Recently, while coaching one of my Self-Help Author’s Crash Course students, I had a revelation. I saw in an instant just how loose and relaxed you have to be in order to become a successful creative business person. Sure, those other business types, the MBA’s, stock market jocks, and corporate biggies can plan and strategize all they want. When they set off to pursue a dream, they make marketing plans and business plans … and they stick to them. They’re amazingly mature and disciplined that way.
But those of us who are artists tend to work by a different set of rules. We bend and flow with our ideas. Impulses and ideas come charging in, riding the steed of inspiration, and we find ourselves changing projects mid-stream or doing fifteen things at once – all of them with sloppy gusto. And then there’s tax time, or inventory time, or marketing time, and we find ourselves scratching our heads in overwhelm.
This is the difference between the creative businessperson and the regular businessperson. If you are an artist of some kind you know what I’m talking about. The part of your brain ordinarily reserved for business has the attention span of a two-year old, often to your detriment. Yet, all is not lost. There are ways to actually be a businesslike creative person – (I wrote about this in the last Joy Letter) -- and one of the keys is learning to relax about it.
I don’t mean relax, as in toss all of your important papers into a shoe box and forget about them. Yes, you do need to be responsible about business and handle the basics. I mean relax, as in make a loose creative business plan that allows for change as your concept opens up and develops. It helps to allow yourself to not know from time to time just what to do next. You want to create a plan that acts not as a strict set of guidelines, but that ebbs and flows along the uncertain path of your dream, guiding you when necessary and retreating when unneeded. (There is a chapter on how to do this in my new book, Living Your Joy.)
For instance, the self-help author I was coaching felt vexed by the fact that he’d spent the last year (and untold thousands of dollars) developing a corporate coaching niche on the Web, only to find out he had a completely unrelated self-help book to write for an unrelated audience. Try as he might, he couldn’t figure out how to reconcile the two. How could he justify all the consulting he received if he just walked away from his site, even though it wasn’t as much of a passion as he thought it would be? And how could he build another platform for his practice from this strange new book project? What was he supposed to do next?
The problem was that he was trying to figure out the path without letting it unfold first. He was assuming that the business plan was correct, as opposed to his all-critical radar and instincts. He was forgetting that great, old golden rule of creating: Go with your gut.
So why do you need to listen to the wisdom of your gut if you’re a creative type? Because this is how you make choices -- out of a combination of sensitivity, emotions and intuition, rather than logic and facts. This access to your emotions is what enriches your work, and makes it so necessary for the rest of the public to respond to. Take away an artist’s emotional infrastructure, and you have no art left, basically.
So this why sometimes the greater wisdom to building your business is to relax, stand back, and watch what unfolds. You don’t necessarily have to know how everything is going to turn out, nor can you. Perhaps the result won’t be one in your mental scripts of how things should turn out. You may even lose money or clients or … god forbid… your business. But you will learn and if you stick with it, you will forge a stronger commitment to accomplishing your dream, this time all the wiser. And you will forgive yourself, because all truly artful businesses are built on successions of mistakes.
Much of the conventional business world operates of formulas – ROI’s and conversion rates, and such. And a working awareness of these tools is certainly valuable to the creative business owner. But the real key to success for creative business people is understanding when to let go of the formulas. Ultimately, it’s a balancing act we’re required to perform. And that’s why relaxing and listening to your gut are the most important things you can do.
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