Good morning and welcome back to Creative Parenting Club.
This week on CPC, we’re back with our latest edition of the Creative Parenting Podcast: this time with Sway Clarke, musician-turned-parenting coach and AI guru, who has found new outlets for his creative talents since becoming a father five years ago.
At the end of the last decade, you might have encountered Sway touring in LA, London, or countless other cities throughout the world — today, you’re more likely to find him at the playground, creating educational resources for other parents, and serving on the board at his kids’ preschool.
In between, he’s utilizing his creative and technical skills to help small businesses implement AI in their workflows, while designing videos and courses focused on empowering overwhelmed parents by emphasizing inner work, breaking generational cycles, and fostering resilience via connection and mindfulness.
Sway is a longtime friend of CPC and we had a great time mixing it up on one of those easy midsummer days when the conversation seems to just flow.
In case you haven’t checked out our other latest episode of the Creative Parenting Podcast with writer, executive coach and mother of 10 Danusia Malina-Derben, you can find it here:
Press play up top to listen to this week’s full podcast with Sway (highly encouraged!), or as always you can keep scrolling for the text version below.
[Creative Parenting Club]
Sway Clarke! Thanks for joining us. Let’s start with the basics. Where are you from, and where do you live now?
[Sway Clarke]
I am originally from Toronto, Canada, and I live in Berlin at the moment.
[CPC]
Tell us about your creative journey – how did you get from music to what you’re doing now?
[Sway]
I started out as a musician singing and playing guitar and bands and stuff like that back in Canada. Putting out music and touring.
I got a publishing deal and eventually landed in Berlin where I started to do a lot of songwriting for other artists and then landed my first record deal with Capitol Records and Island Records.
That was about 2014/2015 and I was just traveling around the world doing a lot of touring – between LA and London a lot – and then started writing for a lot of German artists here.
It kind of went on like that until about 2020. In 2020 I started my latest project, which was my project Ricky Deetz with a German artist. When I released that COVID hit and that kind of changed a lot because I was doing a lot of touring previously and we obviously couldn’t tour anymore, and that was also the time when I became a father.
And after that I just didn’t really want to do it anymore actually. The idea of being on tour and missing the first steps, first words and everything like that was really a decision that I had to make and it was actually quite easy.
[CPC]
You’ve taken your creativity in some new directions since then.
[Sway]
That’s right. I fell into the startup world and I started a company called Kayo, which was directed toward helping parents travel with children.
After that, I kind of found that my true interest has always been in the development of children and the development of parents themselves as they have kids. And I figured: hey, I can help people out, hopefully.
Getting back into that has provided me the outlet of making content again and making content is like writing a good song. It’s the same thing.
You got to have hooks, you got to have structure, you got to have, you know, approach, you got to have delivery. Now I’m recording my own content, recording my own videos, doing my own production, doing my own editing, everything from start to finish.
It puts you back in that mode, right? It also puts you back in that artist anxiety mode where you’re like, “Is that gonna be good? Are people gonna like me????”
It feels really good to be back in the space creating again, but it also feels absolutely terrifying at the same time.
[CPC]
What does creativity mean to you?
[Sway]
Creativity is the process and the courage to develop an idea into the world and make it a real thing.
Everybody gets ideas – but we don’t always follow them. Creativity is the ability to pay attention, to respect, to love, to nurture these ideas into fruition.
[CPC]
And what about creativity in your family life?
[Sway]
With my family, I become very monotonous, like very routine. You know, it’s Monday, kids get dressed, and you drive them to the Kita and you go to work for four hours and you pick them up and then you go to the playground or something.
What I’ve actually tried to do lately is stop planning. Rather than having a plan and saying this is what we’re gonna do, maybe picking up my kids and saying, “well what do you want to do?”
And then we may end up just watching the swans or something like that. I think we need more boredom in our family lives. Like, there’s nothing to do so that creativity can actually spark.
[CPC]
How do you structure time for your creative work?
[Sway]
I work a lot of nights. After they go to sleep, I do a lot of night sessions. And my partner and I have pretty established systems – you take the kids Saturday, I’ll take them Sunday kind of thing.
But the hardest part is I hate being away from my kids. Creative processes always take me away from my kids because they take so much time.
[CPC]
How has being a parent changed your relationship to money?
[Sway]
It has made me more anxious. I worry more about money. But it’s also made me more interested. I started doing deep dives into investing, saving, how money works.
And it’s changed how I think about creative work. I used to think: “just make art, money will come.” I don’t believe that anymore.
Now I look for creative opportunities that actually make sense financially.
[CPC]
What’s the biggest challenge you face as a creative parent?
[Sway]
Creative people are emotionally deregulated, you know what I mean? If it works, you’re happy. If not, you’re down, right?
When something’s not working, I’m trying to create something and it’s not working, and then my daughter comes into the room, and she’s just like, “Hey, Dad…”. And then I’m caught up with myself.
The hardest part is empathy. There are times when I have a very hard time emotionally identifying with my children when they need it, rather than like, when it’s okay for me.
Because that’s actually when they need it the most, when they’re deregulated. When they’re acting up. And, this is the time that it’s hardest for me to give it to them.
I’ve had to dig into my own stories, my own childhood, and kind of getting beyond it. But giving empathy to my children is something I’m not really that good at.
[CPC]
What’s something you used to hate hearing from your parents, but now find yourself saying?
[Sway]
Toughen up. And it comes out when I’m like: why are you whining? I’m warming the porridge. Just wait.
But I realized – it’s the same message I got as a kid. Which is that, your experience is minimized. It’s not really important. It’s not really that deep.It’s not really that bad.
And, then, I’m essentially doing the same thing, that I’m pushing their emotions back down. Which, it was told for me to toughen up.
I’m saying it in a different way. But, it’s the same result. And so, this is one of the things that I got from my parents that I’ve just realized that it’s hard.
[CPC]
What’s something you’re proud of in your family life?
[Sway]
Providing my kids with a healthy and engaged father. This is something that I’m incredibly proud of. I really pride myself in the fact that I can show up for my kids and not just be there, but really be involved.
I hate how this sounds, but I take a lot of pride in showing my son how to be a man.
And then I think what I’m really proud of is to set an example for both my kids of what to expect from a partner. Just the idea that I think my partner and I are providing our kids with healthy examples of family relations whether it’s parent-to-parent or parent-to-kid.
It’s like that saying: “do as I say, not as I do”.
I think that’s the funniest thing because kids do the exact opposite. They just do what you do. They don’t do what you say.
So I take a lot of pride in them seeing what I do.
[CPC]
And if you had to guarantee your kids learned just one thing?
[Sway]
Resilience. Just never stop. That’s it.
[CPC]
Any last thoughts for fellow parents?
[Sway]
We’re all trying to do the best we can with the tools we have. You’ve got to find your triggers, understand the things that are making an impact day to day – and have compassion for yourself.
If we want to teach our kids to take care of themselves, we have to do that ourselves.
They have to see it to learn it.
Thanks again to Sway Clarke for this week’s interview.
If you’d like to get in touch with Sway, you can find him on Instagram as well as LinkedIn.
And if you’re a small business or solopreneuer looking for practical ways to implement AI in your company, be sure to check out Sway’s new project Oloxa.ai which is dedicated toward helping business owners save time and money by automating busywork.
