What Matters

Life is a choice.  We decide it all.  Yes, things happen to us, horrible, wonderful and everything in between.  Our reaction, our pro-action, however, is all ours.  Integrity is staying true to the choice and respecting the choice of another.  We take people as they are, not as we wish them to be.  Light on the shadows no matter how painful is always a good thing.  And we all bring our shadows to dinner, myself very much included.

Creative businesses are in the happy business.  Be it a dress, an event, a home, a meal, a picture, or a drawing (virtual or actual), the point is to celebrate a moment.  Your art and your creative business exist to serve your client’s celebration of the life they have chosen.  Moments that matter to them enough to hire you to make it magical.  If the moment did not matter, you would not be there.  Period.

That then is YOUR choice – to honor your role in what matters.  Do you honor it with ego?  “I am a fabulous so and so, don’t you know, and you are lucky to have me.”  False humility?  “I cannot believe how lucky I am to be working with you, little old interior designer me.”  Or do you bring yourself, your art and your creative business to the party.  “This is who I am, this is what my art represents, here is how my creative business does it.”  Not like it or lump it, rather I do it this way because I am convicted in the notion that this is the best way for me and my creative business to do what we do.  If you have done your work, you can defend every scintilla of your process as a reflection of your core.  Clients know it when you use “just because” as your reasoning and it never comes free.

Truth just is.  You can judge it however you want to – ugly, beautiful, ironic, painful – does not change it.  So too with how you and your creative business do things.  This is your truth, your choice, your conviction.  No, clients may not like it and wish it were not so.  If you built that truth on arrogance, ego or, worse, illusion, you deserve the pain you will get.  However, if you have taken the time to understand what matters, why your clients would choose you and your creative business as a reflection of what matters to them, then you can align the stars. The alignment may never be linear but you will have earned the right to make it true nonetheless.

Do the work then on why you do what you do.  What would the world look like if you spoke only to those that chose you?  If you did everything in your power to make sure you understood their choice, what they most want to celebrate?  What matters to your clients lives underneath your art, between the words and beyond any one thing.  Honor that you and your art are uniquely capable of giving their choice to them.  Then set out to make your creative business a vessel of the journey and never a means to an end.