Your Toolbox

Your Toolbox

Every craft-person has a toolbox of tools and techniques they use to bring their work to life. You too have a toolbox full of the tools and techniques you’ve picked up over your lifetime that have helped you to shape your life into what it is today.

Your tools are very personal, as are how you use them. You can hear people talk about employing techniques and tools generally, but only you can determine how they will work best with your creations.

Like artists, you must discover the truth of your own vision, and take action through this, using the unique tools you have available.

photo credit: Jeffrey Pot

The Art of Your Business

The Art of Your Business

Creating a business is just as abstract as creating a painting, and while you can go to a million painting classes and learn a thousand difference techniques, what will end up on the canvas depends on you. Knowing how to do something doesn’t makes it special—it’s the art of it, the You in it, that makes it what it is.

The right way to run your business, the art of your business, is learned through experience and in a growing awareness of what you know, what you are good at, and what you can do. It’s through this understanding that you uncover how you want to and ‘should’ do business.

If it was so easy to be great simply by knowing how to do something, wouldn’t there be more great people doing really great things? Knowing how to do something is easy, it’s the art of doing it that’s hard. That takes creation, and it requires a stretching of the mind that can be so uncomfortable many people spend their whole lives avoiding it.

photo credit: Alex L’aventurier

Doing Serious Things Badly

Doing Serious Things Badly

Seriously Bad

THIS IS SERIOUS, my ego screams.

She wants my work to be great. For her, it isn’t enough to create, it’s only worth while if I create something great. For her, it isn’t about quantity, only quality.

She is not content with letting me practice and discover my process. She wants serious results, and she wants them now.

She, my ego, has begun her screaming, and quickly my previously delightful project becomes a source of anxiety. Doubt has set up shop and I find I’m no longer working for the sake of it. I’m no longer happy just being on the field, suddenly I need to run the fastest and the best.

I’m comparing myself to imaginary others and instead of creating, I have now shifted into competing.

Getting bad at being serious

When my ego gets mouthy I am learning to stop giving her my energy. I’m learning that playing with her, whether in tearing myself down, or pumping myself up, is not to my benefit. The solution for me isn’t found in trying to outsmart my ego. My solution is found in stepping out of my ego’s game completely and accepting that I just might suck.

In being open to doing things badly, I am ground myself and slowly find my humility and joy once again.

photo credit: Paul B.