Creative Spirits Unleashed – Details, episodes & analysis

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 deeply courageous in sharing his journey to uncover his full potential. As he said more than once, he wanted to find that edge. If you are someone who has wondered for yourself: what if?, this conversation is for you.

We do get to the “results” of his 1000 day plan in this conversation, and his season ended with an unexpected twist. We get into how he is handling that twist, and what happens next for him, which is really inspiring. And there is even more gold in this conversation as we explored the behind-the-scenes thoughts, feelings and beliefs that Corey navigated as he balanced multiples pressures: the declaration he made to go for it, his training, both mental and physical, his family obligations, his business running a vibrant ski school and even what it is to turn a passion into both a quest and a business. 

Here’s what Corey has to say about himself: Sometimes I still pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming. I have been living my life’s dream since 2009, and it just keeps unfolding in surprising, fulfilling and exciting ways. From my daily activities at the Bum Pass Water Ski Club to my interactions with people all over the world, while coaching or skiing on the pro tour, I aim to stay rooted in the mission that animates my entire career: to spread, foster and promote the three things I hold dear - Peace, Love & Waterskiing.

I hope you enjoy this conversation with Corey Vaughn.

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 month ago. This alone is a daunting task, because that’s a LOT of episodes, and my guests have inspired a lot of wisdom. Encapsulating so much inspiring advice in one single episode might be a bridge too far.
 
Just as I was realizing a retrospective will take more than one episode, I got this message from Stevie: “I saw that you are at the 99th podcast, and I was curious who the 100th podcast was going to be…someone should be interviewing you on your podcast. If you don’t have anyone, I will do it! You should be the 100th guest on your podcast, just so you know.”
 
Without blinking an eye, I jumped on this offer. Stevie was kind enough to send me some questions, and I may be borrowing many of these for future podcast guests.
 
One of the things we talked about in this episode is a glaring insight I’ve gleaned in my look back over the last 100 episodes over five years. What I thought this podcast would be about has taken a slightly different turn. Where I set out to explore issues in balance work and life, I found that instead, the prevailing theme is balance under pressure. It’s a subtle difference in words that is night and day in practice.
 
That means in a few episodes, I will be changing the language at the introduction to reflect today’s reality.
 
In the meantime, enjoy this episode where Stevie interviews me.

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 welcoming pressure as a catalyst is that we no longer allow the end goal to define us. Winning the game is nice, but it’s not the point. The point is the opportunity to cultivate our courage, or perhaps a better word is to unleash our courage.” I’ve even come to call the process of raising the pressure threshold “couraging” because we are building our courage.

From Chapter 17 on Congruence, I like this quote: “Like a tangled ball of roots, Rules wind their way into our guidance system, blocking the pathways to our personal truth. The interference makes it very difficult to find our voice. And here’s the strangest part of all of this. We are not aware that our Rules are interfering. Because all of these Rules have been with us for so long, they feel like a part of us. As they direct us out of our awareness, our Rules feel as if they ARE us.”

This quote sums up Chapter 18 pretty well: “Clarity starts with removing that which does not belong. Whether creating a simple picture for how my day is going to go or a picture for the horse on a trail or a vision for my life, the art of subtraction makes room for what is real and true. I can only afford to remove my protective armor when I’ve come to own my true inner strength and acknowledged my true nature.” 

We are nearing the end of the book! Next week, I’ll share the last two chapters of Dancing the Tightrope. Because I tackled this project Frame by Frame, step by step, it’s actually been fun. Hard to believe I dreaded it!

Welcome to the first podcast of Creative Spirits Unleashed, the podcast for people who want more from life than just work. Our first guest has two encore careers and is a master of work/life balance. Julie Gould is the principal of J. Gould Consulting in Washington, DC, a consulting firm for affordable housing and the genius behind the camera of Bright Eyes Photos, capturing magic moments of your beloved pet. Julie's specialty is capturing the essence of what matters in her every endeavor. Our conversation ranges far and wide, from how to say no to seeing the catch lights in the eye of your pet - or the people in your life.

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 not always showing up in pressure situations the way I would have liked to. It was clear to me that sometimes I could reach for my tools, and other times I had to reach for my rules. Awareness was the difference, but there was something more. For several weeks, I became more and more aware of my awareness. 

It was through this focused attention that I began to see that I “fell off” at different points. Sometimes it was at the level of being committed. Sometimes it was lack of curiosity, or one of the other three layers, which I dive into in the chapters to follow. I revisit the lessons in these five chapters over and again, because they help me fine tune my awareness when I get off track – and the nature of the game is not being perfect all the time. It’s about having lots of ways of getting back on track. 

Speaking of curiosity, this podcast was created because of my budding curiosity to have a different kind of conversation, and you will hear about one of my early podcast guests Warwick Schiller, who has also been on a journey of self-discovery. Chapter fifteen has a special surprise in it.

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 years later, I’m still pleased with how well these two chapters explain the “pressure as a catalyst” approach. However, it’s dang near impossible to understand it if you haven’t experienced it.

The best analogy I’ve come up with is what I call the “fish story.” Fish don’t know they live in water. Water is all they know. On the other hand, dolphins are aware of world of water and of course they are aware of air, since they must surface to breathe. Learning about the unseen forces that impacted the way I dealt with pressure was a little like being a fish who discovered there was a whole different world. In order to break the surface and breathe the air of life., I had to ask myself some tough questions along the way. 

These two chapters break down the distinction between pressure and the thing causing the pressure, and also those tough questions, which I believe apply to anyone seeking the signal of a genuine life amidst the noise of the modern world.

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 earlier in the book, this journey showed me that many of my assumptions about pressure, balance and how to develop mental fitness were upside or backwards. These chapters not only capture some of the stories that helped me see things differently, they also capture exactly what I was seeing in my mental process and how I changed it for the better. 

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 am still BEGINNING to understand just how powerful this mechanism inside of us is if we learn to use it. If there's nothing else I have for you for this podcast, pay attention to that story and see how you can start using it for yourself, because this one is powerful. 

I'm also beginning to find out all the holes in my training and all the things I thought I knew that I didn't really know. Because if there's any distinction, especially around this time of the book, but maybe for the whole book, there is a big difference between knowing something and having the wisdom to know how to use it in the right place and in the right time.

I hope you enjoy these chapters of Dancing the Tightrope. 

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 back and read these chapters several years later. I typically can’t remember what I wrote last week, much less four years ago. In that way, it’s fresh. It’s also a little bit like reading a personal journal. I’m reminded of what I went through. 

I hope you enjoy these chapters – they will keep coming every week until we get through the book, and then my podcasts with guests will resume. 

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 for Dancing the Tightrope started well before the accident that lays the foundation for the book. I was already onto the themes of dealing with fear, adrenaline, pressure and uncertainty. In some ways, I had been bumping up against the glass ceiling of my beliefs; the pivotal fall from the horse offer me a way to shatter those beliefs if I chose to open myself up to seeing things in a new way.

What’s standing out for me in this process of creating an audio version of the book are the pivotal moments, where a seemingly innocuous choice created huge change. The small choice to go trail riding could have just as easily been the choice to give up horseback riding for good. The small choice to call Bruce could have just as easily been something I never got around to doing. 

The choice to go back for a second visit to Bruce was both a mystery and a big damn deal. In the world of the way I had done things up to this point, that second visit would not have happened. Yet it did -  in this new world I was discovering.

Chapter 4 talks about our second visit to Camden to understand what this somewhat strange approach to life, horses and learning to live in nature’s world was all about. Chapter 5 shows you where I began to use what I was learning – somewhat naively at the time. In fact, reading it back now sometimes feels like I’m reading someone else’s story.

In Chapter 5, I’m still deciding if I should ever get back on a horse – something that’s difficult to grasp, given that I’m riding all the time these days. Think about a decision you’ve made that now seems so obvious – or a decision you are grappling with that may someday become obvious. Maybe these chapters will help you sort through the risks and rewards with an improving mindset.