🙋🏼‍♀️ Dearest you,

Ever been so stuck in a creative process you don’t know what you should tear apart - the piece you wrote or yourself?

This quarantine - and a frozen down economy, let’s be real 😉 - gave me a big push to bring some great ideas out of my head and into the world. Some days that process is such fun, I feel like I’m the inventor of the phenomenon flow.

Other days though, it’s like I’m burying myself alive in self-doubt.

I went on a walk to gasp some air and figured out there are essentially three relationships you need to manage in your creative process.

Let’s call the thing you’re making The Work, whether it’s an artwork, book, new business, or video.

These are the three things you need to manage:

1. The relationship between you and the Work

2. The relationship between you and the world

3. The way you deal with the relationship between the Work and the world.

In case you lost me by now, here’s the graph:

The big lesson here for me was to see which relationship you have control over.

Imagine that the triangle above wasn’t going about something you create, but about you and two of your friends. You’d have control over your relationship with fictive friend Bob and also over your relationship with fictive friend Martha. What Martha and Bob have between the two of them though - that’s none of your business.

What you feel or think about the connection Bob and Martha have is something you will have to deal with yourself.

The same goes for your relationships with the Work and the world.

I realized that often when I was doubting myself or the Work, I was actually trying to control the link between the world and the Work.

I would be anticipating what the world would think of the Work with thoughts like:
What will they think of it? Will they love it? Will they hate it?

Until I realized that’s none of my business. It’s my business is to create something kick-ass good.

And so is yours 😉.

Have a great week,

PS: Of course with sales, branding, pitching, and testing the market with a prototype you’re not completely in the dark. However, there is always a big part of the relationship between the world and the Work you can’t control.

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