Designing a career
Simon Dixon, co-founder of DixonBaxi posted the following advice:
And it left me flailing on the deck, stunned out of my shoes by the sheer power of it.
The way I coach my clients is through a cocktail of therapy, discussion, connection, ideas, and guidance. Connection not in the sense that I’ll end up best mates with everyone I work with, but in a way that just like my podcasts, I bare my soul to access their inner child, their authentic self, not their job title.
Creativity is directly attached to our personality and story. An extension of self.
You get the best from someone by understanding them enough to remind them of their worth, freeing them from learned doubt and inhibition, destructive inner-dialogue, and dreary prescriptive anti-creativity.
We get vulnerable. We vent frustrations, and we throw dreams, whims, ideas, and silly thoughts around and look at them from many angles. All of this is done within a framework I call ‘The Anatomy of Creativity’ – otherwise, without direction and guardrails, I’d never shut up, and we’d both just die and turn to dust while coughing and spluttering about all the possibilities creativity presents.
But what Simon said. That’s everything.
I mean it. Everything.
In the end, it’s all on us. In career and life. We have to design both. That’s not to say we can control everything. We can’t. Three of the life pillars I get my clients to acknowledge are highlighted in Stutz – a tremendous film about psychotherapist Phil Stutz – and they are:
Pain
Uncertainty
Constant work.
And these never go away. It’s the way of the universe. Everything falling apart, Fight Club style. But acknowledging them and welcoming them into our planning phase, our production processes, and our final execution means we are adaptable, present, and somewhat resilient to what may or may not lie ahead.
After reading Simon’s post, it occurred to me that designing a career and a life is what we do in my coaching, and what I’ve been doing since I set foot in the creative industry.
I use the Japanese philosophical mindset of sei-katsu-sha, which loosely translates to ‘those who live by doing’ - becoming the author of one’s own life.
I’ve done this with varying degrees of awareness.
My first portfolio was a snarling, antagonistic, partisan blast of activism in pen and ink. I did this to ensure I scared off work that didn’t align with my creative desires, and to engage the clients who could give me the stuff I’d give a shit about working on. Since school, I’ve recognised that if I am not passionate about something, I can’t learn or apply myself. It remains the case to this day. It always will. So I set out with intent, designing the career I fancied. I was aware of this.
Champagne and Wax Crayons, my debut book. It’s origin was in freelance frustration, and using the negative emotion spectrum is not a straight forward exercise. It’s bloody confusing and full of doubt and uncertainty.
A blog rant became a rough manuscript because my cathartic release tool – writing – gathered attention. It was real, raw, and resonated with others leading with creativity. I got addicted to the process, the joy of having a voice and connection through it. Suddenly, I was a writer and a published author. Lucky fucker? Well, the luck was being connected to David Woods-Hale, by editor and at the time an illustration client, but the authoring, the designing of my life and career was committing to the work, believing in the story I was telling enough to talk about it, not just lip-service, but glowing as I voiced the magic it made me feel. I was living as a writer, carrying myself with enough self-belief to transmit enough positive energy to hook David’s interest and excitement.
He took that resonance and fought my corner, convincing his superior to offer me a book deal.
I’d had no plans to be a writer. The designing bit was allowing my curiosity to lead because I valued that and trusted it to open the right doors, even if I didn’t know where they were or what opportunity might be behind them. That’s instinct, play, faith in what feels right, and belief in my ability to see the opportunity and my skillset to deliver on it. Fast turnaround responding with the elements that dropped into the folder I shared with the universe, if you will.
Many of my clients lack this self belief or trust in process and play because we live in a world with data pouring our of its arse, and it terrifies people into creative stasis at every level. They disconnect from their instinct, devalue and often demolish their story as they live and die by CVs and track records. Serving the expected, handing the keys to automation.
They await instruction and don’t even put their ideas forward because they already know someone in some department is likely to say no because they know that someone else will never entertain such unpredictability. That’s why burnout, disillusionment, distraction, and ultimately creative self-destruction are rife even among those who we assume live the dream.
It’s my biggest pleasure to see my client’s faces as I remind them that they can design a better way forward by realligning them with their inner child, making them answer to their deathbed selves, and reinstalling the reasons they wanted to create in the first place. I like to identify big dreams and tiny inclinations, blow up the little things sketched in notebooks onto billboard-sized canvases. I love to encourage them to reframe the little jokes shared between friends or to draw with the dirt that’s been festering in the backs of their minds. To begin actively doing, to get sharing it, is to come into possession of a skeleton key that will unlock the door to the exhilarating unknown.
Once I got the sense that coaching was a beautiful fit for me – an empathetic, sensitive, perceptive soul who knows a lot about human needs and creativity – I started to build a home so they might come. First, hundreds of podcasts to build trust and show that my motivations were pure despite my need to ask for money in exchange for my work in a capitalist society. Then public speaking at schools, colleges, universities, businesses, and events. Then another book, The Creative Condition. A degree of risk and uncertainty meant I had to stay attuned to instincts, but this was me. Creativity was by now my life’s passion, and while I adore and continue to make my illustration and art with deep love for the craft, I wanted to put just as much stock in my desire to elevate society’s perception and use of creativity.
I wasn’t making any money, but by designing a scenario where that was possible and would further the cause, I steered things towards a future where I could pay my mortgage and commit to my crusade without having to wait for the economy to collapse. That felt terrifying but also unbelievably enticing.
My coaching clients are often either not making much money – if any at all – from the thing they’d like to become their main work. Or, they’re just not bringing their best version to their roles in companies because they don’t believe something they love so much will be validated in a commercial environment.
Both situations will only change if you design a scenario where they can.
In my case, I invested my own money into a brand, a website, and an infrastructure to visually convey my competency and understanding of what I wanted to bring to people’s lives. Through good copy and visual communication, I made a spider-web, woven from the warm rush this work gave me.
Again, challenges everywhere – imposter syndrome, moments of silly comparison, so much doubt in pricing the work, full-blown financial panic, and lows in which I almost surrendered and ran off, perplexed by what I was even thinking in the first place when I already have a career doing something I love.
But then, through the podcast, some bookings. 6 pilot Pit Stop one-to-one standalone sessions. Each one was thrilling, transformative for the client and me. Then, workshop bookings for agencies and organisations. Positive feedback. Confidence rising. Becoming what I already was inside.
Trust the process, keep doing, feeling – tiny deadlines, holding yourself to account – and compound results start to come. That’s what I tell every client, and every time, things start to change because they’re designing their career again. No massive end goal to overwhelm yourself and miss the signposts along the way. Just one foot in front of the other, going with the flow.
Creativity coach. Writer. Illustrator and artist. All the titles make me smile. I’m whatever I want to be according to what’s in front of me, but, unknowing and knowing in equal measure, I crafted it to be this way.
Whatever you want to do with your creativity, it’s all possible, but just like Simon says, only if you take it by the horns and make it move, feel its movements, trust them, especially when they seem wild and frenzied, and lean in.
Nobody else can do that for you, but I certainly get a lot out of helping you know where to start and how to keep going.
For what this all looks like, pop over to the coaching area. Let’s talk about you.