Dawn: You’ve been teaching everyone about how you warm up, your creative process, and some of the writing exercises that you do. Can you share more about your personal creative process, like when you’re preparing for a speech?
Bo: Yeah, my creative process is on the walls of my office. The walls are covered with giant pieces of paper. Dawn tried to make part of it a living area with furniture and said I couldn’t put stuff on the walls in that area. So every time she comes around, I have to take my stuff off the walls.
But basically, we all have this TNT, or explosive energy, inside of us that we have to express. If we don’t, we’ll end up turning against ourselves. When I played football it was easy to get that TNT out of me and onto other players. I got rewarded for it.
Well, when that part of my life was over I found out quickly that it didn’t translate very well. The things I did best were illegal.
So as I started to learn to get on stage, and to write and express myself, I’d put what I was feeling up on the walls of my office and just write. Over that period of time, I would just go to my office and look at what I’d written and I started to memorize it—to internalize it.
I’ve always put my thoughts, stories and ideas up on walls and let them become part of my molecules so I didn’t have to remember what to say. My body would know it.
If I didn’t have this community allowing me to express myself, I don’t know where I’d be. If you can’t find the vehicle that allows you to express the TNT inside your body then the frustration it feels in a world that won’t allow you to communicate will escalate. You become very valuable to this world if you can express yourself.
So my process is to always keep myself healthy through expression, whether that’s writing, speaking, performing, dancing—it’s all expression. If I can’t do that, I’m in trouble. I’m a warrior without a war. Take a warrior who’s been trained to be a warrior his or her whole life, and then you take the war away. That’s when the trouble begins unless you can redirect that TNT into the next phase of your life by being able to express it.
So tell me about your creative process in the comments section below. How do you get all of your creative energy out of your head and into a place where you can actually do something productive with it? If you don't have a process yet, think about what it might be. Do you need to write, draw, meditate — what is it?
