From Hustle to Flow: My Artist’s Way Experiment, Part 1

How does someone go from the corporate world to fully embracing life as an artist? I can only speak for myself and this is my backstory.

In this initial kick-off to my miniseries "From Hustle to Flow: My Artist’s Way Experiment," I peel back the curtain on how I got into staffing & HR work in the first place, what made me good at it, and why I ultimately walked away from the corporate burnout.

But this isn’t just about me. This is also about you.

Because here’s the deal: if you’re still clinging to the idea that creativity is optional—that it’s only for “artists” with paint under their nails—you’re setting yourself up to fail in the modern economy. The people who thrive now are the ones who can pivot, innovate, and create. Doesn't matter if you're an accountant, a doctor, a carpenter, a barista, etc. 

Whether you’re in business, tech, HR, or something that doesn’t even have a label yet, creativity isn’t a luxury. It’s survival.

In this miniseries, I’ll share my journey through Julia Cameron's book The Artist’s Way and show how unlocking creativity isn’t just about making art—it’s about reclaiming your life.

Links:

https://www.amazon.com/Artists-Way-25th-Anniversary/dp/0143129252 

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Decoding the Unicorn is live on Amazon! Check it out: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DSCS5PZT

Transcript

 Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Creativity, Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way, HR departments, AI and robots, job market, economic changes, staffing, freelancing, writing, Decoding the Unicorn, career transition, job satisfaction, financial stress, co-creation.

Welcome to the Causey Consulting Podcast. You can find us online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com, and now here's your host, Sara Causey. 

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In today's episode, I want to kick off a mini series that I intend to do for several episodes into the future, around Julia Cameron's book The Artist's Way. In some respects, it's kind of like a Bible for creatives. I have not read it before. I would every so often see something on YouTube or hear somebody talking about it, and I would think, one of these days, I need to read that. And it just hit me on a particular day I saw it yet again, popping up in somebody else's YouTube video, and this lady who was talking about it is not a painter, a sculptor. And I thought this is just getting a little bit too coincidental. I think it's time to buy a copy of that book, and I'm so glad that I did. Now, if you're listening to this and you're thinking, okay, but Sara, I'm not a painter, a sculptor, a poet. Am I gonna get anything out of this little mini series that you're doing, yes, because we all need creativity. Think about what's going on in the economy and what's going on in the job market right now. You know, I've said before, if you're not extra, if you're trying to be basic, you're going to be left behind. If you're not improving your craft, you're screwed. We are really living in strange times. It's kind of like the blessing, may you live in interesting times? Well, I think we do. You've got to be able to pivot. It does not matter if you are an accountant, a lawyer, a doctor, if you work for yourself, if you work for somebody else, if you're not a good, creative problem solver. If you can't remain nimble and adapt, you're in bad shape, especially when we look at the pace at which technology is developing, the pace at which change is happening. So I don't want you to roll your eyes and say, Well, I'm not a painter. I'm not going to get anything out of this. This is just all about the artsy fartsy stuff? No, it isn't. It isn't. Creativity is important regardless of what walk of life you find yourself in. Now, before I get into lessons that I am learning from doing Julia's exercises, I really want to kick off this series by providing some backstory, ie, why I have recently left staffing, recruiting and HR work behind how I got started in it, why it was always a bit like feeling that I was a left foot stuck inside a right shoe, etc. Anytime that I record an episode that has anything to do with quitting, it gets a lot of downloads because people are so desperately unhappy at work, and I really want to address some of those issues in this episode. So get a cup of hot tea, get a soda pop, get some water, whatever it is that you prefer to settle in with. And let's have this discussion.

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I've been pretty vocal in saying that I think HR departments are rapidly becoming less and less human. They used to be called the personnel office, and I wouldn't be surprised if we don't see a trend of going back in that direction, because I just think that HR is going to be less and less human and more and more AI and robotic, and I am already seeing that play out in real time, hearing stories and seeing companies where 80% of the humans are laid off and they're not being replaced by other humans. It's not a matter of we overstaffed during the pandemic. Now we need to course correct. I hear those stories a lot about the tech sector, but when I look at HR departments, that's not what's going on. By and large, people are seeing that AI can do these jobs of human beings so much faster, and they're replacing the people with bits of AI and robots. So you have 20% human in human resources, and then 80% increasingly, it's becoming bots and bits of AI program. Now we can sit around and we can lament that, and this is something that I see a lot with. Creatives on LinkedIn, whether you're talking about photographers, graphic designers, artists, actors, people that do voiceover work and so on, AI is the devil. You should not be using AI for your headshots. You shouldn't be using AI for graphic design. If you are in Canva and you're making graphics, you're the devil. Everybody can tell it's not as good. And I'm like, Y'all sound pitiful. You know, nobody else is going to be that blunt about it. I will. Y'all sound salty, you sound bitter, and you sound like people that are getting left behind, and instead of realizing that you need to make changes, you need to adapt in order to survive, you're just lamenting the culture, and you're lamenting technology, lamenting society. I have had experiences with flesh and blood, human photographers that did terrible jobs, and I've had human photographers that were great. I've had aI headshots that look like crap, and I've had aI headshots that turned out beautiful, that I was totally and completely satisfied with. It just depends. But when we look at the price, if you go to a human photographer who charges five or $600 for your session, and the photos look like poo poo, and you can't use any of them. It's smarts. If you pay 50 bucks for some AI headshots, and you get four or five of them that are usable, maybe the rest are garbage and look goofy, but there's four or five of them that are usable that's a much better value. It's financially a better value. We're talking about inflation, hyperinflation, the Trump tariffs. It's this is not a time when John and Jane Q Public are just flush with cash, churning and burning, doing great in spite of whatever bull crap you might be hearing in the mainstream media. People have to make their dollars stretch a lot farther, and if somebody needs a headshot and an AI program, can give them one for 10 or 20 bucks. That looks decent. That's probably the direction they're going to go in. I know that this may sound counterintuitive, like, well, you're talking about creatives, and you're a creative now yourself. Why are you lambasting the industry. I'm not I'm telling you that we all have to be nimble, and we're going to have to use our creativity in other directions. Because if you sit back and say, All right, well, HR is becoming 80% robot, 20% human, I guess I will try to land in the 20% of humans, and hope it's going to all be okay. Maybe you get there, maybe you don't, but you're playing a dangerous game. My thought in the matter now, I always say, I don't give you advice, I don't tell you what to do. I opine for your entertainment only, and that's it. You have to make your own decisions for yourself. The decision that I came to is, I will not just sit and slowly go broke. My profits ever since 2021 which was the grand year of FOMO YOLO and pure insanity in the real estate market, in housing, in the job market. Whoo. Ever since all of that insanity fizzled out, my profits had been steadily declining. It was like 2020 was okay. 2021 was freaking insane. And then every year since then, my profits had been going down slowly at first and then rapidly. It's kind of like how economists will sometimes warn that things happen slowly until they happen very fast. And then by then, who you're in a pickle. And I thought, you know, I don't want to live my life that way. I don't want to sit and slowly go broke and then look around and say, well, maybe I can somehow be in the 20% of humans that stay in the human resources department. I wasn't that passionate about it, hashtag, real talk, and I see some of the people that are still in the industry fighting for clout, fighting for notoriety, and it just strikes me as people jockeying for the best deck chair on the Titanic. I know that sounds cynical and judgmental. I am an INFJ, after all, it's just how I apprised the situation from where I'm sitting. Maybe somebody else has a more optimistic view of the industry, and you're welcome to tune in and listen to them. I'm just giving you the facts as I see them from my perspective. So my back story here is that I got pulled into the industry in an unplanned way. I had been working at a company as a Jill of all trades for about five years, and I like to tell people that I was happy there until I wasn't, but that's not accurate. I thought that myself for a long time, but in its own way, it was a sort of cover story that I was telling myself. The reality is, I was terribly bored. One of the reasons why whenever somebody would. Up by my desk and say, Hey, do you want to learn how to whatever? I would always say, Yes. One of the reasons was because I didn't want to be tossed out during the Great Recession. I wanted to have some job security. The other reason is I would get so bored you can only write the same report. You can only write the same sentence so many times before you feel like your eyeballs are going to turn into goo and run out of your head. So I learned other things. I learned how to do AutoCAD and to do drafting. I even learned how to go out to the shop and operate a manual mill and lathe. So there were times that I could take a part or a component from somebody's sketch on a piece of notebook paper, or even sometimes on a napkin, turn it into an AutoCAD drawing with the correct specifications, and then go out to the shop and fabricate it on the mill and lathe. That, to me, was wicked cool, because it was creation. I wasn't it was, it was artistry in its own way. I wasn't stuck at a cubicle writing the same sentence about the same report about the same oil and gas components, over and over again, ad nauseam, ad infinitum. I could actually get up. I could move around. I could see something go from an idea on a piece of paper to a formalized sketch and a drafting program to an actual physical part that I had made with my own hands. I loved that, but my gosh, there were times that that job would just drag, and I also was frequently roped into working overtime. And I have mixed feelings about that. It was like I needed the money, but at the same time, God, I just wanted to get out of there, so I lived for nights, weekends and vacation. When I had the opportunity to get out. The company that I went to, it was not a good place. I was miserable there, and I applied for a job that was being advertised through a staffing agency. The long story short is that when I interviewed, thinking that they were going to send me out for another interview at this company with a drafting gig, they decided to keep me internally. I could talk the talk. I knew engineering departments. I knew how to also interact with people that were coming more from the blue collar shop world. I just I knew that industry very well, and so they kept me and my first few weeks to first few months on the job were rough. I felt so so out of place. I had a lot of buyer's remorse, so to speak. I was like, I don't think I should have done this. I wanted to go back into more of a quiet drafting room, like sitting with the lights off at the computer drawing and messing around in a program. I did not want to be as exposed the bullpen environment. Oh, my God, so horrendous. If you've never worked in one, get down right now and thank whatever higher power you believe in. If you're an atheist, then thank yourself. But thank somebody because, oh, I hated it. Loud people, loud talkers, bright fluorescent lighting, if you're an introvert or an HSP, and you're recoiling at that image, yes, just 1000 times, yes, I hated it. And I'm like, oh god, I've made a mistake. I shouldn't have come here. And I was looking on the down low. I was looking for other opportunities. But I had been through this upheaval. I'd been at a company where I'd worked for five years, that looks good. It looks stable. I went someplace else for a few weeks left there. Started changing my career by getting into staffing work. And it's like people would look at that and go, ah, you've been making a little bit too many mistakes here. Now we don't trust you. It can't be that something's wrong with the jobs. It must be that something's wrong with you, and we still hear that narrative. Now, job hopping has become much more socially acceptable. I really feel like the young millennials and the Gen Z ers have kicked the door down on that and said, No, we're not going to buy into that bull crap. If we want to leave, we're just going to leave. But back in my day, you know, as a Gen Xer, it was frowned on you needed to get somewhere and stay. You were expected, for whatever reason, the holy grail was one year. You were expected to tough it out at a hell hole job for at least one year before you could leave. Otherwise it would look bad. And that was my game plan. I will stay here for a year to avoid looking bad on a resume, and then I will figure out my next move along. About the nine month point when I was there, I finally got some good training, and the light bulbs started to go off. I realized why I hadn't been very successful, and I really started. To use what I consider to be an introvert superpower of listening, Active Listening, paying attention to what the other person is saying, and using good intuition, hearing what's being said, but then also reading between the lines to understand what's not being said. And one of the things that differentiated me from some of my colleagues, was that I didn't have to do backfills. It was rare for somebody to squirrel out on a job that I had placed them in. It happened a few times here and there over the years, but it was rare. I just was not placing people that got in and was like, oh my god, this is a total misalignment. I can't believe this, for the most part. Knock on wood, pat myself on the back. I really did a good job of matchmaking, and I put on golden handcuffs. I started making much better money, and I felt trapped. So I still didn't like the job, I still didn't enjoy the environment that I was in, but I did enjoy the money. And I think sometimes what we do is when we're making decent money at a job, we kind of use that as a way to placate ourselves, to buy stuff, to consume, to be a consumer, and that becomes like a balm for our wounds. We're not happy. We don't want to be where we are, so we try to buy things as a temporary distraction. It's like, if you're trying to take a baby or a toddler's picture, and you're like, dangling toys in front of them, like, Hey, look at, look at the shiny ball. Look at, look at the plastic rings. Hey, you're kind of doing that to yourself as an adult. At least I can buy these clothes, at least I can buy this car, at least I don't have money troubles right now, you're trying to accentuate the positives in a situation that you probably don't have any business being in in the first place. I decided to freelance because after about five years at this company that I didn't feel like was the greatest environment for me. Personally, other people may have been completely happy. There good on them. I did not like it. I tried self employment for the first time and went splat at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Have talked about that numerous times. I don't want to belabor the point here. Suffice it to say, me trying to have a DIY staffing agency on my own did not go well. I was miserable and broke. I worked constantly and made basically no money. It was horrible. I went back to corporate America with my tail tucked between my legs, and wound up getting escalated and promoted into a branch manager position. So there I was managing a branch for a major chain, and the branch was making like a mill plus every month. So I had some real authority and some real responsibility, and I again, I learned the way that I did things in that job I had for five years where if somebody came by and asked me, Do you want to learn how to do whatever, I always said, Yes, I did a similar thing in that branch manager job, if somebody wanted to teach me how To do something, or if a responsibility just got thrown on me with no instruction, I would do it because I wanted to learn how. And that really helped to pave my way out. It helped me to have enough skills so that when I tried self employment for the second time, I didn't go splat at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. I knew how to do p and L's. I was better at accounting. I was better at the back office stuff, because I've been doing it for somebody else, so it was an easier transition to do it for myself. Now we get into the happiness factor. Money may not be able to buy happiness, but it does help financial worry and financial stress takes such a toll on your life. I've heard Bob Proctor talk about that before. When you get to a point where you're not worried about money all the time, you suddenly have so much more free time and free space in your brain. You're not in basic survival root chakra mode anymore. The other side of that coin, though, is if you're making your money in a way that's detestable to you, that's going on in a continuous loop in your brain. I don't like this. I'm not happy here. I'd rather be somewhere else. And I had more and more of those days as my freelancing career wore on and the profits were getting lower and lower. I thought, I just don't want to do this. I'm burned out. I'm tired. The culture is changing, and it seemed like candidates were waking up to the reality that hopscotching around the job market looking for. Happiness. You're not going to find it there. They get into a job two months later and be like, well, this place sucks. They rolled out the red carpet. They told me all the right things to get me in the door, but I've now come to the conclusion that it sucks and I don't want to be here. So they change jobs, same thing, two months later, this place sucks. Two months later, this place sucks, and people are trying to make entire careers out of that. What you're not supposed to say is that late stage crony capitalism sucks. It's not you, it's not every individual, John and Jane Q Public, it's the system. Oh, you're not supposed to say that. No, no, no, that's naughty. That's That's naughty language. We don't say that. And I got tired of the whole ball of wax, the whole thing, all of it, and I want it out. But that's going on in my, like, unconscious or subconscious mind. It wasn't an active thought, the active thoughts day by day, where I've got to get this done. I need to do this. I've got to keep this client happy, just normal day to day, running a business drama. That's what was in the forefront of my brain now in July of last year. That was when I started writing, decoding the unicorn, and it whether you want to believe this or not, it's completely up to you. It really and truly was a co creation with dag himself, and that's why the book is good. I always say like it wasn't me. The book's not good because of me. It's good because it was a co creation between myself and DAG, I was the vessel. I was the conduit. I just sat here and and let dag say what he needed to say, and did some editing and finesse the language around. And that's why it's a great book. And that really felt like my calling. I realized this, I want to do this, because when I'm in the zone writing, hours can go by and I don't even notice it. It's not like clock watching at a job, where you feel like an hour has gone by. You look at the clock and it's 10am you feel like an hour's gone by. You just know it has to be 11. And you look at it's 1010, and you're like, oh God, 10 minutes. I feel like I'm in a vortex of doom. But writing for me is more like when Ant Man talks about his time of being trapped in the quantum realm. And they're like, Wow, that must have been a very painful five years for you. And he's like, No, it wasn't. That's the thing. Five years for you is only five hours for me, that's how it feels when I'm writing. I can look at the clock and at seven o'clock and I'm going, Okay, that's cool. I look again and it's 10. I'm like, oh my god, did I really sit here doing writing and research for three hours? I feel like I was in a Thanos blip. Three freaking hours just went by. That never would happen for me doing HR and staffing work. There were days when the when, when time went by quickly because I was just so busy I'd have to cram a sandwich down my throat, and I was running pillar to post and but that's different from being in a creative zone, and I felt like I owed more to myself than burnout. I wanted to do something that I felt was lighting me up, that was making a difference in the world. Don't send hate mail. I'm not saying that HR and staffing work don't make a difference in the world. I'm saying that for me personally, I felt like I had something else to offer besides doing those things. And I'm so glad that I listened to that pull. It reminds me a lot of vivid and pretty woman when she tells Edward, you've changed, you've changed me, you've changed things, and now you can't change back. That's how I feel about writing. It's how I feel about DAG. It's how I feel about CO creating. Once you let that genie out of the bottle. You don't want to go back. You feel like whatever this is, whatever this magic, this alchemy, whatever it is, I want some more of that. I don't want to sit at a desk and feel like I'm just hustling for dollars. And I'm dealing with clients where I have to hold my nose to get through the entire assignment. I'm dealing with candidates that flake. There were times where I might have 10 phone interviews scheduled and only two people showed up. Now that's ghosting to another level, folks like, my time is too valuable. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to play games with people forget it like I just I wasn't put on this earth to do that. I wasn't put on this earth to get stood up. I'm not for that. No. Thank you. So that is the back story in a nutshell that I am coming to Julia Cameron's book with. In future episodes, I'll get into some of the. Assignments that she recommends, and what I have learned about myself, because I always say, if I'm going through something somebody else is whether they find this episode The day that it drops, or they find it five years in the future, makes no difference. Somebody else is meant to hear it. Otherwise I wouldn't be giving birth to it. It wouldn't be hitting the airwaves. I was just sick and tired of being unhappy. I didn't want to do this anymore. I didn't want to hustle. I didn't want to scrounge. I felt like a beggar or a dumpster diver, and I realized, no, no, I don't feel like that's in alignment with God's plan. I don't feel like that's in alignment with what the universe or my higher self wants for me. I think I will just stop doing the things making me miserable and lean into the things that are making me happy. Stay tuned. We will get into this, this situation, these exercises, these recommendations that Julia has as we go down this road together, stay safe, stay sane, and I will see you in the next episode.

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