We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Paul Springfield. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Paul below.

Paul , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Are you happier as a business owner? Do you sometimes think about what it would be like to just have a regular job?

Yes. And yes.

Both things are true simultaneously and I’ve stopped pretending otherwise.

There are days I genuinely miss the predictability. The paycheck that arrived whether or not I did. The clear boundary between work and not-work. The meetings I complained about that were at least someone else’s problem to run.
Then I remember the phone queue.

The honest answer is that I am not built for someone else’s structure. I know that now. Late diagnosed AuDHD will clarify a lot of things about your history if you let it. What looked like ambition or restlessness or inability to stay in a lane was actually a nervous system rejecting environments it was never designed for.
Owning the lane — all of them, simultaneously — is the only arrangement that has ever made sense for a brain like mine.

Am I happy?
I’m building an apiary on four acres in Clayton County that nobody believes exists. I’m pastoring a community that started on Nextdoor during a pandemic. I’m acting again after years away. I’m advocating for my wife through one of the hardest medical journeys I’ve ever witnessed up close.
None of it pays on a predictable schedule. All of it matters every single day.
That’s not happiness exactly. That’s something more useful than happiness.
That’s purpose.
And no regular job was ever going to give me that.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

The honest answer to “what do you do” has always gotten me in trouble at parties.
I’m Paul Springfield. Actor. Voice artist. Pastor. Beekeeper. Social media strategist. Content creator. Licensed drone pilot. Ham radio operator. ASE certified mechanic. Notary Public. Air Force veteran. And since 2024, a full time clinical advocate for my wife Melody navigating a complex and serious medical journey.

I didn’t build a brand. I built a life. The brand just turned out to be the life.
I came up through military communications, IT, music journalism — interviewing artists most people would recognize — and a decades long background in audio that eventually found its way into voice over work and acting. Late diagnosed AuDHD, which explained a lot about why I thrived in roles that required reading rooms, holding complexity, and performing under pressure while struggling enormously with things neurotypical people find effortless.
The acting wasn’t a midlife crisis. It was a return. Something I’d put down and finally picked back up when I stopped apologizing for wanting it.

With Paul Springfield Products (PSP) I work with small businesses and organizations on social media strategy, content creation, brand development, and the kind of integrated communication work that requires someone who understands the whole picture — not just the post, but the person behind it, the community around it, and the goal underneath it. My clients include established local businesses and nonprofits who need a strategic partner, not just a content vendor. PSP also produces crafts from reclaimed materials.

PSP Beekeeping operates on four acres in Clayton County, Georgia — single source honey and apiary products from a working southside Atlanta homestead that also houses two senior rescue parrots, three dogs, and more projects than any reasonable person would start simultaneously.

Community Center Church is exactly what it sounds like — a community that found itself during a pandemic and decided to keep showing up for each other. Real talk, no church words, real life through the context of the Scriptures. Last week’s conversation covered DEI, food insecurity, racism — the kind of table most churches avoid. We don’t avoid it. We just make sure everyone gets heard first.

What problems do I solve?
For consulting clients — I translate. Between what they want to say and what their audience needs to hear. Between strategy and execution. Between the big picture and the Monday morning post.

For casting — I show up prepared, present, and capable of inhabiting truth under pressure. The life I’m living has given me a range of emotional experience most actors spend decades trying to manufacture.

For the community around CCC and the broader caregiving and ND spaces — I model what it looks like to keep going when the inventory of challenges would justify stopping.

What sets me apart?
I’ve been in the room. Many rooms. Military briefings and casting calls and hospital rounds and church services and beeyards and recording booths and construction sites and seminary classrooms. Boardrooms, governors, senators, and once a president. I don’t perform expertise I don’t have. I bring the actual cross-domain experience of someone who has genuinely lived across industries, communities, and circumstances most people only encounter one at a time.

What am I most proud of?
The patient advocacy resources built in real time during Melody’s care — now used by a significant number of patients navigating similar terrain. That wasn’t a product launch. That was necessity becoming something useful for other people.
And the apiary split we did recently. Less than a week old. Already thriving. All the colonies synchronized their orientation flight times on the same afternoon. Sometimes the work just tells you it’s working.

What do I want potential clients, followers, and collaborators to know?
I’m not the loudest voice in the room. I’m not the most polished presence on the feed. I don’t have a single clean elevator pitch or the buzzwords to echo back. I will get the job done, thoroughly, and will likely say yes a lot more than you may guess! Churches and Actors share a common challenge: it takes each of us, as one, to accomplish anything. I still do student films, and our church is known for showing up for other churches to be extra hands and backs. I live for collaboration and would welcome opportunities!

What I do have is a unique ability to listen. My world filters data — sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and touches — up to 40% more than a non-autistic brain. This gives me the ability to work outside the box, for the box to maximize efficiency and look damn good being a box.

Range. Depth. Genuine cross-domain fluency. A nervous system that processes everything at once and has learned — slowly, expensively, gratefully — to use that as an asset instead of apologizing for it.
And four acres in Clayton County that nobody believes exist.
Come find us on the southside. 🐝

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

2024 arrived and everything shifted. Melody’s health — already complex — began a serious decline. Worsening hypertension. Dialysis since 2020, now becoming complicated. Then cancer. Five hospitalizations in 2025 alone.I became her primary care coordinator, her advocate, and somewhere in those hospital rooms found myself helping train the doctors and nurses caring for her — building resources now used by a significant number of other patients navigating the same impossible terrain.

The acting waited. The bees didn’t care. The church needed its pastor. The clients needed their consultant. Melody needed her husband.All of it. Still. At once.

Here’s what nobody tells you about resilience — it’s not a moment. It’s not a decision point with a clean before and after. It’s a posture. A daily choice to keep saying yes to all of it when the easier answer would be to put some of it down.A brain that couldn’t survive a phone queue is out here keeping colonies alive, keeping a congregation together, keeping a very complicated woman alive and advocated for, and occasionally showing up on camera when the opportunity arrives.It takes how long it takes. You do it all the way.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

I didn’t know I was AuDHD until later in life.

What I did know was that after a decade at a virtual IT company — carrying most of the load, working twice as hard as the expectation, managing an invisible tax on every interaction (phone based company- that means talking to 30-70 people a day)— the day they put me number one on phones AND number one on tickets simultaneously something in my nervous system said that’s it. A comfortable job, reliable income, steady and well planned life.

I didn’t storm out. I didn’t make a scene. I just knew. We were done.
What I didn’t know then was that I’d spent ten years masking — performing neurotypical in a job that rewarded the performance and punished the person underneath it. The burnout wasn’t laziness. It wasn’t ingratitude. It was a brain that had been running in a mode it wasn’t built for, for longer than it should have.

So I left.

I was in seminary at the time and an opportunity presented itself to study for a semester in Israel. Somehow it all worked out perfectly. When I returned home, the reality of income was a very real and present danger. I walked into an extras casting call almost by accident and felt something I’d put away from my younger days come back immediately.
Acting. The thing that requires you to be completely present in your own body, read every person in the room, hold emotional truth under pressure, and perform it live.

For a brain that processes everything at once — that’s not overwhelming. That’s home.
Around the same time I was finishing seminary. A project requirement. A pandemic that made in-person impossible. I thought — why not try Zoom, and make it a real community conversation, not just people from one church. A handful of people showed up. And kept showing up. Community Center Church wasn’t born from a building or a budget or a five year plan. It was born from people saying yes to each other when the world had stopped saying yes to much of anything.
Two of the most socially demanding professions imaginable. Both gutted by the pandemic. Both chosen by a man who couldn’t handle a phone queue.

I just saw a need and stepped up to do what I could do. That is a risk and one many of us need to take more.

The side hustle didn’t become the main career. The side hustles — plural — became the whole life. Social media strategy and consulting under PSP. Beekeeping and honey production. Acting and voice work as Paul Springfield. Pastoring at CCC. All of it simultaneously. No single lane.
I’ve stopped trying to explain that. It just is.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.paulspringfield.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/thepaulspringfield
• Facebook: Paul Springfield, Paul Springfield Products, Community Center Church

Image Credits

Paul Springfield (c)