Suleika Jaouad: Harnessing Creativity and Curiosity to Lead Through Uncertainty

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Welcome to Meet the Leader, the podcast where top leaders share how they’re tackling the word’s biggest challenges. In today’s episode, we talk to artist and best selling author Suleika Jaouad about harnessing creativity and curiosity to navigate uncertainty. Through creativity and curiosity and the power of reflection.

Subscribe to Meet The Leader on Apple, Spotify and wherever you get your favorite podcasts. I’m Linda Lacina from the World Economic Forum - and this is Meet the Leader

Suleika Jaouad, Author: Where am I conflating momentum with what's meaningful?

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: We talk a lot about uncertainty on this podcast. I’d argue that we don’t talk enough about focus or reflection, about the importance spaces in your life where you can think or say whatever you want without being judged or steered or “Improved”. About giving your self the rarest thing of all: time to think, room to reflect and a chance to make sense of a world changing more by the minute.

A classic journal can give you this this space. Before you click off this podcast, know I’m not here to tell you to get a journal.I myself I successfully resisted journal keeping for most of my life. But I had reason to pick up journaling myself for the first time a few years ago - something I’ll talk about later in this podcast. I jotted down nothing profound, mostly just the mundane, but saw first-hand what a creative practice with no defined goal can do. It’s what science has been saying for years: writing down what you think and feel can help you process tough moments, boost your mood and reduce stress. And according to the research, it can even lower blood pressure and even help you sleep.

She’ll talk more about how reflection can help us navigate uncertainty and the role that practicing creativity and curiosity can play, one that we’re probably taking for granted. But first, she’ll talk about journaling. What is is - and what it isn’t.

Suleika Jaouad, Author: So, you know, I think there's so many misconceptions about journalling. When we think about journalling, it evokes an image of someone writing in their little diary with the locket. But journalling to me is one of the most essential and democratic of the creative forms.

There are no rules when it comes to journalling, a journal can be filled with lists, it can be poems, it can be sentence fragments. It's really, especially in the modern age, a rare space where you get to be in conversation with the self and to show up as your most unedited, unvarnished being.

I am someone who has been journalling obsessively, some might say, from the time that I could hold a pen. And the way that I think of the journal is really as a sort of chrysalis, a place where you don't have to have the answers. To paraphrase the poet [Rainer Maria] Rilke, you get to live in the questions, and someday gradually live your way into the answers

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: You've lived with cancer for many years… there was a time in 2021 I want to take us back to when you, the cancer that you thought was gone a decade before had returned, and you were having a bone marrow transplant and you go to the hospital for treatment, and you bring with you a slew of notebooks. Can you take us through, you know, what those notebooks are? Because each one of them had a very specific purpose. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Suleika Jaouad, Author: So journalling as a kid, as a teenager, was a pastime. It was something I did a lot, but rather inconsistently. And when I was first diagnosed with leukaemia at the age of 22, journalling became much more than a hobby. It became a lifeline.

It became a way for me to give ink to the things that I didn't know how to talk about. To use the journal as a sort of reporter's pad to observe not only the mysterious happenings in my blood and bone marrow, but to understand the kingdom of the sick, and my new role in it.

It also became a way for me to be not only in conversation with myself, but to be in deeper conversation with my loved ones, with the people around me. I find that when you dare to write vulnerably, to share even a morsel of what might come up in the journal – be it something heartbreaking or something mortifying – we learn again and again that we're more alike than we are different. That we're all carrying the same questions, the same doubts, the same fears and insecurities.

A decade after I first got sick, I learned that the leukaemia was back. This was in 2021, and I entered the hospital for what would be several weeks in-patient, to receive a second bone marrow transplant. Now, given that I'd been through this before, I decided to return to the thing that had helped keep me grounded and connected the first time around.

And I packed with me several journals. I had my personal journal. I had a journal for recording notes from doctor's visits. I had a shared journal with my husband, Jon Batiste, where we would write each other letters and little messages. I had a reporter's notebook to write about everything that I was learning, everything that I was seeing.

But to my great surprise, within a few days of arriving to the hospital, I suffered a side effect of my treatment that compromised my vision and made it incredibly challenging to write. And if I had learned anything from being sick once before, it was that to hold to your plans, when your life is upended, is a recipe for frustration, for stasis, for getting mired and stuck in whatever interruption it is that might be plaguing you.

And so I decided to pivot. I had been gifted a set of watercolours, and I was having these frightening fever dreams, literal fever dreams and medication-induced hallucinations, and I decided that instead of keeping a written journal, I was going to keep a visual journal, and I was going to paint the strange dreams that I was have having.

And that to me is the power of a creative act. You get to translate uncertainty into something that feels more akin to mystery. You get to take the interruptions that may be miring you in despair, and turn them into a subject – something that you can examine and make meaning from, something you can render into a piece of work that might even be strangely beautiful.

So my bizarre dreams of 10-foot giraffes that doubled as IV poles turned into paintings. And every day I would make a painting, I would rip it out of my journal, and I would put it on the wall. And by the end of that month in the hospital, I had this visual record, not of what I'd been through, but where one's imagination can take you.

And, I believe that a creative practice is beneficial for everyone. You don't have to be a professional writer, or a musician, or poet to benefit from its power. As children, we're all so naturally creative. We play make-believe, we make gloriously messy finger paintings, and as that pilot light of self-consciousness gets ignited, we start to sort ourselves into categories: bad artists, good artists. We start to focus on investing our time in the things that serve our goals, our outcomes.

But when you think about it, creativity is the undernetting of everything that we do. Cooking is creative. Negotiating a deal requires creativity. Making a sacrifice and having an argument with your spouse requires creativity. Parenting, perhaps, requires the most creativity of anything. And so exercising that muscle of creativity in a context that isn't for public consumption, taking a moment each day, to sit down to write, or doodle, or make a list and find your way back to yourself, that to me is the starting point of every good idea, every first draft of an important conversation, and it is the bedrock of not just my work and my ability to keep enduring and surviving, but more than that – to keep living, to live well, to live intentionally, to life meaningfully, to live a life that doesn't feel like drowning in uncertainty. But instead, is a life of curiosity, of asking questions, of reflecting and taking stock.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: You mentioned that there was a journal that you share with your husband, right? How did that start?

Suleika Jaouad, Author: So I think we've lost the art of letter writing. And early on in our relationship, Jon actually came up with the idea of having a shared journal. Because we're millennials, we weren't actually writing the same journal because we were often in different places due to travel and our work, and we weren't mailing each other letters.

But what we were doing was writing a letter to each other in our own journal, then snapping a photo and texting it to each other. And one of the reasons I love letter writing as an interpretation of journalling is that sometimes in conversation, we're not only unable to say what we want to say, but sometimes we don't even know what we want to say because we're so busy responding to each other, or already anticipating the response as you're also simultaneously listening to someone.

And one of the most fascinating things to me about journalling and letter form is that you're able to write things that would never typically come up in a conversation. Sometimes you're about to tap into thoughts you didn't even know you were carrying in your subconscious. And so for us, it's been a way of having a slower conversation, one that takes time, one that is both a private ritual and a communal joint one.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And why bring that particular journal to the hospital?

Suleika Jaouad, Author: So, to anyone who's been sick, I think one of the hardest aspects of illness is the sense of isolation that can come with it – even if you're lucky as I was to be surrounded by loved ones.

I think, in fact, one of the loneliest experiences a human being can have is feeling alone while being surrounded by the people that you love. And we live in a loneliness epidemic. This isn't just specific to those who find themselves in the patient's chair or the caregiver's chair. And so that sense of connection, connection to self, connection to loved ones, connection to the world beyond the waiting room or the hospital room, I've learned is essential to enduring something like an illness that brings you to your knees, that can bring a relationship to a point of crisis.

And so it was important to me, that Jon and I find ways to stay connected. And so this letter writing practice was one of those ways. It was also the case that, due to a surge in COVID, there was about a two-week period where we couldn't see each other. My immune system was too weak and the risk was too high.

And so we decided to stay connected in other creative ways. Every day, I would send Jon a photo of the paintings I was making. And every day in return, he would send me a lullaby that he'd composed that I would play on loop in my hospital room. And it was his way of trying to envelop me. Not only with his presence, but with the healing frequencies and vibrations of music. Now, I understand not everyone's husband or spouse is a musician and is going to compose a lullaby for them.

But I think that question of how we stay connected to one another, in a world where we have so many ways to feel connected, but often end up feeling more disconnected, is one of the most pressing questions that I have. I think of young people and not only the loneliness epidemic, but the mental health crisis that we find ourselves in. And so to me, until you're able to be in an honest, vulnerable conversation with the self, it's almost impossible to do that with the human beings in your radius.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Was there a moment or a feeling or an idea that you were able to communicate through the sort of letter writing journal that maybe surprised even you, like, ‘Gosh, I'm so glad I was able to either get that out’, that he could maybe have access to it later on, or vice versa, that you are able to learn about what he was feeling. Was there something, was there maybe a special moment that stands out to you within that?

Suleika Jaouad, Author: I think what surprised me most about that period of illness is that Jon and I ended up feeling more deeply connected to each other than we had before. I expected the stress. I worried about the feeling of disconnection when you can't be in the same space, when two people are living what seem to be polar opposite realities.

What I didn't expect is that the struggle of illness, and the sometimes literal distance between us, would force us to find creative ways of connection, that not only got us that period but that have made our relationship so much stronger, so much more honest.

And illness is one of those things that is the moment of accountability that all relationships arc toward. How do we show up when someone is in crisis? How do we show up when things get hard? And I knew Jon to be someone who is on the record as showing up – not just for me, but for so many people. What I didn't expect was how isolation can force you to rethink your priorities and can raise the bar of what it means to be in a relationship with one another, what it means to be in community.

And Jon, during that time, would say to me, we need to double down on love. That's what you do in these moments, you double down on love. And so I think it's also changed the way I think of the role of the creative arts. Often we think of music or writing as entertainment, as something you do for leisure or pleasure. And, I've come to believe that creative work is essential for our ability not only to meaning-make, but to connect to one another within that meaning-making.

Anyone who has sat at a concert and found themselves humming or even dancing along to the music next to a perfect stranger has had that experience of community. It's something we've been doing from the beginning of time, people gathering around campfires and singing, people inscribing and etching stone or making cave paintings and so as much as it might sound like perhaps a slight exaggeration, I've come to believe that creativity is essential. It's more essential now, perhaps, than it's ever been.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: I want to also ask you about The Book of Alchemy. So it's such an interesting compilation of both essays and then journal prompts, but why don't you talk a little bit about it, and how did it come about?

Suleika Jaouad, Author: So like a lot of people, I am someone who occasionally will buy a journal, fill out the first couple of pages, and then drop off. And then I buy a second journal because that one is ruined and proof of my failure to be consistent.

But I think one of the biggest blocks for so many people when it comes to cultivating a daily creative habit is the tyranny of the blank page, the sense of I don't have anything to say or I don’t know what to say. And I found that, especially when I was feeling stuck, I would get either caught in the same thought loops or I'd stop journalling when I needed it most.

And so to me the value of a prompt is that it ignites a little spark. It sets in motion a train of thought that might otherwise not, sorry, let me rephrase that. It ignites a little spark. The image that comes to mind is that of a kaleidoscope – you twist the cylinder and the light falls differently.

And so, The Book of Alchemy is a memoir and essays. It's also a compilation of essays and prompts from 100 of the most creatively inspiring people I know. And the idea is that you don't have to worry about what to write. You can be prompted.

And it's been really interesting to see how people have used the book. Some people use it as a 100-day project. They follow the prompts religiously and write through them day by day. Other people use them as thought prompts. Others still use them as conversation prompts around the dinner table.

And like I said earlier, the beauty of journalling is that it has no rules. It sort of defies genre. It's not, ‘I'm penning a masterpiece’ writing, it's not even grammatical writing. It can be interpreted however serves you. But I really wanted to both give people an introduction, not just to what journalling seems on its surface, writing on paper. But to help people access its real power, its ability to get below the surface, to help you live the questions and to end up somewhere unexpected.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: We are very used to prompting other things. We put things into search engines. We all have AI tools these days. We put little prompts into that. We're getting good at those little inputs. But we're not maybe used to anybody prompting us.

And there's certainly not a lot of opportunities where we're being sort of poked and prodded for self-reflection. And in many cases, some people might not have any real time to pause for self-reflection. What do you think that does to a person, when they're not able to or just don't make time, or can't make time, for self reflection? What happens to you?

Suleika Jaouad, Author: So one of the most common reasons people tell me they don't journal is that they don't have time. To which I often say, please check on your phone how many hours you've spent doom scrolling or on social media. We make time for the things that we prioritize.

I think the bigger thing that stops us from making that time is our obsession with productivity. We live in a culture that is obsessed with, as the journalist David Brooks put it, our resume virtues, the things that make us attractive in the common marketplace. We're less focused on the eulogy virtues, on cultivating the traits that we’re often remembered for long after we're gone. Were you brave? Were you humble? Were you kind?

I think it's so easy in this modern day to tumble through your life, to be focused on doing, as opposed to being, without actually taking a moment to reflect on what it is that you're thinking, what it's that you are feeling and experiencing. And so to me, even one minute, even a sentence, is valuable. It's, to paraphrase the poet T.S. Eliot, a way of finding a still point in the spinning world.

And, what I've found that may seem counterintuitive, is that when I shift away from being productive, when I begin my day with a to-feel list rather than a to-do list, which is one of the prompts from The Book of Alchemy that I return to every day, it changes my mindset as I approach the rest of my day. It sets the tone for everything.

And we are giving prompts all the time, often in the context of AI, but to prompt the self is to take a moment to slow things just enough that you can ask yourself, ‘What actually matters to me today? Are my priorities really my priorities? What would make this day meaningful as opposed to productive? How much of my time is serving the things I actually want versus the things I should be doing?’

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: I think that it's really interesting and just out of full disclosure, I bought your book when it came out and I have given it as a gift as well. I took on journalling after I had a couple of deaths in my family and when your book came out, I was like, ‘Well, that seems interesting to me.’

And what I found myself --and I was using the prompts and one of the things that I thought was interesting -- is that sometimes if I was journalling, I would literally just write maybe what I had for lunch that day. Or sometimes if I was doing the prompts, you know sort of trying to work that in, but it gave me an outlet.

As I was researching our chat, I was seeing all the different health impacts that journalling has, like lowering stress. You know, there's all kinds of mental impacts, but I also found that sometimes I would be very cranky for no reason, and I would have no idea. I would even say to myself, ‘I don't know why I'm feeling cranky right now. I'm not mad at anything. I don't have any problems.’

But I would maybe do my little routine, and then I felt a little bit better. There was still a power to that release, to that output, even if you weren't saying something that was mind-bending or earth-shattering. Is it surprising to people the impact that even a one line a day could have?

Suleika Jaouad, Author: The benefits of journalling have been extolled in study after study – from reducing stress and anxiety to improving productivity, even improving your immune system. But that's not what I'm most interested in.

I think sometimes journalling can be regarded as unserious, as even navel gazing. And yet I know from my own experience and from watching many people take that leap of faith to try it – even if they don't fully understand it – that journalling has very serious applications.

There's so much that we carry in our minds and our body. And there's something that feels almost mystical when we take the time to externalize that swirl of chatter and put it on the page – even if it doesn't seem like much, even if it is a recounting of what you had for breakfast that day. That practice of alchemy, which is why the book is called The Book of Alchemy, is something I'm so fascinated by.

When we think of alchemy, we think of it as this transmutation of something considered base or useless like lead into something precious like gold. And that to me is really what the power of journalling is. You get to alchemize the mundane. You get to alchemize your chatter and turn it into something of your making, something that may seem insignificant in the moment, but that creates a real reverberation.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: I want to talk a little bit about The Isolation Journals, which I think has hundreds of thousands of followers. How many followers now?

Suleika Jaouad, Author: Last I checked, I think we're nearing 300,000 followers.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And, of course, you had mentioned earlier that you have sort of that shared journal with your husband. There's this element of journalling and community. Often when people think about journalling, they think about it being very, very private. Secret, top secret. You mentioned the locket – you lock it and it’s top secret – but there's this element that you've explored of journalling and community. Why is that, why do you think that has filled a gap for people? And what's interesting to you about that.

Suleika Jaouad, Author: So I began a newsletter in the very early days of the pandemic called The Isolation Journals and the premise was really simple. I sent out a short essay and a prompt every day and invited everyone to journal because I knew how much this practice had helped me in moments of isolation and great distress. To my great surprise, people not only began journalling but they began either sharing what they wrote in their journals or sharing what had come up for them.

And it began to spark these conversations despite everyone being siloed in their respective home, that allowed for a kind of honest, vulnerable dialogue that I think exists so rarely, especially on the internet. And so I'm really fascinated by that movement between a private creative ritual and a communal one.

Over the last year, people have formed journalling clubs all over the country and all over the world in response to The Book of Alchemy, where they get together in a living room, they journal to prompts and then they have discussions about what comes up after. I've hosted many of these in my own living room and I'm always surprised by what emerges from it. I learned things about people that I've known my entire life at the end of an hour that I had no idea about. When I journal with strangers in these communal settings, I feel more connected to them than I do many of the people I see every day.

And so, I think that vulnerability creates a reverberation. The ‘I’ very quickly becomes a ‘You’ and a ‘We’. And I think we're in a moment where we want to have deeper conversations. We don't want to have conversations that are oriented toward polarity. We want to be able to share the questions that we're having without rushing toward the answers. And that's what that communal aspect of journalling does. It heals, it connects, and it allows people to have a different kind of conversation.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Somebody who was maybe now thinking a little bit, maybe a little more closer to journalling, who hasn't, maybe they're listening to this, what are maybe three of your favorite prompts that could get somebody started?

Suleika Jaouad, Author: One of my favorite prompts that I mentioned earlier is the to-feel list, and it's exactly what it sounds like. As someone who loves a list, who loves a to-do list specifically (I'll add something to my to-do list that I've already done just so that I can have the satisfaction of crossing it off), I find that to begin the day with a to-feel list, a list of things I want to feel that day – joy, connection, peace – and then following that up by jotting down a couple of ideas of what I might do to get myself to those feelings reorients me away from the to-do list and toward the things that I actually care about.

Another favourite prompt is one called ‘just 10 images’. It was written by my friend Ash Parsons Story who was a very busy mother who had a child in the NICU and barely had time to shower, let alone to write. But she also knew that what they were living together as a family was so important, and she wanted to be able to capture that. And so she started recording just 10 images from the last 24 hours in list form.

And I love that prompt so much because it forces us to rewind the tape and to note moments that we wouldn't otherwise. It also trains our ability to observe, and to note things as they're happening that we wouldn't otherwise. And so that's one of my favourite prompts for digesting my life day-to-day and for really feeling present and grounded.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: You've lived with cancer for years. It has returned, correct?

Suleika Jaouad, Author: Correct.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: How has journalling helped you deal with uncertainty this time around?

Suleika Jaouad, Author: I'm going through cancer treatment for the third time now, and when I first learned of this I really struggled with the overwhelming sense of uncertainty that having an incurable disease brings to your day-to-day. It's hard to daydream about the future when you don't know if you're going to get to exist in that future.

And I kept asking my doctor, ‘How do I endure this? How do I get through the day and make plans when it feels like a sword of Damocles is hanging over me?’ And the advice he gave me is the advice people often give, which is you have to live every day as if it's your last. And every time I thought of that, I felt this intense sense of urgency and panic to make everything count, to squeeze as much juice as I could out of every moment. And I came to the conclusion that for me, that was an unsustainable and maybe even spiritually exhausting, way to go about life.

And so what I've adopted instead is a gentler mindset, and that's of living every day as if it's my first, trying to wake up with a sense of curiosity and playfulness and wonder that a little kid might. And the place where that begins for me is in the journal. It's taking that moment to play, to write without an end goal in mind, to write absolute nonsense and delight in whatever it is that's emerging. And when I'm able to do that, it shifts me out of my fear of uncertainty into a sense of awe at the mystery of our lives and how they unfold.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: That's amazing. You have just one question left, Suleika, and then I can release you back into your very busy day. Leaders are only as good as the questions they're asking. What questions are you asking yourself right now? What are you doing?

Suleika Jaouad, Author: I think the question I'm asking myself in my own work in life is also a question I am pondering on a bigger scale, which is, where am I conflating momentum with what's meaningful?

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: How so? How does that help you, that question?

Suleika Jaouad, Author: It's so easy to confuse busyness with a sense of progress. And as someone who is admittedly pretty ‘type A’, when I'm doing a lot, it feels like forward motion. But the ability sometimes to pause, to take a moment to actually reflect about what I'm doing and why and where it's taking me sometimes can be the most productive unproductive use of time.

And so as we're here at Davos and having questions and conversations specifically, for example, about AI and there is this race to innovate and very real questions about the implications of that race for humankind, for our workforce, for our artists, I think that the focus on meaning over momentum, and specifically defining the why of the momentum and the why of what's meaningful, is something that I know I could benefit from and that I believe others could, too.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: That was Suleika Jaouad.

Thanks so much to her and thanks so much to you, for listening.

You know a leader that values creativity and curiosity. Share this episode with that person.

Find a transcript of this episode – as well as transcripts from my colleague’s podcasts Radio Davos – go to wef.ch/Podcasts.

This episode of meet the leader was produced and presented by me with Taz Kelleher as editor, Juan Toran as studio engineer in Davos and Gareth Nolan driving studio production.

That's it for now. I'm Linda Lacina from the World Economic Forum. Have a great day.