A Different Vibration

No matter how much a butterfly might want to go back to being a caterpillar, it cannot.  A butterfly cannot eat what a caterpillar does, live in the same place or consider being in a cocoon.  Simply, a butterfly has to live a different experience than a caterpillar.  The same holds true for you, your art and your creative business.

Change is incredibly hard.  The process of evolution is exquisitely painful not so much because of who and what the new you represents, but because you cannot live like the old you any longer.  The illusion (delusion?) is that you can always go back to the way you always did it.  Mark everything up instead of charging fees.  Take commissions again.  Move production back in house.  Take and deliver fewer images.  Deliver the disk regardless of whether you actually get to produce an image.  It won’t work.  Why?

You will be in no man’s land – you have changed your vibration and how you are perceived has also changed.  So if you are to backslide all you will do is create confusion – for clients, staff, vendors, colleagues, and you most of all.  And in the confusion will be distrust.  “I do not understand, I thought you only earned money on fees?”  “I thought your image was your art, so why are you just giving it to me now?”  These questions may not be posed directly to you, but they are in the air.  The “new” you will just be proverbial lipstick on a pig when it is anything but.  The irony is, so will the “old” you.  Once you take a stand, are willing to put you, your art and your creative business all the way out there, then you have to live there – warts, fear, glory and all.

Enough with the negative.  The beauty of evolving to a different vibration is all that can and will come to you when you do.  I have seen it enough times in my career to know that aligning your business and your art in your own unique process creates unforeseen and wildly different opportunities.  Preston Bailey designing an art installation in Hong Kong?  Sounds obvious now, but 10 years ago?  A photographer can sell an ottoman, an event designer a hand bag, a graphic designer sunglasses.  When you live at a different vibration, you attract different energies to you and your creative business.  Not altogether better or worse (although hopefully better), just different.

Trying to convince a client, partner, colleague or even yourself that you, your art and creative business should be, could be and will be a butterfly is an incredibly tough challenge when you are still a caterpillar.  However, when you are a butterfly and embrace not only the metamorphosis but live in the transformation, those that see possibilities available only to butterflies will surround you.  There may be those that would want the caterpillar you once were.  The challenge will be to know the difference.  However, the more you are a butterfly the less you will remember that you ever were a caterpillar.