Finding Creativity in the Least Expected Places

*A guest blog post by Melanie Rothschild.

Bear with me on this for just a minute.

I had a stunning encounter with creativity while paying my credit card bill this month – and it was all 100% legal and legit.

I had to handle the payment over the phone due to some unusual events. I was dreading making the call…the excruciating details I’d have to explain, probably to be misunderstood over and over. Good chance there’d be a tussle. Certain that it would drain me.

Serendipity connected me with Teresa. Well, here we go – time to hunker down.

I couldn’t be totally sure, but early on in the telling of my saga to Teresa, I thought she may have made a little joke. It couldn’t be; that was usually the sort of thing I sometimes tried to do to infuse just a bit of human-ness into the mix.

“What?” I asked.

Yup, sure enough, Teresa made a little comment, with just a tinge of snide in it, something along the lines of…“I’ve been waiting to talk with you all morning.” It got my attention and immediately made me chuckle.

Wow, I thought – they never do that.

Well, Teresa did. She also listened to what I had to say. And then, in the most cheerful and buoyant style I’ve ever experienced with telephone customer service, she explained how everything could be resolved…painlessly.

I told her that I was amazed and that I’d never encountered anyone like her on the other end of the credit card “help” line.

And then, Teresa treated me to her most inspiring perspective. She said that she loves her job. She is thrilled every single time she gets a customer on the phone who’s expecting the worse and she’s able to turn it around and win them over. She told me that she had recently gotten out of a toxic marriage and that her job made her feel alive and vibrant in the world. I asked if I could talk to her supervisor to express my astonishment and delight at having encountered her. When I spoke with the supervisor, he echoed my amazement and said that he gets comments like mine all the time and that she stuns people on a regular basis.

Wow.

The whole situation simply delighted me. Teresa at Chase reminded me just how true it is that creativity can be expressed in endless ways.

From The Art of Mistakes:

I like to think that artists have particularly well-developed creative muscle which can be applied in all sorts of directions. I don’t know if Teresa is an artist or not, but she sure lives like one.

Melanie Rothschild is a self-taught artist whose elaborate interior accessories have been sold in stores throughout the United States including Neiman-Marcus, the shops at the Smithsonian Institution, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center and hundreds of others for almost two decades. Her work is shown in fine art galleries and has been licensed to Target. She considers moxie, an irreverent nature, and a respect for mistake-making to be the tools of her trade. Melanie has a master’s degree in the Study of Creativity and an undergrad degree in Anthropology. She is from and lives in Los Angeles. “Like” Melanie on Facebook today!

Click here to see more of Melanie’s artwork and a short preview of her documentary, MISTAKE.