One of the most important lessons about the creative process

What do days of the week feel like for you? Monday: drag yourself out of bed, or start strong? Wednesday: hump day, a tired creature clawing over the middle of the week? And why is one of the best songs ever called ‘Friday on My Mind’?

We treat days like they have personalities. You might say, well, they do.

But in most of the Middle East, Sunday is the first day of the week. So, they feel about Sunday (glorious, lazy lie-in, catch up with friends for brunch vibe for me in Melbourne) the way we feel about Monday.

If the Easybeats were a Middle Eastern band, they’d have written ‘Thursday on My Mind’, which makes no sense whatsoever to a Western audience.

This is anthropomorphising: giving human qualities to something that isn’t human. My printer hates me. The algorithm is sulking. The spreadsheet is judging me. None of these things has feelings, unless Excel has finally become sentient, in which case we’re all in trouble.

In your presentations, anthropomorphising makes abstract ideas (anything you can’t touch) feel alive.

I once saw a speaker show the voices in our head, the ones that pipe up when you try something new. Each voice had its own physicality, its own tone. Simple, fun, so original.

Don’t dismiss anthropomorphising as too hard. Even when it doesn’t give you the result you are chasing. The exploration itself often lands me somewhere richer than where I started.

That’s one of the most important lessons about the creative process. You don’t always end up where you started. But the act of looking takes you somewhere you’d never find if you stayed on the surface.

George Nelson, author of How to See, makes a similar point: the hunt itself is often more satisfying than the find. The real reward is a new awareness of something previously invisible.

That’s what anthropomorphising gave me. Not just a device but a way of seeing.

Start with an abstract idea in your presentation: trust, resilience, change. Then ask: what could this idea do if it sprang off the page and walked into the room? What human qualities would it have?

You might be surprised and delighted.

And so will your audience.