Welcome, I’m Rhona.
I’ve spent over two decades teaching creative intelligence. This is the lived skill set of noticing patterns, generating options, and shaping reality through choice.
The purpose, life and work came out of breakdowns, hot mess mornings, snack-based avoidance strategies (bless you, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups), the scrolling, the meltdowns, and the kind of research binge only a former academic administrator and strategic planner could pull off. Add in strong coffee, a wall of sticky notes, 70 pounds lost, and my derpy corgi sidekick, Yogi—who couldn’t care less about mindset but absolutely insists on showing up for the good snacks and belly rubs—and I built a system that not only stabilized me, it grows with you when you rise.
I come from a line of women who knew how to cut through the noise with one glance and a single sentence. My mum could scorch you while smiling at the neighbors.
Me? I channeled that same fire into weaving together the real challenges women face and the science of how we grow and translating new knowledge into something familiar and usable. My superpower is helping people connect what they learn back to their actual lives.
My work, and current life, didn’t come from a whiteboard. It came from losing my husband to ALS, then my mom to cancer, and watching my entire identity implode in the aftermath. I left the home I’d built for over half my life and landed in Kansas City, where nobody knew me, what I had accomplished, or what I had survived.
Even the best mindset tricks and self-help books couldn’t stop the water from pouring into the sinking boat. (Trust me, my browser history would amaze you.) So I stopped looking for a fix.
The Creative Intelligence OS gives you the internal infrastructure, not just to weather life’s messiness, but to create life forward from it.
Action without creative intelligence is just reaction.
I don’t want a life built out of reactivity.
I want a life I get to shape.
THE OFFICAL BIORhona McBain works at the intersection of creativity and human cognition. Her work centers on creative intelligence, the operating system that allows people to become aware of creative energy, direct it through creative process, and use it deliberately in shaping who they are and what they create.
She is a keynote speaker and CEO of Create Forward. Through her talks and creation environments, Rhona focuses on how origination actually happens, how state of being becomes generative, and how what is created in the present becomes the foundation of what unfolds.
Rhona is the creator of the Originator Lab, a complete creation infrastructure that establishes an ecosystem for active building, supported origination, and generative self-evolution.
She spent over twenty years as a university professor, department chair, and museum director, and her mentees now lead within professional sports organizations, award-winning businesses, and global brands. Her work integrates creative intelligence, neuroaesthetics, and strategic leadership.
She is also an internationally exhibiting artist and lives in Kansas City with her corgi, Yogi.
Being human is messy, ridiculous, funny, sometimes beautiful
and always worth staying awake to create it.
Creativity is our most human way of thinking. You are amazingly creative. It is just rippling out into your life without your direction.
Creativity is the energy – curiosity, imagination, play.
The creative process is the framework that energy runs through.
Unconsciously, it can shrink us into cycles of fear and reactivity.
Consciously, it can expand us into limitless possibilities
The difference is our awareness…our creative intelligence.”
My work is about helping originators build that creative intelligence into an infrastructure they can trust.
