Stress and The High Season

This is the time when most creative businesses are right in the middle of it or coming to the end of the peak season.  Late Spring/Early Summer is just that time of year when creative things happen.  Homes get designed and completed.  Weddings happen.  Photographs are in peak demand.   Regardless of whether it is going to be a good or great year, tis the season.

So how do you handle it? Are you trying to plot the course for the future?  Or are you in head down, get the work done mode?  Somewhere in between?

And what happens when the rush ends?  Do you collapse?  Start to worry about what is coming next (i.e., if there is enough business coming up)?  Obsess over what went wrong in the rush?  Fix everything (or nothing) before the next one comes?

Add to this the stress of our personal lives – for parents of school age children out there – it is end of school madness.  For me, throw in a move to Northern California after a lifetime in NYC and the stress factor goes to the moon.

Four thoughts then on what stress, high season and its effects can mean for your creative business.

1.  It is all bigger than you.  I have had to learn this one the very hard way, control freak that I am.  Sometimes it really is just about chopping wood and carrying water.  Doing great work for the sake of the work and the work alone.  Along the way, note the details – how clients felt, reacted, shared as they moved through your creative process with them.  Sure, what did they not like, but far far more important is what they did.  Under a to-do list that is beyond you, do what matters to you.  Either allow the rest to fade away or have faith that those who desire it most will fill the void.  Nature abhors a vacuum (one of my favorite ideas).  If you simultaneously create the vacuum by knowing your own limitations and refuse to fill it, others will step forward one way or another.  Yeah, so much easier said than done, worth the effort nonetheless.  There is tremendous freedom in acknowledging you need help.  Not just help to do what you no longer have time to do, but help to lift you higher than you ever could on your own.

2.  Create game film.  Nothing gets changed in the middle of a performance.  Tweaks sure.  Substantial change? Never.  Add to it most creative business owner’s memory of what went wrong dwarfing what went right.  The recipe is then to only fix the problems, not celebrate the successes.  Of course, problems need fixing, but only AFTER successes are celebrated.  Not a hint of woo-woo (or, in this case, rah rah) here.  Your creative business gets paid for its successes.  For the most part, clients are rooting for you and are heavily biased to say you did really well.  Who really wants to say that the house you designed sucks? You are in the create happy business after all.  If you truly did create happy for your clients, your work should be to figure out how to do more of THAT first, minimizing the bugaboos second.  We are all really terrible at having a memory if we do not write it down.  The look back filter almost always starts with what could have gone better.  Use your IPad, carry a clipboard, a notebook, hire an assistant, just take notes.  Notice the minutiae, what went right.  When you look back you will be able to see it and work from there.

3.  Strategy matters.  Even if you are in the middle of it all, you always have to come from a place of self-awareness.  You have to know the why of your art and your creative business.  Never forget what you, your art and your creative business stand for.  You can always hone it later, but you can never ever abandon the ethos of your creative business for the sake of getting the job done.  Being overwhelmed is what it is; what it never is is an excuse to do anything other than act with integrity to your art and creative business.

4.  Take a breath.  Perspective demands distance.  You have to leave it alone and shut it down.  I can obsess about the head of a pin and get trapped there too.  We all have to take a proverbial walk to find the road ahead.  Get yourself there however you have to – “I need a break”, “I am exhausted”, “I have earned it.”, “I need time to think.”  When you are there though, leave it all behind.  Just like change never happens during performance, it does not happen during stillness either.  Stillness entertains possibility, not the other way around.  From possibility, you can manifest something other.  To get there though, you have to allow for stillness, a quiet mind that can absorb it all.