Business Innovators Radio - Inside the Mind of Creative Breakthrough Catalyst Michael Brian Lee

Episode Date: April 15, 2026

So excited to introduce my next guest, Michael Brian Lee!Michael Brian Lee discovered the World Cup while living in Prague in 1994, and found himself compelled to root for Hristo Stoichkov’s Bulgaria squad, who finished fourth. He has been a fan of the competition every four years since, and has developed a love for Argentina, long before they finally vindicated this choice with their win in 2022.He is the world’s only certified Master of Creativity and Innovation Coaching and is also trained in six other coaching disciplines, as well as a Master NLP Practitioner, a Certified Coach Trainer, and an Adaptability Quotient (AQai) Professional. He is a #1 best-selling author and has taken the TEDx stage twice. He writes a column on creativity for the Mail and Guardian of South Africa and has written for Forbes. He features on Radio 702 as well as other media outlets. Michael is also an International Advisory Board Member of World Creativity and Innovation and an Exco member of the Creative Community of Practice of the BIC Foundation.He has spoken at numerous creativity conferences and universities, the Global Speakers Summit, and the annual conventions of the Professional Speakers’ Association of Southern Africa and India. His TV productions have won 5 South African Film and TV Awards (SAFTAs) and he was a Founding Editor of the renowned international literary magazine Trafika. He was recently named a top 50 thought leader in Creativity by Thinkers360. Learn more about Michael at www.michaelbrianlee.comSource: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/inside-the-mind-of-creative-breakthrough-catalyst-michael-brian-lee

Welcome to Business Innovators Radio, featuring industry influencers and trendsetters, sharing proven strategies to help you build a better life right now. Welcome to Business Innovators Radio with me Luana Ribeira. And I have a very interesting guest with me today. Michael Brian Lee, author, TEDx speaker and creative breakthrough catalys. Welcome, Michael. Thank you, Luana. Thanks for having me. Do you know what? As a creative, I absolutely love what you do.

So please do, share with the audience exactly what it is. I am a trainer, a writer, a speaker, a coach, a consultant. I am a person who focuses primarily on the discipline of creativity, innovation, and adaptability. I work with companies and individuals to help them be more creative and to help people free their minds from their own limitations. Oh, I love that. And why do people need it? Like, why is creativity so important, particularly in business? Well, I could fill up the rest of the podcast answering that one question. Go for it. Well, we're all born creative, right? Ninety-eight percent of us lose that creativity as we get older.

And the reasons behind that, you know, a lot of people blame school and a lot of people blame society for those problems, right? That we're encouraged to kind of dumb ourselves down and to do things the way that they've always been done. But the fact is that we all need the creativity that we had as children because that's how we learn, right? That's how we became who we are today. And a lot of sources, you know, LinkedIn has called creativity the most important skill in the world. Forbes calls it the skill of the future. The World Economic Forum has repeatedly put creativity and creative adjacent skills in the top two or three skills of the future of work.

It's critically important to business because what value you get in business, that value comes from innovation, right? Innovation is, you know, unlocking new value from new ideas and new ways of doing things. If you do things the same way you've always done them, you know, that's okay. But real value in business comes from innovation. and you cannot innovate without being creative and having new ideas. So the fact that we almost all have lost the kind of creativity we're born with is a big problem. And it's a problem we need to solve and we need to solve it. Pretty much everybody needs to solve it. So it's a good

business to be in. And why does that happen? Like when do we start trading creativity for personality? As soon as we start forming our personality, really, the statistic. The There was a survey that was a study rather that was done showing that 98% of five-year-olds were scoring as creative geniuses. By the time they reached the age of 10 years old, that number went down to. Take a guess, Luana, what number that went down to from 98% at the age of 10? I don't know. This is going to be sad, isn't it? It is.

It's 25? Not a bad guess, actually. It's 30%. And at the age of 15, take a guess? Oh, 15. Very good guess. It's 12. So your instincts are good. They're unfortunate, but they're good. The number gets down to 2% by the time we get to adulthood. This was a study that was done by a psychologist who worked with NASA in the 1960s and 70s. And he had been taken by the idea that, you know, the space program was kind of perfect timing, right, because they're going to the moon again. But the space program was trying to get to the moon in the late 1960s. And he was working with the scientists at NASA to help them be. more creative and was startled to realize that they were not nearly creative enough as they had to be the best and the brightest people who were looking to create the biggest moonshot in history,

literally, right? And they weren't creative enough. And he was surprised to hear or discover this problem. They were surprised to discover this problem that the best and the brightest people in, you know, the world who came together for the space program were not creative enough. And then he started to study children and discovered this terrible fact that 98% of us, lose that creativity as we get older. And it starts pretty much from the time I get to be five, six years old. Do we recognize that that's happening? I mean, I do because I know about it. I think most people don't really notice that it's happening because it's kind of encouraged that we're supposed to become proud of becoming who we are, right? That's, it's a good thing.

Like Luana, you become Luana. If I ask you to describe yourself in a few words, you could probably give me a few words that described Luana, yes? Yeah. So you're proud of that. It's who you become and you did the work to become that person. In fact, you created yourself, right? But it's easy to miss the point that in creating yourself, you've limited yourself to that single creation

and to shift and become somebody different that you need to be to solve problems that might not be applicable to that particular creation requires a recreation. And that recreation is something that we don't really actually become that good at. We're very good at creating ourselves the first time. And then we fall into the trap of believing that that's actually who we actually are. Interesting. So how do we combat that? Well, that's a great question.

I mean, adaptability is the key to the whole thing, right? When we look at creativity, a lot of people define creativity. Like Apple had that campaign where they said it was thinking differently, or think different was the Apple campaign. But actually, the way I define creativity is to think differently from yourself, right? It's perfectly great to think differently from other people. But if you think differently from other people

the same way all the time, then that's not going to help you solve new problems that arise in different ways that don't get easily solved by you, right? Innovation is really just acting differently than you usually would. And so thinking differently is creativity, think different, act differently, innovation, and adaptability, the way I define that is to be different, to actually shift your essence, who you're being. And in shifting who you're being, you'll then have different thoughts, different being, different thoughts, different actions.

So what is, you know, when people say things like, I'm just not very creative, what are the first steps? Like, what do they practically need to do to realize that? actually they are creative. They just need to find it again. Well, the first step is to actually realize that they are actually creative. That's the first step. The first step is to actually acknowledge that they are actually creative. Again, we're born creative. Children are endlessly creative. If a child had the mind of an adult, right, she would never learn to walk because she'd fall down three or four times and she'd say, this is not me. I'm not good at this. I'm good at crawling. I'm good at sucking my thumb, but I'm not good at walking. And this is,

other people do this. Look at all those other babies that walk. That's what they do. You know, I'm going to stick with what I'm good at. Luckily, when we're a toddler, we don't have the mind of an adult. If we stuck our mind today back in our baby brain, we'd all be sitting on the ground sucking our thumbs. Right. So the first thing we have to do to regain our creativity is simply to realize that it's God's gift to us. We are creative. That's pretty much the most human thing there is to be creative. So to say I'm not creative is to already be telling a lie, really. Why do you think people tell themselves that kind of thing?

They say that negative thoughts are, I think, four times more powerful than positive ones. They say there's only five emotions and four of them are negative. So I think people just generally tend to dumb themselves down. I think people don't want to embrace the God-given creative. that we have. Most people, I mean, some people do. But also, again, it's so much, you know, it's so much ingrained in us to become a certain way. And in doing that, I mean, it's, it makes sense because a lot of what we do in life, we, you know, when you're driving your car, you don't think about driving your car, right? Because you have to do a lot of other things. So

driving your car becomes second nature. Being Luana becomes second nature. You don't have to think about being Luana. It's just natural to you. Unfortunately, that brings those problems where lose the flexibility that we could otherwise have. And how do we find that flexibility again? Again, the easiest way to find it is start by just getting that you already have it, right? We think into boxes. We like to say think out of the box.

But the fact is that besides being created, probably the most human thing is judging. Right. The person that's listening to this podcast right now, we've been talking for a few minutes. has made dozens of judgments already about the nature of my voice, some of the things I've said, the nature of your voice, the questions you're asking, all kinds of judgments the person is making. Either they like it, they don't like it, it's good enough, it's not good enough, it's smart, it's stupid, like the judgments we make all the time are how we manage our lives, right? How we can shift ourselves to be, you know, regain connection to our creativity more easily

is to realize that we can't think out of boxes, we are going to think into boxes. It's how we survive. But what we can do is be more conscious of the boxes we're thinking into. We can select the boxes we're thinking into. We can combine boxes together to make bigger ones or different ones. We can make a bigger variety of boxes. Point being like we have to be more conscious of what we're doing when we think. So that we can actually realize that, you know, creativity is automatic.

If you just let yourself be creative, you will be. It's only when you put things in the way of your creativity. that something's in the way of it. Again, to answer your question, you know, I think the simplest way to answer it is to say, get out of the way. Just stop trying to stop yourself from doing what God gave you the ability to do. And when people do get out with their own way

and they find that creativity and they're able to adapt, how does that change for themselves, for their businesses? As I was saying, you know, people who are more adaptable, I was sorry, as I were saying before, when creativity is critical to business. It's critical to coming up with new ways of doing things. It's critical to solving problems. People who are more adaptable are two and a half times faster at solving problems.

People who are more adaptable are 50% mentally healthier, 50% less burnout. Organizations that are more adaptable. They are one-third more profitable. They go bankrupt three times less often. Basically, magic happens is what happens. Magic happens when you allow your creativity to come forth, whether it's as an individual or as a team or organization. And how did you get into all of this? Like, was there a moment when you realized that your personality was limiting you? No, my personality's never limited to me, Luana. I used to be a television director full-time.

and I was asked to start a film school. When we designed the correctism for the film school, we decided to include a creativity stream in which people would learn about how to be creative generally, not just specifically as a cameraman or a director or an editor, but specifically the concept of creativity as a thought process. And that's when I got introduced to the idea of creativity as a discipline separate from, you know, anything it's attached to.

It's not because I myself had a problem with it. It's more that I myself realized that other people do have a problem with it and I could find ways to help solve it. So what happened was I used to use the originally when we did that curriculum, we used to use the book The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. Some people made people familiar with it. And I went to Nigeria to do a reality TV show. And while I was there, somebody else taught my creativity class.

When I got back, they replaced that person with me again, but it was at the last minute. We didn't have time to order Julia Cameron's book for the class. So I had to develop my own creativity curriculum in about three weeks. So from my own knowledge and from further study and sort of figuring stuff out, I figured out that behind Julia Cameron's work, there was a structure that she didn't seem to even quite see herself, 100%. And that structure would allow people to, by following a simple six-step process, be able to, able to unleash creativity, you know, in ways that they were otherwise not doing. And so that's,

that's really how it came about. I started doing that in tertiary at the film school. And then eventually I thought, no, it's better to do this in business in the real world with, with grownups. So, so I started to work with companies. Nice. And can you share with us some real examples of the transformations that your clients have had? Well, it's pretty straightforward. What happens is it's just people getting in touch with the ability to be creative at levels that they've stifled. And their best results usually come from teams because what happens when you take a team, it's kind of like taking a group of robots that programmed themselves, but they programmed themselves years ago and they programmed themselves long before they ever met. And now you're trying to put them together and make them collaborate creatively. Now when you collaborate creatively, you you're going to get a lot better creative results than when you work alone, but not under those circumstances. So I've had teams try to give you some examples without giving away people's IP.

I've had teams where they tripled their, like a marketing team, they tripled the amount of products sold. They actually measure their marketing success in how much product they sold inside the company. They tripled the amount of products sold pretty much overnight because of the better ideas that they had in marketing the product, for example. Again, the kind of statistics I've given you are the kind of results you'll get, you'll get triple the profitability, triple the one-third of the bankruptcy rate. You see remarkable breakthroughs when people let themselves be creative in ways that they're stopping themselves. That's outstanding. Now then, you've got a book coming out.

I do. I'm very excited about the book I've got coming out. And it's coming up soon, 21st of April. Is that right? It is. It's the 21st of April. It's World Creativity and Innovation Day. It's a United Nations commemorated holiday since 2018. And I thought that would be a good day to launch a book called World Innovators Cup, which is about the combination between famous innovators from history and the idea of the World Cup and soccer stars and superstar athletes. So what if we took a bunch of innovators who are important to the world we create today

and we made them at the level of superstar athletes, we gave them that kind of adulation, we gave them that kind of attention that we give to, you know, Lionel Messi or Christiana Ronaldo or people like that? I love the sound of that. So who is this book for? And what are people going to gain from reading your book? People will get a combination of access to, where there's 56 innovators in the book. Some of them are people you know, like Thomas Edison or William Shakespeare. Others are people you've possibly never heard of, like Lee's Meitner. There's people from all across the world. We've broken them down into four continents. Each continent has a four. team of 11 starters, two coaches, and one substitute. And in the book, they even play against

each other. It's just for fun. But the point of the book, what you get out of it is you get a combination of the history of innovation and the history of the World Cup at the same time. And then putting those together, those are both true, putting those together into a fictionalized account of how those innovators played in famous soccer games and contributed to those games, which they of course didn't. So it's a combination of a fiction book and a nonfiction book in one. Who is it for? Well, we'd like to say it's for everybody, right?

But, I mean, it's more for young adults who would enjoy the learning of it and also for people more in our age bracket who would enjoy the puzzles of discovering the sort of the way that the games have been phrased are all related to those innovators in their history and what they did. the fun of discovery of the puzzles and kind of discovering the Easter eggs. I love the sound of that. It sounds really different. It's not the average book that's out there, is it? It's not. I mean, not in the average book where you find things like, did you know, did you know, for example, that the United States shocked the world in the very first World Cup

at reaching the semifinals? The best finish the United States has ever had in the World Cup was in the very first World Cup. Okay, I did not know that. Yeah, and the very first hat trick in the World Cup was by the United States also by a guy named Bert Patanode in 1930 in Uruguay in the first World Cup. Okay. Fantastic. So there's these World Cup facts. Yeah, there's some World Cup facts in there.

Full of facts. Yeah, and then there's also a lot of interesting things about innovators you didn't know. Like, do you know Hedy Lamar? Uh-huh. Do you know Hedy Lamar? Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people probably don't know Hedy Lamar.

She was a Hollywood actress who invented signal hopping technology that ended up giving us Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and GPS. She was not trained as a scientist. She picked all this up because her husband was an arms dealer, or arms manufacturer, rather. And he knew a lot of scientists and engineers and technologists. He spent a lot of time, even though she wasn't really happy in the marriage, she was happy in the relationship where she got to meet a lot of these scientists and learn from them. And so in the 1930s, she helped defeat the Nazis by coming up with single hopping technology that kept us from getting our torpedoes jammed and then ended up becoming Bluetooth today.

So there's all kinds of stories like that in the book. That's very interesting. I only knew a fraction about that. I am looking forward to reading this book. And where's it going to be available? Well, it's, you know, depending on the date that you watch their list, sorry, listen to the podcast, it is launching on the 21st of April. It is available on Amazon. It's available on Barnes & Noble. And it's basically available anywhere books are sold. Wherever you get your books, you can get it there. It's published by a New York publisher called Morgan James. And they, yeah, they reach everywhere. So you can get it anywhere you get books. Fantastic. And we'll include some links with this episode as well. Right, Michael, before we finish, what final words do you have to say to the audience? Two things, I guess number one is you are infinitely creative.

You are able to come up with solutions to any problem you face, right? Adaptability, creativity and innovation are the solution to any challenge you face in your life. And if you embrace your natural ability to already have those things, in you, you can solve anything you come across. That's number one. Number two, please get my book and read it. You'll enjoy it and it'll make me happy. Absolutely, yes. Well, thank you, Michael. You've been absolutely fantastic. Thank you for coming on. And to everybody listening, we'll catch up next time. Thanks for listening to Business Innovators Radio. To hear all episodes featuring leading industry influencers and trendsetters, visit us on

online at business innovators radio.com today.