This week I was at the CMO Club Summit in Beverly Hills. It is a great event, drawing 150+ heads of marketing from across the country for a few days of networking, inspiration and learning from each other. This is the second time I have attended, and something I am excited to continue to be a part of in future years.

One of my favorite sessions was one from novelist and screenwriter Justine Musk on “Finding Your Creative Voice.” Justine authors a blog that I have followed for sometime about embracing your creative badass. During her time at the CMO club event, she spent time discussing the hero and the heroine’s journey in a story. You can find her take on it in a recent post.. One thing that really stood out for me was in her account of the heroine’s journey. She spoke of how the heroine goes internal to her (or his) own space to to deal with whatever internal demons are there, and emerges in a better place. She describes this journey in a story as enclosure, transformation and re-emergence. Gender aside, Justine shared that as a heroie goes to this private place to think it is a place of “creative incubation.”

This speaks so much to me because I feel like to truly accomplish creative solutions in my job and my life, it takes me moving into a quiet, internal place of my own to be able to think clearly and to figure things out. Often times I find this quiet (internal) spot on my mountain bike, at the gym, or when traveling alone. However most times, I find that I crave for more time in my “own” place. This could be the ultimate example of marketing meeting motherhood. I need that place to think both for my success as a marketer, my own sanity as well as to be a better mom. And.there.just.isn’t.time. Or at least that is how it feels.

So my commitment for this evening is to create space (time) for new ideas and for my own transformation of ideas to happen so that I (as a heroine) re-emerge with strength. I don’t know how I am going to make this happen, but it needs to happen. I need my creative incubator running.