The Formula to Tap Into Your Inner Artist - When I Grow Up

The Formula to Tap Into Your Inner Artist - When I Grow Up This week, I gave a talk on Tapping Into Your Inner Child for the Reboot Workshop in NYC. I take talks like these super seriously and have a tendency to over-prepare. I write too much and say too much and then scale back back back so my 10-12 minute talk doesnt turn into 20 (You know you use 10 words when you can use 3, right, babe? my husband, the copywriter, tells me often. Yes. Yes I do.). And in scaling back, I noticed the two main tricks on how we can all tap into our inner child: 1) It boils down to what’s fun for you. Really, it’s as simple as that. As adults I think we think something fun easy is cheating, but it’s the exact opposite. As people living in the 21st century (aka The Age of the Internet), we have infinite options on what we wanna work on and how we wanna offer it whether we work for ourselves or not that could be a blessing and a curse. We need to stop listening to “the experts” and start listening to the usually very small, very quiet voice in the back of our heads that’s wondering, “What if I..?” What if I hosted a monthly show on Spreecast and channeled my inner Oprah by interviewing people who have “dream careers”? What if I put my career change exercises into a book and then rewrote them so they all rhyme? (Oh, and do I mention that I rhyme? All the time! It’s sublime. I feel fine.) What if we have our program be hosted by an illustrated Frenchman who loves Judge Judy, only uses animals as modes of transportations, and goes wild for desserts from TGI Fridays? And then what if we co-wrote a song to describe the course and made a music video to promote it? It still blows my mind that Im a published author, a speaker, a successful entrepreneur, and on a freakin Forbes list (!) and I did it all with a heavy dose of silliness, uniquity, enthusiasm, amazeballs and my pink ukulele, Lucille. 10 year old me would be proud. 2) I think Twyla Tharp said it best in The Creative Habit. She said: We all get tripped up in thinking that we have to Create Something Totally New That Nobody Has Seen Before Or Can Identify. I mean, think about the fact that pretty much everything we do falls under a certain genre: pop music is called Pop Music because it’s a certain type of music that’s established because so many people have done it before. That doesn’t make Adele and Justin Timberlake any less amazeballs. Instead, we need to trust that your personal set of skills, strengths, personality traits, passions, education, experience, specialities and likes makes you a unique snowflake and that there’s room for everyone. Ill never forget helping Jess at her very first SURTEX show at the Jacob Javits Center in NYC. There were tons of students walking the show and admiring the art, and one came over to Jess with lots of compliments about her work and lots of complaints about the field itself. But its really hard to break in to surface design, right? Arent there too many people already?, she whined. I expected Jess to give her a Its hard but its worth it! line, but I shoulda known better. Instead, she said, Not at all. Look around. There are rows and rows of artists, and while some of them have similar styles, theres room for us all. Shes so my hero. And if you don’t believe Jess, Google “creative career coach” and open every site that shows up on the first page. You’ll see in a second that each one of us has a different approach and style even though we’re appealing to “the same” group of people and that there is, in fact, room for us all and then some. Having Fun + Releasing the Pressure to Invent + Trusting Your Uniquity + Making the 10 Year Old You Proud = Tapping Into Your Inner Child (and living your authentic, purpose, declaration-filled life). (I love when math works out like that.)