You have time.
When you're pushing and the response isn't coming, remember your own well of magic.
This piece explores the risk of buying into templates of success in an ever-changing market and how this impacts your creativity, work, and potential. It provides supportive and power-shifting reminders and prompts that you can lean into when you feel like you can never keep up with market shifts and life’s uncertainties and when you desire to step into more potent, aligned, confident ways of working in the world.
What follows is some unexpected advice from an online business coach about why most creative entrepreneurs should stop listening to business advice and get serious about mindset work and putting into practice some serious self-belief strategies instead.
Sidebar before we dive in: in all honesty, I wouldn’t call myself an online business coach anymore because I could give zero f’s about funnels and ad spend and list building and offer stacking. That’s the meat and potatoes of what’s being dished out these days, and in my opinion, it’s the wrong place to start, and too many creatives are placing too much weight in those things as promises of success.
I’ll tell you why.
Because when we begin by looking out into the world at what has been done before us we immediately create unconscious rules and prisons for our creativity and the work that is trying to emerge from us, telling it: “but you have to make it into a top ten lists tip that is pinterest-optimized and do the same thing every sunday for a year.” or something along those lines.
Which is the exact opposite of what creativity wants to do. Creativity wants to be exactly what it is and damn the rules. Creativity knows that everything can work and there is no one format of success or single mold you must adhere to in order to succeed.
Creativity is also cyclical and alive and will not conform to your will no matter how hard you try.
So when you try to follow a template or are too influence-able based on what other people preach worked for them (and after seeing the inside of those businesses, I’m skeptical. They are usually inflating the results and downplaying the sacrifice. They are sales people at the end of the day and it pays them, not you, to make you want what they have), you accidentally start to believe there are ceilings to what is possible. And when things in your life change - for example, you are a writer and your computer breaks down, or you are a mom and suddenly no longer have childcare during your meeting times, or you are a coach and you get offered a job at a resort but it means you have to pause 1:1 clients, or you are a fitness instructor but e-books suddenly become popular and you drop everything to try to make one, or you are a painter and feel ZERO inspiration to paint or people run out of disposable income - and on and on and on - it can be easy to feel both defeated and like you are in a washing machine getting whiplash trying to keep up with what’s going to work for you.
The risk of believing you have to do X in order to get the result you want: Nothing outside of you will ever be predictably stable. The market WILL shift, your life circumstances WILL change, your technology WILL break, your brain WILL need a break, trends WILL keep emerging. And when, not if, when these things happen you will be left doubting and hustling and making reactive decisions for fear of losing it all if you don’t keep up with the times.
The shift that expands possibilities and soothes all fears: You have to let go of expectation before you can step into possibility.
Every belief or story has an impact on you emotionally and physically. Believing those stories (rather than the story itself) that is the real predictor of your confidence and success.
For example:
You can build a business without being charismatic on camera and energetically able to “own the room”
You can build a business that gives you a lifestyle that you love without pushing to 7-figures and year-over-year growth.
You can build a business without it being one of your hobbies. Your hobbies can just be your hobbies.
You can build a business and keep your 9-5 if both give you energy. Or work part-time and do your business part-time, or seasonally, or take a sabbatical to hone your craft before ever offering your work for sale.
You can promote your business quietly and let the quality of your work speak the loudest to the people who want to listen. You don’t have to perform for attention.
You can just share what you love and make a bit of money from it without making it a business.
You can have a business that doesn’t push your clients to make life-changing moves or remortgage their house just to afford working with you. You can offer simple things at an affordable rate that doesn’t make you nervous and it doesn’t mean you have self-worth wounds about money. And maybe that is life changing because we are all so conditioned to more is more, when oftentimes, less is more.
Your art doesn’t need to be museum-quality to add value. Authenticity adds value.
You can not care about starting a business and you can keep your gifts to yourself if that keeps your sparkle brightest.
In essence, you can do whatever works for you and choose to believe that every version of reality is possible. If there is ANYTHING you are buying into that is making you feel like you can’t - let it go. You can.
When you can see and release all the stories and beliefs that are trapping you — mentally, energetically, and physically you become clear and free to actually move WITH your creativity and intuitive impulses which in turn UNLOCKS your best ideas and most potent delivery. You become free to shift and evolve and move around and LEAD in your space and in your life rather than follow.
So you have to ask yourself:
