Have you ever caught yourself thinking, “Maybe I just need a better system, more discipline, more clients, or a vacation”—only to discover that the heaviness is still there?

In this episode, I’m exploring something many creatives and business owners experience but rarely stop to examine: the difference between work that is hard and work that feels heavy.

Hard work can be meaningful. It’s often where growth, learning, and creativity happen. But heaviness is different. It lingers. It follows you when you’re away from your desk. It drains your energy and keeps pulling at your attention.

Instead of rushing to fix it, what if the heaviness is offering valuable information?

In this episode, I share how to recognize when you’re reaching for quick fixes, why your brain wants immediate answers, and the questions that can help you uncover what’s really happening beneath the surface. If you’ve been feeling overwhelmed, misaligned, overcommitted, or simply tired of pushing harder, this conversation offers a different approach.

This episode is part of the Work Your Way Summer Series — a collection of conversations about rethinking work, creativity, and the way you move through your days. Explore the full series here.

What IF the primary purpose of your business isn't to serve the world, it's to make you rich? And, service is just the byproduct?

That's the kind of assumption-flipping you hear from Amber Smith, my coach and the author of Quiet Wealth, who joins me this week to talk about what she calls a "right-sized" business — one built around what you actually want, instead of what scaling culture told you to want. Amber shares the moment she sat in a room full of entrepreneurs planning their company exits and realized she didn't want one — she wanted to know her clients' names, not just their account numbers. I share my own version of that: deciding I needed a "me Monday," immediately judging myself for it ("who takes a full day during the "work week" to do whatever they want?"), and then realizing that day isn't selfish — it's the seed for everything I create the rest of the week.

We also get into the practical side: how "the math has to math" — what you charge has to actually fund the life you want, on the hours you actually want to work. And how an energy audit (looking at what gives you energy versus what drains it) can show you what to keep, change, or hand off entirely.

One of my favorite moments was when Amber said: "It's good for the world when you get what you want." That idea has stayed with me since we recorded.

In this episode, we talk about:

This episode is part of the Work Your Way Summer Series — a collection of conversations about rethinking work, creativity, and the way you move through your days. Explore the full series here.

If this conversation has you wondering where your energy is actually going, you might want to check out the Energy Alignment Intensive — a 30-day program to help you see what's working, what's not, and where the small shifts are. Learn more here.

What if the reason work feels harder than it should isn’t because you’re doing it wrong?

What if you’ve simply been trying to work in a way that doesn’t fit who you are?

Many creative professionals spend years chasing productivity, pushing through burnout, and trying to follow someone else’s formula for success. We tell ourselves we just need to be more disciplined, more organized, or more consistent. But what if the real issue isn’t effort—it’s alignment?

In this episode of the Work Your Way Summer Series, I’m joined by high-performance coach and Human Design expert Allie Kuhland for a conversation about energy, burnout, decision-making, and why understanding your natural wiring can completely change the way you approach work.

Allie shares how Human Design helped her recover from burnout and create a more sustainable relationship with work. Together, we explore how understanding the way you’re designed to make decisions, use energy, and contribute your gifts can help you stop forcing productivity and start creating a way of working that feels more natural, effective, and fulfilling.

Whether you’re building a business, navigating a career transition, leading a team, or simply wondering why work feels harder than it should, this conversation offers a fresh perspective on what becomes possible when you stop trying to fit someone else’s mold and start paying attention to how you’re uniquely designed to operate.

One of the core ideas behind the Work Your Way Summer Series is that there isn’t one right way to work.

You have more agency than you think.

Working your way doesn’t mean avoiding hard work or escaping responsibility. It means discovering how to do your work on your terms within the life you’ve chosen.

This conversation is an invitation to question inherited assumptions about productivity, success, and work—and to explore what becomes possible when you start working in a way that fits who you are.

This episode is part of the Work Your Way Summer Series on The Complete Creative Podcast—a collection of conversations exploring a simple but powerful question:

What if work could feel better?

Through conversations with coaches, authors, entrepreneurs, creatives, psychologists, and thought leaders, we’re exploring how to build a healthier, more sustainable, and more aligned relationship with work.

https://studio.creativemindscoach.com/post/human-design-creative-work-allie-kuhland

Explore the full series here:

https://studio.creativemindscoach.com/podcast/work-your-way-summer-series

Allie Kuhland is a high-performance coach and former sales leader who blends Human Design with practical business strategy to help people build careers, businesses, and lives they’re excited to wake up to.

Website: www.alliekuhland.com

A few days before recording this episode, I celebrated my birthday. I love thinking of birthdays as a personal new year—a chance to pause, reflect, and look at where life is taking us next.

As I looked back on the past five years of building my coaching and photography businesses, one question kept rising to the surface:

What does it mean to work your way?

Many of us start by following someone else’s roadmap. We take the courses, follow the advice, try the strategies, and look for the “right” way to build a business, career, or creative life. But over time, I’ve learned that success isn’t about finding the perfect formula. It’s about discovering what works for you.

In this first episode of the Work Your Way Summer Series, I’m sharing lessons from five years of experimentation, growth, pivots, and refinement. We talk about building a business that fits your life, creating work that aligns with your values, and questioning the assumptions that keep us feeling stuck.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur, creative professional, freelancer, or someone working within a larger organization, this conversation will invite you to think differently about how you work and what success means to you.

Explore the full summer series, including podcast episodes, Work Your Way Live group coaching sessions, and Work Your Way Breakthrough Sessions:

https://studio.creativemindscoach.com/podcast/work-your-way-summer-series

Working your way isn’t about rejecting responsibility or throwing out structure. It’s about creating work that supports the life you want to live and making intentional choices that align with who you are, what you value, and where you’re headed.

This episode kicks off the Work Your Way Summer Series, where we’ll explore creativity, money, energy, identity, success, rest, community, and what becomes possible when you stop forcing yourself into someone else’s model and begin creating your own.

Something unexpected happened after I sold my house, moved into full-time travel, and watched momentum build in my business.

Instead of feeling energized by all the good things happening, I slowed down. I stopped posting. I stopped showing up in the ways that felt normal. And, it all felt pretty confusing.

In this episode, I’m sharing something that helped me make sense of it: the Upper Limit Problem, a concept from The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks that explains why we sometimes pull back, procrastinate, or make things harder right when life starts getting better.

If you’ve ever found yourself getting close to something you really want and suddenly feeling stuck, overwhelmed, resistant, or weirdly uncomfortable… this conversation is for you.

We’ll talk about the difference between burnout, misalignment, and upper limits, how creatives often sabotage momentum without realizing it, and what it looks like to gently expand your capacity for success, visibility, joy, and ease.

In this episode, we explore:

• What the Upper Limit Problem actually is and why it happens  

If growth feels uncomfortable right now, nothing has gone wrong. You might simply be learning how to let something good become normal.

Mentioned in this episode:  

Don’t miss the summer series:

Follow The Complete Creative in your podcast app so you’ll be notified when new episodes drop.

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Connect With Me

If you’d like to continue this conversation:

Join me on Substack where I share more writing and ideas around creativity and business: https://thecompletecreative.substack.com

You can also connect with me on Instagram: https://instagram.com/creativemindscoach

Work With Me

If you're ready for deeper clarity in your creative life or business, you can start with a Clarity Call, the first step inside my Creative Compass framework, where we begin shaping your personal vision and direction.

You know that moment after you hit send…

Or when you snap, shut down, or spiral—and later you’re like, where did that even come from?

In this episode, I’m talking about what’s happening in those moments—and how to catch it before it takes over.

This is a follow-up to the Think, Feel, Do framework, and we’re focusing in on the most powerful part: what you’re feeling in your body, in real time.

When you start to notice it as it’s happening, you get your choice back. And that changes how you show up in your work, your decisions, your relationships… all of it.

Connect With Me

If you’d like to continue this conversation:

Join me on Substack where I share more writing and ideas around creativity and business: https://thecompletecreative.substack.com

You can also connect with me on Instagram: https://instagram.com/creativemindscoach

Work With Me

If you're ready for deeper clarity in your creative life or business, you can start with a Clarity Call, the first step inside my Creative Compass framework, where we begin shaping your personal vision and direction.

You can also explore my Energy Alignment Intensive, where I combine coaching with a custom AI tool to help you evaluate how you're spending your energy and realign your creative work with what actually matters most.

Learn more here: https://creativemindscoach.com/energy-alignment-intensive/ 

There’s a moment every creative knows well—you sit down to do the thing that matters most… and suddenly you’re doing literally anything else.

Checking email. Reorganizing your desk. Thinking about the project instead of actually starting it.

In this episode, I’m walking you through what’s sub-consciously happening in those moments—and how to move through resistance in a way that feels simple, doable, and even… kind of fun.

Because resistance isn’t a sign that something’s wrong. It’s a signal that what you’re working on actually matters.

And when you understand how your brain is wired—and how to work with it instead of against it—you can get unstuck faster than you think.

• Why resistance shows up (and why it’s not a character flaw)

• Think → Feel → Do episode

Connect With Me

If you’d like to continue this conversation:

Join me on Substack where I share more writing and ideas around creativity and business: https://thecompletecreative.substack.com

You can also connect with me on Instagram: https://instagram.com/creativemindscoach

Work With Me

If you're ready for deeper clarity in your creative life or business, you can start with a Clarity Call, the first step inside my Creative Compass framework, where we begin shaping your personal vision and direction.

Selling my home took almost a year… and instead of being stressful, it became one of the most easeful transitions of my life.

That wasn’t an accident.

In this episode, I’m sharing what actually made the difference—from the emotional side of closing a long chapter to the practical shifts that helped me move through it in a completely different way than I used to.

This wasn’t about forcing a positive mindset or pretending things felt easy. It was about learning how to move with the process instead of against it—and what opened up because of that.

If you’re in the middle of a transition (or can feel one coming), this conversation will help you stay grounded, trust yourself more deeply, and create a little more ease along the way.

• Why big life transitions can feel heavier than expected—and what’s actually happening underneath that

If decision-making has ever felt exhausting or overwhelming during a transition, this episode will support you:

How Decision Fatigue Drains Creatives (and What to Do)

If you’re curious about the framework I reference in this episode:

The Gene Keys by Richard Rudd

Join me on Substack where I share more writing and ideas around creativity and business: https://thecompletecreative.substack.com

You can also connect with me on Instagram: https://instagram.com/creativemindscoach

Work With Me

If you're ready for deeper clarity in your creative life or business, you can start with a Clarity Call, the first step inside my Creative Compass framework, where we begin shaping your personal vision and direction.

There’s a framework I use every single day—and now it’s so integrated into how I think and live that I sometimes forget to even talk about it.

But this one changed everything for me.

In this episode, I’m walking you through the simple but powerful framework of Think, Feel, Do—a concept I learned during my life coach certification that completely shifted how I understand my emotions, my actions, and the results I create in my life and creative work.

If you’ve ever felt stuck in your reactions, overwhelmed by your emotions, or unsure why you keep getting the same results, this is going to bring a whole new level of clarity.

Because here’s where the power is:

You’re not reacting to your life—you’re responding to your thinking about your life.

And when you start to see that, everything changes.

• Why your thoughts are not facts—and how they shape your entire experience

This framework is the foundation of everything I teach—and once you start seeing it, you won’t be able to unsee it.

I hosted a free workshop called The Imposter Syndrome Fix, where I walk you through this framework in action—specifically for creatives navigating self-doubt.

You can watch the free replay here:

https://studio.creativemindscoach.com/imposter-syndrome-fix

If you’d like to continue this conversation:

Join me on Substack where I share more writing and ideas around creativity and business: https://thecompletecreative.substack.com

You can also connect with me on Instagram: https://instagram.com/creativemindscoach

Work With Me

If you're ready for deeper clarity in your creative life or business, you can start with a Clarity Call, the first step inside my Creative Compass framework, where we begin shaping your personal vision and direction.

AI is everywhere right now—and creatives are navigating a new landscape of tools, possibilities, and questions about authenticity.

In this episode, I’m sharing my honest perspective about how I use AI in my creative business, where I draw the line, and why transparency matters more than ever.

After reading an article that felt completely AI-generated, something inside me said nope. That experience sparked a deeper reflection about what we’re actually creating, what we’re outsourcing, and why the human part of creativity is still the whole point.

So today I’m pulling back the curtain. I’ll walk you through exactly how I use AI behind the scenes in my business, how it supports my creative process, and the places where I intentionally refuse to let it replace my voice, intuition, or lived experience.

Because AI can be an incredible assistant—but it should never replace the humanity that makes your work meaningful.

If you're a creator navigating this new world of tools and technology, this conversation will help you find clarity about how to use AI intentionally while staying fully yourself.

• The moment that gave me the full “AI ick” and why it sparked this episode

AI is here to stay—but your humanity is still the most powerful thing you bring to your work.

If you’d like to continue this conversation:

Join me on Substack where I share more writing and ideas around creativity and business:

You can also connect with me on Instagram:

If you're ready for deeper clarity in your creative life or business, you can start with a Clarity Call, the first step inside my Creative Compass framework, where we begin shaping your personal vision and direction.

You can also explore my Energy Alignment Intensive, where I combine coaching with a custom AI tool to help you evaluate how you're spending your energy and realign your creative work with what actually matters most.

Learn more here: