HOW: Isn't one of the greatest creative challenges trying to teach people to be creative?

Monahan: I don't truly believe you can teach it, because everyone is born with creativity. Kids prove that every day. My job, rather than to teach, is to help people access the freedom to imagine that they had when they were kids.

The reason kids imaging so much is because they don't know much. We're trained as adults to know, and when you know, you're not imagining. Picasso said it took him 70 years to have the mind of a child. In a short amount of time, I try to give people the tools, techniques and insights that will help them access their imaginations.

HOW: Is there any difference in the way men and women approach their own creativity and use it?

Monahan: Yes, and there's an advantage to either programming. Women are much more open to their intuition than men. Men, whether they're right or not, act like they are. So even though women might be more open and childlike in trusting intuition, they aren't usually as aggressive as men in pulling the trigger.

HOW: How do you address this in your training?

Monahan: Two ways. One, I try to give the whole group strong tools so that those who need to have more conviction will get it. And I also try to give the whole group tools on how to be more open-minded and to trust their intuition.

When we do applied creativity exercises in our seminars, we try to have mixed teams of men and women. Men can stifle a group because they're often too self-conscious about being wrong and they're not as prolific in idea generation; women are usually prolific in coming up with ideas, but are they going to pull the trigger? So the mixed group works best.

Still, I don't flag this as a male or female message. I put it all out there and think of it this way: We're staining some floors at home and when you do the second coat, the spots that didn't get covered well on the first coat soak in more. I'd l like to think that when you're talking to a large group, the right people soak in the right information.