Welcome to Your Evolution

By Luke Clark, CP5

What if you were told that the answers to your biggest questions lay inside of you – if you could just reconnect with your whole self? It might sound far-off at first, but for Hilary Lee, corporate strategist turned creative expansionist, it is a proven science that can help us feel more alive, and with a great capacity to realise our goals. And as she tells Luke Clark, it is a process that for her, has been both enjoyable and life-changing.

Hilary Lee begins each creative work-day with a theme in mind to explore. “When I wake up, I’ll know how I’m feeling,” she describes. “I’ll set off to explore that particular mood or set of ideas – then see where the journey takes me.”

Typically it means venturing to Sundial Studios, and an intuitive re-entry into her personal creative process. Once Hilary has started painting, as she describes, the act of alchemy is almost out of her hands.

“The painting knows what needs to be done,” she recounts. “It’s not really a conscious act. The ideas are always floating around in the wider consciousness – you just have to be the channel ready to pull them out of the ether.”

A new venue for creation

Regardless of the precise mechanics, one thing becomes clear when you walk into Hilary’s new space – the formula is working. Sundial Studios is her new homebase for intuition and creativity expansion, situated on the leafy fringes of downtown Singapore. Step inside the airy space, and instantly you see that for Hilary,  the ‘creative ether’ has been offering up an abundance of riches.

Inside the long roomy art space, one is struck by the thrill of recent invention. It’s a heady wave of colour, space, and light: paintings, collages and thoughts in rich abstract varieties across canvases large and small, the shelves and work spaces scattered with potential inspiration.

Next to one chair, Hilary’s self-penned and rough-sketched journals and workbooks are filled with ideas and works-in-progress. Elsewhere, magazines and books range from music and culture magazines like The Face or National Geographic, through to chosen works of much-loved artists, thinkers and agitators.

Hilary is herself at once artist, thinker and agitator. Conversations with her are often cinematic, and hers is a mind that responds to the frequencies of its subject matter. If this were a car journey, lane changes would be par for the course. After all, going with where our minds lead us, is one key to the intuitive journey. 

Being who we are

For any client, student or visitor to Sundial Studios, the setting you step into exudes the sense of creative possibility and the promise of a journey yet taken. Creativity and self-exploration were themes in Hilary’s early life: born in Scotland as one of two siblings within a loving yet conventional family, she spent her early adult years exploring the world – living in Paris, London, New York and Hong Kong. Over the past decade, her busy career and family world have centred her in Singapore.

Recently, at a time in life when many confront life’s bigger questions, Hilary’s search for centredness shifted from geographic movement, to a deeper look inwards. It was a process that has over time created a trove of creative treasure – and the idea for a shared experience.

Amidst the distant sound of birdcall outside, the sharp midday light reflects off the bright canvases surrounding us, each offering up its own unique story. At a glance, many seem to connect with wider themes around nature and balance, and what happens en masse when our ‘natural balance’ slips.

Addressing issues like these has long been front of mind for Hilary. For 30 years, her corporate work as a strategist centred on solving problems for large organisations, including numerous FTSE500 companies. Yet in time, she began to realise that if she wasn’t careful, her work helping to grow brands and businesses, also risked making her sick.

As someone highly-sensitised to her surroundings and their energy, Hilary made a deliberate choice for the long-term benefit of both herself and her family. The first big step involved recalibrating her work environment, shifting her focus to finding solutions that could solve big human questions. One of these was the idea that people and business have become disconnected from our true nature. And if we could somehow become more aware, we would see our inextricable connection to all of nature around us.

Fast forward down her new path, and having intensively explored and refined her own personal creative process, gaining several new skill-sets in the process, Hilary’s creative output was extensive. In 2023, she successfully debuted her first art exhibition. Soon after, began the planning and creation of a space where those with a strategic or creative problem of their own could venture. A place to reflect, solve and explore your full potential. The first steps towards Sundial Studios had begun.

Welcome to the real you

As we delve into her artwork, Hilary explains how reconnecting with, then following her own creative intuition has been a personal game-changer in her life. Thanks to her work and a host of reading and discovery, she has come to realise that much of her own unease was part of a wider sense of disconnection that many of us were feeling. Whether intentionally or not, she learned, too many companies or corporate settings were cutting us off from making sound, ‘whole-brained decisions’. And she theorised, if left unchecked, the results of this could be dire.

Researching an array of theory from social psychology to environmental stewardship, Hilary became convinced that many of our societal friction spots today serve to illustrate what happens when people get ‘boxed-in’ to roles or personas they didn’t consciously sign up for – a collective act of being forced into predetermined lifestyles based on cultural and societal conditioning.

Too often as a result, the further we as groups and individuals become from ourselves, the more we lose our sense of purpose and shared connection. In time, our groups and the individuals within them, become stressed and sick. Symptoms big and small include a greater range of ailments, poor mental health and wellbeing, family friction and workplace toxicity, through to poor stewardship of our wider environment.

“Sundial Studios is about being who we are,” she asserts. “If everyone can be more themselves than they are today, we’ll soon be getting closer to where we need to be, and much quicker.”

Being who she is, has for Hilary meant creating a space within which she can better activate the multiple dimensions of her own whole self – the left-brained business strategist and thinker, the right-brained artist and the whole-brained problem solver  – within an environment of calmness, peace and positive energy.

As she herself has healed over time, the positive results of this recentring process for both Hilary and her family have boosted her determination to share this new methodology with others. The result is a range of human-centric small-group workshops and bigger-picture innovation and brand building, which she collectively refers to as ‘Ideas for Evolution’.

A space to solve problems

Each session held within the studio setting is tailored to the needs of her customers, following road-tested methodology taken from her own growth path, and from transformational work with businesses and leaders. “I really believe that inherently, we are whole human-beings when we’re born. And we’re happier when we can return to that place.” Getting back to this place is in essence about creating a series of solutions which help provide participants a gateway to tapping into their own intuition, and expanding their creative and critical-thinking process.

“It’s a combination of play, explore and discern,” she describes, comparing the reconnection process to a natural way of life – or what scientist and philosopher David Bohm describes as an “unfolding and enfolding”.  While the journey is of course different for everyone, Hilary says that with time, intuitive expansion and creative exploration have helped her slow her busy mind – entering a realm of less short-term thinking and an acceptance of consequence as a way of life.

“It’s almost as if you’re opening up your right hemisphere, then trying to keep it open – not being cut off too soon by fear, over-thinking or our self-limiting beliefs,” she notes.

Soundtrack to create

At Sundial Studios, each creative expansion class helps to assist those seeking to open up their mind, by connecting with and amplifying their uniqueness. Hilary says the process can help people release and review their ingrained stories and limitations: and in time, lead them to experiment with new ideas and techniques.

Thankfully, the process need not be a silent one: “Music and sound can really help me get into this state,” Hilary describes. If you ask Spotify, this could mean gentle Solfeggio frequencies, or the epic tales of Australian balladeer and innovator, Nick Cave. On other occasions, it will mean punk rock, nature sounds or “anything by Philip Glass”.

Whatever the soundtrack, over time, the method has helped expand her intuition, imagination and creativity. As she describes, returning to and relearning our own personal intuitive process, can help us all to integrate what many might describe as our ‘work self’ with our ‘creative self’. In time, this fusion allows us to address our most important problems with a ‘whole-self’ approach.

Hilary says her people-centred workshops and small-group classes have a host of real-life benefits: “Accessing and refining the creative process can help you reduce stress, lower anxiety, and address feelings of being ‘othered’,” she describes. “It makes you feel you have a place to belong.”

“As a leader, it can help you access the greater part of your mind, so that you can start making bigger decisions – and feel more confident about them,” she shares. “It helps give you courage for that.”

“Or for corporate workshops, it’s a great way to ensure you’re accessing inspiration from outside yourself, in a way that doesn’t try to ‘close the lid’ too quickly on any potential solution you might encounter.”

Self-managed journey

While at times confronting, for those who embrace it, introducing an artistic lens to life can help us to become healthier and happier people: “As human beings, we all have so much creative expression inside of ourselves, and it’s trapped,” she describes. “The ability to let that through, in any medium that you might be drawn to, helps you get back in touch with yourself.”

As a necessary caution for any self-driven process, she cautions against expecting immediate ‘results’ or chastising oneself for not at first ‘getting it’. Instead she urges, the most important part of individuation is just to start out curious, and remain open-minded.

“A lot of the ideas come later,” she recounts of her own discoveries. “Whether you meditate, or just lie back and let something wash over you, the whole idea is to allow that stillness,” she says. Then often, just by switching it off from timelines and to-do lists, our brain in turn rewards us: “If you trust the process, when you go home and have a shower or go for a run, your answer often pops out at you.”

The life you want

As to her personal journey, Hilary believes the deeper result of harnessing the power of the process, has been gaining a richer awareness of her personal powers. “We are the universe,” she says. “And I have the power within myself to create the life I want. And the only thing holding me back from doing that, is me,” she asserts.

“We all have freedom to make choices: I made the choice to step away and explore that.”

The key for Sundial sessions to work, she stresses, is to manage classes such that each person’s journey can unfold, unfettered by others. “We’ve all got different problems to solve: and there’s no forcing anyone to share,” she adds. “Pigeonholing ourselves just gets us back into the wrong patterns.”

As a space for problem-solving, Hilary is determined that her job is to not define or limit what that process means for others. “That’s why it’s about ideas for evolution. As human beings, if we want to build a better world, we’re not yet as evolved as we could be” she notes. 

“That’s the macro problem. The micro problem was that I needed to do it for myself first – to prove it works.” She smiles. “So I’m kind of my own experiment.”

ENDS

Winner 2019 Roffey Park competition Asia Empathy: Game changing the Asian workplace

Winner of Roffey Park Institute’s Val Hammond Research competition 2019 (Asia)

Read the full published paper here

Executive Summary

We are living in the age of the Anthropocene - an age where human decisions and activity have shaped our environment to the point of potentially no return.

Alarming signals of climate change, environmental and resource pressures, technological change and influence -  in confluence with global political change  and major socio demographic shifts -  will continue to have unprecedented and uncertain ramifications on how humans will be living and working, into the next decade and beyond.  

Across Asia, the ‘world’s most disaster-prone region’ (CNN, 2019),  people  are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of such uncertainty, given our heterogeneous geographies and cultures, inequalities,  rapidly shifting commercial landscape, and mass labour and migration patterns.

 Yet we are also in a uniquely powerful place to more proactively and positively shape the change, given our size, our dynamism and advantaged growth.

This paper argues the momentum for influence and opportunity for changing the game lies as much with the private sector as it does with government. We need CEOs, leaders, businesses and other organisations to collaborate, to act as a catalyst for the  transformation of our incumbent, outdated approaches toward humanity’s problem solving.  To universally adopt accountability for solving the challenges of people and of our planet, and to institutionalise this as a valid strategy for business wellness. To think bigger; to ground strategically in a useful purpose;  to recognise the impact on all  stakeholders of the multiple decisions made every day, for the long term as well as for tomorrow. 

To get there, we most urgently must upgrade our understanding of the needs, tensions and values of the people,and communities that business serves, and also those of the workforce that supports business success.  We need to ultimately build new, more enlightened paths to create new value and mobilise regenerative growth, if we are to survive, never mind to truly shape the change we need. We must champion  purposeful brand building which consciously considers the wide ranging impact of our decisions, inside of the organization as well as out.

As technology also continues to transform the way we work and live, we too - as practitioners, decision makers and human beings - have a clear and pressing mandate to reflect more closely on our own human values and behaviours. With sweeping shifts made even bolder by AI and automation,  we now have an opportunity to nurture all of our human advantages - our reasoning, our creativity, our intuition, our wisdom and our experience - and most critically our empathy.   Above all, we must proactively nurture and reframe  “soft skills” as “critical skills”, if we are to work productively as a complement to machines, rather than to continue to emulate them by divorcing ourselves from our uniquely human strengths.

Finally, we should dismiss employee wellbeing at our peril. The evidence is clear; businesses will no longer be able to operate without an overhaul of workplace practices; practices that have been so detrimental to the health and wellbeing of the very people business relies on to succeed.  A new generation of customers is here to hold them to account.

Ultimately though, we must all be accountable if we are to survive what the future brings;if we are to lead itwith purpose, pace and scale. Are we to bemasters of our human destiny? Or will we look back in dismay on what we have createdand realise we becamearchitects of our own demise? Each of us gets to decide, and the time to choose is now.