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Creative Mornings Phoenix

Chris Koens
In The Back Burner

Sometimes Your Biggest Competition Is the Person in the Mirror

a line drawing of a hand-held mirror. Touching on the theme of the piece, that your biggest competition is the person in the mirror

If you’ve been following this feed, you know how this goes by now. When it comes to CreativeMornings recaps, it’s not a competition, but you’ve probably mastered the idea of what to expect: CreativeMornings Phoenix hosts a free monthly talk – one local creative, one theme shared with chapters around the world, no pitch, no agenda. I show up most months. Last week’s encounter broke the format a little, and it turned out to be just the cup of coffee and ridiculously freeing body-shakes I’ve had in a while.

This month’s theme was Competencia (translated from Spanish: competition). It’s a loaded word to hand a room full of creative people first thing in the morning, and CreativeMornings’ Santiago chapter, which chose the theme, put it plainly: competition drives us to improve and innovate, but it also breeds comparison, stress, and isolation. Both things are true at once. That tension was the whole morning.

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Chris Koens
In Leadership, The Back Burner

Energy is in the Making, Not the Made

digital illustration of a treasure map with a gray X and a dotted green line to get to the X. It depicts how energy is in the making, not just the destination. The image is a light blue map on a field of dark blue.

The Creative Mornings theme for May was Create, and the local speaker was Giovannie Dixon – LA-born Jamaican-American artist, muralist, and about as self-taught as it gets. The early morning chat took place at Ignite Sparked by BBB in downtown Phoenix – comfortable, bright, built for entrepreneurs and the people who think like them. It’s the kind of place that makes you want to get busy immediately. Maybe start a podcast. Enter the co-working vs cubicle debate. Question business “truths” more this week than you did last week.

That last one turned out to be more relevant than I expected.

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Chris Koens
In Leadership, The Back Burner

Before the Phoenix Rises, There Are Embers

a photograph of ashes and embers, the embers form the word "EMBER"

A quick introduction before we dive in to discuss the Creative Mornings Phoenix event – I’m Chris, part of the leadership team at FlexTal. If you’ve visited our blog before, you know our content typically lives in the world of workforce strategy, flexible talent, and the future of how companies get work done. All important stuff. But our digital team has been nudging me for a while, asking me to take over the feed every now and then and share something a little more personal – so welcome to The Back Burner, where I’ll surface the ideas, observations, and occasional rabbit holes that don’t always make it into the main feed. Personal ramblings from someone who has spent 25+ years working as a freelancer, but who’s also logged his fair share of time in corporate cubicles.

So here I am. Fair warning: these posts may occasionally involve things like corporate events and musings about workforce solutions, but more than likely I’ll end up in rabbit-holes on ideas that have little or nothing to do with staffing models or hiring decisions – think of this space as a blank canvas to have you join in on the conversations I have with myself when I’m stuck in the desert, bumper-to-bumper, on I-10 during my commute.

This is one of those.

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