The Business of Creativity

INTRODUCTION I am so happy that you have chosen to pick up this book. I wrote this book to help women like you, and to dispel the myth of the starving artist. If you have ever wanted to have a career in the creative industries, or set up your own creative business, this book was written for you. I have worked in the creative industries for over 24 years as an award winning photojournalist, in advertising, documentaries, book publishing, picture editing, and feature films to name a few! I now run Creative Women International ® supporting women like you to build sustainable creative careers. When I started out the world looked very different to the world we live in today. There were no smart phones, no Facebook or Instagram. Portfolio careers were something alien, but I knew that I didn't want a 9-5 job in an office. The idea of remote working was something only journalists on assignment did. Today I work remotely from my laptop and train creatives in countries like the Ukraine, Brazil and Turkey from my studio via Skype. I have had the pleasure of watching creatives like you build amazing careers, and choose the type of life they want to live. I curated my own career in the way that I wanted it to be, and I know that you can too. When you start to read this book I want you to have a notebook to hand. Put your digital gadgets away and return to paper. The act of opening a page and slowing down, allows your brain to process at a different rate. I believe that it opens up the 'dreaming area' of the brain. This book is about dreaming, believing, and making the life and career that you want. I also want you to look after your mental health, find support, and I'm here to help you make a career that you are proud of, and in for the long run. I'm excited to take this journey with you, and grateful that you have chosen me as your guide. You can find more support at www.CreativeWomenInternational.com 1. CONFIDENCE When I started out on my career path as a young woman, I was terribly shy. I would look at the floor when walking down the street and was constantly underselling myself and the talent I possessed. There wasn’t a huge light bulb moment when I suddenly became confident overnight. It was more a series of trials and errors until I found myself standing in front of a room full of people to deliver a talk and realised that I wasn’t scared. Now don’t get me wrong, I do have many days when I wake up and feel unconfident, but I have worked out tricks and ways of making myself more confident that I want to share with you. Let us start with why we don’t feel confident and work towards how we can fix that. Being unconfident, shy or fearful shouldn’t stop you from creating a career that you love or earning money from your talents. It’s all a matter of how you deal with it and what your goals are. We’ll talk more about that later. When we don’t feel confident we have a flurry of several emotions. We might feel fear, embarrassment that we shouldn’t be there, that we don’t know enough or that we will make a fool of ourselves. These are perfectly natural emotions and it is what we do with them that matters. Women often feel that they are under qualified for certain situations. Having gone to all female schools myself, I know the pressure that is placed on women to study hard and get good grades. We are taught to remember facts and behave. I was one of the ‘good girls’ at school, but I admired those that rocked the boat. Their energy and enthusiasm for making changes to the rigid rules and educational system inspired me. Why were we being told to sit still, learn the facts and not cause trouble? Obviously we don’t want a school full of over opinionated, hormonal teenagers, but those high-spirited girls were onto something. During my career I have worked as a secondary school teacher in inner city London and as a university lecturer, teaching boys and girls and men and women. What I see time and time again is the girls studying hard, making notes and making sure that they have all the bits of paper and information that they need tot get good grades. The boys on the other hand will ask for extra information, will question if there is an opportunity they could be put forward for and will have an opinion in class, but will privately ask me questions afterwards to fill in their knowledge gaps. Now, I am of course making a sweeping generalisation, as there are always exceptions to the rule. What I have noticed though – is that if an opportunity is presented for male and female students to take part in, the male students will say yes and worry about whether they are qualified enough or not. Whereas the women will either turn the opportunity down saying that they aren’t qualified enough, don’t have enough experience, or else they are too scared to try. Having grown up in an all male household, raised by my father and four brothers, I have seen this gung-ho attitude in men throughout my life. My brothers will set themselves up for jobs that push the boundaries of their knowledge and experience. They will learn on the job, or else say yes to opportunities and figure it out afterwards. It can be pretty inspiring to watch. As women, what would happen if we started saying yes to things before we were ready? What if we got grip on our fears and put ourselves forward more often, as an expert, talent or trainer?