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

Lisa Belisle: Hello. I am Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to or watching Radio Maine, our video podcast where we explore and celebrate creativity and the human spirit. 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, as he pointed out today, I have known 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. Recently we've seen each other again at the Portland Art Gallery, and Portland Art Gallery is a sponsor of the Radio Maine podcast. Thank you for coming in today.

Chip Brewer: Oh, thank you so much for having me, Lisa. I'm very excited to be here.

Lisa Belisle: 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 at 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. I was like, this is so Maine. We've been circling each other for decades and have just come back into each other's orbits. Do you find that a lot in your life?

Chip Brewer: 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. I remember when we were moving our oldest daughter, Meg, to high school, they have the middle school parents come in and meet some of the high school teachers and so forth. 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. 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.

Lisa Belisle: That's really true. I had three kids in the Yarmouth school system, and even just the difference in their years, if it wasn't exactly that they were both seniors in high school together, somebody could have been a junior that year and you would never meet their parents.

Chip Brewer: They would never meet their parents.

Lisa Belisle: Exactly. But I also think it's interesting that Bowdoin continues to have such a strong connection. 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.

Chip Brewer: It's interesting, right? Bowdoin is very important to both of us. My dad also went to Bowdoin and we loved it there. I was actually just up there a couple of weeks ago doing an improv session, teaching improv to the Bowdoin Alumni Council. They do a biannual meeting, and it's people from 22 to 102 on the council basically. 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. 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, it gave them that bond so they could have the difficult conversations and not be strangers doing it.

Lisa Belisle: I love that you brought us in a different direction. I love this idea of sneaky bonding, this idea that instead of just putting people in a room and having them 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. Then you start to realize you're more alike than you are different.

Chip Brewer: Yes. 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, a six-foot big red rubber ball. We would just say the object of the game. We'd split them into two halves. What we wouldn't say to them is the goal is to get the ball in the net. 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. Then eventually someone would realize they didn't put us in teams, they just put us on the other side of the field. Once they worked together and got it in the net, that was it. They passed the test. I remember learning that lesson as a kid and then teaching it again as a counselor. It was really powerful to watch, because all the light bulbs go off. 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. We don't need to be fighting about it. We can be helping each other. We're much better together than we are separate.

Lisa Belisle: 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 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.

Chip Brewer: Agreed. So I use improv comedy to teach teamwork, storytelling and stagecraft, and I've been doing that for about 20 years. 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. 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. It's much easier to solve a problem when you have that kind of support. 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. The cowboys didn't survive by themselves. They didn't build the railroads, they didn't bring the food. Even when they were out there, they worked together to survive. So the cowboy ethos, I think, is an empty myth, and teamwork, 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 work as a team. The second thing is kindness. 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.

Lisa Belisle: Again, preach. I feel like this is something that I felt 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 you also wrote a screenplay about an over-40 men's hockey team in Portland. So teamwork is really deep into your DNA. Talk to me about that.

Chip Brewer: Yes. 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. 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. 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. He was like, yes, let's do that. 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, the result was so much better than what I could have come up with on my own. So that was a really great way to get into writing as a craft. Then I had enough confidence from that that I thought, okay, I really want to write a novel. I've always wanted to do that, and I love thriller novels. 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 just retired at the end of March as a colonel. 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? He said, well, it reads like someone who's never been in the military wrote about being in the military. I'm like, well, that's exactly what it is. 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? Even this show, you have sponsors, you have the Portland Art Gallery that helps make it happen. You have people helping you produce it. Everything is a team effort.

Lisa Belisle: Absolutely. Yes. 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, 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 the cross-pollination. 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. Then we come in as members of the community and we get to be kind of overhearing this, and we're inspired by it. So you're right that the creative process is this cross-pollination, and it does create these more copious fields of flowers that just continue to spread, much more so than if we were always by ourselves being creative.

Chip Brewer: So 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. After a couple, generally there's a couple of false starts, and then they kind of get into it. 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 always goes in a direction that nobody expected, even though everybody contributed. 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, whether it's a creative problem or an actual problem, if that makes sense.

Lisa Belisle: It does, absolutely.

Chip Brewer: I would think the same is true for medicine as well, certainly on the research side, but even in terms of dealing with patients. Would you agree with that?

Lisa Belisle: 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'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 as regards to sales, for example. You show up and people can take you or leave you. They're not necessarily thinking that you're additive to their life. So your job is to understand what do they actually need, whatever it is you're selling. I might be selling health, 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.

Chip Brewer: Yes, I totally agree. There are definitely some exercises that I teach as well, not to hammer on about the improv teaching, but one of them is, to put yourself in someone else's shoes, you need to be willing to consider other perspectives. 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. Take note of things. 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. When you're really high up, you notice completely other things. So that's the same room. We're all in the same room, but that room has multiple realities. That gets people thinking, 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. 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. Then I'm going to call out things, and you're going to act like what I call out. So I'll say, walk around, you're angry. People will change their gait and they'll speed up and put an angry face on. I'll say, walk around, you're happy, or you're depressed. Then I'll end it with, walk around the room, you are the CEO of this business. Everybody gets very high status and shoulders go back and the head goes up. 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. 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. That's the beginning, I think, of starting to be like, okay, maybe there are other perspectives and I should consider those. 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.

Lisa Belisle: I'm going to take us back to when you and I first knew one another. I think it was many years ago, we both had different hair, for example.

Chip Brewer: I had hair that was...

Lisa Belisle: 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 where 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. 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?

Chip Brewer: Yes.

Lisa Belisle: And I believe you were a Chi Psi.

Chip Brewer: I was. That's a very good memory.

Lisa Belisle: Yes. I mean, fraternity does not exist in the same way at Bowdoin anymore. But for somebody who comes into it as much as I love teams, I was like, oh, I'm a little bit different, different process. How do you bring people who are not you, who don't have this sense of, all right, let's go? How do you bring them forward? How do you help them with their stories and bring them into the improv space?

Chip Brewer: That's a great question, and I love how you framed it. 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.

Lisa Belisle: I never would've known this about you.

Chip Brewer: Absolutely true. I was super insecure. One way that I found, it turned out that I was able to sometimes make people laugh, and so 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, let other people talk, listen to what they have to say. That was a hard lesson. I 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 take up all the space in the room, and that's not fair to anyone else. So I had to be told that, and thankfully I took it to heart. I feel like I'm much more sensitive now to people who are more introverted and less forward than I was. So when I have a session, I try and proactively make sure that those folks are, I'm bringing them in to contribute, gently bringing them into the conversation. At the same time, gently, there's always the extroverts in the room and they need to also leave room for everybody. 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&D engineers, so literal rocket scientists. These are the most introverted people on the planet. They're smarter than everyone put together. They wanted me to teach them improv for an hour at this conference. I asked the woman who hired me, okay, so why is storytelling important to these engineers, these rocket scientists? 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 it was in the data, but they didn't tell the story, and it had catastrophic consequences for the shuttle. I thought, that's what they're dealing with. The things I do, no one's dying if I mess up your website copy. But these folks, that's their reality. So even the most introverted people in the world open up when you teach them improv, because you literally can't do it wrong. There's very few situations that we find ourselves in where you can't make a mistake. 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.

Lisa Belisle: First of all, I really appreciate you saying, I felt really insecure.

Chip Brewer: I was.

Lisa Belisle: I've come to see this in different people over time, but as somebody who tends to be more of a stand back and observe person, 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 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.

Chip Brewer: Of course. Vulnerability is just being honest about yourself, and you've got nothing to hide. This goes back to the kindness thing. If you're willing to show vulnerability to somebody, then that helps build trust, because you're trusting them with whatever it is you've told them. That builds a bond, and then that allows them to be vulnerable, and then it becomes a beneficial cycle.

Lisa Belisle: To some extent, that's why when I come into these conversations, I try to 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. 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.

Chip Brewer: Yes. Growing up, my dad had multiple family mottos, which were sort of jokey, but sort of not. One of them was, I can try. My parents, thankfully, were not focused on successful outcomes per se. They were focused on the effort, the honest effort that you put in. 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. Obviously they didn't say that at the time when I was 10, but I think that's 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, 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 one of my favorite moments ever, 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. 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. 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, like, oh, what are you looking at? And then now there's three of us doing whatever we're doing, but we're doing it together. 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 what I call the virtuous cycle. It starts with confidence. 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. When you take risks, that's when the magic happens. You don't always win. Sometimes scenes go nowhere. But that's kind of the drug. There's a thing in improv called the group mind. There's short form improv and long form improv. Short form is like, Whose Line Is It Anyway? Games, scenes that are very short, but very jokey and funny. It's fantastic. But long form improv, you get a single word like water, and then the actors will go for 45 minutes on just that one word. There's a version of it called the Harold where you do three unrelated scenes, but they relate to the word. So if it's water, the first scene's on a boat, second scene's in a desert, third scene is a waiter delivering a glass of water, but otherwise they have nothing to do with each other. 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. There's a point in the show usually halfway through where, if it's going to happen, you look around, you can see in their eyes, I think I know where we're going. Everyone kind of comes to the same conclusion simultaneously. 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. 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, oh, we're all getting to get there together, we all know where we're going. It's very exciting.

Lisa Belisle: 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. Then one day you're like, I think I see glimmers. Then you're sitting with the group and you're like, oh my goodness. I feel like that is the drug that I'm chasing when it comes to leadership. 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? The time where you are on stage or you're in a classroom and you're like, I'm not sure. You have to kind of have faith in the process, which I think gets talked about a lot.

Chip Brewer: I think you also need to be willing to fail, because fear only works on you if you let it. What are you really afraid of? You're afraid of an outcome that you don't like, getting run over by a car, for example. Nobody wants that. You can be afraid of that, but in a group setting, 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. That 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 same idea about that.

Lisa Belisle: A hundred percent. Leadership is actually, 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 you 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. 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 ultimately.

Chip Brewer: Going back to Camp Belknap again, one of the mottos of Camp Belknap is, God first, the other fellow second, myself last. It's an all boys camp, so that's why fellow. I'm not super religious, but I can understand spirituality, first be good to the universe, but put other people before yourself. Going there for 10 summers, that reinforced in me, and then seeing how that plays out. 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 how you should behave, this is how you treat other people, this is what leadership looks like. Then you have an opportunity to do that yourself, which is a very powerful motivator.

Lisa Belisle: Yes, absolutely.

Chip Brewer: Especially the best 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.

Lisa Belisle: 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, I believe, graduated the same year. So professionally, you and I have each had the opportunity to live these parallel professional paths, but I think you put a stake in the ground and you're like, this is it, I'm doing this. Talk to me about that decision to move towards Growth Story and what you're trying to accomplish.

Chip Brewer: Yes, thank you for asking. So I was lucky enough to have a very successful career in the corporate world. It took me overseas. We lived in Amsterdam for two years. It literally changed my life for the better. I've traveled to Asia because of work. It's been an amazing 30 years of work. At the same time, I found it fundamentally unfulfilling over the last maybe decade. That's because I knew, once I had gotten into writing the screenplay and I really started to invest energy and time into the creative side of my brain, that that's actually what I wanted to do. So it became very clear to me at age 45, 47, that if someone were to drop 10 million in my lap and say, just write for the rest of your life and teach, I'd be very happy to do that. So I basically spent the last eight or nine years trying to figure out a way to incorporate both things. I still need to bring in a paycheck. I still need to make money for the family. We still have one in college, one's out, thankfully, but the other is still in. So, find a way to be creative as I try to make money for the family. This has been a really good way to do it. I'm not at the point yet, I'm not Stephen King, nobody's handing me huge writing contracts. So I feel very lucky to have been able to carve out a niche where it seems like people need what I'm offering to them. What it turns out, I thought I would be doing a lot of piece work, content writing. There's a training side, which we've talked about. But I expected I would be doing a lot of, hey, I need a white paper, I need blog posts, I need content for my website to drive organic traffic. What it turns out I'm spending most of my time doing is helping firms uncover their fundamental why story, why do they exist. Companies and individuals are really good at talking about how and what, and I'm getting this framework from Simon Sinek, the famous author, so I want to give him credit where credit's due, it's not my idea, but I do think he's correct. Companies, if you go to just about any webpage, they're great at the how and the what, but they're very bad generally at the why. But they almost all have good whys. People aren't entrepreneurs generally for cash. They're entrepreneurs because they're passionate about something. Being able to help those folks and help them convert the ideas in their head into a story that resonates with their audience is super fulfilling. It turns out people want that, which is great. So I'm volunteering through the Maine Center for Entrepreneurs with their Top Gun program, which is a five-month January to May program for Maine entrepreneurs where they get access to mentors like me. There's something like 300 mentors around the state, and they take weekly classes on basically everything you need to know about a business. What is marketing, what is sales, how does operations work? One of the cohort picked me to be their mentor this year. It's a company based out of Pembroke, Maine, which is east of Machias. It's a woman who has four kids, and she's trying to launch this business that's called Theater of Dice, and it's for tabletop role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. They have an online platform, so if we're not in the same location, we can play together. The reason they started the company is because the co-founders all played together and found that they had a very toxic experience online. The person leading the game was toxic, or other players that they might be matched with were toxic or homophobic or sexist or racist. So these folks, the company I'm mentoring, they've created a non-toxic environment to play the game together, but she's doing it with four kids running around, which is crazy. That level of commitment and passion, she's not trying to be a billionaire, she's solving a problem that matters a lot to her. So getting to work with those folks and tell their story is really powerful, and it is both financially rewarding and fulfilling as well.

Lisa Belisle: If you're thinking about what you would like this to look like for yourself, and I'm sure that because you have this longstanding business experience, you're very familiar with metrics and goals, and ideally let's say five years from now, where would this be? Where would your company Growth Story be for you?

Chip Brewer: There's two answers to that question. The first answer is, I get a publishing contract and I just write full time. That's the number one goal. But failing that, because that's a rare occurrence, I would love to be in a position where I'm fully booked with folks that are interested in having their stories told more appropriately, and there's a nice balance of, I'm writing and creating stuff and training other people to do it for themselves. I don't know whether it's a 50/50 or a 60/40, but it's fine to fish for people, but it's also fun to teach them how to fish for themselves so they can uplevel their own skills and do it on their own. Because honestly, everyone knows how to tell a story. You don't really need me. Nobody teaches us in high school or college or after, systematically, how to tell stories effectively. Our brains are genetically wired to tell stories. As you may know, the brain releases different chemicals when it hears a story versus when you're being told information. You get oxytocin, which helps with memory, I believe. Is that correct? No, cortisol helps with memory, oxytocin helps with empathy, and dopamine helps with engagement. So your brain produces those when you hear a story versus a PowerPoint deck or a spreadsheet. That's why stories are powerful, because you get engaged, empathetic people who are going to remember what you said. That's kind of the point of the story. So we're genetically predisposed to learn stories, which means you're genetically predisposed to tell them, but nobody gives you the 10 rules you need to do it effectively.

Lisa Belisle: And so you will be that person.

Chip Brewer: And so I'm doing that, but that's why I love teaching it, because it literally is not rocket science. You already can do it. You do it every day, you just don't realize it. So it's like peeking behind the curtain. The wizard is not this great beast. Actually, the wizard is just an old guy. It's not that hard to do. It's just no one's explained it to people before. It's fun to teach something that's super easy to learn, because people think it's impossible, so their perception of how hard it is is radically different from the reality of how hard it is, if that makes sense. So it makes it fun, because then people are like, oh, that was easy. You're like, yes, you already know how to do it. Same with improv. We're improvising right now. There's no script for this. You improvise your entire day every day, fundamentally. People realize, oh, okay, well, I guess this isn't going to be so hard, once you get them on stage. Stages are scary for people, understandably so.

Lisa Belisle: I think stages are scary for pretty much all of us, but some of us really like stages, and that's the interesting thing, right?

Chip Brewer: Yes.

Lisa Belisle: Clearly you gravitated toward being on stage.

Chip Brewer: I do. Look at me on stage.

Lisa Belisle: And I've acknowledged for myself that I've always liked being on stage. Not that I get a chance to do it very often, but I actually do.

Chip Brewer: Well, you kind of do, right?

Lisa Belisle: So, yes, this is my stage, yay. But I do think that it's also tapping back into what it is about actually being on stage and being in an improvisational or creative space that just feeds us in a way. And I love what you're saying, that for 10 years you're like, yes, I kind of knew that I needed to do this other thing. I could feel it, but I also knew I needed to feed my family. So trying to bring those things together I think is a really important thing for people to hear.

Chip Brewer: I want to make a pitch to anybody out there who's interested, who's always said, I have a book in me, I have a poem in me, I have a song I want to write, or a painting I want to make. You can do it at 45, 55. You don't have to start when you're 12. It helps to start when you're young, but you definitely can start at any age. I went at the novel with no idea what I was doing. I did a little bit of research, but not a whole lot in terms of how to write the novel effectively. I kind of just had at it. So it took me five and a half years of nights and weekends and airports and hotels sitting in bars and restaurants by myself working on this thing. The process itself was so joyful that it became self-perpetuating, because for me, I would get into a zone where I literally can't type fast enough because the ideas start coming so fast. That's another one of the drugs that I chase when I'm writing. Sometimes it's like in any job, it's like pushing water uphill and you're like, none of the words go together, I can't solve this problem. But if you can have patience, come at it from multiple angles, and improv's really good actually for writers, because it helps you think about a scene or a situation from different perspectives that can unlock a scene. For example, there's an improv game where you run a scene and then you rerun the scene, but from a different character's perspective. Then you run it again from a third character's perspective in the scene, and you get three different scenes, as we were talking about earlier. That's a really good writing tool. So if you write a scene from character A's perspective, and this is not working, rewrite the scene from the other character's perspective, and all of a sudden you unlock all these things that were happening that you didn't know were inside that other character's head. So even if you don't go with the other one, it will almost always unlock whatever problem you're having with the scene, or put it somewhere else. Or have a third, even if it's as an exercise, have a bystander, someone sitting on a park bench nearby, how would they perceive what was happening in the scene? So just changing your perspective allows you to, as I said, unlock the problem.

Lisa Belisle: Well, Chip, I've learned a lot today and I've also really enjoyed reconnecting with you.

Chip Brewer: Yes, this has been lovely. Thank you so much for having me in.

Lisa Belisle: It's fun to show up. I don't think it's like you and I ever sat down at Bowdoin and had long, deep conversations when we were hanging around what used to be called the boot pit, I'm sorry, at Bowdoin College. These things don't exist anymore. Kids, we don't like this idea, don't try this at home. No, definitely not. But I really appreciate your willingness to reconnect and have a conversation, and I hope that people who are listening do reach out to you, because I love what you're doing. I think that the idea of story is especially important right now as we try to reacquaint ourselves with our fellow human beings and bring that kindness in that you're describing and try to understand that we should come at this from a place of unity and not divisiveness.

Chip Brewer: The other way to think about, and I agree with you, one other thing we can leave with is, we tell our kids this, and we didn't come up with it, but everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about. What that's really saying is, put yourself in their story. Try to understand that their story has things happening in it that you aren't aware of. You haven't read those chapters yet, or they haven't shown them to you. So if somebody cuts you off in traffic or is rude to you in the coffee shop, maybe their mother just died or they're having a horrible day. So it helps with the kindness piece, remembering that other people's stories may not be as happy as yours reminds you to maybe be kinder.

Lisa Belisle: Great way to end.

Chip Brewer: Fair enough. Thanks so much, Lisa. This is lovely.

Lisa Belisle: Yes, it is. Thank you very much.

Chip Brewer: Thanks.

Lisa Belisle: I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you've been listening to or watching Radio Maine, our video podcast where we explore and celebrate creativity and the human spirit. I encourage you to learn more about Chip Brewer, who is of course a Bowdoin College graduate like myself, also the founder of Growth Story LLC, and author of Questions of Iron and Blood. And putting it out there in the universe, if you are a publisher of books, Chip would love to have a book contract, so if you're listening, he's open. You should learn more. We are sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery, and we hope that you will join us at one of our openings or learn more about our artists online. Chip, I hope we get to reconnect at one of our future openings at the art gallery.

Chip Brewer: We absolutely will. Lisa, thank you so much again. This has been really lovely.

Lisa Belisle: Thank you.

Chip Brewer: Cheers.