Create Magic At Work®

Today’s Edgewalker card explores how self-awareness deepens when we become intentional about where we seek inspiration and guidance. By tuning into something beyond ourselves, we create space to better understand our thoughts, values, and the way we move through the world.
Start your own journey of reflection, creativity, and intentional growth with the Create Magic at Work Journal or bring the wisdom of the Edgewalker mindset into your daily life with your own copy of the Edgewalker Card Deck. You can find both at https://magicthreadmedia.com/experience

What if the life you keep working toward is already asking to be noticed?
For high achievers, happiness can become conditional. The next promotion. The next revenue goal. The end of the chaotic month. Peace is always waiting somewhere beyond the next finish line, while the finish line keeps moving.
Amy Lynn Durham and Michele Phillips explore the emotional cost of conditional happiness, high achiever burnout, and a culture that has normalized running on adrenaline instead of alignment. Michele does not ask ambitious people to stop wanting more. She asks a more uncomfortable question: can you still feel satisfaction with where you are while remaining open to what comes next?
Their conversation moves through happiness habits, personal energy, comparison, daily rituals, and the small resets that help leaders return to center when pressure takes over. It also examines the difference between appearing happy and being honest with yourself about what you actually feel.
Inner peace is not a permanent destination. Neither is happiness. Both require a relationship with attention, values, and the stories we repeatedly tell ourselves.
Maybe the goal is not to stop achieving. Maybe it is to stop requiring the next achievement to prove that this life is finally enough.
Moments That Create Momentum:
When Happiness Keeps Moving With the Finish Line – Explore how tying fulfillment to the next achievement can leave high performers constantly striving without ever fully arriving.
Running on Adrenaline Instead of Alignment – Discover why urgency and pressure can feel productive while quietly disconnecting leaders from their body, values, and internal sense of direction.
The Difference Between Looking Fine and Feeling Aligned – Understand why performing happiness for others is different from ignoring your own emotions and disconnecting from what is actually happening inside.
A Full Life Is Not a Full Calendar – See how constant activity can become proof of success, while slowing down reveals whether those experiences actually reflect what matters to you.
The Story You Repeat Becomes the Outcome You Expect – Hear how changing the language you use about yourself can shift attention from old limitations toward more conscious possibilities.

About the Guest:
Michele Phillips is a celebrated leadership coach, keynote speaker, and author of two books, the award-winning Happiness is a Habit - Simple Daily Rituals that Increase Energy, Improve Wellbeing and Add Joy to Every Day, and her brand new book, Energize Your Happiness - Tap into Your Personal Energy and Shape Your Destiny. This transformative new book blends neuroscience, behavioral psychology, and spiritual wisdom to help people elevate their energy and shape their destiny.
With more than 25 years of experience working with Fortune 500 companies, Michele has inspired thousands to create motivating beliefs, powerful habits, and lives filled with purpose.
She is the founder of Key Performance, a sought-after consultant known for her “Write Your Outcome” methodology, and host of the podcast by the same name. Michele has a Master's degree from Fordham University in Organizational Development, and is a certified practitioner of Positive Psychology and emotional intelligence.
She wrote Energize Your Happiness to help people build the energy for change.
She hosts Write Your Outcome podcast to help people raise their consciousness.
She works with organizations to create more conscious leaders and individual contributors.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michele-phillips-9409707
https://www.instagram.com
https://www.facebook.com/Happinessisahabitaway
Mentioned in this episode:
This show was brought to you in part by the Magic Thread Media Network. To learn more visit: https://magicthreadmedia.com/

Today’s reflection explores how financial success can grow from intentional decisions, thoughtful leadership, and clearly defined goals. By considering where we direct our support and attention, we create space for greater confidence and possibility around our finances.
Start your own journey of reflection, creativity, and intentional growth with the Create Magic at Work Journal or bring the wisdom of the Edgewalker mindset into your daily life with your own copy of the Edgewalker Card Deck. You can find both at https://magicthreadmedia.com/experience

What happens when taking care of someone else slowly requires you to disappear from your own life?
Family caregiving rarely arrives according to plan. A diagnosis changes. A parent declines. A spouse becomes dependent. Roles reverse, schedules collapse, and someone quietly becomes responsible for another human being twenty-four hours a day.
Amy and Monica Vest Wheeler explore the realities behind caregiver burnout, unpaid caregiving responsibilities, and the pressure to keep performing at work while privately carrying grief, medical decisions, and exhaustion. For many working caregivers, the strain is not only emotional. It can affect income, career stability, health, and the ability to remain in the workforce at all.
Monica challenges the assumption that families should simply absorb this responsibility without consequence. The conversation turns toward workplace support for caregivers, the limitations of rigid bereavement and leave policies, and why flexible work for caregivers can be an act of both humanity and good leadership.
Support can also begin closer to home. Another family member learns the care routine. Someone finally says what is really happening. A caregiver stops answering “fine” and allows another person to help carry the weight.
Caregiving can be an expression of extraordinary love. But love does not make a person limitless. Sustainable care requires us to protect the life of the person receiving care without sacrificing the life of the person providing it.
Moments That Create Momentum:
When the Caregiver Becomes Invisible – Explore how responsibility for another person can consume so much emotional and physical energy that the caregiver’s own needs quietly disappear.
The Workplace Mask Caregivers Learn to Wear – Understand why employees may appear composed and productive while privately managing grief, medical crises, and round-the-clock caregiving responsibilities.
Why Flexibility Is More Than an Employee Perk – Discover how small adjustments to schedules or work location can help organizations retain experienced employees instead of losing them to caregiving demands.
The Cost of Keeping Caregiving a Family Secret – See how shame, privacy, and poor communication can leave one person carrying responsibilities that could be shared across family, friends, and community.
Your Life Is Just as Worthy as the Person You’re Caring For – Hear why caregiving cannot require complete self-erasure, and how protecting the caregiver may ultimately protect the person receiving care too.

About the Guest:
Monica Vest Wheeler speaks with heart, humor, and hard-earned wisdom, helping caregivers, families, and communities navigate some of life’s most difficult moments. Her work is rooted in lived experience, including hundreds of interviews, volunteer work at more than 180 stroke and brain injury camps nationwide, facilitating hundreds of support and discussion groups, personal caregiving journeys, and her own openness about mental health. She has written more than a dozen books on Peoria, Illinois, history, along with five books exploring health, grief, and the emotional realities families face during catastrophic life events.
As a writer and presenter, Monica is unafraid to address the questions many people avoid. She brings truth, warmth, humor, and practical clarity to conversations about caregiving, grief, communication, and emotional survival. Her work gives caregivers permission to ask for help without shame, encourages patients and survivors to express what they are experiencing, and reinforces one of the lessons she has seen repeatedly: families who communicate are more likely to stay connected through crisis rather than fall apart.
https://www.monicavestwheeler.com
https://www.facebook.com/monicavestwheeler
https://www.linkedin.com/in/monicavestwheeler/
About Amy:
Amy Lynn Durham, known by her clients as the Corporate Mystic, is the founder of the Executive Coaching Firm, Create Magic At Work®, where they help leaders build workplaces rooted in creativity, collaboration, and fulfillment. A former corporate executive turned Executive Coach, Amy blends practical leadership strategies with spiritual intelligence to unlock human potential at work.
She’s a certified Executive Coach through UC Berkeley & the International Coaching Federation (ICF) In addition, Amy holds coaching certifications in Spiritual Intelligence (SQ21), the Edgewalker Profile, and the Archetypes of Change . In addition to being the host of the Create Magic At Work® podcast, Amy is the author of Create Magic At Work®, Creating Career Magic: A Daily Prompt Journal and the founder of Magic Thread Media™. Through her work, she inspires intentional leadership for thriving workplaces and lives where “magic” becomes reality.

Connect with Amy:
https://createmagicatwork.net/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/create-magic-at-work
https://www.facebook.com/112951637095427
https://www.instagram.com/createmagicatwork
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnEm4h3fUgaq8qgvZpz6dGg

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Mentioned in this episode:
This show was brought to you in part by the Magic Thread Media Network. To learn more visit: https://magicthreadmedia.com/

What if courage in creativity has nothing to do with feeling brave and everything to do with being willing to be unmistakably yourself?
In this latest episode of The Spark Sessions: Resourcing for Creativity, Rachel begins with a song she did not want to write. After forcing herself through three lifeless love songs, she finally surrendered to the one that felt too personal, too strange, and too exposing. It became the work that carried the most truth.
That experience opens a deeper exploration of creative courage, one of the five essential resources for creativity. Rachel challenges the belief that we need confidence before we create, reframing courage as the fortitude to make what is ours even when self-doubt is loud. She offers a surprising way to relate to the inner critic, not as proof that the work is wrong, but as a possible sign that something meaningful is at stake. From there, perfectionism comes into focus as another subtle force that can make creativity smaller, safer, and less alive.
With reflections on identity, risk, mistakes, and creative relationships, this episode asks a more intimate question: what becomes possible when we stop trying to make the right thing and give ourselves permission to make the thing that is truly ours?
Ready to discover your unique creative landscape?
Download the Muzi app at http://itunes.apple.com/app/id6739667782 to take the Creativity Assessment, and uncover your Spark profile. Then email your Spark to Rachel at rachel@rachelefron.com for a chance at a Spark Reading, where Rachel will offer personalized insight into what your creativity most needs from you right now.
Sparks of Insight:
Creative courage is not confidence. It is the willingness to make what is yours, even when you feel uncertain, exposed, or afraid.
The song Rachel did not want to write, and what finally surrendering to it revealed about the work that carries real creative urgency.
Your inner critic may become loudest when the work actually matters. A different way to understand the voice that tells you to pull back.
Perfection can quietly eclipse artistry. When avoiding mistakes becomes the goal, creativity begins to lose its risk, play, and aliveness.
A creative courage practice designed to reconnect you with what is uniquely yours to make, including the quirks, experiences, and perspectives only you can bring.

About Rachel:
Rachel Efron is an Oakland-based songwriter, producer, and creativity coach. She's released four full-length albums of original songs, plus written for such legends as Narada Michael Walden and Journey. Rachel is a premier songwriting coach for songwriters across the world, and has over fifteen years experience helping artists, leaders, and teams find their voice.
In 2022, Rachel turned her methods into a comprehensive framework and groundbreaking app, Muzi, to help everyone —artists and non-artists alike—access greater creativity in their lives.
email: rachel@rachelefron.com
website: https://www.rachelefron.com/creativity-coach-1
Download the Muzi app at http://itunes.apple.com/app/id6739667782
Thanks for listening!
Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page.
Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!
Subscribe to the podcast
If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can follow the podcast on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.
Leave us an Apple Podcasts review
Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you are enjoying the show, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts.
Mentioned in this episode:
This show was brought to you in part by the Magic Thread Media Network. To learn more visit: https://magicthreadmedia.com/