Stepping Off Now: Lessons in the Art and Craft of Creativity

By the time you're in burnout, it's too late to manage it. You're in recovery mode. And it's a lot harder to recover from burnout than to manage it before it gets bad. In this episode I talk about th…

Have you ever thought you wanted something, but it didn't turn out as great as you expected? Or thought something would make you happy but it doesn't? It's confusing when we get what we think we want…

In this first episode of a two-part series, I talk about why HSPs struggle so much with creative rejection through the lens of my recent experience of entering the PitchWars competition (see E41 abou…

Most of us see creativity as something we do when we have the time for it. After all the things we have to do are done, then we'll have the space to really focus on our creative practice. But this pe…

Carlos Saba is a co-founder (along with Laurence McCahill) of the Happy Startup School, an online community for people looking to do heart-centered business in creative ways. Like myself, he is a PhD…

Being irrational is bad, right? Not always. Sometimes our culture labels something as irrational because it challenges cultural control. If you find that all the things you thought would make you hap…

So many people don't believe in their own creative capacities. They think that they're not one of the "really" creative ones. But everyone is creative, and everyone has the capacity to be highly crea…

That's right, I actually love networking now, and that's saying something for a shy, sensitive introvert with social anxiety! In this episode I give you all the tips I've learned over the past 1.5 ye…

I don't think I've ever been this excited about a Stepping Off Now episode! I share all about my writing journey, including my previous failures to get published (ouch), how deciding not to seek publ…

We cover so much in this interview that I hardly know how to introduce it! We talk about Samara's journey to Ministry as a non-theist Unitarian, how to be an individual in community, her struggles wi…

I figured it was time for an update on my intentional practice of wasting time! I first talked about this in episode 3, and since then anti-productivity practices like wasting time have become even m…

I have always felt guilty about my strong craving for solitude. Is something wrong with me? Am I a weirdo? Does desiring so much solitude mean I don't deserve to have intimate relationships? The answ…

You know that feeling of inertia we all get sometimes, when doing something, anything, to improve our lives just seems so hard? Maybe you're dealing with exhaustion and burnout, maybe it's fear that'…

In this episode I interview Chrissa Trudelle, a fellow INFP, and we talk all things personality typology! Both being INFPs, we have many points of resonance, but as I'm an Enneagram 4 and she's a 9, …

So this was supposed to be an episode on identifying what motivates us and using that to guide us through periods of doubt, but it turned into a bit of a manifesto on how I want to do business as a c…

I've struggled with depression since childhood, and in this episode I tell you all about it. You'll hear about the two different kinds of depression I have, what they feel like when they hit, and how…

During my decades as creative writer, my greatest struggle has been consistency of habit. I always had to force myself to sit down and write on a daily basis. I started and abandoned writing projects…

In this episode I talk to Dr. Ann Wainscott, a politics professor I met in grad school. Ann is one of the most naturally creative and intuitive people I know, and it's evident in how she lives her li…