Creative Spark: Follow your Intuition to Build a Business, Start

I love that feeling of creative spark – You get an idea - that inspiration to create something new! An idea that keeps popping up or nags at you like it's meant for you. And when you go for it, you dive in and revel in it! The possibilities occupy your mind day and night - you are excited about something like you haven't been in a long time. You dive in - it feels so right, and you catch a FLOW state where you get to ride the waves of passion, ideas, exploration, and possibilities for your life. It’s the honeymoon period of a relationship - except you get to do this all on your own – if you want to. It is your baby, your masterpiece, your idea alone, and it feels so good.

For some of us, big, beautiful creative ideas that spark deep inspiration and desire only come along once in a great while. I’m talking about the kind your soul needs to follow. To be creative, you need time to think, get inspired, and dream. And many of our lives don’t leave much room for that. 

We move through cycles of building and becoming followed by confusion, boredom, and disarray. Then we rinse and repeat. We want to feel the passion and drive of youth again. Where did that young girl with so many hopes and dreams go? Why does our success, our current life suddenly feel so hollow? As we achieve a lot of the goals we set out to accomplish, life can seem repetitive, meaningless, and boring. The sheen wears off. Like, is this really it for me? We hope to be inspired to do something big, new, interesting. But when we feel inspired to do something new, we stuff down our ideas, our passions – I'm too old, it’s too hard, I have built too much in my career to jump ship now. I can’t. 

What if I told you that you could turn that creative spark into a fiery new life? You can add excitement and creativity to your life at any time - as long as you really want it? If you want to take a creative spark and turn it into a side hustle, a new business, passion project, or new lifestyle, this message is for you!

Personal Story – My Creative Spark

It all came to me in dream – no, just kidding. It all actually started with getting my eyebrows done. Back in the mid-2010s, all of the sudden the eyebrow trend came about. Prior to that, it was totally normal NOT to put any makeup on our eyebrows. No eyebrow crayon, combing them straight up with sticky goo. They looked good as long as they were thin and plucked! Not to totally date myself, but this was likely the result of us trying to grow back brows from the 90s when we plucked them pencil thin. We couldn’t grow back our brows it seemed. It was a curse! And suddenly, the trend was moving toward thicker, natural, but still perfectly shaped brows. And anyone could get these eyebrows - no matter how little you had to begin with. And I was IN. I made an appointment to get my eyebrows microbladed. In case you don't know, microblading, microshading, Ombre brows - these are all variations of tattoos. You lie on a table, the artist redesigns your shape, and then uses a tiny blade of anywhere between 1 and 16 needles to create tattooed strokes or points to fill in your eyebrows. It goes through a hideous healing process – the tattoo gets really big and dark – like Angry Bird brows, then it awkwardly and unevenly flakes off. Over the course of 4-6 weeks, when your skin turns over cells, the color comes back to a reasonable strength, and boom – amazing eyebrows.

It didn’t take me 4-6 weeks of waiting for my new eyebrows to return to get a creative spark immediately. I was fascinated with this process on day 1. After my appointment, I told everyone, SOMEONE HAS to do this for a business! The results were so amazing – life changing! The artistry was amazing! The concept was so unique yet become a super trend on social media and in real life. What could be a better business idea right now? Was there a friend who needed a gig? I thought of several who might be interested, and I was appalled that none of my friends wanted to immediately take on this idea and bring it to fruition. But the reality is that one man’s treasure is another man’s trash. You simply cannot transfer a creative spark from one person to the next. A creative spark comes from within. When nobody seemed to be biting on this opportunity, I mulled over it questioning WHY? And it slowly came to me: I should do it!

At the time, I had a full-time job in medtech and a toddler. I was a single mom with custody majority of the time. Doggie momma of one. I was the default you could say. Head of household. And I was real busy and was spending more money than I was earning. Some might say that starting a new craft and business might be impossible in these circumstances – but not me! I felt the passion and something within my body and mind just knew that I had to follow this spark. My intuition.

How I built a side business.

It was a constant buzz of ideas, pushed forward by leaning in. Writing goals, plans, strategy, ideas. What ifs? How could I's? Researching all of the best training opportunities. Getting started on a company name, logo, branding, platform ideas, marketing, concepts to spin into content! It was fun and exciting and something I could do just for me in a time where it felt like I was doing everything for everyone else.

I found a weekend training and I paid a couple of thousand dollars to attend. I was in a tough spot at the time. I had a well-paying job considering that I had moved from teaching high school to tech a few years previously, but I was paying a lot for day care and a lot for rent in the SF Bay Area, one of the priciest areas of the nation. I was not rolling in extra funds, so this side business had the potential to really help my situation. I was able to leverage my primary income to feed this new dream - and when I say leverage, I mean I dug to the bottom of the purse. I had to take a chance on me if I wanted to see a different future for myself. Even if it didn’t work out, I would have some really good learnings from it, I was sure.

I had recently read some of the Rich Dad, Poor Dad books by Robert Kiyosaki. The one I was reading was called Cash Quadrant. A couple key takeaways for me were first, that there are four quadrants for making money: 1. Working for a business (employment), 2. Building a small business or solo business, 3. Building a business system or company, and 4. Investing. I thought how amazing would it be to diversify my money-making into all 4 quadrants? This was my opportunity! The second takeaway was that many people believe that starting a business and failing is a FAILURE of who they are - like not coming out perfect on the first try is some kind of a lifelong stain on their capabilities. Robert Kiyosaki teaches that it is through such business failures that we learn and create future successes. Failing leads to better ideas, learning, possibly more failures, but you FAIL UP and eventually you will find success. In other words, you can’t find business success without trying and failing at some point - or you'll never go anywhere. As I began my journey into a creative business, this was so comforting to me. Totally made sense and it gave me the permission to FAIL. It made me feel warm and fuzzy enough to confidently put my money behind myself when I didn’t have that much extra to go around.

So as I began my training journey, I started setting up shop. I didn’t want to get into a long lease – I’m bold but not stupid! I had carefully considered how long I would have to start making money and decided I would give myself a year in the business before I would even consider quitting. So I rented a room in an already booming shop – a mixture of aestheticians and hair stylists. I was the perfect addition and the rent was month to month. I used off-the-shelf tools to create my logo and website. So many tools out there are easy to learn for new creatives – Canva for photo editing, GoDaddy for website templates and hosting, Acuity Scheduling for taking appointments, and Square for payments. These are just a few basics needed to get going. I learned how to do basic social media marketing, and started building a list. Things I didn't really have any experience with. Today its even easier with mountains of information and learning opportunities available on the internet.

I was in the FLOW. As I built the business infrastructure and prepped the studio, I found new trainings to expand my skill set. God knows nobody wants someone with two days of experience tattooing their face! I found a community with other artists and experienced trainers to learn more about the craft. I learned the sales techniques, the best pigments to use, and a lifeline to reach out to when I needed support. In a few months, I was up and running with clients and truly enjoying this side business and new person I was becoming. When I told people that I was a tattoo artist, they couldn't believe it, and I enjoyed upending others' assumptions about who I was as much as I enjoyed upending my own expectations about who I was.

What I got out of it

Becoming an artist and business owner – paid for my work - in a totally new field - took major thought work – I had to be able to believe that someone like me was capable of becoming someone new. I went from what if? To I can, to I’m doing it, to I am. 

I felt all of the fears – what if I was terrible? What if no one wanted to work with me? What if I failed to make any money? But so what? Everyone has fears about doing new things. I was able to acknowledge that my fears had a lot to do with my thoughts about my LACK – lack of skills, lack of money, lack of time. And I had to look at the negative thoughts driving them. I had to look them in the face and shift them toward the positive. What if I could become good? What if I could get a ton of clients? What if I could make a ton of money? That allowed me to see what was possible for me. For many people wanting to make a shift in their lives, it is the negative thoughts about their own capabilities and identity that hold them back from learning, growing, and becoming. A Fixed Mindset does just that - fix you in place under the burdens of your own self imposed limitations. You are putting yourself in your own jail. Doing this thought work is a crucial element of personal growth and making POSSIBILITIES come alive for you.

I could have easily shut down my desire to start a creative business with negative thinking – after all, I was not an artist. I didn’t know the first thing about tattooing people’s SKIN on their face for that matter. And I am embarrassed to sell things – I find it rude and uncomfortable to push people into doing things. That's what selling is, right? Well, these were also my thoughts and assumptions about what it means to be an artist and a sales person. Expectations that in order to be an artist I had to be one of the greats or be born with the deep seated desire to only live and breathe art. But why would I compare myself as a new artist to someone who had been practicing for years or even decades? These were just my thoughts trying to scare me into submission. My thoughts were based on what I had come to expect from my self. But Why couldn’t I create my own version of artistry? My own version of sales? Why couldn't I start learning something new in my 30's? To allow myself to succeed I had to be able to get beyond the self-imposed limits and willing to engage in massive action to create a new version of me. I would have to allow myself to learn as I went along my new path. If I didn’t give myself grace and allow myself to try at building this new persona, I never know if I could do it.

Today we see so many so-called experts on social media telling us that they have the secret formula for success – you should only do organic marketing, be on all the socials, only do person to person marketing, only sell packages, do discovery calls, don’t do discovery calls. The truth is that there are many many ways of growing a successful business and the only way you are going to find out what works FOR YOU is if you give SOMETHING a try..and decide what works best FOR YOU.

Through this work, I wanted to embrace AUTHENTICITY. I didn’t want to become somebody else I want to become a future version of me. Following your creative spark is NOT just another way for you to take your idea and kill it by doing what everyone else is doing, the way they are doing it. In learning my new craft, I consumed a lot of information - different styles of work, business models, sales techniques and came up with a natural version of doing business that felt right to me. I found my market positioning - I was the person you came to if you wanted a natural look – not those huge Instagram brows. I didn’t feel good about giving everyone big, bold brows – especially if they didn’t want that! I wanted to serve by helping women – and men – feel their personal best. I developed my own sales technique. I wasn’t going to be a hard sell-person - ever. I wanted to consult and educate people about their options. I wanted to serve only clients who were ready to make a change, so that’s what I did. I stayed authentic to what felt good and right for me. Sure I could have skirted around my own ethics and learned to drive hard sales, but that didn’t align with my goals in having this business at all. Maybe over time, if I had continued this business until today, I would have come to embrace different methods for sales, business, and artistry and that too would be my prerogative.

Becoming was not a straight shot to stardom. It was a spiral up of challenges, skills, problems, wins, fear, surprise, and rewards. Change is supposed to look messy because in it we are letting go of some core beliefs, habits, expectations and replacing them with brand new beliefs, habits, expectations. It takes time. Building a new business and sense of self does not and should not happen over night.

It’s important to really understand your WHY when making a bold change. I felt a strong pull toward this particular art and really wanted to bring it to the world. I also wanted more money and to engage in creative work I wasn’t feeling in my day job. I’d always been shuffled down the hallway toward a secure, stable job in the workforce, so I never really even considered starting my own business. I had, in fact, struggled with following my passions versus following a more traditional plan all the way through my twisted path through college. It seems my inner desires were not squelchable. Somewhere in there I was an artist and it wanted to come out. Many of us find these urges for a different life come up and then we knock them down, thinking I can’t do that. What would people think. I could never make a living at that. When in fact we can.

By following the creative spark, despite all of the business of getting paid, I found real artistic enjoyment. It was working like it was a hobby, and making money like it was a business. I loved methodically practicing the stroke patterns, learning a detailed craft. In the sessions, I found meditation in the hours I would spend working so closely with people – especially when I added scalp tattooing to my repertoire!

I found care and connection with others. I now understand how hairstylists say they sometimes feel like therapists. I spent time with people who were looking to solve the problem of hair loss and lack of confidence in their appearance. Being able to help those people find confidence and peace felt like a worthy accomplishment. So wholesome.

I found that I’m great at selling to people who want to be sold. I learned to become confident in my consultative education approach to sales. I leveraged my desire to help people who wanted to be helped and that felt right to me.

This journey brought me so many things I had been looking for – creativity, serving others, connection, new skills, and confidence to keep growing, learning, and taking BOLD Leaps in my life.

Key Takeaways

New beginnings don’t have to be stressful. You don’t have to be perfect or totally prepared before you make a change. Learn along the way. A new beginning doesn’t have to be the end of a job or all of your old ways – you get to choose the pace and timing for growth. You get to decide what you bring along and what you leave behind on your journey.

Transition, total transformation can feel slow. In fact the biggest changes should take time. Ease in. Do it right. Move through the fears. Give yourself grace. Focus on doing thought work. Revel in the journey rather than trying to get to some imaginary ending.

Because what is the end anyway? A jumping off to a new beginning.

Invitation 

What creative spark have you been feeling and ignored? Maybe you are being called to turn a hobby into a small business or maybe you have been wanting to start a hobby for hobby’s sake!

Take a look at what is stopping you. Is it perceived lack of time? Money? Self-confidence? A lack of support or a community? I cannot solve for all of those circumstances today, but if you are feeling the creative spark and really want help getting to the next stage, reach out to me for coaching at www.theboldlife.coach. I guide people who are committed to making a big change, but are having trouble managing their mindsets through the massive action needed to achieve the results they want.

Today, I challenge you to simply imagine who you would need to become – what would your thoughts have to be like in order to move forward with your creative idea? For example, in order to build my business, my thoughts changed from: 

-I’m not a sales person and can’t stand the thought of selling TO I can sell packages by educating people. I feel comfortable selling.

- I am not an artist became I can learn to become an artist which became I am pretty great at this artistry! To I'm proud of my artistry.

-I shouldn’t waste my time because competent superstars are already in this business niche became I believe in what I am doing and if they can do it, I definitely can too. 

These are HUGE mindshifts that I was able to make, but as you can imagine, the mindshifts did not take place without massive action – Investing in myself and my learning, honing my craft and my business skill set. 

If you are ready to do the work to create mindshifts through massive action, let's get going.

For more weekly content on taking bold leaps, follow TheBoldLife.Coach. Sign up on my email list. If you want help taking your creative spark to the next level, schedule a strategy session to get started..