What we should be doing in creative business

Spoiler: it’s whatever you want to do. Neither me or anyone else can tell you want you should be doing. Find Your Focus can help you figure out what you really want to be doing.

I’m not sure its possible to avoid comparing ourselves to others. As artists or creatives, we engage with the world through sharing, selling, publishing or exhibiting our creative output. There is always someone or many someones doing ‘better’, being more successful, getting the better jobs or commissions, selling in the right galleries or being featured in the magazines we aspire to be in. 

Managing our feelings about all these things is a constant work in progress. From my 20 years of experience it does get easier to manage those feelings, because you simply won’t get very far in this creative life if you let all that comparison get on top of you. It’s not a matter of ignoring or avoiding the feelings, but instead its one of knowing what you really want to do, where you want to get to for yourself, not in comparison to other people or what other people think you should do. There’s too much should in a creative practice

you should be achieving this by this point in your career

you should be trying harder to sell your stuff

you should be making video content to get higher engagement

you should be happy all the time because you are doing the thing you love

From all my years in making a creative living and supporting others live their best creative lives, I know just how difficult it is to truly know what you want to do, when there is so much SHOULD all around you. It took me years, I wasted a lot of time trying things that I thought I should be doing or that other people thought was the right route for me, all the time wishing, dreaming, of the time when I could do what I actually wanted to do. 

Over many years of wrestling with this challenge, I figured out that I had to bring the stuff I really wanted to be doing (creating textile art inspired by stories of care and connection) to the forefront and drop back on the stuff I thought I should be doing to patchwork together a creative career (which was mainly teaching textiles). There’s a lot more to it than that and my health had a lot to do with the changes I made then, but the key point is that I allowed myself to focus in on what I really wanted to be doing with my life, my days, my hours in the day and my time in the studio. I let that be my guide. If I want to be making work for exhibitions, I needed to be working towards that, not designing cute sewing patterns for magazines. I needed to shift my expectations of what my days look like and I need to shift my understanding of what success means. I had to stop aiming for goals that took me in the direction that worked for other people and aim for goals that took me towards where I wanted to be. I needed to radically revise what ‘success’ looked like, because my version of success was never, could never, be the same as anyone else’s. 

Re-inventing success

To work this out I really paid attention to what I wanted to achieve creatively, not what I wanted, needed, to achieve financially, or what profile I felt I needed to be successful.

I wanted to be making artwork that had meaning

I wanted to be sharing that artwork in publications and exhibitions

I wanted to be sharing with others in community settings

I wanted to feel connected with other creative people 

I wanted to be working with interesting organisations

Knowing, acknowledging what I really want to be doing helped me move towards it. It helped me make decisions about what to say yes to, what to pursue, what to walk (or crawl) away from. 

I started thinking career-long, not just this quarter or year, I started to think big in creative ambition but small in approach. I realise now that I was always drawn to the smaller things, smaller galleries, local community projects, artist groups not the higher profile way of working that I had long felt was what I should be doing. 

So much changed during Covid, we all had to shift and adapt just to survive and thriving was only a dream. This time did actually help me learn to thrive, by enforcing a change of way of working, a change in ambition, a change in approach. One of the things I developed in this time was online working, courses and memberships. Its been a revelation and a joy to work in this way. I had no idea before covid that this was something I could do let alone something that I would relish. One of the first online offerings I created was Gentle Goal Setting, building on a few in-person sessions I had run and the many hours of mentoring I had done with other artists and makers. Right from the start, that course included figuring out your own version of success. I knew what a difference that had made to me and I wanted others to feel that sense of freedom of being clear about why you are doing the things you do. 

Over the last 5 years, that course has grown and blossomed into Find Your Focus. It’s now about more than goals it’s about working out what is right for you in your creative practice and working, gently, kindly, towards that. It’s about understanding your values as a creative person, and how to apply them in real life, about what success really looks like for you, at this time in your life, and how to bring all that into focus. Through the five weeks of the course we create Guiding Lights, rather than goals, beacons of hope and creative ambition to lead us to where we need to be. There’s no ‘finished’ in creative practice, it’s not something you can complete, so goals don’t really work because there’s always a new thing to explore, a new curiosity and connection to unravel. I go through this process every year, but really the guiding lights I created 5 years ago still hold true and just need tweaking each January. 

So if you take part in Find Your Focus this new year, what you learn about yourself, the decisions you make will continue to guide and support you for years to come. 

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The course starts 2nd January and runs for 5 weeks. You can also start later if that suits you better – resources are delivered every week from your start date. It’s £49 and you have access for 12 months so you can catch up if you don’t manage it all in 5 weeks.

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If you are looking for a lighter touch over a longer period, you might like my reflective writing courses which run for 12 weeks each.