Stretching Your Creative Identity
How do you view yourself as a creative? How do you see your creative work? These are not easy questions to answer. But regardless of whether you can put it into words or not, how you view yourself have wide-ranging effects on your creative work.
From our creative habits, to the kind of work we create, to how we present ourselves online, your creative identity plays a big role in shaping your creative life. It will put up boundaries for what feels possible for you, and it will affect what you feel comfortable doing.
So at times, you might find that your identity, in fact, is working against you. That it has started to feel limiting, like an old skin, and that it might be time to stretch it. This is what happened to me during the summer, and this is what I want to talk about in this post.
My identity shifting during my 6 month leap
It was back in June that I first realised that my creative identity was changing. I was two months into my 6 month leap to take my business full-time, and I had hit my messy middle. I was trying to figure out why I felt so incredibly uncomfortable sending out pitches to podcasts and magazines. I wanted to do this, to make my reach a bit wider, get my name out there and grow my business. It was something I’d had on my to do lists for years, and always procrastinated on. Earlier, it hadn’t been so very important, so I’d let myself off the hook. “Next month”, I had said for three years.
But there I was, working full-time in my business with a goal to grow it to something sustainable, and I couldn’t keep letting myself off that hook. So I sat down to journal about it. What I uncovered was this: I didn’t fully take myself seriously. In my own little bubble online, on my own website and on my accounts, I felt safe. But beyond… that was different. If I showed up as a creative coach on some podcast about creativity, I would be presented alongside other people who I saw as much more “legit”. Clearly, I had some kind of imposter syndrome going on there.
But where did it stem from? This struggle to fully take myself and my work seriously? When I dug a little deeper, I uncovered that it very much reflected how I had seen myself up until that point. Until very recently, I had run my business one day a week and on weekends. I had only been coaching for a little over a year. My work was born out of years of blogging, and that’s how I had seen myself: as a blogger who had just started a business.
Once I saw that this had been my identity, I started seeing it everywhere. I saw it in my Instagram bio and the photos I posted. When sending off a pitch, I saw it in the whole design of my website. I saw it in how I thought about the future and how I approached my work.
But I saw something more. I saw that my whole business leap was also a leap towards a different identity. It came partly from a longing to take my work seriously, to see myself as a full-time creative coach and business owner.
So there I was, on one side a past identity that had started to feel limiting and not really true any more, and on the other side an identity I wanted to step into.
When I had realised that I was on this journey between two identities, it was easier to keep stepping towards the one I wanted. I asked myself: what would look differently if I saw myself as the full-time creative coach I actually am? What would I do differently? The answers to those questions mostly looked like small shifts (like actually sending those pitches), but it also lead to a complete redesign of my website.
Things like that - labels, designs and descriptions - it can feel like they wouldn’t matter very much. But they do. Just like the clothes we wear and the items we surround ourselves with, they say something about who we are. And if we’re carrying around an old identity, it’s hard to move on without shifting those things as well.
How your identity shapes your creative life
If you see yourself as an amateur, you will show up as an amateur. There is nothing wrong with being an amateur, of course, I see myself as an amateur in many crafts (like drawing and sewing). But if you aspire to be something more, an amateur identity can keep you in that camp a little longer than you have to.
Imagine two writers - one who sees herself as an amateur, and one who sees herself as an inexperienced but dedicated writer. How would they be different? The amateur might write when inspiration strikes, maybe abandoning stories after a few pages and go long stretches of time without writing. She’ll expect her writing to not be very good, and if she looks into learning more about her craft, it might be free advice found online. If she has an online presence, it might be to connect with other writers and occasionally post some of her writing.
The inexperienced but dedicated writer on the other hand, she might have a writing habit she sticks to every week. She’ll have writing projects she works on consistently. She’ll want her writing to get good, and she’ll put in the work to improve, reading books, taking courses or working with a coach. Maybe she has a website where she writes about her writing, or offer her services as a freelance writer. She might send short stories to journals and gather rejection letters in her drawer.
These are two very different creative lives. Notice that nothing here is said about the skill of the two writers - they might be the same. But I think you’ll agree with me that the inexperienced and dedicated writer will have a much higher chance of improving her writing and getting a project done. Soon, her skills will surpass the amateur’s.
Looking at these two writers from the outside, people might say the amateur is just lazy. She doesn’t care very much. She doesn’t have the disciple. She might even be thinking this herself. But that’s just how it looks from the surface. In reality, there’s always so much more that affects our creative lives, and our identity is one of them.
Stretching towards the identity you want
So let’s say you are that amateur writer, but you want to see yourself rather as an inexperienced but dedicated writer? How do you make that shift? Do you just force yourself to believe it, do you fake it ‘til you make it?
There are loads of people online who will tell you to show up as a pro even if you don’t feel like one. Business owners just starting out will be told to have the most confident website for your business. Why not, right?
Well, here’s the thing. If you try to stretch yourself too far, you’ll end up feeling inauthentic. Imagine the writer who feels like an amateur starting an Instagram account giving writing advice and marketing herself as a pro freelance writer. She’d feel pretty awkward about it, right? Like a fraud. Likely, she might be able to keep it up for a while but eventually the urge to hide will take over and she’ll stop posting. Stop marketing herself. And she’ll still feel like that - an amateur.
What she wants to do is to make a smaller leap. The inexperienced but dedicated writer will feel like a much more realistic identity to stretch for. So first, identify an identity that feels like a slight stretch but still attainable. Like the next step on a longer journey towards something cool like “published author”.
When you know the identity you’re stretching for, ask yourself what that version of you would be doing. Perhaps the first thing the amateur writer would do is to try out a writing habit, because that’s something a dedicated writer would do. Or take a writing course. Or try to stick with a project for a month. Or get help from a coach to shift her writing life and work on a project.
When you do things like this, you’re showing to yourself that you actually can be that person. I’ve seen this many times with my coaching clients. They may feel quite inadequate when we start working together, but as they’re implementing things like new habits, as they’re making progress in their projects… their identity starts to change. They see that they, in fact, might have become that creative person they wanted to be.
Having spent a couple of months working full-time as a creative coach has undoubtedly helped me immensely in embracing that identity. Had I kept going part time, I would probably still struggle to take my work fully seriously. And it would have been reflected in how I show up, how I approach my work, and in extension, how others see me. It would have kept me with the identity of a blogger who had just started a business for much longer.
Sometimes we don’t see how we view ourselves until we realise the alternative. We don’t realise that we’re holding onto an identity that keeps us smaller than we want to be. So I’d like to ask you… could you view yourself differently? What might a small shift in your creative identity look like, towards the creative human you want to be? And finally, what would that version of you do? Sometimes the doing have to come first, and the identity will follow.
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