Creator Spotlight: Victoria Hines

Introducing Victoria Hines and The Empowered Creatives podcast

Victoria Hines is the insightful host of "The Empowered Creatives” podcast, where she leverages her experience as a creative career coach to help artists and creatives balance their passions with practicality. The podcast features a diverse lineup of guests from various creative industries, discussing both the challenges and joys of living a creative life. Each episode is packed with valuable insights and advice, making this podcast a crucial resource for those looking to navigate the complexities of blending creativity with a sustainable career, all while avoiding burnout.

You can check out her show here: https://www.victoriahines.com/podcast

Tell us about your show!

The Empowered Creatives Podcast is all about finding confidence between hustle and burnout. Listen in as fellow artists, creatives, scientists, and creative business owners dive into the process, science and mystery behind the ultimate question: how do I make a living and live a creative life? After all, you can’t put your life on the backburner in the hopes of making it in your creative career. You also can’t squelch your creative dreams for the sake of making a living. Each week creative career coach Victoria Hines hits the mic (often with a fabulous guest) to talk about how to find your confidence and forge your individual path as a creative.

Why did you start your podcast?

Back in 2020 when I was launching my own business as a creative career coach, I had a business coach essentially dare me to launch a podcast. Since my background was in theater, creating a podcast felt like mixing a new cocktail with all of my old strengths and talents. I was also feeling fairly starved for a creative outlet at that time so decided... why not? That podcast I launched is not the podcast I run today... but it's what gave me the confidence to just put something out there messy. It was a really great lesson in letting go of perfection. The idea behind my current podcast came about after hosting a room on Clubhouse for 6 months on burnout. Throughout the months, over 500 creatives popped in and out of that room and shared their stories and wisdom on burnout and navigating the ups and downs of living a creative life. Although my time on Clubhouse fizzled, the conversations had not. This was a topic that creatives were itching to talk about. We all faced burnout and we all felt the grind of hustle. I wanted to help address the in between - how do we find that balance? Between hustle and burnout? Between creating and making a living? Between all the different facets of ourselves? That's what this podcast is all about.

What's been your biggest challenge?

I'm now producing and hosting this podcast on top of having a full time job in the tech world and running a business. Time is a tight commodity to say the least. For me, the biggest challenge has been figuring out how to delegate the tasks of podcast producing that don't bring me joy. I love finding guests and hosting the conversations. But spending an extra hour every week editing is not my strength. So I hired an editor. Writing show notes and finding key snippets to add to Instagram reels also felt like an area where I was spending time that was not highly valuable. With the huge surge in AI, I thought to myself... wouldn't it be nice to upload the audio into an AI bot and have them write most of the show notes for me? Well turns out my hunch was not wrong which is what brought me to Podium.

How has podcasting impacted your personal and professional life?

The podcast is a huge marketing tool for me and my business. Although I'm not quite at the point where it works as the top of my funnel bringing an audience to me, it does build the trust factor with my audience. Every week, I get to share new insights, wisdom, and advice with my audience. In return, they get to learn more about me. When recording a podcast, it's so easy to just be yourself. There's no video to perform for. You're just talking. That's incredibly powerful and intimate. As a business owner, you quickly learn you cannot attract everyone. Nor do you want to. My podcast brings all the good vibe people to my tribe.

What advice do you have for new podcasters?

Set a date for launch and put your first episode out there... even if it's not perfect. You can spend so much time delaying launch because you don't have the right mic or you aren't sure how to edit or you don't know if you have the right podcast name or art. The learning is in the doing. Since creating a podcast can come with minimal monetary investment up front, the stakes are low. It's better to just put something out there. I'd also highly recommend having a few extra weeks of content ready to go before the publish date looms. It's never fun to try and launch a podcast episode last minute. By having 4-8 weeks of content pre-scheduled, it will give you breathing room to create on your own time.

Anything else you'd like to share with world?

We all need time for unstructured play, intentional rest, and focused work. If you're feeling out of balance, it's highly possible one of these areas has been lacking in your life.

How has Podium improved your workflow?

Not having to write my own show notes from scratch has been a huge game changer! It was always the one area of podcast producing that felt highly tedious. In fact, I initially hired out that part of producing because I didn't want to do it. Looking back, that was a pretty expensive service I was paying for. Having the ability to upload the content I've already created and utilize AI to adapt that content into written formats for different utilization has been huge. It's saving me close to an hour every week.