciated and angry. And this emotional climate had consequences. Having an emotionally intelligent supervisor makes workers see opportunities for growth and act in more creative and innovative ways. If the goal is creativity and innovation, leaders should develop emotional intelligence skills. A review of dozens of studies shows that training programs—either in higher education or through workplace professional development—make people better at accurately perceiving, using, understanding, and managing emotions, regardless of their industry. When leaders develop these skills, they notice how their team members feel, demonstrate understanding of how their decisions impact others, and help people deal with challenges of work. Investment in leadership development will pay off in capacity for innovation.
Fast Company
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Fast Company
‘I am very motivated by frustration': A Yale creativity expert on how to turn your ideas into action
BY When scientist Zorana Ivcevic Pringle first started out in academia as an undergraduate student, she wanted 'to study interesting people.' Unfortunately, that's not a scientific term, and it carries with it a value judgement (also unscientific, as fun as it sounds). 'I started being interested in describing what creative people are like, and understanding that complexity in a creative personality,' she says. 'They seem to embody these dichotomies, things that oftentimes don't go together in most people. It grabs your attention to something really important.' She frames creativity in her research around strength and vulnerabilities, particularly engaged in how both personality and processes feed a creative act or idea: 'How do you approach it when you have an idea? What happens with it? I became interested in what I ended up calling the process of self-regulation in creativity. And that is, how do you make yourself do it?' Now, on the heels of launching her book The Creativity Choice (May 2025), Pringle, who is a senior research scientist at the Yale School of Medicine's Center for Emotional Intelligence, admits she was onto something, and that dichotomy she senses about creativity is endlessly inspiring and interesting, across disciplines, everywhere. 'I wanted to study people who are complex, who are doing things that are different, and who are pushing boundaries of what is possible.' The body of work she's cultivated in more than two decades of researching creative individuals and their processes is both incredibly layered and also fundamentally pedestrian. We all can relate to it, even if we don't have the last name of Bezos, Einstein, or Monet. Creativity has a lot of fun in it. We don't talk enough about it, but it also has times that are very hard—I mean, excruciatingly hard. We encounter obstacles, as a rule. Nothing you ever try works out. That's disappointing, frustrating, overwhelming. That can be stressful. We have to deal with that and on some level accept it will happen. We have to have comfort that we can handle it somehow. I became fascinated by that. The super-early-rate deadline for Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies Awards is Friday, July 25, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.
CNBC
02-07-2025
- Science
- CNBC
Dr. Zorana Ivcevic Pringle
Zorana Ivcevic Pringle, PhD is a senior research scientist at Yale University's Center for Emotional Intelligence. She is a regular contributor to Psychology Today and Creativity Post, and co-editor of "The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity and Emotions" and "Crises, Creativity, and Innovation." She is the author of "The Creativity Choice: The Science of Making Decisions to Turn Ideas into Action." She lives in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Forbes
15-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
How Leaders Can Prioritize Creativity At Work: Yale Professor
Business leaders should adopt concepts like problem finding, rather than problem solving, to help ... More teams be more creative. In some business situations, the need for creativity is obvious: research and development, new business pitches, user experience strategies. Yet creativity is also an imperative in situations like organizational structure or other instances that can elevate a team's output while also improving its work experience. 'The point is to value creativity in places you wouldn't expect,' said Zorana Ivcevic Pringle, PhD, a Yale professor and author of The Creativity Choice: The Science of Making Decisions To Turn Ideas into Action. Pringle argues that both the agency creative director and the food service supervisor have the potential to be deeply creative—if their workplace allows it. 'Creativity is doing something new and original, but it also has to be effective,' Pringle said in our recent interview. Creativity is not just about finding the breakthrough idea — it's about improving outcomes, whether you're launching a new product or finding a better way to deliver meals to hospital patients. We discussed how leaders can intentionally build environments that invite and sustain creativity. Here are five takeaways for leaders who want to help their teams turn ideas into action. Many leaders default to the approach of 'don't bring me problems, bring me solutions.' Pringle warns that this is a mistake. As study of successful teams indicate they spend 53% of their time deeply exploring and questioning the nature of the problem before stepping in to solve it. 'If you skip problem finding,' she said, 'you risk solving the wrong problem.' She encourages leaders to reward thoughtful inquiry, multiple perspectives, and even the discomfort that comes with lingering in ambiguity. 'Creativity isn't just idea generation— it starts with defining what really needs solving,' she said. Creativity isn't confined to product development or marketing. Pringle shared a story from her consulting work in a hospital, where a food service supervisor noticed his team was burning out. Instead of simply pointing them to a wellness program, he realized that the burnout was caused by physical fatigue. He redesigned their workflow, minimizing repetitive bending and reaching, which reduced stress and mistakes. That simple shift improved job satisfaction and patient outcomes, yet required an approach to thinking outside the standard approach. 'This was physical creativity,' Pringle said. 'He saw a problem, acted like a leader, and made the system better.' Leaders should empower teams to reimagine how work gets done, even in roles that don't seem 'creative' on the surface. Pringle conducted a study of over 14,000 U.S. workers across all industries where she found a clear connection between emotionally intelligent leadership and employee creativity. When leaders acknowledge and respond to emotions in the workplace, what Pringle calls 'emotion management,' employees are more motivated, less frustrated, and more creative. Ignoring emotions doesn't neutralize them; it simply leads to what she calls 'emotional leakage.' That unspoken frustration or tension shows up in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that impact results. 'Emotion contagion is real,' Pringle said. 'A leader's mood can spread through a team, influencing everything from morale to innovation.' Inspirational leadership gets attention, but sustaining creativity over time takes more than a great pep talk. Leaders must also create the conditions for long-term creative work, including adequate time, resources and, yes, rewards. 'There's a myth that paying people undermines creativity,' Pringle explained. 'That might be true in short-term lab studies, but in real work, people need to know their efforts are valued. Pay, recognition, and support all matter.' This doesn't just mean occasional bonus checks. Acknowledging someone's contribution publicly or giving them room to grow creatively can also have a lasting impact. One reason emotional and creative expression gets stifled at work is a lingering idea of 'professionalism' that discourages vulnerability or emotion that comes with bringing forward untested ideas. Pringle believes those norms are outdated and counterproductive. 'You can't leave emotions at the door,' she said. 'Pretending to leads to suppression, and suppressed emotions don't stay hidden.' Leaders who model authenticity and invite safe emotional expression create workplaces where people feel seen—and are freer to take creative risks. Creativity isn't a special skill reserved for 'creatives.' As Pringle's research and examples show, it can flourish anywhere—if leaders create the conditions. That means slowing down to define problems clearly, responding to emotional signals, and rewarding not just results, but the creative process that makes them possible. As Pringle put it, 'Creativity doesn't live only on inspiration. It lives on support.'
