My 2021: The Year I Took My Creative Work Full-Time
What a year it has been. Vast, challenging, pivotal, transformative. It’s difficult to grasp, and even more, explain what a fundamental effect this year has had on me. Who was she, the Elin who entered 2021, filled with fears and hopes? She feels oddly distant, not because I don’t remember her, but because so much has shifted since then.
But let’s go back to her. Let’s go back to the beginning of 2021, and to the Elin who had made a choice that would transform me into the person I am today.
Scared, hopeful and brave
In the end of 2020, I made a decision. I had started my coaching business earlier that year, I was working my day job four days a week, and I was longing to give my creative work more space, time and effort. I could see that the energy I had alongside my day job just wasn’t enough to give my business what it needed to grow, and I was deeply fed up with my job. So in the end of 2020, I decided I would take 6 months leave from work to try to take my business full-time.
Did I trust it would work out? No, I didn’t. Did I trust myself as a business owner? No, I did not. But I knew I needed to start trusting myself, and make decisions as if I trusted myself.
Entering 2021, I made it my yearly goal to grow my creative business, and my word for the year Trust. I remember feeling awkward and uncomfortable about simply having as a goal to grow my business. I thought it meant I said I was worthy of growth, and I still doubted if I was. I look back on that with a smile. I was a blogger, having just started a business, and I was afraid of taking up space.
I knew what I wanted, but I had little confidence. Still, that scared, hopeful version of myself went ahead. And I’m proud of her for it.
Taking the leap
My journey as a full-time creative business owner started in April. From one week to the next, my day to day life flipped upside down. In the first months, I was high on finally living life as I had wanted to, with creativity filling my weeks, working with clients, waking up when I want to in the mornings, and going for walks during the day. But I was also disoriented, I experimented with habits, I was stressed about my 6 months ending, and I struggled with mindset issues.
These struggles, however, forced me to deal with things. Mindsets holding me back simmered to the surface. I was forced to do work that made me uncomfortable, like running marketing campaigns, live workshops and doing outreach work. During the summer, I saw my inflow of clients dry up, I worried more, and after the summer things picked back up again. Throughout my leap, I blogged about the experience and documented many of my insights and the changes I went through.
Towards the end of my leap, I decided to quit my day job. Had they allowed me to come back 2-3 days a week, I would probably have opted for that, for a time at least. But they didn’t, and so I quit. I felt I had enough momentum to keep going, and going back did no longer feel like an option.
Growth inside and outside
My goal this year, and the goal of my leap, was to grow my business. And grow it did. If you were to look at my business from behind the scenes, it’s very clear when I started working full-time. My income has grown quarter by quarter. I’m creating more content, spending more hours on creativity, working with more clients, and my Youtube channel has gone from 137 subscribers to some 1300 subscribers. Everything with my business is still small - but even so it has grown significantly. In that way, my leap worked.
At times during this year, I’ve felt stressed, I’ve worried about money, I’ve been frustrated by the challenges of selling. I’ve wished things would go faster. But looking back, I’m happy with how things have developed. I’ve done so many things for the first time, I’ve learned so much, and things have been moving slowly in the right direction.
Alongside the growth of my business, my confidence has gone through a similar and even more remarkable change. That scared, hopeful blogger who felt uncomfortable at the mere mention of wanting to grow my business… she has become someone who doesn’t flinch at introducing herself as a self-employed creative coach. I grapple with words to describe this change, but it’s deep, fundamental and transformative. I doubt less, I feel more grounded, and I trust myself.
After I ended my 6 month leap, and knew I would keep going full-time for the foreseeable future, I shifted to a more long term perspective in my life, creative work and business. Wanting to work with groups of creatives, and having felt unsettled in launches and the unpredictability of my income, I dug deep and emerged with my new membership community Companions In Creativity at the end of autumn.
With a more long term view, I also picked up my novel manuscript again, and decided that I would give it one more rewrite to see if I can get it published. I started exploring what would keep me energized, aligned and inspired in my day to day, not just in short projects, but in the long term.
The complexity of the real experience
The first blog post I wrote when I stared my leap was one titled Life Is Always Messier Than Our Dreams. That could have been the title to this end of the year review. Not because it has been an overly messy year, but because there is so much we don’t see when we’re dreaming. This is both good and bad - our biggest fears are rarely as scary when we actually face them. But things are also more complicated, take longer, and are less linear. Reality has a sharpness, a level of detail that our dreams lack.
I think many of us creatives sharing our work online has been sold the dream of your own business. Usually it sounds something like this: a blogger or artist did her work out of pure joy. Over time, people flocked to her work and loved it. They started asking her to sell things, so she did, accidentally built a successful business in a couple of months, and lived happily ever after. Maybe it did happen like this for some people. But really, for the most of us, this is not reality.
Coming up on 9 months as a full-time business owner, I feel that I now understand what growing a business looks like. I understand the work I have ahead of me to get my business to a place that is long term sustainable. I feel confident in my work as coach, and I’m at the same time looking forward to going deeper into it. My challenge now isn’t my lack of confidence, it’s in doing the work. I still find marketing quite draining - it’s not my favourite part of running a business. The challenge lies in staying motivated, inspired and supporting myself through the work.
It’s no longer a dream with vague contours. It’s my everyday reality, with less rose tinted glasses, but also with less scary unknowns. It’s more about finding fulfilment in the day to day, to capture inspiration when it comes, and doing this work in my own best way.
I’m more patient now. I can see that a year is not a very long time. For most of us, building a creative business takes years, bit by bit, step by step. Maybe that sounds discouraging. But it doesn’t to me, not anymore. I’m here to stay.
I used to be scared of having my dream taken away from me. That I would fail on business, and not be able to keep going. It’s very similar to the fear I had of writing books - that I wouldn’t be good enough, and wouldn’t be allowed to be an author. Now I can see that my business is mine, and nobody can take it away from me. Maybe I’ll at some point take a side gig for a bit of extra income as I keep growing my business. I’m not ruling that out, nor do I really mind it. I know that my business is there, it’s no longer a dream but a real thing.
Living my vision
For a couple of years now, my “why” has been to live a slow and creative life. For a big part of this year, I have lived that kind of life. I’ve started my days slow with a walk in nature. I’ve created more than any other year of my life. Much of my days are spent creating, thinking about creating, talking about creating, and helping others create. After my weekends being filled with creative work for years, I’m now taking them off to just live life, go on long walks in the forest, spend time with friends and family, go on adventures, read, potter about around the house, and rest.
It’s a good life. Not perfect, not devoid of challenges, tension or bad days. But overall, it’s a life that brings me joy and meaning. As the year draws to its end, I feel that I have spent much of it getting the big foundation of this life in place. I’ve gotten more experience as a coach, I’ve found focus in my work, and with the launch of my membership community, I feel that the big outline of my business has found its shape. I’ve settled into new weekly and daily habits.
Going forward, I feel myself turning from the big brush strokes of life, and towards the smaller things. I think about my vision for my monthly themes in my membership. I think about concepts and exercises to use with my coaching clients. I ponder the cycle of my own work. I explore where I get my joy and energy. I have ideas for a shift I want to make in my videography. I want to try something new in my photography. I’m itching to sink deeper into my work as a creative coach.
It has been a creatively and emotionally turbulent, pivotal year. Now, at the end of it, I feel things settle a bit. And as happy as I am about the changes made and the challenges I’ve faced, I welcome a new normal. I’m ready to relax into the work and life I’ve created this year.
If you are looking to reflect on your 2021, check out my planning guide Four Seasons of Creative Work. It begins with end of the year reflections and it’s what I’ve used in my own review of 2021.
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