The Blog
The emotions, actions and thought processes of my creative work.
This is where I share what I’m doing and why, how I’m thrashing out problems and what I’m trying to achieve.
Q2 2021 Review
In my first job, Q2 was the dreaded quarter. For reasons that were never quite pinned down, interest, enquiries and sales bombed during Q2 – which, of course, led to morale dropping and stress levels increasing. My Q2s since then had levelled out, being neither great nor awful, but this year the curse of Q2 came back to bite me. In every conceivable way, this has been one of my worst quarters to date.
But What’s It For?
A few weeks ago at my workshop about time there was an artist who couldn’t find the time to paint. This, as you can imagine, is something of a problem. I suggested that she paint just for an hour with no expectation in order to get back into the habit. “But what would it be for?” she asked, “I can’t just paint without there being a point”. “The point” I said, “is that it’s your life”.
How Reflecting and Realigning Has Shifted My Content Buckets
There are a few things that clients tell me they’re planning to do that always make me cock my head to the side and ask whether that is the most effective use of their time right now. These things are my alarm bells of procrastination. They’re the things that scream of someone fearful of putting their business out there, and therefore busying themselves with Very Important behind the scenes work that no one will ever see and that won’t make any difference. Updating their website is one of these t
When Is The Right Time To Give Up On Something?
I have been asked this question a few times; it pops up in podcast Q&As occasionally. It always twists my heart in my chest. It feels so sad, like watching the last fraying strings of hope give way within someone, watching them fold up their dreams and lock them away and go back to what they were doing before with crestfallen shoulders.
Goals, Intentions and Word Of The Year 2021
This new year is different. This new year there is not the clean break to “start again” that other years have. Of course this is always the case; the ticking over of a digit at the end of the year denotes nothing but our human need to control and measure time. Usually we manage to kid ourselves that the ticking over is meaningful, that it can birth us anew into a whole different world – but this year, with ongoing lockdowns and vaccine rollouts and continuing deaths around the world, it is harder to feel the change in the air.
End Of Year Thoughts 2020
For the last three years I have published an End Of Year Review here. They have always been some of my favourite things to read and my favourite things to write – a chance to share everything that happened behind the scenes that made up the whole year. This year, however, is a little different. This year there are too many untied loose ends, too many still misplaced hopes and too much not processed that it just isn’t the right time to share my usual warts and all review. I did think, though, that I would share some end of year thoughts for 2020 that are arising as I reflect on the changes that I have been making – and I actually think this has worked out better than usual.
One-To-One to One-To-Many (And Back Again?)
At the beginning of this year, one of my main goals was to be “appointment-free” by the end of it. I no longer wanted to do one-to-one work and so my plan for 2020 was to phase it out to the point where my calendar was gloriously empty and all my time was my own. This is something I was very open about and shared the detail of in my newsletter and here on the blog and I got lots of questions about how it was going along the way – so I thought I would sum it all up here. Keep reading for my journey from one-to-one to one-to-many (and back again?).
How to Stay on Course
One of the problems with fulfilment or success being a place you get to or a goal you hit is that once you get there, you can stop. When you hit that financial target or book that client, all the good practices start to slide and you can end up spiralling back down the Inward Attainment Map without really noticing. If we want true fulfilment and enjoyment in our work, it’s something we need to get used to working on little and often, rather than something we do one big push towards. We need to learn how to stay on course.
How To Know What To Do Next
Ever get that feeling of not quite knowing what the next best thing to do is? It might be that you have loads of ideas and can’t decide where to start, or that you know where you want to go but have no clue what to do as a first step. Perhaps you’re overwhelmed with options and can’t find a way through them, even though you feel pretty confident about where you want to go. Either way, building a business really boils down to a series of decisions about how to know what to do next, so getting confident about how to do that makes this whole journey a lot smoother.
How To Stop Overthinking
Ok, I’ll admit that’s quite a clickbait-y title, and I don’t know whether it’s possible to completely stop overthinking. But before you switch tabs feeling short-changed, hear me out. When we have any problem, be it overthinking, low confidence or perfectionism, we want to be able to stop it entirely, overcome it – grind it to dust. The trouble is, that takes a lot of time and a lot of energy – time and energy you’re not spending on your business. The fears aren’t ever going to go away entirely, and while we’re focused on them, our dreams are stagnating. So rather than try to stop overthinking, let’s think about how we can keep going in spite of it.
How to Be More Decisive
Indecision is one of our greatest plagues as business owners. It can exist as a constant small doubt in your chest that has you anxiously seeking out validation, and it can also come in huge waves, dashing your confidence against the rocks. “I just don’t know what to do for the best” is one of the most common struggles I hear, and when indecision sets in we stop, lose momentum, stagnate and, sometimes, give up entirely. In this post, I address that indecision and help you learn how to be more decisive.
The Small Things That Build Your Self-Trust
If you read my Q3 review you will know that this current season of my work is fraught with what I’m calling “opportunities for doubt” and practical pitfalls. With the protracted end of a relationship and the shouldering of all the financial responsibilities, I now need my business to step up for me financially (and probably emotionally too). My trust in myself to actually do this has been tested pretty much as rigorously as it can be the last few weeks.
The “Work Is Hard” Myth
“This is work and work is supposed to be hard”. How many times have you told yourself that over the course of your business? Perhaps substituting hard for painful, or miserable, or just a feeling that it’s not supposed to be fun? It might be something you’ve used to justify not doing a project that you were really excited about, or it might be the reason you agreed to do something your whole body was ringing alarm bells about. It’s work, and work is supposed to be hard.
Find Yourself On The Inward Attainment Map – And Know What To Do Next
When you feel disconnected and don’t know how to get out of the funk in your business, it’s easy to try to work your way out of it by doing whatever trick or “must-do” you stumble upon first. Maybe you decide the way back to falling in love with your business is to start getting really serious about your Instagram photos, or that you will feel more joyful if you create a one-to-many offering.
Q3 2020 Review
When I scroll back through the blog I see it was only a few posts ago that I published the quarterly review of Q2, and that, in itself, is an apt metaphor for Q3: the summer months were personally tumultuous and, as such, I struggled both with creativity and being visible in my business. Let’s get into my Q3 2020 review, shall we?
The Fetishisation Of Implementation
“It’s all meaningless unless you’re taking action”. That might not be the exact quote, but I have certainly said words to that effect numerous times over the years. To some extent, I do still believe it: if you’re just thinking about doing something, you’re not really doing it. In order to have a business, a new product, a change of direction you need to take action rather than plan it for six years. I do, however, think that it’s possible to put too much emphasis on action and implementation – and that I have definitely been doing so. There is a true difference between the fetishisation of implementation and actually doing something.
Q2 2020 Review
Welcome to this review of Q2, or as it will henceforth doubtless be known: the lockdown quarter. It has been three months where life and society have turned on their heads, and, as if to illustrate this perfectly, I write this on a storm-ravaged July day as I recall an April heatwave. In the last three months, the ground has shifted, forever, beneath our feet. We are here at the beginning of the most significant civil rights movement in history; we see the wilful negligence of governments to protect their people. We understand, more than we did at the end of Q1, that there is no normal to get back to.
The Final, Scary Leap: Saying It Out Loud
There is nothing left to say, but to say it out loud. As I hinted at in last week’s post, this is the point where you make the change. You’ve given yourself permission, you’ve contemplated the bigger problem, you’ve planned, you’ve crafted – but the change doesn’t happen until you give it life. It is all theoretical until you nudge your baby bird out of the nest and let it fly. You have the final, scary leap.
Being Brave and Actually Making a Change
It is one thing to know a change needs to be made, and another to be brave and actually start making the change. The first is an uneasy place to live, but there is a kind of comfort in it. Strangely, the knowing is enough and becomes an excuse – “I know it’s not right, but I’m not ready/too busy/not the right time to do anything about it.” Because taking action and making the change is a fearful place; it risks failure, risks you not knowing what you’re doing, and risks discomfort. Far easier to sit in the knowledge of “something’s not right” than to head out on the quest to rectify it.