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This is my blog archive. My new writing lives on Substack.
The Crossroads Between Security And Freedom
In April, I started my leap. For 6 months I would be on leave from my 9-5 job to try to take my business full-time. The goal was always to turn my creative business from a small side business, to something I could keep doing full-time. But I knew there was a big chance I wouldn’t get all the way in 6 months time.
At the end of summer, a little over a month left of my 6 months, I knew I had to choose. Would I go back to my job, maybe fewer days a week, or would I keep going full-time? Neither option was perfect, and I found myself at a crossroads between security and freedom.
Six Ways My 6 Month Business Leap Changed Me
When I decided to take 6 months off from my day job to try to take my creative business full-time, I thought a lot about how it would change my business. I thought less about how it would change me. Yet as I’m now nearing the end of my leap, I can see that those changes are the most important ones.
In creativity and business alike, your beliefs, identity and mindsets are going to play a huge role in your work. It will affect what you create, how you create and, in extensions, what results you get. So today, I want to tell you about six ways my business leap has changed me, and how that in turn is affecting my creative work and business.
The Scarcity Mindset I Didn’t Know I Had
Impatience is fear, I wrote in my notebook a couple of weeks ago. But it would take another month of being a full-time business owner before I realised that impatience isn’t just fear, it’s scarcity.
Building my business is opening my eyes to just how much of a scarcity mindset I’ve had around my business, and how it’s been limiting the options I see for myself. I’m starting to see that there’s a different way - one of abundance. This is quickly becoming my biggest mindset shift yet of my 6 month business leap. And it’s one that is long overdue.
What To Do When Your Creative Goal Feels Impossible
Recently I had that feeling again. Impossible. My summer vacation was nearing an end much too soon. (How is it that vacations always feel so long when they begin and before you know it they’re over?) I hadn’t made all the progress in my creative work that I had hoped to make. I saw autumn creeping closer. I looked at where I was and where I want to get to, and the road between felt so very long. It was like time was running but I was standing still. How would I ever get there? Impossible.
I think this is a feeling that most creatives deal with now and then, especially if you’re trying to do something for the first time. We can see clearly where we are now, we can dream up a destination but the road in between is fuzzy, perhaps a bit scary and so terribly long. We might as well be trying to fly, that’s how likely a successful outcome feels.
Ridding ourselves of these feelings completely isn’t very likely - it’s human to doubt. What we can do is to learn how to deal with them, when they invariably turn up.
Dealing With Fear Of Failure In My First Month Of Business
I want to tell you a story from my first month of running my creative coaching business. I want to tell it because I know that the fear of failure holds many of us back in our creative lives. It held me back when I started writing my first novel, and I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t dealt with that fear.
In my first month of business, I had another round with that fear, in its new shiny shape: the fear of failing as a creative business owner.
What to do when overwhelm strikes
One of the most common struggles I see creatives having and hear from my clients is overwhelm. Creative work involves to many different skills to learn and so many things to do, and there’s a plethora of advice out there contradicting each other.
Add to that all of your own ideas and inspirations and you have the recipe for a nice and big bout of overwhelm making it really hard to move forward.
When there’s so much to do, where do you even begin?
How learning to trust my intuition has made me a better creative
Some time during my school years, I became someone who relied on logic.
I was just passing into adulthood when I first took the personality test MBTI. The test told me I was a sensor, not an intuitive, and in a way it was probably true. I had been fed the idea that you should not listen to your intuition or gut feeling. It wasn’t to be trusted. It wasn’t logic.
It has taken me a long time to even understand what my intuition is. I’ve been overthinking and second-guessing everything for so long, I had forgotten what it means to trust my intuition.
Getting to work when you’re prone to get stuck pondering
If you make a rough generalization, you can divide people into two camps. You have those who are prone to say hang on, let’s think this through, and those who get’s impatient with the first camp and goes ahead anyway.
Let’s call them ponderers and explorers. You can find them divided up into different roles everywhere. The architects and the builders. The plotters and pantsers. The ones who like strategy games and the ones who like adventure games.
But we can’t always divide up in camps. When doing creative work on your own, you need to be able to wear both hats. And most likely, there’s one mode you’re more comfortable with.
Me, I’m a ponderer.
Ideas that scare the pants off of me and how I approach them
My creative life began in 2016 with a year long challenge: to face my creative fears. If you think that means I’m now fearless, I’ll have to disappoint you. But my fears have changed, and there are new things that scare me now.
In in the end of 2018 when I looked back on the year and set my intention for 2019, one thing stood out to me. There were again ideas I never got around to doing, and just like before it was because they scared me.