The Balanced Creative

Welcome to the final episode of season two for The Balanced Creative.

Spend this time to sit in the space with Chelene and reflect on how 2024 went for you.

What have you learned about yourself?

What would you like to bring into 2025 with you?

And what will you be making time for?

This may be the end of season two, but season three will be back in the new year with all new ideas to help you find creative balance.

“How do you grieve not only the person you lost, but the person you can no longer be? … There are identities and parts of ourselves we lose when we lose people we love.” Shelby Forsythia

In this special episode, Chelene sits down with Shelby Forsythia to discuss the trials and tribulations that grief brings us through, in all avenues of life.

When we experience any form of loss in our lives, it can bring our creative journey to a halt. Not only do we feel isolated from the world around us, but our entire perspective and relationship to the world changes.

Shelby Forsythia is a grief coach, author, and podcast host here to share her experiences and insights into grief. In 2020, she founded Life After Loss Academy, an online course and community that has helped dozens of grievers find their way after death, divorce, diagnosis, and other major life transitions.

Following her mother’s death in 2013, Shelby began calling herself a “student of grief” and now devotes her days to reading, writing, and speaking about loss. Through a combination of mindfulness tools and intuitive questions, she guides her clients to welcome grief as a teacher and create meaningful lives that honor and include the heartbreaks they’ve faced. Her work has been featured in Huffington Post, Bustle, and The Oprah Magazine.

If you or someone you know is experiencing grief, and is seeking support and community in this process, be sure to visit Shelby’s website.

As we reach the end of 2024, take a moment to pause, dear creative listener. Where has your creative path taken you this year?

In today’s episode, Chelene is here to discuss a point in the process you’ve all experienced at least once: the rupture point. A moment of extreme, energized clarity about what your project is supposed to be and do. The part of the processes where suddenly, everything clicks, and that long emotional rut you’ve been in finally passes. But this point comes with facing something you may have been avoiding - starting over.

Maybe you realize your characters aren’t making choices that align with their personality, or maybe you discover a key ingredient to your project that shows you exactly how to get back to point Z.

The rupture point doesn’t happen when you’re working on your project - it usually appears when you begin to ask yourself “what do I need in order to continue?”

In a world that values word count over creative exploration, it’s not a surprise that imposter syndrome has become one of the main hindrances for creative joy.

So why are we still allowing space for that?

In today’s episode, we’ll take a look at:

• The importance of unstructured play

• Building confidence through clarity

• The role that comparison plays in all of this

The art of self expression brings us an opportunity to see ourselves in a light that we otherwise wouldn’t make time to acknowledge. Whether you are a writer, a podcaster, a singer, or an artist, you will always choose the project that best reflects you at that moment.

So consider your current project - what is it telling you about yourself?

In today’s episode we’ll explore the importance of self awareness in our work, and how it can help us gain the clarity we need to then build confidence in it.