Sara is the founder and facilitator of S. Francis Creative, a creative mentorship and consultancy company for creatives, leaders, and entrepreneurs.

Since its founding in October 2019, she’s served over 300 clients globally to master their creative process and performance.

Currently, she runs a suite of online offerings that have assisted leaders and creatives in America, Europe, Brazil, Australia, and beyond.

Her specialty? Using the power of play, mindfulness practice, and flow-state cultivation. She’s discovered this takes her clients beyond just optimizing their system of productivity and into adaptable, confident, and innovative creative mastery.

Read more on:

• Sara’s values and passions
• Creative coaching & how to work in flow
• Favorite rituals to embody creative living

Who are you and where are you from? 

Hi! I’m Sara Rose Francis – a witchy, artistic, seasonal-living lover. I live in Toronto, Canada, running my own business as a full-time creative coach and consultant for women entrepreneurs.

How has your upbringing shaped who you are today and what you believe in? What do you currently care most about? 

I grew up with a rich inner world as an only child, which has continued my love of solitude, writing, and cultivating my spiritual abilities as a co-creator of my reality in adulthood. I’ve also had some coping mechanisms tag along into my early adulthood, especially hyper-independence and hypervigilant observational skills. This was a weirdly huge asset when starting my own business fresh out of college at 23 years old.

But now, a lot of these more extreme patterns of belief have reached the end of their usefulness. I’ve been exploring what the opposite end of these spectrums feels like, to develop more balance within myself…allowing more support from others, discerning where I can release control, and truly trusting my environment and the people around me. Because of this, what I currently care most about is relationships, and who I am within them.

What called you into your line of work within Business, Flow, and Creativity? How did it feel then and now? 

I fell into this line of work by “accident” when I started my first business as a marketing consultant, and quickly realized two things:

1) The majority of my marketing meetings with women founders, creatives, and small business owners were spent talking more about their inner world: procrastination, perfectionism, self-doubt, and other creative blocks they were having that impacted their workflows.

2) At the same time, in my own business, I could fight and push my way to success (on paper) as a creative entrepreneur, but that wasn’t what I wanted. It didn’t ultimately give me the freedom and fulfillment.

Instead, I wanted a way of experiencing my creative process, my art, and my business.

To live and work in flow.

This was also what my clients were craving to experience in their workflows and kept trying to get at in our meetings. Big light-bulb moment. I started focusing exclusively on this specialization of coaching and consulting – the intersection between personal and creative development –  and 4 years later, I’m still deepening and evolving that coaching practice as my full-time job.

In the beginning, my mind couldn’t believe I would be able to support myself by starting my own business, and on top of that, no one would pay for “flow-state coaching”. But on another layer of my inner landscape, I had a steady knowing that this was the outlet my energy was being asked to pour into without limiting myself through logic.

Now, it feels like this creation’s original outlet (running the business exclusively on Instagram) was just the beginning. This vocation is so much bigger than one offering, industry, or model of business. It feels like it has so much to teach me over a lifetime, and I’m in a place where I am not rushing or waiting. It feels inevitable to devote to it and allow it to happen (in the most relaxing sense of those words).

Are there any new or favorite rituals you currently can’t live without?

• Keeping my phone in a cupboard when I don’t actively need it for something

• The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

• Forest bathing multiple times a week, no matter how “busy” I am

• Sauna and cold-plunge sessions

• Training in Muay Thai

• Reading way more books for fun than for learning

• Creating micro bucket lists for each season with activities, recipes, books, and films/shows that ground me in the feeling of that season

Do you have any tips or advice for those interested in living and embodying a creative life, but don’t know where to start? 

You’re already creating every day simply by living: the way you breathe, how you move and speak, and what you do with your time are all acts of creation.

So, stop trying to figure out where to start. Not knowing where to start is the perfect place to begin engaging with creativity, because true creation comes from newness and nothingness.

Instead of trying to figure it out, play more.

Play is the language that all of Creation speaks in, so start with whatever makes you feel playful rather than what feels like you should do to try and make proper, good art. I don’t even want my art to be “good”, I want it to be honest. That motto itself has freed me up to create for the sake of experiencing it and experiencing myself, like I felt as a little kid. Your little kid self knows exactly how to embody.

MORE ABOUT SARA ROSE FRANCIS

Sara has assisted both new and seasoned business owners in growing their sales, client bases, and creative output with consistency by focusing on the “soft skill” development that fuels sustainable creation like building clients’ capacity to leverage their time rather than working longer hours, and finding personalized pathways to more ease and enjoyment in their workflows.

She’s also guided dozens of other clients working as employees or helping organizations in fields that require significant creative output. Under this mentorship and consultancy, she’s witnessed these clients become the leading force in their team atmosphere: driving innovative project strategies, higher volume and quality of sales, as well as improved client delivery and relationships.

Alongside her international online offerings, she’s hosted her first 2 multi-day creative retreats locally in 2023.

Connect with Sara on socials: Instagram | LinkedIn | YouTube