Sustaining Creativity Podcast

Creativity through the lens of a wonderist

"If you're feeling powerless you're not letting your creativity come alive."

Gyll Star is a NYC storyteller and creator who uses wonder, imagination, and curiosity to bring people together. Her creative journey took an unexpected turn while she was working as a superintendent in one of Manhattan's wealthiest neighborhoods. There, she created The Joyful Magic Garden—a whimsical space that invited people to stop, make wishes, play, and connect. The garden grew into something much bigger than she ever imagined, receiving hundreds of letters and wishes and being featured in magazines.

Today, Gyll continues exploring what happens when adults are given permission to reconnect with their imagination. Her work includes Sandbox Story 5, an interactive storytelling experience where five ordinary objects can lead anywhere.

Website:
www.justmyvibe.com

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Before you go: take our 5-question Creativity Archetype Quiz at https://sustainingcreativity.fillout.com/creativityarchetypequiz. It takes under a minute and reveals your dominant creative style, your superpowers, and the #1 bottleneck holding you back.

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Creativity through the lens of the co-founder of Outdoor Gear Coach and Author

"Creativity means different things in different phases in my life."

Mike Parsons is known for helping people understand the real story behind outdoor gear, mountain innovation and the human problems that push equipment forward. His perspective comes from more than five decades in the outdoor industry, including his work as a manufacturer behind Karrimor and later Original Mountain Marathon, where clothing, packs and equipment had to perform in conditions where failure mattered.

Mike’s view of innovation is practical rather than abstract. He sees breakthrough ideas beginning with the people at the leading edge: climbers, expedition teams, factory workers and problem-solvers trying to overcome something that stops them from going further, staying warmer, moving faster or making a process work. That lens shaped his manufacturing career and later informed a decade of part-time teaching on innovation at Lancaster University Management School, where he worked alongside an academic colleague and won recognition for innovative teaching.

• Website: https://www.outdoorgearcoach.co.uk/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-parsons-2736381/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theomm.mike/
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@OutdoorgearcoachCoUk
• X: https://x.com/omm_mike

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Before you go: take our 5-question Creativity Archetype Quiz at https://sustainingcreativity.fillout.com/creativityarchetypequiz. It takes under a minute and reveals your dominant creative style, your superpowers, and the #1 bottleneck holding you back.

Thanks for listening!

"Creativity is: To look at all the information you have and find a new and exciting way through."

• Ability Pathways Australia
• Jodie’s LinkedIn
• Jodie’s Instagram

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Before you go: take our 5-question Creativity Archetype Quiz at https://sustainingcreativity.fillout.com/creativityarchetypequiz. It takes under a minute and reveals your dominant creative style, your superpowers, and the #1 bottleneck holding you back.

Thanks for listening!

Creativity through the lens of an architect, writer and humanist

 "Creativity is: Coming up with something that no one has done before."

Mario Cartaya was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1951. Eight years later, the turbulent winds of political change swept over the land of his birth, leaving his family with little choice but to immigrate toward the United States in search of a new life lived in freedom. There, he realized his earliest Cuban childhood dreams of becoming an architect and started an enduring and highly acclaimed architectural firm in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. His life’s story and award-winning architectural designs were entered into the United States Congressional Record of the House of Representatives in 2019, forever enshrined into the US Library of Congress. An American flag was flown over the US Capitol to celebrate his American legacy in 2022. 

With the same dedication and love that made him an architectural success and iconic designer, Mario has now turned his attention to writing books. His debut,  Journey Back Into the Vault: In Search of my Faded Cuban Childhood Footprints, was recently released in new hardcover and paperback editions. The Spanish-language book, La Bóveda: En busca de mi niñez cubana was released in 2026. His fresh voice and humanist values will refresh one’s soul.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/authormariocartaya/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/authormariocartaya/
Author Website: https://mariocartaya.com/

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Before you go: take our 5-question Creativity Archetype Quiz at https://sustainingcreativity.fillout.com/creativityarchetypequiz. It takes under a minute and reveals your dominant creative style, your superpowers, and the #1 bottleneck holding you back.

Thanks for listening!

Creativity through the lens of a psychotherapist, author and speaker

"I don't think I can't be creative!"

Elke Scholz, MA, RP, REACE, is a registered Psychotherapist, an internationally
registered Expressive Art Consultant/Educator, and internationally certified EMDR
Therapist. She is the well-known author of 3 nd edition, Loving Your Life, containing over 40 creative exercises as an e-book and paperback. This book is internationally available, teen friendly and is translated in German. Elke has launched Anxiety Warrior Vol One and Vol Two, both with powerful tools for your journey to emotional freedom.
Elke manages her own anxiety. She believes strategies can be accessible and easy for people to lower their anxiety levels.
As an Energy Rich Vitality Specialist: living with passion and abounding energy,
Elke is excited to announce her new webinar “Energy Rich” and her audio meditation series based on her book, Loving Your Life. Her work includes creative anti-anxiety-wellness kits for employees, youth-at-risk and seniors in managing anxiety and depression. For over 30 years Elke has helped people and runs her private therapy practice in Bracebridge, Muskoka, in person and zoom sessions. She is a keynote speaker and has facilitated at conferences, enjoys giving interviews on podcasts, radio and TV. Find Elke’s work on You tube, Spotify, I-tunes and international audio platforms. Her passion is to empower people. She loves her work and her life.
www.elkescholz.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/elkescholztherapist/

https://www.facebook.com/elke.scholz.71

https://x.com/AnxietyWarrior1

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYf99EPFC3m01ft5ugIIC-g

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Before you go: take our 5-question Creativity Archetype Quiz at https://sustainingcreativity.fillout.com/creativityarchetypequiz. It takes under a minute and reveals your dominant creative style, your superpowers, and the #1 bottleneck holding you back.

Thanks for listening!

Creativity through the lens of the Co-founder of Pippa

"Creativity is a nurturing activity that is also a developed skill."

I’m a serial entrepreneur. I’ve owned and run an advertising / marketing agency for 10 years (20 years in the industry) that is still going strong and continues to grow. I’m an investor and advisor for a business accelerator out of Austin, TX called SKU (the largest CPG brand accelerator in the US). And last year I co-founded PIPPA, an AI-powered animation platform that helps people turn ideas, scripts, voices, photos, and characters into studio-quality videos (using licensed art styles from human artists who earn income on every image and second of animation produced on the platform). My professional background is in marketing, brand strategy, experiential marketing, content, partnerships, and startup growth, so I tend to see PIPPA not only as a technology product, but as a storytelling and creative-access platform.

https://www.instagram.com/gopippa/

https://www.tiktok.com/@gopippa

https://www.youtube.com/@goPippa

https://www.linkedin.com/in/hoganshrum/

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Before you go: take our 5-question Creativity Archetype Quiz at https://sustainingcreativity.fillout.com/creativityarchetypequiz. It takes under a minute and reveals your dominant creative style, your superpowers, and the #1 bottleneck holding you back.

Thanks for listening!

Creativity through the lens of executive producer, songwriter, musician, writer, actor and combat veteran 

"Being creative is deciding the means to your end."

The Quarantined is a grunge/punk/metal project led by Sean Martin that combines aggressive music with socially critical lyrics addressing politics, trauma, addiction, and modern life. The band's first self-titled record was released through college radio play in 2013 and built momentum with live shows in Southern California. Their single Point the Finger earned an international nomination in 2015, and later their Antiquate Hate EP brought wider attention and radio play and an Independent Music Award nomination. In 2021, Sean expanded the project with solo work and successful crowdfunding, leading to new music including Bedroom Inc. and the 2025 album Aversion to Normalcy, which has gathered over 1 million streams on Spotify, continues to spark conversation over social media. Martin’s background—Musicians Institute alumni and service as a U.S. Army Airborne Infantryman—deeply influences the band’s message and advocacy for veterans’ mental health.

The Quarantined continues to release purposeful music as a resilient, independent force in modern rock.

•  Website — https://www.thequarantined.com/
• Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/thequarantined/
• Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/TheQuarantined/
• TikTok — https://www.tiktok.com/@TheQuarantined
• Bandcamp — https://thequarantined.bandcamp.com/
• Spotify Artist Page — https://open.spotify.com/artist/5mBHj43S2kBEJxxfwHrOSt?si=qrTPnKbCRXmpxVkpJoIHLw
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@thequarantined
• LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean-martin-42912361/
• Apple Music — https://music.apple.com/us/artist/the-quarantined/586506131
• Aversion to Normalcy hyperlink— https://too.fm/kdmjayj
• Merch store: https://wrongwaytraffic.myshopify.com/

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Before you go: take our 5-question Creativity Archetype Quiz at https://sustainingcreativity.fillout.com/creativityarchetypequiz. It takes under a minute and reveals your dominant creative style, your superpowers, and the #1 bottleneck holding you back.

Thanks for listening!

Creativity through the lens of an art dealer,

"I believe very strongly everybody is born creative."

Michael Findlay is a Director of Acquavella Galleries, which specializes in Impressionist and Modern European works of art and post-war American painting and sculpture and represents contemporary artists Miquel Barceló, Jacob El-Hanani and Damian Loeb. Acquavella presents major loan exhibitions of works from museums and private collections such as “Picasso’s Marie-Thérèse”(2008), “Portrait of a Collection: Robert and Ethel Scull” (2010), “Georges Braque—Pioneer of Modernism” (2011), “Jean Dubuffet: Anticultural Positions” (2016), Joan Miró “Constellations” (2017), and in 2018 “The Worlds of Joaquin Torres-Garcia”, “James Rosenquist-His American Life”, “Lucian Freud: Monumental” in 2019, “Pablo Picasso—Seven Decades of Drawing” in 2021 and “Matisse: The Pursuit of Harmony” in 2026.  In February, 2023 Findlay curated “less: minimalism in the 1960’s”.

Born in Scotland in 1945, from 1968 to 1970 Mr. Findlay directed one of the first galleries in the SoHo district of New York City and established his own gallery there from 1971–1977. He was the first dealer in the United States to show the work of Joseph Beuys, Sean Scully and other European artists and gave American artists such as John Baldessari, Hannah Wilke, Stephen Mueller and Billy Sullivan their first solo exhibitions as well as representing veteran Abstract Expressionist Ray Parker. 

From 1964 until 1984 Mr. Findlay bought and sold Impressionist and Twentieth century works of art on behalf of American and European private collectors and secured early portrait commissions of Dennis Hopper and others for Andy Warhol. 

In 1984 he joined Christie’s auction house and was head of the Impressionist and Modern paintings department until 1992 when he became International Director of Fine Arts and a member of Christie’s Board of Directors. He supervised the sale of many important collections: Mr. and Mrs Paul Mellon, Hal B. Wallis, Victor and Sally Ganz as well as the historic sale of “Dr. Gachet” by Vincent van Gogh in 1990. Findlay opened Christie’s first office in China 1994 and in 1995 was part of an advisory team assisting the creation of a Western art program at the Shanghai Museum. 

In 1985 Findlay was one of five panel members convened to hear arguments for and against the removal of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc sculpture which had been commissioned by the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) for Federal Plaza in New York City. Speakers included former First Lady Joan Mondale, artist David Novros, collector Victor Ganz, critic Rosalind Krauss and museum curator William Rubin. The panel voted four to one to remove the sculpture, Findlay in the minority.

In 1998 GE Capital Corp. acquired Japan’s fifth largest consumer finance company and appointed Findlay to direct the sale of its $200 million art holdings which he accomplished over two years of both private sales and sales at auction. Findlay retired from Christie’s in 2000. 

In the early 1960’s Findlay’s clients John and Kimiko Powers started to acquire what would become a major collection of post-war American art and when John Powers died in 1999 Findlay became a close advisor to Mrs. Powers for ongoing strategic private and auction sales to build and endow The Powers Art Center which opened in 2014 in Carbondale, Colorado. 

In 2011 Findlay was keynote speaker at the international seminar in Barcelona on authentication sponsored by the Salvador Dalí Foundation. He has lectured at museums and universities including Seattle Art Museum, The Menil Collection in Houston, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Bridgestone Museum, Tokyo, New York University, Washington & Lee University, Gakushuin University, Tokyo and Peking University, Beijing.      

In the 1960’s he exhibited and published poetry and read with poets such as Anne Waldman and Gerard Malanga at Judson Memorial Church and other well known New York City venues. In the 1970’s Findlay attended workshops with Jean Valentine, June Jordan and Kenneth Koch. His poetry has been recently published in Lalitamba and Cloudbank.

He is a contributing author of The Expert versus The Object: Judging Fakes and False Attributions in the Visual Arts published by Oxford University Press in 2004. His first book The Value of Art has been translated into German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean and Mandarin and a new revised tenth anniversary edition has just been published in English and German. His second book, Seeing Slowly—Looking at Modern Art was published in 2017 in English and in Mandarin in 2021. Portrait of the Art Dealer as a Young Man—New York in the Sixties will be published in 2024.

Since 2001 Mr. Findlay has served on the Art Advisory Panel for the Internal Revenue Service of the Treasury Department of the U.S. Government. He is on the Board of Directors of the New York Foundation for the Arts, The British Schools and Universities Foundation and a former President of the Art Dealers Association of America Foundation. He is on the Advisory Councils of the Max’s Kansas City Project. In 2022 Findlay was appointed by President Biden to the Cultural Property Advisory Committee at the State Department and he received the 2023 Award for Excellence in the Arts from the Appraisers Association of America.

In 2018 Findlay supervised the sale of works of art from The Estate of Jerome and Geraldine Coles for executor Alvin Schulman of Moses & Singer, New York as well as The Estate of Adele Klapper for executor Susan Bloom, Fiduciary Trust, and Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler. Findlay was appointed by the New York State Supreme Court to be the Receiver for the sale of The Macklowe Collection which in 2021 was sold at Sotheby’s and at $922,200,000 became the most expensive single collection sold at auction. 

https://www.michaelfindlay.com/

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Before you go: take our 5-question Creativity Archetype Quiz at https://sustainingcreativity.fillout.com/creativityarchetypequiz. It takes under a minute and reveals your dominant creative style, your superpowers, and the #1 bottleneck holding you back.

Thanks for listening!

Creativity through the lens of a Storybuilder, Brand consultant and author

"I love exploring and learning new things."

I’m a business storytelling consultant and the creator of the Storybuilding method. It’s not just storytelling. It’s brand realignment disguised as storytelling.

My work is about flipping the script, instead of starting with what a company wants to say, I help teams step into the customer’s standpoint and understand how people actually think, decide, and choose. I’ve worked with startups, scale ups, and established organizations across Europe to align their messaging, sharpen their positioning, and make their story resonate in the real world. I’m the author of Storybuilding, a practical book that gives teams simple tools to build brand stories from the outside in.

https://standpoint.ch/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/elbing/

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Before you go: take our 5-question Creativity Archetype Quiz at https://sustainingcreativity.fillout.com/creativityarchetypequiz. It takes under a minute and reveals your dominant creative style, your superpowers, and the #1 bottleneck holding you back.

Thanks for listening!

Creativity through the lens of the founder of Intrinsic Leaders

"Creativity: It's mostly paying attention."

Duncan Brand is a leadership and organizational effectiveness advisor, founder of Intrinsic Leader, and author of Mind the Gap. Having worked with nearly 100 organizations across healthcare, technology, finance, and the public sector, he helps leaders build stronger cultures, improve team effectiveness, and navigate change in rapidly evolving workplaces. Drawing from experiences during the financial crisis at the Federal Reserve and in healthcare during COVID, Duncan focuses on helping organizations move beyond outdated leadership models and create people-first systems that balance performance, adaptability, and human connection in the future of work.

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/duncancbrand/
• https://www.amazon.co.uk/MIND-GAP-Organizations-Centric-Employee-ebook/dp/B0GR6QYFZG

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Before you go: take our 5-question Creativity Archetype Quiz at https://sustainingcreativity.fillout.com/creativityarchetypequiz. It takes under a minute and reveals your dominant creative style, your superpowers, and the #1 bottleneck holding you back.

Thanks for listening!