Rebel Take-Aways From Creativity Coach Susie deVille

Susie deVille calls herself the Concrete Chiseler in Chief. After talking with her for an hour, I'd say that's underselling it. Here are the things she said that I'm still thinking about.

Stop Trying to Exhale Your Way to Success

Susie's nuclear winter hit all at once: the 2008 market crash, a marriage dissolving, her health unravelling. Her first instinct was to work harder. It didn't work. What she eventually figured out is that most of us are gold medallists at the exhale. We do, we grind, we burn, and then we wonder why we feel like hollow husks. Susie's whole framework starts with the inhale first, literally inspiring yourself with what brings you alive, before you try to build or create or lead anything.

Chisel Off the Concrete With Something Handmade

Susie didn't grow up thinking she was an artist. Her dad was an engineer-artist-entrepreneur and she figured she'd just missed that gene entirely. (Turns out that's a story we tell ourselves, and Susie says she can disprove it in three minutes with a piece of paper.) She started with private sketching lessons, then watercolour, then acrylics and mixed media. The more she made things with her hands, the more she felt giant chunks of concrete cracking and falling away. What was left, she said, was the authentic her.

Find Your Creative Circadian Rhythm

Susie used to get up at five in the morning to write. Then she tried four, and the words came faster. Then she tried three, and she says she could practically take dictation from the universe. She calls it your creative circadian rhythm, the window of the day when your clarity, focus, and imagination are actually firing. It's not the same for everyone. Some people light up at 5 p.m. The point is to find your window and protect it like it's a reservation at the best restaurant in Paris. Which, as it turns out, is also something Susie has strong opinions about.

Do Your Five Minutes of Making Something Every Morning

Susie has a morning ritual that her clients apparently fight her on, and it's the making-something part. A quick sketch, a collage, a French sauce thrown together in the kitchen. Anything that moves your hands into the analogue world and out of the digital one. She describes it as crossing a threshold into an in-between place, uncertain, unidentified, and that's exactly where the interesting thinking lives. Five minutes is enough. You don't need to make a masterpiece. You just need to not be at the wheel for a bit so your soul gets a turn at the mic.

Treat Your Energy Like the Scarce Resource It Actually Is

This is the one that landed hardest for me. Susie's point isn't complicated, but most of us are ignoring it completely. Bold action costs energy. Creative thinking costs energy. Hard conversations, new habits, holding a boundary — all of it draws from the same tank. And most of us are running on fumes and then blaming ourselves for not knowing enough or not hustling hard enough. Susie says the real lever isn't time management. It's energy management. Inspire yourself first, protect your rest, do your daily practices. Then go build things.

Say Yes When All the Arrows Point the Same Direction

Susie's trip to Lisbon started the same way a lot of good decisions start. She kept stumbling across references to it: an interesting artist based there, a mosaic workshop, a random mention here and there. She said she knows enough now to recognise when that's happening and to just book the ticket. She calls it letting serendipity have a chance. It's the same instinct that took her from anthropology to publishing to nonprofits to real estate to a master's degree where a design firm called IDEO blew the top of her head off and redirected her entire life.

Honour What Only You Bring to the Table

Susie's advice for anyone starting their own rebellion is to remember that all the information in the world is out there, and it's genuinely useful, but it's not the thing. The thing is the version of you that's actually aligned and authentic. She frames it like a Joseph Campbell dragon in a cave: you think you're trying to figure out the launch, but really you're figuring out who you are under pressure. Keep a journal, she says. Track what's happening. You're drawing a nautical chart every morning toward your highest and best desires. You can recalibrate it every single day.

If any of this is rattling around in your head the way it's rattling around in mine, catch the full conversation with Susie deVille on The RebelRebel Podcast. She also tells a story about beef cheeks in a copper pot at the oldest café in Paris that will make you want to book a flight immediately. Don't say I didn't warn you.