Create Magic At Work®

What happens when work rooted in service slowly disconnects you from the very values that called you to it?

For leaders working inside humanitarian crises, nonprofits, healthcare, education, business, and other demanding systems, exhaustion can become more than physical. Margie Buchanan-Smith calls it “soul weary,” the feeling of dragging yourself from one demand to the next while losing contact with purpose.

Amy, Margie, and Dr. Margaret Benefiel, explore what it takes to stay human when need is immense, resources are shrinking, and systems increasingly reward compliance, metrics, and upward accountability. Margie brings the reality of decades in humanitarian leadership. Margaret brings a spiritual lens to organizational life, asking how leaders can draw on inner resources when systemic dysfunction cannot simply be worked around.

Replenishment emerges not as escape from responsibility, but as part of how responsibility is sustained. So do values alignment, contemplative practice, community, and the willingness to take thoughtful risks.

The work does not become less urgent when a leader pauses. Sometimes the pause restores the ability to see clearly. A breath, five quiet minutes, or an honest question about whose rules we are following can reconnect leadership with the people, purpose, and inner knowing that made the work matter in the first place.

Moments That Create Momentum:

1. When Compliance Pulls Leaders Away From Purpose – Explore how an intense focus on reporting, accountability, and organizational requirements can disconnect leaders from the people they serve and the values that brought them to the work.
2. What It Means to Become Soul Weary – Understand how sustained pressure in purpose-driven work can slowly deplete a leader’s inner resources, and why burnout can become a signal that something deeper needs attention.
3. Leading From the Inside Out – Discover why creating even a few minutes of space for reflection can help leaders reconnect with their values, balance soul and ego, and respond from a more grounded place.
4. When Success Measures Lose the Human Being – See how an overreliance on metrics, bureaucracy, and traditional definitions of success can obscure the well-being of both leaders and the people their organizations exist to serve.
5. The Difference Between Thoughtful Risk and Recklessness – Hear why trying to eliminate uncertainty can keep leaders trapped in old ways of working, while carefully judged risks create space for new possibilities to emerge.

Learn about The Soul of Leadership experience here: https://www.executivesoul.com/soulofleadership.html

About the Guests:

Margaret Benefiel, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Executive Soul, directs the Soul of Leadership program, which has been offered on four continents over the past 14 years. Over 3,000 executives, managers, and other leaders have participated in her seminars and programs. She has served as Chair of the Academy of Management's Management, Spirituality, and Religion Group, and is currently Vice President of the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality. She served as Executive Director of the Shalem Institute for over 10 years, has served as Co-chair of the Christian Spirituality Program Unit of the American Academy of Religion, and has held various leadership roles in Spiritual Directors International. Author of Soul at Work, The Soul of a Leader, and Crisis Leadership, and co-editor of The Soul of Supervision, The Soul of Higher Education, Soul Food, and Hidden in Plain Sight, Dr. Benefiel has also written for The Leadership Quarterly, Management Communication Quarterly, Managerial Finance, Journal of Organizational Change Management, Organization, Personal Excellence, Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, America, Presence, The Way, Studies in Spirituality, Radical Grace, and Faith at Work. She lives with her husband in Greenbelt, MD. and enjoys hiking, cycling, reading novels, and scuba diving in her free time.

https://www.facebook.com/people/Executive-Soul/100057597423603/#

https://x.com/executivesoul

https://executivesoulblog.wordpress.com/

https://www.pinterest.com/executivesoul/

Margie Buchanan-Smith has been working in a range of different leadership roles in the humanitarian aid sector for over 30 years, with a current focus on the crisis in Sudan. She has conducted and published research on models of excellence in value-driven humanitarian leadership across the globe. She co-facilitates the Soul of Leadership programme in the UK with Margaret Benefiel. Margie works as an independent consultant, facilitator and coach. As a well-published policy researcher, she is a Senior Research Associate with ODI Global, a Visiting Fellow at the Feinstein Center of Tufts University, and a Fellow of the Rift Valley Institute.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/margie-buchanan-smith-2905a01/

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

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!

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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.

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Today’s Edgewalker card explores how playfulness is more than a moment of escape. It is a way of approaching life with curiosity, creativity, and perspective, allowing lightness to open possibilities that seriousness alone often cannot.

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

Why do successful men still struggle with burnout, anger, disconnection, and feeling unfulfilled?

Amy sits down with men’s high performance coach Pat Smith to explore why professional achievement, physical fitness, and financial success do not necessarily create emotional well-being. Pat shares why many business problems are actually personal patterns showing up at work, and how perfectionism, grief, shame, pressure, and survival strategies can quietly shape the way men lead.

Together they explore emotional intelligence for men, the shift from positional power to relational leadership, and why emotional awareness can become a form of strength rather than weakness. The conversation moves through high performance without burnout, emotional regulation at work, psychological safety, masculine identity, accountability, vulnerability, and the importance of creating spaces where men can speak honestly without blame or shame.

By the end, what emerges is a broader definition of strength. Sustainable success is not about having everything under control. It is about developing the self-awareness, emotional ownership, and relational capacity to lead yourself and others with greater trust, connection, and resilience.

Moments That Create Momentum:

1. When Business Problems Are Really Personal Problems – Explore how perfectionism, performance anxiety, and unresolved experiences can follow leaders into the workplace disguised as professional challenges.

2. The Shift From Positional Power to Relational Leadership – Discover why getting results through hierarchy and authority can create disconnection, while relationships, trust, and emotional intelligence strengthen leadership.

3. The Leadership Mask That Becomes Exhausting to Wear – Understand why trying to appear as though you have everything together can drain leaders and keep their teams from experiencing who they really are.

4. What Emotional Strength Actually Looks Like – Hear why accessing sadness, fear, frustration, and other emotions is not weakness, and how learning to move through them can build resilience.

5. Taking Back the Reins of Your Emotional Life – See how changing language from blame to ownership can help leaders stop giving other people and circumstances control over how they think, feel, and respond.

About the Guest:

Pat Smith is a men’s high performance coach who helps men become wildly successful professionally without losing themselves in the process. Over the past four years, he’s coached Fortune 500 executives, pro athletes, celebrity actors, business owners, top sales professionals, and men in many other leadership roles. His work is shaped by his own background in corporate sales with Fortune 1000 companies, along with his continued education under Dr. Joe Dispenza during his time as a corporate trainer for NeuroChangeSolutions.

IG - https://www.instagram.com/patsmithwellness/

LI - https://www.linkedin.com/in/patsmithwellness/

Skool - https://www.skool.com/success-squad/about

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

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.

Today’s reflection explores how productivity is about more than accomplishing tasks. When we celebrate the achievements of others and prioritize work that brings us energy and purpose, productivity becomes a source of fulfillment rather than obligation.

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

Why do high achievers still feel unfulfilled after reaching their goals?

Amy sits down with executive coach and founder of Personal Energy First, Chelsea Szabo, to explore why professional success does not always create the fulfillment people expect. Chelsea explains how external expectations, learned definitions of success, and constant achievement can disconnect people from the internal signals that reveal what genuinely feels aligned.

Together they unpack how body awareness can help you recognize a true yes or no, why fear can sometimes be mistaken for intuition, and how small daily decisions can rebuild trust in yourself. The conversation moves through personal energy, burnout, workplace pressure, higher-self leadership, and the difference between pursuing a goal because it is meaningful and pursuing it because you have been conditioned to believe it should matter.

By the end, what emerges is a grounded reminder: when success feels empty, the answer may not be another goal. It may be learning how to recognize what your body, energy, and inner wisdom have been telling you all along.

Moments That Create Momentum:

1. The Success That Leaves You Feeling Empty – Explore why external achievement can still leave you disconnected when it isn't aligned with what truly matters to you.

2. Learning the Language of Your Body – Discover how recognizing your body's natural "yes" and "no" signals can lead to more confident, aligned decisions.

3. When Fear Sounds Like Wisdom – Understand how to distinguish protective patterns from the deeper guidance that supports personal growth.

4. Alignment Happens One Decision at a Time – See why meaningful change often begins with the smallest choices to honor your needs throughout the day.

5. The Most Inspiring Thing You Can Do Is Be Yourself – Hear why authentic presence often creates a greater impact than striving to impress or perform.

About the Guest:

Chelsea Szabo is an executive coach, speaker, and founder of Personal Energy First. Drawing on more than 15 years of corporate coaching and training experience, she helps high achievers and leaders manage stress, reconnect with their personal energy, and lead with greater clarity, purpose, and resilience. Chelsea is also a certified Energy Leadership Index™ master practitioner, Reiki Master, ThetaHealing® practitioner, and breathwork guide.

https://www.personalenergyfirst.com/

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

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.

Creative block feels eminently real: it feels like some magical channel closes and our creative ideas are nowhere to be found. But creative block is nothing more than a very tempting illusion. Really creativity is our natural state. When we aren’t creating, it means only that our creativity needs something from us.

In this installment of The Spark Sessions: Resourcing for Creativity, creativity coach Rachel Efron explores what happened when the most creatively alive season of her life was interrupted by a devastating fire in her home. For the first time in her life, she felt creativity blocked. But rather than surrender she tried using her own methods on herself. She asked herself what she asks whenever someone comes to her blocked: what is the missing resource for creativity to come back online? In her case, it was rest. And once she rested, she started creating again.

Through her own story, a client’s struggle with self-doubt, and an abridged creativity assessment, Rachel invites listeners to consider what their creativity may be asking of them now. At its heart, this episode reframes creative block not as an ending, but as a sign: that our creativity needs something from us.

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 [email protected] 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 block is a tempting illusion. The feeling of creative block means only that your creativity needs something from you.
• What Rachel’s experience after the fire reveals about the creative work involved in rebuilding a life.
• The five resources necessary for creativity , and how depletion in even one can quietly interrupt creative flow.
• Rest is more than recovery. Rest is how we clear space in our minds and hearts for new creative ideas.
• An abridged creativity assessment to help you recognize what is helping and hindering your creative process.

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: [email protected]

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.

Today’s Edgewalker card explores how self-awareness deepens when we intentionally create space to listen beyond our own thoughts. Reflection becomes more than looking inward. It becomes an invitation to receive guidance, ask meaningful questions, and trust the wisdom that quietly emerges.

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

Today’s reflection explores how growth begins by recognizing the strengths that already exist within us. When we value our unique gifts and use them with confidence, we create opportunities that expand both our careers and our sense of purpose.

Bring the wisdom of the Edgewalker mindset into your daily life with your own copy of the Edgewalker Card Deck: https://createmagicatwork.net/shop/ols/products/the-edgewalker-card-deck

Start your own journey of reflection, creativity, and intentional growth with the Create Magic at Work Journal: https://a.co/d/06N0Hypc

What happens when the system designed to care for you requires you to become your own advocate, negotiator, researcher, and risk manager?

For millions of people, illness is no longer only a physical crisis. It is a financial and emotional one, intensified by opaque prices, delayed treatment, insurance denials, and the quiet fear that help may never arrive.

Amy and Adam Cunningham explore the human cost of a healthcare system that often leaves patients and families navigating alone. Adam’s work with Sylk Health began with a friend’s suffering and grew into a larger question: what changes when people can see real prices, compare international options, and act before waiting becomes deterioration?

Their conversation reaches beyond medical tourism or employee benefits. It asks what responsibility looks like when institutions become difficult to trust. For individuals, that may mean seeking a patient advocate or looking beyond familiar systems. For employers, it may mean treating affordable care as a human obligation rather than an expense to absorb without question.

Sometimes agency does not arrive as confidence. It begins with the quiet recognition that waiting is also a choice. When people can see their options clearly, they are no longer only reacting to a system. They are participating in the future of their own care.

Moments That Create Momentum:

1. The “You’re on Your Own” Threshold: Why accepting that the system may not rescue you can be the first step toward reclaiming control of your care.
2. The Navigation Trap: How years spent waiting, appealing, and decoding healthcare bureaucracy can quietly become part of the harm itself.
3. The Price Blindness Machine: Why medical costs remain hidden until after treatment, and how that secrecy keeps patients powerless when they are most vulnerable.
4. The Credible Threat: How simply having a legitimate international healthcare option can force domestic providers to reconsider prices, even when no one gets on a plane.
5. The Employer Accountability Question: Why offering health insurance is not the same as protecting employees, and what responsible leadership demands when care becomes financially destructive.

About the Guest:

Adam Cunningham is the lead founder of Sylk Health, a company providing direct access to accredited international hospitals and freely publishing healthcare prices.

https://sylkhealth.com/

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

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.

Today’s Edgewalker card explores how meaningful growth often begins with the willingness to trust what cannot yet be proven. Risk-taking is less about certainty than having the courage to follow your inner knowing, even when the path ahead has not been walked before.

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