A Different Perspective

The article this week is inspired by a chat I had with a fellow creative, self-employed person. It’s all about work and how we view it. As a creative person we can find it hard to adjust to our creative jobs on many different levels. The two main symptoms are where the person feels that being paid for something they love doing is fraudulent, and where the person becomes a workaholic because they just can’t get let up on the drive to be perfect. Sometimes there’s a convoluted mix of both of these issues. These issues are often deep seated and can sometimes be detrimental to our overall success. Basically though, most of this comes down to our personal definition of success and what it means to us.

Today I invite you to see it from a different perspective, and work on defining your meaning of success in your career and life. I am confident that this will help a lot on your way to achieving your ultimate goal. Our perceptions can be changed to work better for us.

The Encarta Dictionary definition of success is:

• The achievement of something planned or attempted
• Impressive achievement, especially the attainment of fame, wealth or power
  

Does this ring true with you? Of course it does - it does with me too. But, what distorts the path of success is how the prospect of being successful sits with us emotionally, physically, mentally, spiritually and environmentally.

Here lies and exercise for us – to do some serious thinking and balancing of our ideas of success. Write down on a big piece of paper these 5 life element headings - Physical, Mental, Emotional, Environmental and Spiritual. Under each heading, write down a list of words or sentences that describe the effect that success would have or does have on that area of your life. When you have done this, have a good look at what you have written. The aim is to have a good balance of things – and mostly positive. You may however discover some imbalances and negative effects. These will need to be dealt with.

I strongly believe we can find answers to any arising issues ourselves, but we may need to enlist the help of family, friends and even a coach to overcome any problems.

I know I have only touched on this subject, but a different perspective is all I wanted to prompt in you. From here I know you can go forward and make progress and realise that fighting with yourself is disadvantageous to your success. Hold on to the fact that even at rest your contribution is undiminished – your creative works still exist, and if you’re a professional, your work is still out there working for you all the time.

Next time, in 2 weeks, I'll be talking about Being Resourceful. In the meantime, feel free to comment, and or share your experiences.

Above painting: Creation Continues 1 © 2008 Deborah Eileen Burrow

Overcoming Avoidance

Creative Avoidance is a normal part of the creative person’s life. It presents itself in many ways, and until we get to know ourselves well in the creative process, we may not recognise it very well as it can be quite subtle! Mostly though, we can identify our avoidance tactics by realising that we haven’t got on with our project as we planned and we can’t see a good reason why.

But it’s ok because once we are aware of our tactics, we can choose to say no to them, and get on with our plan. By the way, these tactics can range from re-sharpening your entire colour pencil set to taking up a job you said you’d never do!

This main thing to remember is that avoidance in creativity exists, and we should allow it to exist because from time to time you will be able to analyse it to find out what exactly you are avoiding. That reason could be anything from boredom to a particularly difficult problem. Once the self awareness is switched on, you can take steps to resolve the avoidance issue. Things that help are:

• Patience with yourself
• Allowing, not forcing the project to grow
• Nurturing your creative side
• Keeping attentive to your environment
• Keeping in touch with other creative people
• Understanding your personal concept of success
• Allowing yourself free time
• Walking through the experience
• Feeling the fear and doing it anyway
  

Whatever happens, be resourceful so that you can find solutions to problems at every stage. Often the life of a creative person can be isolating and it’s important to remain connected to the community of your speciality. Remember, most of all, we all have the answers to our difficulties at our fingertips and it’s up to us to choose the path of solution. Working SMART (previous blog) will help you to self-coach your way to the answers and method to achieve your goal.

Good luck, and I'll see you in 2 weeks, where we'll tackle a tricky subject - the perception of success.