There is so much noise coming at us from just about everywhere. It feels like everyone wants your attention, even if only to get your attention. For your creative business, well meaning people and businesses want you to use their product or service to take your business higher. Each is the solution you seek and offers you the path forward. Maybe.
And you can get lost in the mental masturbation of figuring it all out. At a certain point though, you just have to dance. Perhaps you can dance better tomorrow (and hopefully you will), but that is tomorrow. Today, you have to just be where you are, out of your head, out your heart and just feel it (ht David Gray). When you are always picking at the edges, sometimes you forget that the whole point is to be fully in it.
Giving yourself permission to be fully in it though requires that you be vulnerable, that you are on the right stage to give your performance the best chance to shine. These are two voices that you have to hold in your head simultaneously and you have to distinguish the two not just to yourself but to clients, employees, colleagues alike. On the one hand, you speak as an artist, the one who sees the world your clients so desperately wishes to inhabit for themselves. You share your world so theirs is transformed in the effort.
On the other hand, you speak as a business in order for the artist to thrive. It is not the same voice and one does not justify the other, despite their inexorable connection. No, each voice is its own glory if you permit them to be. The beauty of “and this is how we do it.” is sadly lost on so many creative business owners. What it has become is this battle of ego, a power struggle where, too often, you are (sometimes literally) stealing what you need to do your work. To those who would teach the art of the con, shame on all of you. And make no mistake, if you are just trying to figure out how to get a client to say yes without regard for the implications of the yes, you are engaging in manipulation (or worse) and, in the end, no-one will win. Not you, your client or, least of all, your work. Compromise is the death of creativity.
Instead, set about earning permission to do the next thing. Then the next and the next after that until you are done. It means you have to know all of the necessary “nexts” and why they are nexts. It means you have to know what happens if the “next” is delayed or does not happen. It means you have to lay out the beauty of the map for all to enjoy with the perils of the cliffs front and center. Use your business voice with integrity and intent and joy that you heretofore have only given your art.
Confidence. So easy to say, “be confident”. However, if you have never used the voice or have no idea that you are, in fact, using two voices, it is very hard to be confident. Worse, if you use the voices of others that are not authentic to your own, you will also be hard pressed to feel your own power. Nope. The beauty of your business voice is that it is your own. Go to work on that every single day no matter the noise. The rest will take care of itself.
