Laura Carmichael - Creativity Coach - Workshops and Training

Laura Carmichael synthesizes her learnings on creativity, engagement and paying attention from the arts and brings them into the business world as learnable processes. By demystifying creativity and applying it practically with self-aware leadership and communication tools, everyone in a team or company is an engaged participant in the creation of new products, services and ideas. Serious Play offers a variety of services in collaboration with various partners, including weekend workshops and retreats for individuals, as well as in-company trainings and consulting.

Creative Thinking Processes:
Laura employs an expanded tool-kit of Design Thinking, body-mind improvisation exercises, and rigorous idea development to spark clients' original thinking and innovation capacities. Unlock the power of actively noticing, empathy with the customer/client/user, and the spirit of play.

Leveraging Diversity:
For companies who want to harness the creative power in diversity by overcoming the resistance to the discomfort it produces. Exercises create full participation in teams, either by preparing the environment, or by Laura temporarily managing a team or project as a consultant. Driven to help people discover the inspiration in inclusion.

A new definition of Power:
With self-awareness and collaborative strategy taking many tips from the "coaching" model, leaders can increase confidence and creative output in their teams. Learn models for giving and receiving meaningful feedback that moves everyone forward. Harvest the best ideas and create an engaged culture.

For Individuals:
Get out of your head and into an open state of mind where curiosity leads your engagement with the world. Get out of the corner and go to the heart of what matters. Tired of being a passive consumer of other people's creativity and ideas, and want to jump start your own creative engine, gain more meaning and direction? Allow yourself to be surprised.

Learn about creativity and BE creative. Workshops are 95% experiential and offer time to move, rest, write, make and reflect. Jump start that project you have been putting on hold. Enhance your team's creative inspiration. Unpack what "confidence" is all about. Develop your authentic leadership.

"I joined Laura's Serious Play workshop because it appealed to my rational, business-side while teasing the latent, not-always conscious creative side in me.
If you want to experience a different way or thinking; a different way of being, go take Laura's workshop. It's as simple as that." -- Kate capitalize,
Sound Machine Inc.; CEO/Founder of OMALA LLC, a sustainable women's activewear lifestyle company

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Laura Carmichael has a rare first-hand knowledge of both the arts and business world at a high level. She is on the faculty at THNK, School for Creative Leadership. As a clarinetist she's played with the San Francisco Symphony and created innovative projects with major ensembles in Europe. For fifteen years as a corporate trainer she's worked with senior management and executive level clients from corporations including ABN Amro, Robeco, AKZO Nobel, KLM, DSM. She has completed Tara Mohr's Playing Big Facilitator Training, and she incorporates this work in her creativity workshops and consulting. A seasoned teacher and facilitator, she's lectured at many universities including Harvard, Stanford, Rice, University of California Berkeley, Davis, San Diego, University of Chicago, and the Mozarteum. Over the years she has logged countless hours of practical, on-the-ground knowledge of how to combine left and right brain thinking, and get people to move out of their habitual comfort zones. Laura is determined that creativity is not a talent of the few, but a practice, and a core human quality, available to all.