Monica is an interdisciplinary communications and storytelling expert with over a decade of experience helping organizations strengthen emotional intelligence, collaboration, and creativity. A sought-after facilitator and speaker, she has worked with global brands including Google, Sony Music, Uber, Publicis, The Financial Times, and Airbnb.
All sessions by Monica →Creativity is often misunderstood as a rare talent reserved for artists, while in reality it is a practical and learnable skill that lies at the heart of effective problem solving. In this session, Monica McCarthy challenges participants to rethink creativity as a mindset rather than a gift.
By learning to think like an artist, professionals discover how constraints, uncertainty and even failure can become powerful drivers of better decisions and innovation at work. The session offers fresh perspectives on how creativity supports focus, adaptability and resilience in an increasingly complex workplace.
The session is highly interactive and experiential , designed to keep participants actively engaged throughout. Monica combines brief creative exercises, guided reflection, and small-group moments to help audiences apply the concepts directly to real workplace challenges.
Using practical examples from acting and storytelling, she encourages participants to test new perspectives in real time, making the session dynamic, accessible, and immediately relevant for professional audiences.
Creativity is not about inspiration or talent, but about making and fulfilling. It is a skill everyone can develop and apply to everyday workplace challenges.
Effective creative thinking requires holding opposing states at once, such as focus and openness, solitude and collaboration, pressure and relaxation. This balance enables deeper insight and more nuanced problem solving.
Innovation depends on experimentation and repeated iteration. Viewing failure as a natural and necessary part of the process leads to stronger outcomes and more resilient teams.
Monica McCarthy, facilitator and creative professional with a background in film, theatre and education, explains how artists naturally work within constraints and shows how the same mindset can help professionals navigate complexity, uncertainty and decision overload in the workplace.
She then explores how creativity has been historically misunderstood, from divine inspiration and genius myths to modern misconceptions about left-brain versus right-brain thinking. Drawing on insights from psychology and neuroscience, Monica reframes creativity as a practical form of problem solving that relies on both focused thinking and mental flexibility.
The session continues by examining the neurological foundations of creative thinking, including divergent thinking, pattern recognition and the importance of understanding the “problem behind the problem.” Monica uses examples from acting and storytelling to illustrate how imagination and empathy allow individuals to see situations from new perspectives and generate more effective solutions.
Monica also addresses why creativity often feels difficult, particularly in high-pressure environments. She explains concepts such as resistance, fear of the unknown and amygdala hijacking, showing how stress can limit perception and decision-making.
Drawing on techniques from acting, she highlights the role of relaxation, movement and awareness in breaking habitual responses and entering a state of flow.
The session concludes with a focus on the necessity of failure and feedback. Monica emphasizes that meaningful innovation rarely happens in one attempt and encourages organizations to normalize iteration, frequent feedback and experimentation.
By reframing failure as part of an ongoing process, teams can build the courage needed to innovate and make better decisions in today’s workplace.
It is interactive, and the block above says exactly how for this session. Nobody has to speak up who does not want to: the chat and the polls carry most of it, and the questions can come in anonymously.
Creativity is often misunderstood as a rare talent reserved for artists, while in reality it is a practical and learnable skill that lies at the heart of effective problem solving. In this session, Monica McCarthy challenges participants to rethink creativity as a mindset rather than a gift. It is built for a general working audience: no prior knowledge is assumed, and people who already know the subject get the research and the practical side rather than an introduction.
It runs 45 min / 15 min: the talk, then live questions. All you do is pick a date. We brief Monica, produce the session, host and moderate it, run the Q&A, and send you the report within an hour of the end.
A team, a department, an employee network or every single employee at once, with no cap and no per-seat price. It runs inside your own Microsoft Teams, Zoom or Google Meet, or on a branded page we build. No integration, no login, no company device or e-mail.
The session is delivered in English. You can add high accuracy live subtitles in 8, 16 or 24 languages, so everyone follows in their own. That is a paid option, priced by the number of languages you need.
No, and that is by design. There is nothing to install, nothing to integrate and no connection to your systems, so there is nothing for IT to validate: we join your own Teams, Zoom or Meet as a guest speaker, or we host a page and your people open a link. No software, no accounts, and no data of yours that we can reach. It is why hundreds of companies, among them some of the largest technology and financial firms in the world, were able to start within a day.
We never receive or hold personal data about your employees. Because the session runs in your own environment, attendance and identity stay with you, and what we report back is aggregated: numbers, ratings and survey answers, not people. That is also why IT approval usually takes minutes rather than weeks.
You keep the recording and can share it internally. You also get attendance over time, participant ratings for the content and the speaker, the survey answers, and the topics your people asked for next.
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