The Thriving Creative

Raise your hand if your kids have caught the entrepreneurial bug from you! Was it a lemonade stand? Dog-walking service? My kids have definitely tried out a few ventures, but their most recent one was selling...are your ready for it? Crystals-AKA the white sparkly rocks we find on our neighborhood walks. And as precious as these "rocks" were to my kids, they made a few blunders in the process of developing their strategy to market and sell their product. I share this story on the show today because I see many creatives struggling with the same sorts of challenges when it comes to deciding what you are going to sell!

Perhaps you are just in the beginning stages of building your business. Or maybe you were a brick and mortar business and now you have to shift to the online space. Or maybe you have a great product, but you just need to figure out how to make consistent income selling that thing. Wherever you are in your business journey, I have some practical steps for you to take to identify the unstoppable offer you need to create for your people!

During this season of Covid 19 and beyond how can we thrive in our mental health? On today's Mental Health Monday we talk about using block scheduling to prioritize different types of energy in our lives. Whether you're navigating working from home for the first time or working from home with new challenges and distractions let's look at the rituals that will support us.

If the words "bookkeeping" and "accounting" make you want to hide or change the subject, today's episode is for you. I'm not going to beat around the bush. If you are a freelancer, you are an entrepreneur and it's important that you understand your responsibility when it comes to your finances and paying taxes. But today's guest, Diana Torres is with me to dispel some of that doom and gloom.

Diana shares some super practical tips to make bookkeeping something you can stay on top of in just twenty minutes a month. Diana offers done-for-you services or can work with you one on one so you can learn to take care of your books all on your own.

So if you're ready to stop DI-hacking your books and praying you have all your receipts somewhere at tax time, listen in!

Though I always try to provide my listeners with timeless insight, tips, and tools, today's episode comes to you at a very specific moment in time. We are in the middle of a pandemic.

We are in the middle of figuring out a temporary, yet new normal with a discouraging economy since no part of our lives can really carry on as normal. We are scrambling to become homeschooling parents, trying to adjust to less income, trying to stay healthy both mentally and physically, and all of this newness is hard.

I am right there with you and asking all of the same questions. We want to know if we will be able to feed our families with a diminished income and we want to know what will even happen tomorrow. And in all of this, I want to invite you to stop running and tell me honestly-how are you?

Join me as I share with you some tips for navigating your complex emotions in these weeks ahead. Plus, you will learn about how you can join a very unique community of support to stay confident about the future of your creative business!

Join the new community HERE! We can't wait to connect with you!

Are you a little weary of the moment conversations shift to topics related to careers-especially YOUR career? If you're an entrepreneur and a creative, it's so easy to be misunderstood by people who work a typical 8-5 job. What I'm learning is that most of the time people's curiosity stems from either a lack of understanding about being a freelancer or jealousy that you could actually be pursuing a passion and get paid for it. Seriously, what nerve you have!

In this episode, I want to help you consider what feelings those types of conversations bring up in you and how you can be intentional about responding to them before that wreak havoc on your mind and heart. I also want to share some helpful ways to respond to those comments or questions that come out a little bit sideways. That way the next time you find yourself in this delightful conversation, you won't have to walk away feeling small. You'll have the tools to practice listening, responding, and NOT internalizing their well-intentioned but utterly uninformed comments or concerns.

Do you have any stories of friends or family who have made comments or been concerned that what you do for a living isn't a "real job"? Have you come up with a perfect response? Come share so we can all benefit.

It all starts with an innocent scroll on your phone. Someone you know as a friend, maybe someone you know in your industry, is winning some way, somehow in business...in just the kind of way you would love to be winning. How do they make it look so easy? What are you missing? Now you've forgotten why you got on your phone in the first place and you suddenly feel like it's time to finish off the tub of ice cream in the freezer.

Do you feel me? I know, because I've been there. I lived it for the first of eight months of starting my online business, and it was miserable. I was totally burnt out and not even turning a profit. Why? Because the only strategy I had was to implement everything everyone else was doing in their business.

The reality is that it happens to all of us. Pretending like you don't play the comparison game isn't honest or realistic. So today I'm going to help you identify what you can do to stop feeling paralyzed and start taking action in ways that propel you in the direction of your own business goals.

Simple Ways to Escape the Comparison Paralysis:

1. Acknowledge that you're stuck in the comparison trap. Remind yourself that you're human so you can begin releasing the power it has on you.
2. Consider how you can learn from someone else's success.
3. Find ways to celebrate the success of others around you.
4. Practice believing in your own success and pair it with an action plan!

Depending on your musical tastes, you might have been a little surprised to see Taylor Swift's name in the episode title. But before you judge, I want you to consider all the powerful mindset encouragement you can find in Taylor's documentary recently released on Netflix. I didn't know much about Taylor Swift as an individual before watching, but I was really impacted by her story and vulnerability. The lessons she's learned as a creative are ones that could also save any other fellow creative a lot of wasted time and heartache. So listen here and then go watch it!

5 Mindset Lessons to Learn from Taylor Swift

• Be aware and confident of where you find your motivation.
• The more you know about your negative mindset habits, the more you can actively change them.
• Know the difference between hard work and destructive work.
• The more you know what your opinions are, the more you can have an impact.
• When we prioritize fun and play, the quality of our work is better.

If you struggle in any of these mindset areas, you would benefit from being part of a really intentional community to integrate a healthy mindset and business strategy! Reach out and let's chat more!

You will not always be a starving artist stuck in a cycle of distraction-at least not if you don't want to. Can you sit with that possibility for a moment? The thing about distractions is that they are inevitable-they are not the enemy. Distractions can actually be a tool that allows us to identify what is going on under the surface. They can show us when we are avoiding pain, fear, overwhelm, burnout, or even overstimulation. Distractions have power. They can release pressure and when we are mindful, distractions can even lead us to our next step.

So my question to you is: are you going to use the fact that you are a creative and perhaps easily distractable as an excuse for not being able to follow through? For not being able to make money in your business? You have a choice. But if you choose to acknowledge the power the distraction has in your life and why it could be surfacing, you won't stay stuck. Join me and my creative community as we practice doing this together!

I have a treat for you on the podcast in the form of a very special thriving creative, Chelsey Rogers. In a past life, she was a banker and even had her MBA, but she painted on the side. With no formal training and after simply posting some of her work on social media, some friends reached out, asking if Chelsey would teach them how to paint like her. What started as a gathering of friends with a smattering of art supplies quickly gained traction as a business! She realized people loved gathering with friends to be creative and she could be the one to guide them! Chelsey travels to unique and hip venues to provide a creative experience that can include acrylic pouring, exploring with ink, or painting your pet!

In this episode, Chelsey assures us that though she was simply following a passion, her business was no overnight success. She shares how she learned the most about teaching from her very first class and how she has tweaked a lot of elements of her business as she's grown. We talk about how she's been able to find ways to establish perfect price points, draw repeat clientele, market successfully, and what priorities she has in place to help her make important business decisions. Chelsey loves what she does because she is getting paid to help people see things differently through experiencing art!

Buy this software. Attend this retreat and this networking event. Show up on social media ____many times a week, and make sure you're going live at least ____ times. Update your website. Offer a freebie. Network online for at least ___ hours a week. Nurture your email list...

I bet you could add a million other tasks to the list. And then we wonder why we are so busy and so burnt out. It all boils down to one money mindset myth: working harder makes you more money. I will tell you that nothing brings me more joy than helping clients break free of feeling pressured to do everything well all the time!

The only way we make more money is when we sell our product or service, right? But selling often hits on our pain points because it causes us to question the value of our time, energy, and talent. I want to drill down and talk about methods by which you make money. Then I want to challenge you to think about all the tasks you do in your business so you can determine which ones are actually generating profit and which ones are only making you busier and more stressed. If you commit to this evaluation process regularly, you will be able to continually eliminate those tasks that only lead to hustle and burnout.