I was, incidentally, mindlessly scrolling on the subway when a clip of Kareem Rahma, the Subway Takes guy, caught my attention.
Kareem talked about how his creative projects took off when he stopped pretending to be something that he wasn’t; always trying to get rich quick instead of just making the things he wanted to make exist.
Since the flop of my Decelerator launch I have been asking these same questions.
Who am I am pretending to be and who am I really?
A CEO? A business woman/girl boss? Something else entirely?
Yesterday I told my husband to leave me alone as I was busy "creating content" and I was only half joking.
This is the part of doing my own thing, running a creative small business for the past 10 years that I absolutely was not prepared for…
How it will hold up a mirror and force you to confront your SELF – how you think and feel about who you are, what you do, your work.
You can look the other way, but only for so long before it starts to bubble-over like an over-fed sourdough starter.
And the funny part is that this type of self reflection isn’t exclusive to failure. It is just as likely to come up when it works, when you achieve the success that you desire.
I 100% agree that running a creative small business requires just as much shadow work and personal development as it does marketing or bookkeeping or any other business-related activity.
That’s the whole point when I say it's never just marketing.
Building a business, especially a personal brand, is going to bring up something existential.
This is exactly what I talked to Taylor Elyse Morrison about on this week’s episode of Personal Business:
Shadow work and building the inner infrastructure required to hold the success and failure of running a creative biz.
Listen to the episode then dive into the companion zine for reflections, resources and tools you can put to use right away.
Then let me know your take – do you 100% agree or disagree?
Until then,