1095: Keeping Your Productive Groove through Movement, Thought, and Rest with Dr. Natalie Nixon

How to Be Awesome at Your Job

How to be Awesome at Your Job

Sharpening, Self-improvement, Meaning, Winning, Development, Money, Interview, Writing, Health & Fitness, Speaking, Mental Health, Success, Wins, Fun, Skills, Business, Careers, Training, Education, Collaboration, Decisions, Career, Selfhelp, Mockaitis, Thinking

4.5 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 22 September 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dr. Natalie Nixon discusses how to develop strategic thinking, prevent burnout, and enhance creativity through her move, rest, and think framework.

— YOU’LL LEARN —

1) The inner skills that make us more strategic and effective

2) The neglected skill that makes us more strategic

3) How to prime your best ideas in 90 seconds

Subscribe or visit AwesomeAtYourJob.com/ep1095 for clickable versions of the links below.

— ABOUT NATALIE —

Dr. Natalie Nixon, creativity strategist and CEO of Figure 8 Thinking, is known as the ‘creativity whisperer to the C-Suite’ and is the world’s leading authority on the WonderRigor™ Theory. She excels at helping leaders catalyze creativity’s ROI for inspired business results. She is the author of the award-winning The Creativity Leap and the forthcoming Move.Think.Rest.

With a background in cultural anthropology, her career spans global apparel sourcing with The Limited Brands and a 16-year career in academia, where she was the founding director of the Strategic Design MBA at Thomas Jefferson University. She received her BA from Vassar College and her PhD from the University of Westminster in London. She’s a lifelong dancer and a new aficionado of open water swimming.

• Book: Move. Think. Rest.: Redefining Productivity & Our Relationship with Time

• Book: The Creativity Leap: Unleash Curiosity, Improvisation, and Intuition at Work

• Website: Figure8Thinking.com

— RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE SHOW —

• Study: “Knowing your own heart: Distinguishing interoceptive accuracy from interoceptive awareness” by Sarah N. Garfinkle, et al.

• Study: “Effects of interoceptive training on decision making, anxiety, and somatic symptoms” by Ayako Sugawara, et al.

• App: Fitebo

• Book: How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett

• Book: Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross

• Book: Brain Rules (Updated and Expanded): 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School by John Medina

• Book: The Covenant of Water: A Novel by Abraham Verghese

• Book: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

• Book: In Search of Satisfaction by J. California Cooper

• Past episode: 1005: How to Feel Energized Every Day with Dr. Michael Breus

— THANK YOU SPONSORS! —

• Strawberry.me. Claim your $50 credit and build momentum in your career with Strawberry.me/Awesome

• LinkedIn Jobs. Post your job for free at linkedin.com/beawesome

• Quince. Get free shipping and 365-day returns on your order with Quince.com/Awesome

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	If we don't have means, tools, ways in to build creativity as a capacity, We will be working in a very myopic way.
0:23.7	We will miss opportunities.
0:25.4	And we actually will not innovate in a way that makes that's interesting, that makes it
0:30.5	exciting and cool to show up for work.
0:32.5	And that actually delivers value, meaningful value to the clients and customers we serve.
0:50.5	That's Dr. Natalie Nixon. She's a CEO of Figure 8 thinking and a creative strategist who helps leaders catalyze
0:56.7	creativity's ROI for inspired business results.
0:59.7	She's also the author of The Creativity Leap and more recently, Move Think Rest,
1:04.2	redefining productivity and our relationship with time.
1:07.6	So you'll learn one, the inner skills that make us more strategic and effective. Two,
1:12.4	why not to dismiss your gut feelings? And three, how to prime your best ideas in 90 seconds.
1:18.4	And if you want a quick summary write up with the actionable wisdom that Natalie shares,
1:22.0	I recommend you sign up for the free gold nugget email newsletter, which you can find at
1:25.7	awesome at your job.com. I'm Pete McItis.
1:28.5	This is how to be awesome at your job. Now, here's Natalie. Natalie, welcome.
1:36.7	Thank you. It's good to be here. Yes. Well, I'm excited to hear some of your wisdom from your book,
1:43.6	Move, Think, Rest. Can you share with us one of the most
1:46.7	surprising or counterintuitive or wildly fascinating discoveries you've made in investigating this stuff and putting together the book?
1:54.3	I think one of the most interesting learnings I got was to really leaning into this idea of emotional recovery.
2:03.4	I think that we spend a lot of time thinking about physical fitness and endurance so that our
2:10.0	cognition is nice and sharp. And we think obviously about mental agility and sharpness.
2:17.7	It's really the emotional dimension of ourselves that kept coming up over and over as I was
	...

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