Create Magic At Work®

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

Thanks for listening!
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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/

Today’s Edgewalker card explores how the future is shaped by more than careful planning alone. When we remain open to both practical insight and intuitive guidance, we begin to recognize possibilities that invite us to create what has not yet come into view.
Bring the wisdom of the Edgewalker mindset into your daily life with your own copy of the Edgewalker Card Deck: https://a.co/d/00i0R1EW
Start your own journey of reflection, creativity, and intentional growth with the Create Magic at Work Journal: https://a.co/d/06N0Hypc

Today’s reflection explores how success becomes more meaningful when we define it for ourselves. By celebrating our achievements and welcoming abundance in all its forms, we create space for a life that feels both fulfilling and deeply aligned.
Bring the wisdom of the Edgewalker mindset into your daily life with your own copy of the Edgewalker Card Deck: https://a.co/d/00i0R1EW
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 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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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/