If you’ve been following this feed, you know how this goes by now: CreativeMornings Phoenix hosts a free monthly talk, one local creative, one theme shared with hundreds of chapters around the world, no pitch, no agenda. I show up most months, notebook in hand, ready to get talked out of whatever I thought I understood walking in. This month did that within the first five minutes – and the speaker had me thinking about something I’m going to call open palm leadership.
Nakhlah
The theme was Nakhlah, an Arabic word for palm, chosen by CreativeMornings’ Khobar chapter in Saudi Arabia. Our chapter’s speaker was Nicole Underwood, a Phoenix creative who’s spent the better part of two decades producing music events, writing, and building community around Roosevelt Row, and she used the word as a launchpad into something bigger than the fruit. Palms, she pointed out, do something most trees don’t. When a storm hits, rigid trees resist the wind until they snap. Palms bend. That flexibility, not stubbornness, is what keeps them standing.She also reminded us that a palm isn’t just a tree, it’s also a visual of an open hand.
She built her whole talk around one image: the closed fist versus the open palm. A closed fist protects, guards, holds tight. An open palm gives, receives, and occasionally asks for help. It sounds simple until you sit with how rarely most of us actually practice the second half of that.
Building With a Closed Fist
Nicole’s own story is basically a case study in the closed fist, told with real affection for the version of herself who lived it. She became a nonprofit director at 29 after years volunteering around Roosevelt Row, and later built a music production project, The Zenith Experiment, that started as fifty folding chairs and a borrowed sound system in her backyard. It grew into a regular four-nights-a-week booking circuit, then intimate pop-up shows, then producing a solo performance for a musician nervous about testing new material in front of a crowd. All of it happened alongside chronic health issues she’s dealt with since childhood, something she mentioned almost in passing, the way people do once they’ve made peace with a thing.
She built almost every bit of it by saying yes to everything and carrying the weight herself. That’s not a character flaw. It’s just what building usually looks like, especially in the early years, when asking for help feels like admitting you’re not up to the thing you said yes to.
The Tire on the 202
About a month before her talk, Nicole hit a tire on the 202 freeway. Totaled her 4Runner. Walked away with no broken bones and a bruise on her leg that took a week and a half to fade, and she described the moment itself almost clinically, like being inside a washing machine for a few seconds before the strange calm of realizing she was actually fine.
What happened next is the part of the talk that’s stuck with me. Friends showed up before she’d finished processing the accident. Someone from the local music scene, not even someone she was especially close with, handed over his own car for two months without being asked twice. Family stepped in unprompted. A fundraiser she hoped might hit four thousand dollars, and secretly hoped might stretch to six, closed north of nine.
Nicole didn’t frame that outpouring as proof she’d earned it through years of community goodwill, though she clearly had. She framed receiving as its own separate skill, one she’d never actually trained. Asking for help, she said, felt exposing in a way that offering it never had. She had to talk herself into posting the fundraiser at all.
Receiving Is a Practice
That distinction, between giving as a reflex and receiving as a practice, is the part of this talk I keep turning over. It also happens to be well-documented outside of Nicole’s own experience. Most of us are wired to give freely but hesitate hard when the direction reverses, often out of a quiet fear that needing something makes us less capable. Research out of Harvard Business School found that people who ask for help are generally perceived as more competent, not less, provided the ask is specific and thoughtful. The fear is common. The evidence just doesn’t support it.
I see a version of this play out constantly in the workforce world I spend most of my time in. Leaders build their teams with a closed fist. They hire, they absorb, they protect their headcount and their turf, and there’s real pride in being the department that handles everything internally. Asking for outside help, even temporary, specialized, exactly-what-we-need help, gets filed under admitting something went wrong. So it doesn’t happen until the team is so stretched that the question isn’t “should we bring someone in” anymore, it’s “how did we let it get this bad.”
I’ve sat on both sides of that table over the last twenty-five years. As an independent professional, I’ve watched companies wait entire quarters longer than they needed to before admitting a project required outside hands, usually after someone on staff had already quietly burned out covering the gap. As an executive managing contingent talent, I’ve made the same mistake in the other direction, holding onto the belief that our internal team should be able to handle everything, right up until the moment it clearly couldn’t.
The Open Palm Version
The open palm version of workforce planning isn’t about giving anything up. It’s about treating outside capacity, a specialist for a defined project, extra hands during a crunch, expertise you don’t need year-round, as a normal, practiced move instead of a last resort you reach for only after a crisis forces your hand. Nicole’s community didn’t show up because she was in trouble. They showed up because she’d built a habit of showing up first, and because when she finally asked, she let herself actually receive it instead of deflecting, minimizing, or insisting she’d figure it out alone. That’s the muscle. Not the asking itself, but the letting it land.
That’s more or less the case for flexible talent too, though I’ll admit that’s close to home for what we do at FlexTal. The healthiest teams I’ve worked with aren’t the ones that never need outside help. They’re the ones that built the practice of asking for it before the tire was already in the road.
Nicole closed with a line I wrote down word for word: if there’s a tire in your cup, sit with it, you’re going to be fine. I keep thinking about the “sit with it” part. Not fix it alone, not power through it. Just sit with the disruption long enough to notice what you actually need, then open your hand and let someone hand it to you. Palm trees don’t fight the storm. They bend, and they’re still standing when it passes.
If you’re in Phoenix and haven’t made it to a Creative Mornings talk yet, join us for the next one. Bagels, coffee, and a room full of people who’d rather be curious than sleep in. Not in Phoenix? There’s probably a CM chapter near you, worth checking out this month.
Chris is the President & COO of FlexTal. He brings 20+ years of experience in Customer Success, UI/UX, design, and marketing – including time within start-ups, agencies, and enterprise orgs. Chris has also served as a University adjunct professor in Advertising & Public Relations for several years.
