Why Playing It Safe Is Keeping You Small (And What to Do About It) with Pia Liechter

Are you living life on autopilot, checking all the boxes but still feeling stuck? Ever wonder if the path that feels safe is actually keeping you small? What if the real key to freedom and fulfillment is creativity, not just in art, but in how you live, decide, and grow? In this episode of Actions Antidotes, we're joined by Pia Liechter, founder of Kollectiv Studio and author of Welcome to the Creative Club. Pia opens up about how divorce, burnout, and losing her job became the turning point that helped her reconnect with her creative power. She takes us through her journey, including a bold ride on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and shares what it means to truly direct your own life instead of following someone else’s script. Pia reminds us that you don’t need permission to rewrite your story. Even small “firsts” can be powerful steps toward a life that feels more like your own. Listen in and discover how to tap into your creativity, take meaningful risks, and explore a version of life that’s built on your terms, not someone else’s. --- Listen to the podcast here: Why Playing It Safe Is Keeping You Small (And What to Do About It) with Pia Liechter Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about something that can often get ignored in the modern world, and that is creativity, creative pursuits, and creative suits can take on so many different forms but can often fall into this bucket of things that the modern day cult of productivity, if you want to call it that, can really ignore as like, okay, it wasn’t really productive for you to spend a Thursday afternoon drawing a picture or something like that. My guest today has her own story around creativity. Pia Leichter is the founder of the Kollektiv Studio. --- Welcome to the program. Thank you, Stephen. It’s so nice to be here. Yeah, it’s nice to have you here. And let’s start with your story, because you recently published a book covering your story around kind of discovering your creativity. Yeah, absolutely. Well, it’s called Welcome to the Creative Club and it smashes the myth that creativity is reserved for the chosen few and invites everyone to access and apply creativity to the design of their lives, and I do share stories about how I lost and found my creative power and also really exploring what creativity means in moving into a much more expansive definition, because, often, what stops us from being creative is the belief or idea that I’m not the creative type. I want to debunk that one, because if you’re human, you’re an artist at play. So, this sounds like a story that a lot of people have, and if I had a dollar for every time I heard someone around my age say something along the lines of, “I’m just not a creative person, it just happens.” So let’s start with the specifics of your story. So you said you lost and found your creative abilities of some sort. Well, power, really, because, first, it starts with shifting my own experience or definition of creativity, which happened through different moments or pivots or sticky junctures in my life. For me, growing up with an artist father on the Lower East Side Manhattan, abstract, my dad is an abstract painter, creativity was just something we did. It was just a natural part of life. He’d be painting, I’d be writing stories as a little kid or poems or whatnot. And creativity, later on, I moved into the realm of commercial creativity. I worked in creative studios and age brand agencies for the majority of my career, well over –– 15 years, until I left to start my own business. And so creativity was still very much something I did. When life threw me through the windshield of the car I was driving that needed to get fixed, changed, traded in through a series of events that, say, the divorce, unhealthy rebound relationship, and then getting fired from my six-figure cushy creative partner and creative director role, I kind of sat looking at the shards of what my life was in that moment and decided to, instead of stressing and staying and trying to figure out what to do next, I decided to check off a bucket list desire and go on the Trans-Siberian Express, which I’ve always dreamed about. Felt like every –– I had lost everything, felt like I was lost, so I decided to change it up. And it was while I was on the train, hurtling through Siberia, looking around me, looking at the Russian man who drank too much vodka who was punching the steel wall and looking at the socks hanging and the smell of sauerkraut and looking at the scenery and kind of sitting back and reflecting on, I had the epiphany that, “Oh, I’m creatively directing my life. I creatively directed this scene. I brought myself here.” I could have chosen a variety of different things, but I chose to put myself on a train across China, Mongolia, and Russia and switch the scenery, switch the set design, and kind of rediscover that I’m the one sitting in the director’s chair. And so creativity started to shift for me. So what creativity meant started to change. So, creativity wasn’t just something that we do. It is that too, but it’s a way of being in the world.Share on X So, what I’m –– That was losing and finding my creative power. So, creative power is my ability to create my experience. So I lost that. I was in the middle of three Ds, drunk, divorce, and actually then death later on but there’s another story. It’s also in the book. It kind of shook me. It felt like life was happening to me. It felt like I was just a passenger, an extra on set. And then making that big decision and choosing to go on the Trans-Siberian and then sitting and just kind of reflect on it, it’s like, “Oh, wait a minute, I’m not an extra. This is main character energy right here. I made this. I creatively directed this,” and that’s sort of some of the background of what prompted me to write the book. So, you’re talking about kind of this creative power but you’re also talking about this perspective shift, and I think kind of even going back to the way I introduced the podcast is the way a lot of people think about creativity, of, okay, creativity means getting out a canvas and drawing a painting or I’m going to play a little beat and do a little bit of freestyle rapping into the mirror, but it has that kind of somewhat narrow, I don’t know, just only in the fine arts type definition, and maybe there are some people where those types of pursuits don’t really call them. They’re not going to go to the open mic night and do kind of a random standup or do impromptu speaking somewhere, but you’re saying that it has a bigger definition and it sounds like it could be around even just all these decisions that you make, even if like today, between recording podcasts, it’s like am I going to cook something for lunch or am I going to go to Taco Bell or something. Totally, totally. And, I mean, what you just described is creativity is often associated solely with artistic expression. And that is one big form of creativity, absolutely, but it’s not the only one. Science is immensely creative. Crime is creative but, ultimately, how we choose to create our next scene, how when we’re in touch with our unique essence, the way we see life, the way we respond to everyday challenges in novel, original, unexpected, and delightful and useful ways and throughout one day is immensely creative. The way our brain works, neuroscience points to this, we’re wired for creativity. It’s what enabled our survival. So, that is the invitation to see it in a much more expansive way because that’s how we reclaim it. Do the two forms of creativity, the more narrow artistic definition that many people think of it as as well as your expanded version of it relate to one another? Can someone take on artistic pursuits and that kind of train their brain around this more expansive type of creativity around designing your life? Well, because creativity isn’t just solely artistic pursuits, and it’s so much more than that, that’s not the only way to build your creative muscle. That is one way but really interesting in my research, travel actually is a fantastic way, based on research, to build your creative muscle because you are going to be in new and unexpected environments, and travel could be far or nearby, and it’s going to require different creative responses. Does that mean also just taking on, say, a different type of activity, like let’s just say –– Definitely. –– you never played pickleball before for some reason, and just being like, “Okay, I’m gonna try it out now.” Yeah, definitely. I think there’s a correlation between uncertainty in first times and experimentation and building our creative capacity, for sure, but that can take many different forms because, again, when we look at the story of, “Well, if I’m drawing, does that help me creating my life?” it’s still equating creativity with artistic, like, yes, that is one way but there are many others. Yeah, it sounds like there’s a ton of others. What do you think gets in the way of people being creative today? You have your story around the things that happened to you in your life. What do you think happens to a lot of other people? Well, I think we’re handed scripts about how we should live. Often, stories. I call them scripts but they’re beliefs or stories about life, about what we’re capable of, about how it’s supposed to be, about the path we’re supposed to be on and what’s meant for us but someone else dictates it that can shrivel our creative expression. And so many times it’s about becoming aware of what script am I reading from? Is it, for example, life is working with me or is life, is it a dog eat dog world? What story are we running in the background that influences our behavior?...