What if creativity isn't something you’re born with or you’re not — but rather your birthright, your natural state, and your most fundamental relationship to the world?

In this first installment of The Spark Sessions: Resourcing for Creativity—a special monthly bonus mini-series—Amy welcomes listeners into an exciting new creativity chapter of the Create Magic at Work podcast. In this introductory episode, Amy sits down with your host for the series — creativity coach, songwriter, and Muzi founder Rachel Efron. Together, they explore the vision behind the sessions and the creative journey that lies ahead. They discuss why creativity is more essential to our wellbeing than we've been taught to believe, how people become disconnected from their creative nature, and what’s possible when we finally learn to tend to our creative health. Rachel offers a glimpse into the philosophy, tools, and practices, that will guide her future episodes, supporting listeners to understand creativity not as something reserved for the select few, but rather as a universal and vital part of being fully alive.

Sparks of Insight:

• Why some of the most common beliefs about creativity might be limiting your potential.
• A surprising insight on what might be standing between you and the projects you long to get off the ground.
• An introduction to the five creative resources that will be a game changer for your creativity.
• A fresh way of thinking about rest that challenges conventional ideas about productivity and recovery.
• A preview of the practical Missions, Spark readings, and creative insights listeners will encounter throughout the series.

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 [email protected] for a chance at a Spark Reading on air, where Rachel will offer personalized insight into what your creativity most needs from you right now.

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: [email protected]

website: https://www.rachelefron.com/creativity

Download the Muzi app at http://itunes.apple.com/app/id6739667782

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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/

Amy Lynn Durham: Hey everyone, Amy here. If you listen to this show, you know we focus on expanding human potential and bring spiritual intelligence into modern leadership, but there's a blind spot that so many high performers may have. We treat creativity like a rare talent or a luxury we don't have time for, rather than an essential everyday resource, creativity isn't a gift reserved for a lucky few. It's a live relationship that determines how fully you engage with your work, your ideas, and your life. And like any relationship, it must be intentionally resourced and tended to help us all shift into this vital, energetic piece of our humanity. I've partnered with elite creativity coach, songwriter, and producer Rachel Efron to bring you a brand new monthly mini series, The Spark Sessions: Resourcing for Creativity. Each month, Rachel is taking over the mic to share deeply personal stories, break down common myths and hand you a specific 10 minute mission designed to resource your creativity. By the end of this journey, our goal is to help you rekindle your life force, step into infinite possibility, and become a truly vibrant, thriving human being. Get ready, because you're about to step into the Spark Sessions, resourcing your creativity. Here's Rachel Efron.

Welcome to the Spark Sessions. I'm your creativity coach, Rachel Efron. Here, we understand creativity isn't a talent or a mood, it's our natural state, and it comes alive the moment we support it. Every session will challenge myths, break through blocks, and help you discover what's yours and only yours to make. Let's get to it.

Amy Lynn Durham: Hey everyone, it's Amy here, and I am so excited right now because we are launching a new mini series on the Create Magic at Work podcast called The Spark Sessions: Resourcing for Creativity with former guest Rachel Efron. Her episode on resourcing for creativity and her app, Musy has been so well received, and the episode was so popular that I sort of tapped Rachel on the shoulder, and I said, Rachel, I want to do a mini series for the Create Magic at Work audience and listeners on creativity, because this is so important, and so behind the scenes, for the past few months, we have been working on the Spark Sessions resourcing for creativity with Rachel Efron, so today we're so excited to introduce this new mini series to you, and to give you a little bit of, I guess, a peek behind the curtain, and then also an idea of what to expect over the next few months, as each month on the Create Magic at Work podcast, you'll see a bonus episode drop for you called The Spark Sessions with Rachel. So, Rachel, thank you for doing this for all of the Create Magic at Work listeners. I mean, it's such a gift. So, thank you.

Absolutely, Amy. Thank you for your vision. This is one of this is one of the only times I think that actually I am creating something because of someone else's vision. You were so clear that this had to happen, and I just completely respect you and believed you, and that momentum brought me to what has become really my own vision for it as well, and I'm just super excited for what we get to make here now.

Amy Lynn Durham: Yeah, how cool is it? Like, we are living the creativity model in real time that you created, almost like it's so cool, so interesting, that's so true. Okay, so for everybody listening, I know you, you were a guest, and we had an incredibly popular episode around the resources of creativity, but for those that haven't heard that guest episode, tell everyone a little bit about you and who you are.

Yeah, well, my name is Rachel Efron. I started out my career, such as it was, as a singer songwriter. After I graduated college, I realized what felt very much like a calling to me. I wrote a song, and I was like, 'Ah, this is home. It was like a bell rang, so I moved out to California, and I started writing songs, recording songs, performing songs, and I did that for a great many years. Had a wonderful time doing that. I still do write songs for myself and record songs for myself as well. Then after after years and years of this I started doing something else, which was coaching other artists to write songs themselves, and it was like the second time the bell rang for me. I was like, oh, you can have two callings in a life. It was so exciting. I taught a class called Songwriting for 10 years at the California Jazz Conservatory. I started hosting a weekly songwriting salon for advanced songwriters. I ended up coaching songwriters all over the world. I made a list of all countries where I coached songwriters a couple days ago, and it's like you could put a pin just almost everywhere in the world. Oh, that's so cool, so fun. It is so fun. Then it was just a few years ago that one of my students, and an artist that I ended up producing, said to me, "What you do isn't just music specific, it relates to all aspects of creativity, and I think it's meant for a wider audience. So, let's build something so that your tools reach more people. That is how Musy was born. So, basically, I had the incredible opportunity to think about how I work with people, what actually happens in a room when an artist is telling me how they're blocked, how I actually attune and figure out what they need in order to become free and thriving creatively. I took all of that kind of intuition and I externalized it as this tool, this app that people can now use to help themselves access more creativity in their lives.

Amy Lynn Durham: The app is amazing. I've taken the quiz, I've gotten my Spark, and we'll get into that in a little bit.

Yeah, butas we're, as we're talking about the series that's about to unfold for all the listeners, what is your core mission for this series? What's the biggest thing you might want the Create Magic at Work listeners to walk away with? So, I am maybe unhealthily obsessed with other people creating. I love, I love creativity. It's my favorite thing about everyone. If we're at a party and you tell me you want to write a screenplay, it's now my singular mission that you write the screenplay. So this is just this is a thing, this is a thing about me, and I've found a career that justifies it. So my main thing that I want for listeners is to access heightened creative states. The message that I need everyone to just internalize right out of the gate is that all of us are built for creativity. All of us arrive to this earth with the apparatus to create. If we're not creating, it's simply because we're under-resourced for creativity. When you resource yourself for creativity, you can't help but create, and that's what the series is going to do. It's going to explain the resources, and we're going to do actual exercises in real time to get people resourced to start creating more.

Amy Lynn Durham: Why should we care about resourcing our creativity? Why is that something that is even anything we should put our energy towards.

I think people do care about their creativity. I think there is a growing awareness among people that they need to create in order to even be well, certainly in order to realize their potential and give their singular gifts while they're here alive on earth? I think maybe it's true that there's still a lot of people that don't realize the importance of creativity, but they too feel the effects of not accessing their creativity. They too are sad, right? They feel a little out of sync with what they're doing in a day, for me, creativity is actually the opposite of depression, not joy, not happiness. It's creativity. If you're creating every day, you're not going to be depressed, because it's so positive, because it's you doing this right action that just really aligns you with the creative world around you. So, yeah, I guess that's my answer. Amy is, I think people already do care, and for those that don't sort of have it identified that they care, it will mean so much to them as well.

Amy Lynn Durham: Yeah, I think for me everything that you're saying is really speaking to feeling like I am living in a space of vitality as a human and like fully expressing myself as a human being, so that's why creativity is so important, because we do grow up with different. Scripts that people say to us, or judgments, or assumptions that people place on us. You, you, you're a songwriter, so immediately people are like, "Oh, you're so creative, you're a songwriter, but then maybe the accountant or the bookkeeper, I'm just thinking of the might people might say, oh, that person might have had some sort of statement said to them that, oh, you're more analytical, you're not creative, and so then they shut that portion of themselves down, and to me this is really uncovering what real creativity is and really resourcing being a vibrant human being, while we're able to be here in the world. This gift that you've created, the way that it's just incredible, and I'm so excited for the listeners to go on this journey. The audience is going to hear you, and the mini series break down some common creativity myths. What is one of the biggest? I know I kind of dove into a little bit already, but like, what do you think is the biggest misconception that you hear doing this work about creativity that you want to dismantle this series.

Oh my god, how can I pick one? The truth is, there are so many myths around creativity. It's fascinating. It's like, why on earth are we so obsessed with marginalizing, quote unquote, artists, right, othering artists in others and in ourselves, it's almost as though we're afraid of creativity and its wild, unbridled power, right? It's almost as though we're afraid changing potential, right? How are you going to make me pick one? Can I just list a few? Let's, yeah, give us, okay, artists are over sensitive. Girl, artists are broke. Artists are broke is this whole like legend that keeps people from pursuing their creativity. Artists are mentally ill. That might be my least favorite. Artists do not create because they are mentally ill. Certainly, some artists have mental illness. Also, some non-artists have mental illness. And if there's a productive artist who's mentally ill, they do it despite the illness, not because of it. Artists are addicted, alcoholic, irresponsible. I mean, it's wild. It's wild what we think about artists, it effectively keeps a lot of people from pursuing creativity, even in small amounts. Yeah, I guess my least favorite today is the mentally ill one. We'll go with that today. It'll be a different one tomorrow. Well,

Amy Lynn Durham: we can look forward to all the different ones you'll unpack in the mini series. So, I'm excited to hear which one comes up in the coming months. Can you preview the five creative resources for everyone listening, so they can get a feel for, or an understanding for, what you're going to get into?

Absolutely. Yeah, so when I sat down to create this resource, this app? I thought, what is it that people actually need in order to create, and I thought about all the hundreds and hundreds of artists that I worked with, and started organizing them in my mind, and realizing, oh, there are certain kind of archetypes, not of artists, but of creative need and creative lack, right, resource lack became pretty clear to me that if you're not creating, it's because you are depleted in inspiration, courage, discipline, rest, or connection, or some combination of them. Those are the big five for me: inspiration, courage, discipline, rest, and connection.

Amy Lynn Durham: I know. When I took the quiz in the Musy app, which everyone can access that in the show notes, I came up depleted in rest, and part of this mini series is you are going to, at the end of every Spark session, you're going to give the listeners and the audience a specific mission or challenge, and I'm curious, because you said something that piqued my curiosity, that not all the missions for rest are what we would think it would be for rest.

Rest is just one of the most fascinating resources for me. Rest is not the absence of activity, right? If it were just that, maybe we'd all be better at it. Rest is actually a proactive, you know, action. It's what we do. You, so some of the rest missions are really about thinking about how to take more time off and take it down a notch, but a lot of them are actually proposed activities that will restore you and prepare you for creating again. Rest, more than anything, is about creating space in your mind and heart for new ideas to flood in. If we're, if we're backlogged with mental chaos and emotional chaos, there's just not room. There's not room for new ideas. So, resting is really about undertaking those activities that kind of clear out some space in your minds and heart. What are some rest activities? Going for a walk, free riding, making soup, that's one of my best missions. The rest reflections are about, you know, leveling up your rest, like how can you not aim for the stars, not trade, you know, Instagram for transcendental meditation, but maybe how can you go one notch higher quality rest throughout your day.

Amy Lynn Durham: Okay, so the series, each episode that comes out, tell us what it's going to look like, because I referenced, okay, you're going to discuss these five resources of creativity, you've listed them. We talked about how at the very end you're going to send us on a mission to resource one of those areas, frame up what what an episode might look like for us, or what the series might look like within that. Yeah, well, any, you're the one who really helped me conceive of this, so I appreciate you so much. So great, it's so great, you are so creative, and yeah, I am a beneficiary of it, so fantastic. I love it. Yeah, yeah, I think every every episode is gonna involve

a bit of the philosophy, just like a bit of a concept of a new idea to try on that's going to support you in creating. It's also going to involve some anecdotes, some actual lived experience from my time creating and from my time coaching artists, I can't resist sharing these stories that led me to the methodology, and yeah, and every episode will involve actually an assignment, right, a mission, a reflection, some sort of a tool or a practice that listeners can do immediately and quickly, like within 10 minutes, to access a more heightened state of creativity, and also what I hope is that every episode will involve a quote unquote spark reading, so one of the things about the app is that before you get going with anything, you take a creativity assessment, you answer 30 questions, and that gives you a picture of your creative landscape in the form of a five pointed spark, so you see an image of how inspired you are, how courageous you are, how disciplined you are, and again, these aren't character traits, they are levels of resource, and then based on that, you know, oh gosh, I've been so focused on discipline, but I'm wildly disciplined, I really need to focus on my creativity relationships, I need to resource for connection, right, it helps you actually focus your creative wellness, so my hope is that every episode will also involve me taking a look at a listener's Spark and giving some extra insights on what it could mean and how to work with it,

Amy Lynn Durham: that is going to be so fun. Spark readings, like, how cool is that? So far, so for those of us that are going to participate in listening to the mini series, we should take the quiz, so we have our Spark, so we can follow along throughout. Reference our Spark as you're speaking in each episode, and if, if we're listening to this first introductory episode, we click on the link in the show notes to get the Musy app, that's the name of the app, is Musy and Mu Zi. It's available in the Apple Store. You take your creativity assessment in that, then you get the picture of your spark, and then if they want a Spark reading from you in the mini series, how do they get a hold of you and give you their spark for a reading?

Yeah, well, I believe we have links in the show notes, and they can literally email it to me. Yeah, my favorite thing is to get emails with sparks. Yeah, this

Amy Lynn Durham: is going to be so fun, it's. So again, come along with us in this mini series for resourcing your creativity. Follow along the Spark sessions, but to really engage, download the Musy app in the Apple Store, take your quiz, have your Spark ready, email it to Rachel. We'll have her email address in the show notes, and you might get picked for a live spark reading in one of the episodes. We'll flash your spark on the screen anonymously if you want us to keep your name private, and Rachel will do a live spark reading for you. How fun is this going to be? This is amazing. Any other final thoughts for us as we start this journey of resourcing our creativity?

Well, I kind of loved how we began with you calling out that making this series is a creative act, and in building it right now. I am running up into my own creative process. I just.. I guess that's how I want to end, is by saying all of us are artists. It takes a very expansive definition of what creativity is. It's not just, you know, drawing portraits or writing songs or whatever. It's you. it's really about recognizing what your special gift is in this world, and then doing it on purpose in this great creativity project. I am just another human creating as well, and that's what this is, it's very special. It's very special that this series is both to help people access their creativity, and it is an expression of creativity.

Amy Lynn Durham: Yeah, it's going to be incredible. I can feel it. I already love the magic and the cover we created, the music that's going to be in the show, your beautiful butterfly wall that you've created, and for me it was when I started working with you, and discussing with you, and interviewing you, and these conversations we've had, it was this deeper understanding of the human vitality that comes from resourcing our creativity, and not only being able to innovate with these amazing gifts that we might have inside of us, yeah, but also to problem solve when we feel life is really hard. That was a big aha moment for me with Musy and with your Spark, was I seen it with people that are so depleted and feel like their life force is so low that they don't know what to do, and resourcing their creativity actually was the answer, yeah, going on a mission for, for whatever they were depleted in was the answer to resource them back up to where now they can see hope, they can see possibility, they can see choice, and so I'm just really excited to see where this series takes us, and everybody else listening. I mean, we want to hear what you're experiencing as you move through this mini series with us. Rachel, thank you so much for bringing the Spark sessions to life, and for helping all of us resource our creativity. Can't wait to see how the series forms and shapes up. I'll be following right along with everyone else.

Thank you for having me, Amy. And I am so excited to share this with your listeners.

Thank you so much for joining me for this month's Spark session. Download Musy to take the creativity assessment and send me your Spark for a chance to get your spark interpreted by me on an upcoming episode. Visit Rachel lefron.com for more info on all things creativity. And until next time, keep giving your creativity every last thing it needs.