I Am Artist. This speech is an innovative training experience that challenges you to discover that no matter what you do, you are an Artist! By digging a little deeper into your own unique talents, you will be inspired to take the next steps to achieve breakthrough levels of success. Join Erik Wahl as he helps you redefine your art, equips you with the tools to become more productive and unleashes your creativity. By offering you key frameworks to unshackle yourself from the status quo and begin doing business as ‘unusual’, you can start thinking like the artist you were born to be. This new perspective is an opportunity where you can solve existing challenges, create new exciting solutions, possibly re-discover old passions you previously thought were impractical, or finally write out your life story.

Constant Creativity through Chaos - “shift happens.” Erik helps audiences to reframe change, embrace the positive, and leverage their creativity. He advises organizations on how they can position themselves to navigate the modern age. Erik’s messages will use examples of how wildly successful entrepreneurs and inventors built something from nothing, and give audiences the tools to do the same. 
Topics covered:

• Embracing Disruption and Resiliency
• Chaos Creates opportunities for Innovation
• Differentiating from the competition
• Amplifying your Unique value proposition
• Shifting to habits to fortify our mindset

Disruption = Innovation. Our greatest growth happens on the border between chaos and order. In this presentation, Erik provides a history of innovation through disruption (Instagram, AirBnB, iPhone, Uber, AIDS, 9/11 and himself) and shows audiences how to spot and create opportunities to benefit their communities and their organizations.
Topics covered:

• Adopting a growth mindset
• Beginner’s mind leads to discovery
• Overcoming fear and achieving peak performance
• Dynamic Intelligence 
• Navigating ambiguity
• Divergent thinking

Building a Better Brand in the Time of Adversity. When the global economy has gone off the rails, it’s time to rethink who you are and what you can offer to a new world. In this presentation, Erik discusses how to leverage your digital and human capital to emerge stronger and more authentically than ever before.
Topics covered:

• Purpose, passion and performance
• Humanizing your brand in a digital future
• Amplifying trust to build authenticity 
• Driving a new competitive narrative

Power Of Disciplined Creativity. If you are not thinking about disruption, complexity and continual innovation in your industry, then we’ve got news for you: You are ignoring a perilous gaping void, and if you don’t fill it, someone else will.

Technology and culture are in a state of continual flux, and today’s business demands an environment where innovation is not only welcomed, but required. So how can you keep up and instill a disciplined approach to innovation?

Erik Wahl, best-selling author, artist, and one of the nation’s most in-demand keynote speakers. His new book and presentation, THE SPARK AND THE GRIND: IGNITE THE POWER OF DISCIPLINED CREATIVITY, presents the yin and the yang of the creative process: How to create and maintain the flow of ideas, and how to execute them. The world is filled with dreamers and doers—but the only way things happen are when dreamers muster the mental tenacity and hard work, and when doers harness their innate creativity and flexibility.

Erik’s dynamic presentation explores the process of creativity and creation. Audiences are inspired to laughter, tears and always leave with a desire to unearth more meaning in their work and their lives, and the tools to find it.

In THE SPARK AND THE GRIND keynote, Erik:

• Deconstructs the process and discipline necessary to realize the visions of master creators such as Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison and Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Delves into the science of innovation, and how to tap it for your own purposes
• Drives home the importance of creative culture, regardless of industry, and how to harness it for individual and collective success.

The Art of Leadership. Today’s leaders face a pressure to innovate – or else perish – unlike any other time in history.  Advances in social, mobile, and cloud technology coupled with fierce global competition have made the business landscape nearly unrecognizable from what it was a mere 10 years ago.

Erik Wahl’s entertaining and invigorating Art of Leadership presentation paints a compelling new portrait for what the successful leaders of tomorrow will look like. He inspires audiences to shed old ways of thinking and “business as usual” processes that are outdated, inefficient, and detrimental to productivity. Audience members learn new ways to build an emotional connection to drive future employee engagement.  Erik’s presentation stretches traditional assumptions on leadership. The end results include:

• innovative solutions to further your organization
• attracting and engaging quality employees
• new efficiencies and the end of detrimental redundancies

Growth and comfort cannot co-exist. When leaders come from a place of authenticity, curiosity, exploration, and purpose, this leads to more meaningful connections among team members and with clients and customers – and ultimately, a more profitable organization. An engaged employee equals an engaged customer.

The Art of Vision. The best sustainable edge in business is the ability to differentiate yourself from your competition. Through this entertaining and highly practical program, we will uncover new ways to make your organization more creative, innovative and profitable, but more so, help your employees see the need to become better storytellers within and for your company and industry.

By embracing innovative strategies, professionals at all levels can achieve superior levels of performance by creatively and visibly differentiating themselves from the competition. No matter what kind of organization you have—from a small company to a large corporation—employees at all levels will better able to embrace the future by becoming more innovative, more productive and ultimately more profitable.

ORGANIZATIONAL EXCELLENCE

• Differentiation, differentiation, differentiation
• Telling a better story
• Outthinking the competition

EMBRACING CHANGE

• Working smarter, not harder
• Sustaining excellence in a changing economy
• Leveraging chaos to capitalize on opportunities

Unthink. Somehow we’ve come to believe that creativity is reserved for the chosen few: the poets, the painters, the writers. The truth is bigger and better than that. Creativity is in all of us. We simply need to rediscover the keys that will unlock our potential. UNthink is the keynote experience that will push members of your organization beyond their traditional thought patterns and habitual levels of performance. UNthink will inspire audiences to realize they are capable of so much more than they have been led to believe.

The UNthink program helps reframe your organization’s thinking so that new creative actions become possible. Learning how to UNthink will inject your daily grind with new passion, allowing employees to see how the organization wants and needs all of their talents and energies, not just the ones they’ve been using so far. You’ll begin the process of rethinking your life as a blank canvas of limitless opportunity on which to create your masterpiece.

This program will allow your organization to:

• Step outside convention to discover new and unexpected solutions to business challenges
•  Challenge pre-conceived notions about what’s possible
• UNthink your way to increased creativity, productivity and passion 

The Discipline of Creativity. It’s one thing to understand the importance of creativity to the success of your business, but what most people don’t understand is to how to put a structure in place so that innovation can find its way. The paradox of creativity is that structure creates freedom. Even the wildest minds require extreme orderliness and attention to detail so that they have the space and discipline to create.

Consider:

• Beethoven sat down everyday at daybreak, regardless of season, and composed until 3:00pm.
• Kafka started writing at 11:30pm each night.
• Mozart taught lessons by day and composed only in the evenings.
• Picasso ate lunch each day with his family in silence and only allowed visitors one day per week.
• Mark Twain awoke at 5:30 am, ate a hearty breakfast, and wrote until 5:00 pm

This training covers:

• Why fanatical discipline is necessary to creativity and innovation
• How to tap your “beginner’s mind,” which is a way to harness a fresh perspective on an issue and map uncharted solutions
• How to overcome mental fatigue and mind blocks
• How to set up a structure and culture in your organization that fosters creative work

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