How to Navigate Anxiety as a Creative Services Provider

Tools, resources, and words of wisdom from your conscious creative guide.

If you’re reading this and identify as a creative service provider, my guess is:

✺ You do what you do because you love your craft, passion, and creative gifts.
✺ You’re grateful to be paid to create.
✺ You’re doing your best to make your clients happy.
✺ You became a creative founder to help your clients make beautiful things.
✺ You didn’t anticipate the stress, anxiety, and pressure that creeps in as you wait for payments, feedback, and edits.
✺ You didn’t go to business school or get trained on how to become a service provider.
✺ You’re figuring it out as you go.
✺ You often doubt yourself when you face client problems, miscommunications, frustrations, or scope creep.

If you saw yourself in any of these, save this for future reference. I know what it’s like—because I’ve been through it too.

If we haven’t met before, I’m Amanda Chase. I’m the Founder of Substance, a platform that empowers female creatives with the tools and resources to create a life and business of more—more alignment, fulfillment, beauty, and joy. We do this through creative services, guidance, coaching, mentorship, and support for conscious entrepreneurs.

I started my entrepreneurial journey in August 2016. Since then, I’ve:

– Built a multi–six-figure business
– Navigated a pandemic, ACL tear and surgery
– Faced unemployment, debt, and SBA loans
– Hired and led a part-time team
– Started (and dissolved) a business
– Started over and built my second company from the ground up

I’ve been through it all. And even now, I still wake up with days filled with dread, anxiety, and pressure.

But if I’ve learned anything over the past 9 years, it’s this: that stress is a signal.
It’s your mind, body, and heart trying to get your attention.
It’s your cue to pause and take inventory of what’s working—and what’s not.

Here’s a quote from the ’90s country classic ‘Time Marches On’ by Tracy Lawrence:

The South moves north
The North moves south
A star is born, a star burns out
The only thing that stays the same is
Everything changes, everything changes

I share that because sometimes, out of nowhere, something just… stops working. And, you have to make some changes.

Here’s what I do to figure out what that something is, reconnect with myself, and begin to change things: