I have started working through some of the exercises from the book by Lisa Sonora Beam, The Creative Entrepreneur.
The exercises focus on 4 pathways to help design a viable creative business.
Pathway 1: Heart and Meaning looks at how to follow your heart’s desire and creative dreams, while lessening the potential for heartbreak.
Pathway 2: Gifts and Flow reveals how uncovering and using your unique gifts contributes to flow, or less-effortful accomplishment.
Pathway 3: Value and Profitability is about creating a customer-centric business, and how to create and deliver value that people will pay for.
Pathway 4: Tools and Skills presents the vital necessity of developing your business skills and leadership capacities to achieve the results you want in the first 3 areas.
I’ve done the collages and journalling that go with the first two pathways below:
Pathway 1: Heart and Meaning
I’ve always wanted to make a difference, do what I love on my own time table, not have to live according to the demands and expectations of others, explore what moves me and interests me as I am internally led, be noticed for my creativity, have a sense of accomplishment in my work.
My creative dream is to produce visually appealing and conceptually exciting work that communicates to others in an inspirational and thought provoking way, create several bodies of work that explore interesting themes, exhibit work in galleries, collaborate with other artists.
I would continue to learn, sharpen my artistic skills, paint, even if it didn’t pay.
What matters most to me is seeking to reach my potential, growing my latent talents and gifts, helping others explore their creative dreams, continuing my journey in reaching my creative goals.
I value financial security, recognition, helping others, autonomy.
I am most passionate about self-expression, self-realization, meaning, harmony, unification.
I have a burning desire to feel rooted, find my place, live joyfully, feel integrated in body, mind, and spirit. I want to be recognized and financially viable as an artist and mentor/creative coach.
If I was to answer my creative calling and knew I couldn’t fail, I would own a studio, produce work, invite people in, receive recognition and admiration as an artist and creative spirit, help others identify and reach their own creative goals, participate in a creative community that is altruistic and wholistic in nature.
My deepest creative longing is for creativity and leisure to take place at home, unharried; to make art and live a life of richness and meaning.
More than anything else I want to be part of a creative community where I am accepted, participating, producing, contributing.
Pathway 2: Gifts and Flow
What do you do so well you barely exert effort to do it? Spending time alone. Self Inquiry. Self awareness. Writing and journalling. Tying ideas and images together in symbolic, metaphorical ways. Abstract connections. Playful discovery.
What comes naturally or easily to you? Flexibility. Adaptibility. Creative problem solving. Although I love my artwork (drawing/painting) it is really hard work! I do not find that it comes naturally.
What do you get absorbed in for hours? Thinking. Daydreaming. I can get absorbed in a drawing or painting once I get started for 3 and 4 hour blocks of time. (But I need to have structure to get started. Being in school at this moment helps.)
What do you do that feels like rowing against the current? Being organized. Knowing where to start. Getting started. Making money and having financial savvy. Networking.
When are you most in flow? When I enter a project excited. When the project is new or when I return to an older project having taken a break. I have to have rested physically or mentally, need to feel energized instead of exhausted. I am most in flow when I have filled the creative well, when the idea for a piece has perculated for a while and I’m anxious to birth it, cross it off my to do list, when I have a build up of emotional energy. I am in flow sometimes unpredictably, as long as I am working, and work through the times I feel stuck.
What are your unique gifts? I like my sense of color and the ideas I want to express. I see the big picture. I am a unifier and harmonizer of divergent things. I am persevering in pursuing the goals I have identified for myself.
What are the things you are better at than anyone else? Knowing what I want. Making decisions for my own life.
What would I like to stop doing even if I’m good at it? Stop procrastinating. Stop telling yourself you’ll do that later. Stop whittling time away in areas that are not priorities. Take those chunks of time to fill the creative well, take care of my body, reflect/journal, play outdoors, sketch, observe and take note of the things that inspire me. Stop deferring to others by allowing myself to be limited by what I perceive others expect or want from me.
If you were using your creative capacities to the fullest, what would you be doing? I would be financially viable as an artist. I would be recognized, productive, showing and selling work. I would be satisfied with my work; it would remain authentic to my own creative vision.
How are you being underutilized? I am not investing enough time in my work.
