Fear

I believe in radical change.  Rip the band-aid off.  Find myself in a wholly uncomfortable place.  I do not do it because this is how change has to happen, only because my fear would stop me if I didn’t.  Fear of failure, humiliation, shame, and all of the judgment that comes with standing apart.  And even after the radical change, no matter how positive, I am always trying to find my way back and somehow undo what I have done.  In so many cases, ripping the band-aid off is the easiest part, dealing with the newly hairless, scarred skin, the hardest.

Regardless of how you make changes in your creative business, beware of your fear.  Knowing where we have all been over the last few years, you probably now fall into one of two categories:

The first is that, with fingernails hanging onto the cliff, you continue to function in dysfunction.  Despite being inefficient at what you do – pricing, production, customer service/management – you survive (note: not live) because of the strength of your art and your charm as an artist.  You probably have cut back on everything but didn’t really change how you do things. You might be taking work that doesn’t fit your art, lowering prices, doing what you can to keep things going.  About now, you are probably on the edge of collapse – financial and physical.

To those of you who are in this category, first and foremost, I am so sorry and do so know the depth of the pain you must be in.  Your fear (maybe of function?) has brought you to the precipice.  However, it has also forced you to choose: change or die (your business that is, not you).  Dying might be a necessity, but likely it is a choice.  Many before you have dug themselves out of much worse.  In the face of your fear (and because of it), you now have nothing to lose and everything to gain from changing the way you run your creative business.

The second category includes those of you that have adapted your creative business to the world we live in today.  Some of you have re-focused on what the absolute strength of your art is and let everything else go.  Some of you now outsource everything you can to reduce the risk of the money you generate.  Maybe you have expanded nationally, even internationally.  No matter what steps you have taken, you can probably say that your business today looks almost nothing like what it did two or three years ago.  To the outside world it might look the same, but, to you, it is an entirely different being.

I am not commenting on whether you are financially successful or not, just that you have adapted.  But to you too, I would say, beware of your fear, especially if the real reason you adapted was because your survival instinct was better than your colleagues who did not adapt.  Change is a difficult process at best and old habits do die hard.  Just when you think you have let go of that which can not work for you any more, there it is again. However, the bigger point is that we are still at the beginning of the seismic shift in how our world operates and what works for you today probably will not tomorrow.  If you can continue your commitment to change, opportunity will also continue to present itself to you and your creative business.