Creative Spirits Unleashed

My guests for this episode of the podcast are Bernie Harberts and Julia Carpenter. You might recognize both of those names, as they have both been on the podcast individually. What made this episode special was that we did this conversation while they were on Bernie’s 24 foot sailboat “Grit” as it was anchored off Shackelford Banks, a barrier island off the coast of North Carolina. Picture a skinny, long stretch o...

After a short break after my 100th episode, the podcast is back with a returning guest. Corey Vaughn is here for his 4th episode. In 2024, we spoke both in the Spring and in the Fall as he shared his 1000 day plan to see how far he could take his water ski goals if he chose to really go for it. The plan culminated with the World Waterski Championship held in late August of 2025 in Italy. 

Corey has been both brutally honest and...

I have just released the 100th episode of the Creative Spirits Unleashed Podcast. For most of the 99 episodes of this podcast, I have been your host. In this episode, the tables are turned. This time, it’s me answering some thought provoking, and in at least one case, tear-inducing questions asked by Stevie Delahunt.
 
Here’s how this episode came to be. I began working on a 100 episode retrospective about a ...

My guest for this episode is Carolyn Swinton, who is an Executive Coach and consultant, and who also happens to be one of my former clients. We worked together years ago when she was the Chief Nursing Officer of a large hospital organization. We’ve stayed in touch over the years, and more than once, after we had a meaningful conversation, I hung up thinking “We should have recorded that for a podcast.” Well, we fi...

My guest for this episode of the podcast is Tik Maynard. If you follow Road to the Horse, known as the world championship of colt starting, you know him as the winner of the last two years. Besides that distinction, he is a 3 day event rider, clinician, and horse trainer. 

Yet,Tik shared a very simple bio about himself:

Author of two books.  Father of two kids.

Also: three-day event rider, husband, juggler, dad-joke teller, ...

My guest for this episode is Stevie Delahunt, returning for the 3rd time. We spoke about this time last year, after she finished the endurance race known as Tevis a 100 mile endurance ride on the Western States Trail in California. This ride is legendary, with only 39%  of the entrants completing the full race this year. Stevie was one of those riders, along with 2 other riders competing on her horses. She had a total of 5 hor...

My guest on this episode of the podcast is Kyle Pertuis of Mindfit Coaching. Kyle and I have known each other for at least 25 years, first meeting in Lake Lure when he was in the hospitality business. Now he is a coach, and I was intrigued to hear what he’s been up to in the last decade or so, and what drove him to make such a huge career shift.

In this episode, we are catching up with each other after many years of not seeing...

My guest for this episode is Hannah Betts, Hollywood Stuntwoman, Professional Skydiver and more. If you watched the Superbowl this year, you saw Hannah land in a cruise ship swimming pool after jumping out of a helicopter. She shares some of the behind-the-scenes magic from that commercial, as well as some of the scarier stunts she’s done for other shows and movies. She’s had a number of scary things happen in her caree...

My guest for this episode of the podcast is Julia Carpenter. This episode started unlike any other I’ve done. Julia read a passage from a non-published book she calls the Prologue to the Unwritten Memoir. The passage was a launching point for touching on many, many themes. Perhaps the most important was the theme of finding our true nature and purpose in this world.

 Julia also happens to be the wife of my last podcast gu...

My guest for this episode is Bernie Harberts. We covered so much ground in this podcast, much like Bernie has done for much of his life. When I say covering ground, that’s for real. Bernie has taken several cross country trips with his mules over the years, covering over 10,000 miles and 1,000 nights.

In our conversation, he offers his hard-earned wisdom on approaching life on the road, life with horses and mules, and living a...

This episode of the podcast is the last two chapters of Dancing the Tightrope. We have reached the end of the book!

You might hear me be a little choked up at the end of this reading. There are so many layers to unpack as to why. First, when I started reading this book, I didn’t expect to get much further than Chapter 1. Just reading twenty whole chapters felt like a huge accomplishment. For those of you who encouraged me to r...

This episode of the podcast is Chapters 16, 17, and 18 of Dancing the Tightrope, the last of the self-awareness chapters, or as I call them the “C” chapters. In these chapters, we cover courage, congruence and clarity. Over and over again, I come back to these chapters to find what’s missing when I find myself stuck. 

My favorite quote from the Courage chapter is this one: “The beautiful thing about welc...

This episode includes Dancing the Tightrope Chapters Fourteen Commitment and Fifteen Curiosity. These are the first two of five chapters in the book outlining the building blocks of self-awareness. If you have listened this far, you have certainly heard me talk about the value of these inner “tools.” 

I decided to highlight the five building blocks of self-awareness at this stage of my story, because I found myself ...

This episode includes Dancing the Tightrope Chapters Twelve The Froth is My Friend and Thirteen The Art of Living. These chapters mark a turning point in my journey of making friends with pressure. To this day, I still find it difficult to explain how different this approach to pressure – and to life – is from the typical approach espoused in high performance coaching elsewhere. Rereading these two chapters several year...

In this episode, I’m reading Chapters 10 and 11 of Dancing the Tightrope. If there is a theme in these two chapters of my journey, I have to call it “stuff happens.” I’m going along, expecting things to go as planned, and instead, something unexpected turns everything on its head. Of course something unexpected happened. That’s how the world works. Why would I think it should go any other way? As I say...

In this episode of the podcast, I am reading chapters 8 and 9 of Dancing the Tightrope. I'm starting to put things together, as you will hear when you listen. At the very beginning of chapter eight, I had a wild experience going out and learning the negative-positive poll in a completely new or deeper way. 

Let me tell you something that's interesting about that particular super tool as I call it. It is eight years later, and I...

In this episode of the podcast, I’m reading Chapters 6 and 7, The Decision – Sort of, and Imbalance is a Good Thing. As you will hear, at this stage of the journey, I’m somewhat flailing. Looking back on it, I’m still surprised that I took the path I did. Some part of me saw the promise of taking the more difficult path – something that was typically not my norm.

It has been fascinating for me to go bac...

This episode of the podcast features chapters 4 and 5 of Dancing the Tightrope. If you haven’t listened to the first 3 chapters, I suggest listening to those first. It will help make sense of what’s coming in these next few chapters.

When I listened back to Chapter 3, where I read the sidebar blog “Where’s My Choice Here?”, it was somewhat stunning to me that many of the threads that I pulled together f...

This week’s episode is – drumroll – Chapter 3 of Dancing the Tightrope. I’m just going to say it – you were right and I was wrong! I’m speaking to those who’ve been telling me for a long time that they would appreciate an audio version of my book. 

Not only have I been getting great feedback and gratitude for providing the book in this form, but I have also surprisingly enjoyed reading ...