The Unexpected Mentor

Dan here! If you have ever heard the expression that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, you will understand what happened with our first-ever live episode of the  Unexpected Mentor. What you are about to listen to is a somewhat off-the-cuff conversation that often veers from the subject at hand.  It was a fun hour, and something we will try again. I think you will be enterta...

Dan and Emily together here! (Emily typing) We just took this Thursday morning to eat a load of bread raccoon-style and listen to this episode on the big speakers in the Art Boutiki. We set out at the beginning of this episode to talk about joy, but as is often the case with us we meandered about and took some time to talk about the emotional necessities of creativity and the power we hold over ou...

From Dan: While it was not part of the plan, this episode about having a family while working in the creative world is coming out a few days before Father’s Day (in 2025, or whatever stardate equivalent if you are reading this from some ancient looking device after the collapse of humanity... which seems right around the corner). Being a father was not something I wanted for myself, nor did I have...

Hi! Emily here! A few months after this episode was recorded, tax season came around and I had to file my taxes for the first time as a person who had made real money from her creative business. I was so freaked out about doing something wrong that I big-brain-smartly waited until the literal day before the filing deadline to even start. Dan, being the dad-type that he is, saw my obvious panic and...

Hi from Dan Vado... Listening to this episode the night before its release, what stands out to me is that I was surprised by how much Emily had remembered from the previous weeks of work. It gave me the feeling that there was something here worth listening to. You'll hear Emily recite parts of what I call my "origin story" and even now I can hear how much she seemed to care about the lessons of my...

Em here! I called Dan this morning to tell him how nervous I was about this episode because we attempt to tackle so much in this short 30 minutes. We move from the idea of having a creative process to applying that process toward writing about identity to the use of identity as a pathway to creative genuineness... and all of the ways that telling a "genuine story" has shown up as a guiding light t...

Hiya! Emily again. Episode three. Fear of screwing up. Back in November when we recorded these first few episodes, I was so excited about the vision for this project that I would often go home and edit our long conversations down to a rough-cut episode just a day or two after recording. It became a ritual for Dan and I to sit around a laptop and listen to it together the next time we met and discu...

Dan Vado here, welcome to the second episode of The Unexpected Mentor. I’m assuming you are here because you listened to and found something interesting in the first episode. As Emily mentioned in the previous episode notes, I was (at the time of this recording) involved mainly because I was trading my time for some help with my music venue's social media. I discovered that deep inside the person...

Emily here. Truly, honestly, thanks for tuning in. This podcast means a lot to us. This episode was our proof of concept. Neither of us were convinced at the time of recording this that the other party would have anything of value to say. At the time, I think Dan was just hoping to get some free social media consultation and I was certainly hoping to bring more exposure to my newly published book....

On The Unexpected Mentor, unlikely friends Dan Vado and Emily Parent attempt to sort out the truth of what it means to live – and attempt to make a living – as an authentic, independent artist.