Daily Practice

Change happens.  Fast.  Especially when you truly ready yourself for change.  Until that time, you can work and work and work with very little to show for your (enormous) efforts.  Sort of like a car staying out of alignment and trying to get it to go straight on its own.  You spend as much time protecting against veering as you do actually driving.  However, when Passion, Philosophy, Platform, and, most of all, Process are where they are supposed to be (i.e., in order and ever-present), great things tend to happen.  Volume, profit and opportunity can feel like a tidal wave, hopefully larger than ever expected.  Then a whole new feeling of being overwhelmed takes over.  All at once, your creative business is larger than you.  Its size and scale beyond any one person, yet wholly dependent on your vision.

Nature abhors a vacuum.  As your business grows, you will have the choice to let it or to bring it back into your comfort zone. One way or another your creative business will live the truth you consciously or unconsciously aspire to.  Will you allow employees to act beyond assigned tasks, yet always as a functional part of the core?  Or will you give over your power to employees so you run a glorified talent agency?  Will you throw away your process at the first sign of stress or is it unshakable?  Will the lure of money from the wrong client seduce you into a deal with the devil or will you stay true to yourself, your art, your integrity? As much as a failing business truly sucks, growth without foundation sucks worse. M.C. Hammer anyone?  Field of Dreams is right – if you build it, they will come.  But FOD does not go far enough — you can never stop building.

In so many ways, radical change is the easiest part of your experience as a creative business owner as much as it as an artist.  Yes, there is incredible risk in both endeavors, its just that your intrinsic truth is almost always unbelievably compelling – to you, your clients, employees and colleagues alike.  Daring to be more of you is never as risky (or as hard) as maintaining a façade.  Working the process of change, staying in the minutiae of what the challenges of today set before you, that is hard.  We all want to coast, to say that we have the answer that works and let it ride if things are going well.  Your choice if good enough is good enough.  Just know that setting the stage for what is to come based on what is going well is everything.  Fixing what is broken just gets you back to even.

Ironically, the best way to cement change is to move deeper into the moment.  If you have done the work, seen the results and, hopefully, are reaping the rewards, then what’s next lies in reinforcing what you have built.  For instance, if clients now pay you directly for your artistry (i.e., design fees, session fees, straight payment to commission you as an artist), then where you take that trust next is up to you.  Creating a creative business that will scale demands that you honor what is necessary to deliver on that scale.  So take yourself out to lunch, go to a spa, spend three hours walking by yourself, go on a dream vacation.  Push yourself beyond the boundaries of your own limitations and honor all that is possible.  Then you can better set about the business of taking your creative business beyond its own boundaries with mindfulness.  Mindfulness is the solid foundation of your own integrity as an artist translated into your creative business.  It is a daily practice.  No, you cannot build Rome in a day, but if every day is a profitable day (in every sense of the word), you will get Rome.