Storytelling, Teamwork, and the Art of Creative Connection: Chip Brewer

It's really my great pleasure to speak with Chip Brewer today. He's the founder of Growth Story LLC, but he's also somebody that I, as he pointed out today, I have known him now for decades and we're sort of reconnecting again after spending some time together in our tender years at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Thank you for coming in today. Oh, thank you so much for having me, Lisa. I'm very excited to be here. It's so interesting to me, Chip, that you and I have lived in Maine after graduating from Bowdoin. You married another Bowdoin alum, you raised your children in Cape Elizabeth. We probably crossed over, I don't know, sporting events, but it wasn't until your sister-in-law became a represented artist with the Portland Art Gallery and this is Susan Johnson. That all of a sudden this connection surfaced and I was like, this is so Maine. I mean, we've been circling each other for decades and who've just come back into each other's orbits, but do you find that a lot in your life? I do, and it's funny, Cape Elizabeth is a small town. We've been there for 23 years now, but if your kids don't align with someone else's kids in the school system, then you miss each other like ships in the night. And I remember going from when we were moving our oldest daughter, Meg to high school and they have the middle school parents come in and meet some of the high school teachers and so forth. And I went in and I thought I would know 80% of the parents that showed up and I knew maybe 10% because if you're just not in the same year as them, then it's really hard to interact. And I've been working from home for 23 years, so I don't have an office group of people and their friends or their partners that I would meet. So we were really dependent on the kids and sports and coaching. That's really true. And actually I know I had three kids in the Army school system and even just the difference in their years if it wasn't exactly, they were both seniors in high school together, somebody could have been a junior that year and you would never meet their parents. They would never meet their parents. Exactly. Yes. But I also think it's interesting that Bowdoin continues to have such a strong connection for, I can only speak for myself, but I assume it is strong for you because you and your wife both went there. So how is there that simultaneous? We disconnect when we're raising our children sometimes and we go to these new towns, but we're so strongly connected to the place that we went to college say. It's interesting, right? Because so Bowdoin is very important to both of us. My dad also went to Bowdoin and we loved it there and I was actually just up there a couple of weeks ago doing an improv session for teaching improv to the Bowdoin Alumni Council. They do a biannual meeting and it's people from 22 to 102 on the council basically. And they wanted to be able to get those folks, even though they have the Bowdoin connection, we have a Bowdoin connection. They're from radically different eras. So the 23 year olds and the 75 year olds don't actually live in the same world or speak the same language. So they wanted to have the improv class at the beginning of that weekend in order to get them all on the same page and get them to sneaky bond together so that when they got to the tricky conversations that every alumni council is having these days with everything that's happening in the world and the way students are organizing protests, again, it gave them that bond so they could have the difficult conversations and not be strangers doing it. I love that you brought us down in a different direction. I love this idea of sneaky bonding, like this idea that instead of just putting people in a room and just have 'em start going at it together, you're like, well, let's have them try to work on something at the same time with one another. We're all going to sit in the car together and we're all going to move in the same direction. And then you start to realize you're more alike than you are different really? Yes. So I used to work at this YMCA camp called Camp Belknap in New Hampshire, and we used to do a game with the kids where we'd take 30 kids out into a field and we'd put up two big soccer nets, and this huge rubber ball mean like a six foot big rubber, big red rubber ball. And we would just say the object of the game. We split 'em into two halves. We wouldn't always say to them is the goal is to get the ball in the net. And for the first 20 minutes they would fight each other like teams, they would try and get it in and they'd stop each other. And then eventually someone would realize they didn't put us in teams, they just put us on the other side of the field. And once they worked together and got it in the net, that was it. They passed the test. And I remember learning that lesson as a kid and then teaching it again as a counselor was really powerful to watch because all the light bulbs go off because they're like, oh, we're so programmed to compete against each other that we forget that actually we can compete together and cooperate against some other common enemy, whatever it might be, whether it's disease or poverty or whatever it might be, we don't need to be fighting about it. We can be helping each other. We're much better together than we are separate. Oh my gosh, could we take that message and just plaster it all over everything? Because I think that is what has happened, right? Is that, I don't know, is it because we all had to go underground in covid? We all felt afraid. It's gotten so divided out that at the end of the day, if we keep being divided, we're never ever going to come to any kind of solution. Agreed. The two things that I think are the most important messages, so I use improv comedy to teach teamwork, storytelling and stagecraft, and I've been doing that for about 20 years. And the most important thing I learned from one of my directors when I was performing was, your only job on stage is to make everyone else look good, full stop, just your only job on stage is to make everyone else look good. And what that means is when you go on stage, if there's five of you and I'm thinking about myself and you're thinking about yourself and everyone else is thinking about themselves, then you only have one person concerned about you on stage during the scene, which is not great. But if I go on stage and I'm only thinking about the other four people and they're all thinking about the other four people, then I've got four people worried about me. And it's much easier to solve a problem when you have that kind of support. And so one thing is teamwork is exponentially more effective than individual behavior, which I think goes against the American cowboy ethos that we're seeing. And the cowboys didn't survive by themselves, they didn't build the railroads, they didn't bring the food, they didn't had to do it even when they were out there, they worked together to survive. So the cowboy ethos, I think is a myth, like an empty myth and teamwork, I think we all know there's not a team that's won a single sports championship that did it because they were all working as individuals. They do it, they work as a team. The second thing is kindness. So I don't understand why kindness has been pushed aside in society. I think people tend to be very kind in person one-on-one, but then they get into what they think is an anonymous or a crowd situation and they feel like it's fine to comment meanly on someone or shout something mean to someone or push someone aside. I don't understand why kindness has been removed, and if we put kindness back in, I think you do a lot better. I mean, again, preach. I feel like this is something that I felt also very deeply. I love that you're a novelist, you're a screenwriter. You're working on the second book of your thriller trilogy, which is fascinating, but also you wrote a screenplay about an over 40 men's hockey team in Portland, so teamwork is really deep into your DNA at seas. Talk to me about that. Yes, so actually the screenplay I wrote with a good friend of mine, Sean Becker, we play hockey together on a team sponsored by the pizza villa actually. And so one night we decided at the bar, I knew I wanted to write something. This was around maybe almost 10 years ago when I was turning 45, and I was thinking, geez, I didn't think I'd still be in the corporate world at 45. And I've always thought of myself as a writer, but I realized that unless you actually write something, you're not a writer, you actually have to write something. So I got it in my head to do something and my friend Sean and I were having drinks after a game and I said, Hey, we should write a screenplay. And he was like, Yes, let's do that. And then I woke up the next day and I thought that was bar talk like, oh, let's run the marathon, let's save the world. It never happens. But then he called me the next day, he's like, let's do it. Let's do the screenplay. So we spent the next couple of years, we had no idea what we were doing. Neither of us had written a screenplay before, but it was a thing we got to do together and in the end, result was so much better than what I could have come up with on my own. So that was a really, really great way to get into writing as a craft. And then I had enough confidence from that that I thought, okay, I'm going to write. I really want to write a novel. I've always wanted to do that, and I love thriller novels. And even though I wrote that all by myself, the amount of help that I got from a wide range of people to actually produce it was humbling to say the least. For example, I have a friend who's in the military, his name's Rush Filson. He went to Bates, grew up in Massachusetts, he's in the Marines and he's been in the Marines, actually just retired at the end of March as a colonel. And so I had sent him the manuscript of my first book and he read it and was like, Hey, love the book. Great story. All of the military stuff is wrong. I was like, can you be more specific? And he said, well, it reads like someone who's never been in the military wrote about being in the military. There are scenes that are army related. And I'm like, well, that's exactly what it is. I don't know. So thankfully he didn't just criticize. He then told me what I needed to do, and there's no way that I could ever have brought that level of authenticity to the story unless he had taken the time to help me do it. So every endeavor is a team endeavor. Fundamentally. Nobody really lives on an island, you know what I mean? I mean, even this show, you have sponsors, you have the Portland art guy that helps make it happen. You have people helping you produce it, you have everything is a team effort. Absolutely. I mean, I'm the oldest of 10 children. I was born into the team, so I am so with you on this piece. The thing that I find interesting also when we talk about art and your art is storytelling and improv and presentation is that people do think of it as a solitary pursuit, which is because you do have to sit down at the end of the day. If you're going to write for example or paint, you have to have your own showing up as an individual. But when I watch what goes on with the artists at the Portland Art Gallery, one of the things that's really powerful is to see kind of the cross-pollination. And they will talk about craft, they will talk about inspiration, they will talk about their family situation, and there's always this interesting buzz back and forth. And then we come in as members of the community and we get to be kind of overhearing this and we're kind of inspired by it. So you're right that the creative process is this kind of cross-pollination does create these just more copious fields of flowers that just continue to spread much more so than if we were always by ourselves being creative. So there's early in my improv classes, I do an exercise where I have everybody stand in a circle and we just do one word at a time story, so everybody can contribute one word in a row. The idea is to do it fast, don't think about it, just say what comes in your head. If it doesn't make sense, we'll just stop and start a new one. So there's no mistakes that you can make. And after a couple, generally there's a couple of false starts and then they kind of get into it. And the lesson of that is the story that ends up getting told is not one that any of the individuals would have ever written or told, but when we tell it together as a group where we all equally contribute, and the circle is important symbolically because it's not like I'm in the middle directing the story, no one's in the middle. We're all equally invested in how this story turns out and contributing equally. And the end story ends up going in. It always goes in a direction that nobody expected, even though everybody contributed. And that's kind of magic. That's the magic of having multiple brains working on the same problem because one brain works in the lanes it works in, but somebody else comes in orthogonally and all of a sudden you've unlocked the problem, whatever it might be, whether it's a creative problem or an actual problem, if that makes sense. It does, absolutely. I would think the same is true for medicine as well, certainly on the research side, but even in terms of dealing with patients, I would think it's true as well. Would you agree with that? Yes. You've just written my script and I love how you flipped it over and you were doing exactly what we were talking about before, which is you, you're coming into this situation and you're like, all right, I know what I'm bringing to this, but what does Lisa want to get out of this conversation? Which I think you and I were talking about this as regard to sales, for example, that you show up and people can take you or leave you. They're not necessarily thinking that your additive to their life. So your job is to kind of understand what do they actually need, whatever it is you're selling, I might be selling health. I mean, you might be selling at this point, you might be selling stagecraft, but you have to understand the other person's mind in a way that I'm not sure everybody completely always connects to. Yes, no, I totally agree. And there are definitely some exercises that I teach as well, not to hammer on about the improv of teaching, but one of them is I have people come in. So to put yourself in someone else's shoes, you need to be willing to consider other perspectives. And I think we all have an unspoken bias to our own perspective of how the universe is unfolding. So what I do is a simple exercise. I say, okay, walk around the room or just stand where you are. Look around the room and just notice what you see. Just look around, take note of things. And then I have them sit on the floor and then if they're willing, stand on a chair or a table and I say, did you see the same things when you were in those three different levels? And the answer is no. When you're on the floor, you notice the dust and the gum and the ball in the corner when you're standing up, you notice the door and the chairs and whatever. And when you're really high up, you notice completely other things. And so that's the same room. We're all in the same room, but that room has multiple realities. And so that gets people thinking like, oh, okay, maybe we're all in the same room, but we don't process the information the same way. We have different lenses through which we are absorbing this conversation right now. And then the other thing I'll do is I'll say, okay, walk around the room silently. I'll have all the people there, like 25 people and just walk yourselves. And then I'm going to call out things that, and you're going to act like what I call out. So I'll say, walk around, you're angry. And people will change their gate and they'll speed up and a little kind of put angry face on and I'll say, walk around, you're happy or you're depressed. And then I'll end it with walk around the room. You are the CEO of this business. And everybody gets very high status and shoulders go back and the head goes up and I'll say, walk around the room as if you are an unhoused person who has just walked into a board meeting and they have to completely flip their reality. And that forces them to be like, oh, okay. I actually would be a very different person in the board meeting as the CEO than I would be if I were not welcome there. And that's the beginning I think, of starting to be like, okay, maybe there are other perspectives and I should consider those. And if I'm going to get somebody to be interested in what I'm offering or if I'm going to have a meaningful conversation with someone, then I need to be willing to understand their perspective. I'm going to take us back to when you and I first knew one another. So I think it was many years ago, we both had different hair. For example, I had hair that was... I mean, there you go. But my perception of you, for what it's worth, you always had a confidence. You were always super energetic. You were always right in the middle of everything. I believe there are a few fraternity parties that there's Chip, you're just right in there myself. I'm probably a little bit more like I'm going to observe, I'm going to be a little bit more on the outside. And so you're already in the middle of it. I think you have this intuitive understanding like, all right, we are all going to figure this out, right? Yes, You got the, and I believe you were a I was. That's a very good memory. Yes. Well, I mean, don't believe fraternity does not exist in the same way at Boin anymore. But I think this was coming into it this way for somebody who comes into it, as much as I love teams, I was like kind of like, oh, I'm a little bit, I'm just different person, different process. How do you bring people who are not you, who don't have this sense of, alright, let's go. How do you bring them forward? How do you help them with their stories and bring them into the improv space? Yes, that's a great question and I love how you framed it because I, looking back with the benefit of many years of hindsight, I was super insecure in college, and the way that I dealt with that was I projected confidence. You project you. I never would've known this about you. Absolutely true. I was super insecure. And so one way that I found that, it turned out that I was able to sometimes make people laugh, and so that you kind of grab onto that and it becomes a reinforcing thing. But what I had to learn after college was to actually step back, step back, let other people talk, listen to what they have to say. So that was a hard lesson. I mean, had some friends have a hard conversation with me, you need to settle down. It's just too much. You're not giving other people space. You just take up all the space in the room, and that's not fair to anyone else. So I had to be told that, and I thankfully took it to heart. And so I feel like I know I'm much more sensitive to people who are more introverted and less forward than I was. And so I try, when I have a session, I try and proactively make sure that those folks are, I'm bringing them into contribute gently bringing them into the conversation. And at the same time, kind of gently, there's always the extroverts in the room and they need to also leave room for everybody. So I try and do that. So I got hired by Lockheed Martin a bunch of years ago to go down to Orlando. They were having a conference of their senior r and d engineers, so literal rocket scientists. These are the most introverted people on the planet. They're smarter than everyone put together. And they wanted me to teach them improv for an hour at this conference. And I asked the woman who hired me, I'm like, okay, so why is storytelling important to these engineers, these rocket scientists? And she said, well, you may remember a bunch of years ago, our engineers knew what would happen if the O-ring got below a certain temperature and they told it was in the data, but they didn't tell the story and it had catastrophic consequences for the shuttle. And I thought, that's a little bit, but that's what they're dealing with. That's the things I do. No one's dying if I mess up your website copy. That doesn't happen. But these folks, that's their reality. So even the most introverted people in the world are open up when you teach them improv because you literally can't do it wrong. And there's very few situations that we find ourselves in when you can't make a mistake. And so when you can't make a mistake and because everyone's looking out for everyone else and you don't have to worry about you, then you can take off the blinders and just let yourself be free. And then magic happens. First of all, I really appreciate you're saying, I felt really insecure. I was, And I've come to see this in different people over time, but as somebody who just tends to be traditionally has been more of a stand back and observe people, I always had gathered that people who are in the middle of it, it's because they felt great and they were more than happy to share the happiness. So it's so helpful for me to know just where you're coming from as somebody who I think we just showed up in the space differently. So I appreciate your willingness to be vulnerable that way. Of course, vulnerability is just being honest about yourself and you've got nothing to hide. And I think when you, and this goes back to the kindness thing. So if you're willing to show vulnerability to somebody, then that helps build trust, right? Because you're trusting them with whatever it is you've told them. And so then that builds a bond, and then that allows them to be vulnerable, and then it becomes a beneficial kind of cycle. And to some extent, that's why when I come in these conversations, I try to actually be very honest and authentic about who I am because it may not always be what I would like people to know, but it is just who I am. So to give them, here's a space at the table, take it or leave it. It is what it is. But when you're talking about yourself and you showing up and you learning these lessons, one of the other things that I hear is you had to work through some level of also pushing through fear and being willing to show up and take a risk. And I mean, what I heard from what you were saying earlier is there's a lot of failure involved, and in sales in particular, there's a lot of failure involved. It's a numbers game. You have to go out there, you have to put yourself out there. It takes something to push through that fear of failure. Tell me what that was like for you. Yes, so growing up, my dad, he had multiple family mottos, which were sort of jokey, but sort of not. And one of them was, I can try and never, my parents thankfully, were not focused on successful outcomes per se. They were focused on the effort, the honest effort that you put in. And if you get a successful outcome, that's great, but actually the successful outcome is that you've learned how to be disciplined and work hard and fight through failure, which obviously they didn't say that at the time when I was 10, but I think what they were doing. So that's the first part of it. But then I still had a lot of fear. Most people do around being exposed for being a fake, there's always imposter syndrome, but improv, when I learned improv back in 1998 and we were living in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and improv taught me that fear shouldn't exist. It taught me to be fearless on stage because there are moments when a scene ends, the lights come down, lights come up two seconds later, and you have to start a new scene. There are times, and actually that has turned out to be my favorite, one of my favorite moments ever is when I can walk out on a stage with literally no idea what I'm going to do or say, and then the lights come up and the audience is right in front of you and you have to, and something happens. But there's a delicious moment of terror where you're like, oh, this is going to go very poorly in front of these people in the live audience. And then either you come up with something or which is more often, your other actors will join you on stage. So if I'm just standing there staring off into the distance, panicked, I can't think of something, then if they're paying attention, they will come up on stage and mirror what I'm doing and just like, oh, what are you looking at? And then now there's three of us that are whatever we're doing, but we're doing it together. And so the audience goes from, well, I feel poorly for that guy who seems like he's panicking to, oh, they had a plan and there's no plan. It's just them supporting me in the moment, which is very much what improv is about. So I teach one of the things I teach, and this is relevant, so I have what I call the virtuous cycle. So you starts with confidence. So you should have confidence in yourself that you already know how to tell stories, you're going to be fine. You can't do this wrong. Once you're confident, then you can stop worrying about yourself and you can worry about other people. So you start to support them openly. When you feel yourself being supported openly, you start to trust. When you build trust, then the team can take risks. And when you take risks, that's when the magic happens, right? You don't always win. Sometimes scenes go nowhere. But that's where, that's where, and that's kind of the drug. There's a thing in improv called the group mind. So there's short form improv and long form improv. Short form is like, whose line is it? Anyway? So games, scenes that are very short, but very jokey and funny. It's fantastic. But longform improv, you get a single word like water, and then the actors will go for 45 minutes on just that one word. And there's a version of it called the Herald where you do three unrelated scenes, but they relate to the words. So it might be if it's water, it might be first scenes on a boat, second scenes in a desert, third scene is a waiter delivering a glass of water, but otherwise they have nothing to do with each other. And then you revisit them several times throughout the 45 minutes, and by the end, if you've done it and you get to group mind, all of the stories will come together and make sense and wrap up with a bow at the end, even though they were totally random at the beginning. And there's a point in the show usually halfway through where if it's going to happen, you're like, oh, I look around. You can see in their eyes, I think I know where we're going. And everyone kind of comes to the same conclusion simultaneously. And then it's like when a band drops into a groove, you can tell the difference between a band that's playing and a band that's in a serious groove. And that's what happens on stage in improv with long form. You get that group mind, and that's the drug I'm always chasing on stage. There's no better feeling than like, oh, we're all getting to get there together. We all know where we're going. It's very exciting. I can't say that I've felt that exactly on stage with a group, but I can say that in the work I've done in leadership, it's very much like that you're trying to cultivate the individual. You're trying to cultivate the relationship, the group dynamic. And you could be like, oh, this is so hard. It's not working, it's not working. And then one day you're like, I think I see glimmers. And then you're sitting with the group and you're like, oh my goodness. And I feel like that is the drug that I'm chasing essentially when it comes to leadership. And so I will say that having been in multiple leadership roles, I think for me, the challenge is you actually have to work through that uncertainty of will this actually work? I mean, the time where you are on stage or you're in a classroom and you're like, I'm not sure. And you have to kind of have faith in the process, which I think gets talked about a lot. And I think you also need to be willing to fail because fear only works on you if you let it. Right? And what are you really afraid of? You're afraid of an outcome that you don't like getting run over by car, for example. Nobody wants that. You can be afraid of that, but in a group setting like that, it's already not working. So anything you can do to get that better than where it is today is going to be a win. And so that kind of takes the fear out of it. Everything you do is going to help that group communicate better, work together, better understand what leadership really is. And leadership, we may have similar or different ideas about leadership, but I think leadership is taking care of other people, not putting yourself first. It's the opposite of what I think a lot of people think leadership is. I'm guessing that you and I have actually the similar, the same idea about that a Hundred percent. I mean, leadership's actually some, I'm sorry, to all the great leaders who may feel differently, but leadership is actually somewhat thankless. Externally, you can't do it because you're waiting for other people to pat you on the head because mostly what get externally is people like, why didn't you do it the way I thought you should do it? So it really has to be an internal thing. And really you have to be doing it thinking, I think I can move these individuals and this group forward in a way that will actually be better. And going back to Camp Belknap again, one of the motto of camp down app is God first, the other fellow, second myself, last. It's an all boys camp. So that's why fellow, and I'm not super religious, but I can understand spirituality first, be good to the universe, but put other people before yourself. I think that actually going there for 10 summers, like that reinforced in me and then seeing how that plays out. And they also, the camp selects 90% of its leaders. They call their counselors leaders, not counselors, which I think is an important thing. And 90% of the leaders are promoted from the campers. So as a camper, you see, they lead by example. You see, this is what you should, this is how you should behave, this is how you treat other people. This is what leadership looks like. And then you have an opportunity to do that yourself, which is a very powerful motivator. Yes, absolutely. Yes, especially when you're putting, it's always about the best forward piece of advice I ever read was, it's not about you keep that in mind. If I get confused or I'm not sure how should I handle this situation, I remember that. I'm like, okay, it's not about me. It's not about whether I'm concerned about this or what I'm worried about. It's about that person and what they're dealing with. So you took a dramatic turn in your professional life, which I think has incorporated so many different elements of your past experience. And you and I believe graduated same yea