How Creative Leaders Build Capacity in a Sociopolitical Hellscape: Structural Self-Care, Boundaries, and Enneagram Pattern Awareness
In this episode of The Creative Impostor (Creativity and Media as Resistance), Andrea Klunder talks with small business coach Leigh Cambre about building leadership capacity during a difficult political moment. Leigh defines resistance as supporting the frontline through boundaries, balance, and structurally designed self-care, especially scheduling “two slots of blob time” each week for judgment-free spontaneity. The conversation uses the Enneagram as a practical tool for identifying over-coping patterns that replicate into business leadership, reframes “follow your passion” advice with a more sustainable money→choices sequence, and explores how compassion and self-knowledge reduce “us vs. them” thinking.
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Show Notes
In this episode of The Creative Impostor with Leigh Cambre, we discuss:
1) Creative leadership is capacity management, not martyrdom
Leigh frames leadership (especially for entrepreneurs) as creating your own existence, choices, and freedom, while protecting capacity through boundaries and self-care.
2) “Resistance” can be indirect: support the people doing frontline work
Leigh recognizes that his zone of genius is not being the frontline voice and instead defines his resistance as supporting those who are on the frontlines through building capacity by coaching boundaries, and balance.
3) Self-care as a system: the “nine non-work slots” + two “blob time” commitments
Self-care is described structurally: split the week into non-work “slots” and dedicate two to unplanned, judgment-free times (“blob time”).
4) The Enneagram as an ethical leadership tool: awareness of over-coping patterns
Leigh positions the Enneagram not as a cute personality test, but as a way to see how you overdo coping strategies and how those patterns replicate into business because “businesses are energetic replicas of its leader.”
5) Sustainable systems start with honest sequencing: money → choices → designed life
Andrea rejects the “follow your passion and the money will follow” cliché advice. Leigh replaces it with a pragmatic order: build a business that brings in money, then design the life/company you want.
6) Audience trust: “lighter” media as relief and regulation in a social media hellscape
Leigh’s social presence is one of the rare accounts that makes me feel lighter and unburdened in this cultural moment, which supports my theory of audience trust: people return to creators who regulate the room rather than escalate it.
7) Media ethics: resisting “us vs. them” narratives through compassion
We try to reconcile the idea that “there is no us and them; there is only us,” even when we vehemently disagree. Leigh connects that to Enneagram as a way to understand others and build compassion rather than demonization.
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On Creativity as Resistance
“Compassion shows up when you finally understand what’s going on underneath the hood for someone else.”
— Leigh Cambre
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Credits
Edwin R. Ruiz – Technical Director
Citation
Klunder, A. (Host). (2026, January 4). Balance, boundaries, and blob time: Enneagram-Based Self-Care as Creative Leadership with Leigh Cambre (Audio podcast episode). In The Creative Impostor. The Creative Impostor Studios.