Lawyer and Small Business Owner

“I have had the pleasure of working with Astrid for over 7 years.  Astrid has been an integral part of my career and her coaching has helped guide me from a junior attorney to the owner of my own small business.  Astrid has a unique ability to identify and highlight your strengths and passions and helps coach you on how …

How to Jumpstart Your Creative Career

If you are wondering how to translate your creativity into a career, be sure to read my article this week in forbes.com Use Your Creativity to Jump Start Your Next Career.  I am honored to be featured in forbes.com and am grateful to Robin Ryan, bestselling author, national speaker and America’s top job search expert who invited me to contribute to …

Mentor & Protogee: Challenges and Opportunities for Women Arts Leaders

OPERA America’s Mentorship Program for Women teams emerging female administrators with established leaders. At the 2019 Backstage Brunch at the National Opera Center, I led a discussion with one of the initial pairs of participants: Stacy Brightman, vice president of education and community engagement at LA Opera, and Mitra Sadeghpour, who was recently appointed education director at Minnesota Opera after …

Creative Success Now: Overcome the Creativity Killers

It has been a busy summer for me! I finished up my book, Creative Success Now, which will be published in a few weeks.  I traveled, did some fun guest teaching and performed at my annual piano retreat in California,  pianoSonoma. It was here that I learned a valuable lesson in what to do when your creative pursuits butt heads with …

Tap into Passion and Purpose: How to Ignite Your Creative Career

This past week, I had the privilege of speaking on Creative Success Now: How to Ignite Your Passion and Purpose for Successful Creative Careers” to students at Yale University. My talk attracted a variety of students who were intrigued about creativity and turning their passion and purpose into a successful career.  These included singers, composers, performers, an aspiring novelist, several …

Percussionist

“Thank you, Astrid! Your coaching really helped me figure out a way to approach the vast new career field [of music production] I was treading into. I was able to frame what I was doing very clearly and keep focused on where I was going with it in a way that was probably the most productive I’ve ever been.” – …

Innovation for Music Entrepreneurs: Get Creative with Implementation

One of the hallmarks of my class at the Yale School of Music, Creating Value Through Innovative Projects, is that students learn by taking action.  My seminar’s focus is how to generate innovative solutions to the most pressing problems in classical music today. Over the course of the past semester, my students worked collaboratively on four different creative projects. Three …

Debunking The Creativity Myths: 4 Reasons Why Creatives Will Thrive in the 21st Century

I love working with creatives to help you achieve success in today’s ever-changing landscape!  I firmly believe that we live in an age where creatives can not only make a living from their creativity but also thrive.  Yet, creativity myths pervade our culture. These myths cast doubt on the importance and sustainability of creativity in the 21st Century. Let’s examine …

Ideation and Incubation: How Music Entrepreneurs Expand and Improve Their Creative Ideas

When we last left the students in my Innovation and Collaboration class at the Yale School of Music, they identified the key problems of their audiences.  The next order of business was to come up with some creative ideas for solving these problems. We entered the phase of creative problem solving known as “ideation” where students have brainstormed using a variety of …