How to turn a creative person on…
and get the best work possible
I am currently working on a project where I have been given FULL creative control. YOU JUST WAIT.
Firstly I would like to just start off by mentioning that I know. I know I didn’t meet my commitments of every day blogging by missing yesterday. BUT. I have a very very good excuse. I had planned to write in the afternoon and then I started watching Season 4 of Sex and The City and I was so into it that I just decided to finish it off. Totally worth the missed blog.
I promise to make this one double as nice and double as long.
Today's topic is one of my favs, because there isn’t one creative freelancer that I have had this conversation with that has disagreed with my findings.
Now first let's distinguish the difference between a creative person, and a creative freelancer/biz owner/artist. As I have spoken about much like Elizabeth Gilbert does in Big Magic - everyone is creative. It's not something that has been allocated to a specific group of people. It is in all of our DNAs and it shows up in a range of ways.
These ways do not need to earn you an income. Being creative can be how you line up your blueberries in your morning porridge or the love note you leave on your lover's car. With surrounding birds and love hearts on green paper with a blue pen. These creative pursuits don’t need to pay the bills.
Your creative freelancers/biz owners/artists are different. Creativity sits at the forefront of their cash earning. They have chosen to buy their weekly $20 avocado on toast with money earnt from our beloved C word. They have wholeheartedly decided that logical and organised processes in the assembly is not where they want to make their money. For this discussion, let's call them CF (creative freelancers).
The non-CF’s of the world look at the CF’s and wonder how they do it. And vice versa. When I walk in Melbourne CBD and look into the Westpac building on Russell St and see Sandy at her desk staring out the window - I think about how I would rather eat glass then be in an huge office building, sitting down, with no fresh air and specific eating times.
And I am sure when one of my extremely cautious, planned, secure and predictable friends see me running around in a flurry because I’ve taken on way more than I can handle, because I am a freelancer meaning you always are waiting for the day when all work will disappear so you say YES to everything. I am sure that cloud of unknown is something she is very happy she doesn’t have. I am also sure she loves the paid holiday leave she gets when we go away together. You know - the one us CFs don’t ever get. The lesson before we continue on: is each to their own.
Give me freedom and I will create the bestest of best rooms.
When I decided to discuss this topic and before I went all “ra ra ra this is how creatives work” I knew I first had to discover what made me such an expert on the topic. I had to study my life first as a creative. Through everything that I can remember about my last 30 years, what have I spent a lot of my time doing?
As a kid it was lots of things. I put on dance shows, sewed clothes, made mix tapes, made collages and cards, played outside on my own for hours. I was literally always entertained by myself as a kid because my mind was always going and I was always doing things with my hands and my body.
As a tween and a teenager the creativity was injected into my fashion but mainly into my discovering of photography at school. I found my thing and I was good at it. I would be in the dark room every lunch hour and after school, taking film photos and developing them all. I was obsessed. I remember having a little notebook with a pencil next to my bed and I would wake up in the middle of the night and right down photo ideas. I had pages and pages of pictures from my head that I wanted to recreate.
And recreate I did. I literally would run around and grab all my neighbours and set up these photoshoots with my ideas. One of those photos won me $20,000 and six brand new digital Canon cameras. I couldn’t believe it, I was 18 and it was WILD. And that's when my photography business started.
We could go into many more creative stories of mine, but I just wanted to make the point clear, that I have been present and practicing creativity for as long as I can remember. And as I get older I realise that I hold creativity at the forefront of my actions. It is what gives me the most amount of joy, satisfaction and confidence. Plant Mama was born and continues to grow because I get to live out my funnest and my greatest creative dreams and pursuits.
LUCKY ME. No, not really. Not at all. With years of creative pursuits, comes years of failures. Honestly the list of failures far surpasses the successes. So much so, that I shrug them off and just continue on. Because I know and am confident that the next wave of creative thoughts will get me through and get me continuously moving forward and onward to the next. Continuous failure just makes you realise that there is more beyond them, but only if you keep pushing forward.
As I connect more with this side of myself and understand my creative processes, it has allowed me to have multiple and organic conversations with other CFs within my realm. And one thing continues to come up. I could be yarning to a local graphic designer or emailing a European artist for a collaboration. I’ve known successful CEOs and local Pasta makers who all echo the same desire from their customers and clients.
T-R-U-S-T.
Five teeny letters that make any CF mentally, emotionally and physically orgasm. Trust can turn a project that is a dead set six, and turn it into a whacking ten. I have seen this myself.
Some of the greatest jobs and jungles that I have ever built, have always been the ones where the clients have said: (to my absolute glee) “you are the professional and we trust you.” I know that when I get to organically build a jungle without constrictions and gather things along the way - I will serve the client the best possible creative outcome.
And the greatest thing about learning this, is that I get to tell potential future clients about my ‘best work’ process, and we can decide from there if we want to work together. I have to respect that some companies really need concrete plans to proceed and that the “trust me” doesn’t work for them. Which is fine. Great even. There are plenty of other fantastic Melbourne plant services that can cater to those companies. People come to me because they want my style, they want my creative brain to be lost within their space and for me to be left to my own devices to come up with a solution to make it nicer. And if I only want my best work to be done, then I must only accept the jobs that match that desire and need.
And as it always goes, as I start turning down the jobs that don’t creatively serve me, I get handed instead a bunch of ones that do. Bless the universe.
Now of course we need to play devil's advocate too. I get that you cannot trust everyone. Like MANY hairdressers I have trusted in the past, some creatives should not be trusted without much research. You can’t say yes to everything a CF puts in front of you. Yes people trust me, but they do that because I have worked and built an aesthetic over four years. After each job I finished, I built a little bit more trust, and a little bit more. When you harness your passion and your skill as a CF, and fail and try millions and millions of times - eventually over time you master your craft and people will see that. You become worth the trust.
However it takes time and you have to be patient. I understand why people didn’t trust me early on, and so they shouldn’t have. But I do think that there is something that we can all do when we work with CFs, to assist in allowing them to serve their best work and in turn create better, more powerful work thereafter.
Here is how.
In about the last two years, I have consciously made an effort to “let go” of my thoughts and ideas when collaborating with another creative. In the situation where I am working with someone whose expertise is completely in a different field to mine - I try real hard to give a broad idea of my direction, keep my mouth shut on the details, let them go off and start the mind rolling, and then be open to what they bring back. Once you master the art of giving constructive and good feedback, you aren’t scared of guiding a CF in a different direction if their initial thoughts didn’t match your outcome.
But here is the funny thing about trust and letting go when working with a CF. In my experience I have found that when I fully trust and allow my collaborating CF to present their craft with their own rules and direction, they tend to kick the brief and project out the park and go even far beyond what my initial expectations were.
See the thing is when we are an early on CF, a beginner, we are very rarely trusted with our own ideas and even more rarely paid to run with them. So when someone tells us to broadly to “head down this direction but just see what flows through and out and we’ll discuss after” (which by the way is what I say to CFs now). We melt into enthusiasm, gratitude and excitement of what we know what we can create without restrictions, but are ever rarely given the chance to be fully free in our pursuits.
A practical story for you.
In the last two weeks I have been creating a new product with a friend and his company in Sydney. I had a broad idea of what I wanted, and waited for appropriate the CF to be dropped into my path to make it happen. My friend tagged me in this illustrator's work on Instagram, I literally saw one photo and instantly liked his style. Needing to see no more proof to feel confident in his abilities, I got his details.
We spoke on the phone and I explained my broad description words. In the first conversation I try not to say too many things or give too much information as I find that CFs can get overwhelmed with lots of information and not know which creative path to take. Give them clear, short, descriptive words and maybe some images. Ask them how they work best too.
He sent me an invoice for a deposit and told me to pay the rest after. I told him that “I trust you completely already so send me the full bill to pay before we begin.” Clients had graciously done this to me over the years, and it made the world of difference to me. So when I can do the same at the right time financially, I do.
Within two days he had completed the brief (which honestly has taken others weeks to do) and had formed something that was even better than what I had initially dreamt up. So much so that I instantly hired him again for another project, and will keep him firmly by my side as a talented CF.
So next time you have the exciting opportunity to work with a CF, take a few moments and consider if this could be an opportunity to let go in some small way, and trust them to do their thing.
Like I didn’t do with my past hairdressers: research your CF and investigate their craft before collaborating. If you instantly are satisfied or are grabbed by their style and aesthetic, then trust them. All you are responsible for as the receiver is harnessing your ability to give feedback if your “relaxed approach” doesn’t meet your desired outcomes.
However I can confirm and properly predict that you will, like me, realise that trusting fully in a CF, might be the best thing you will ever do for yourself and a CF.
All a CF ever wants to do is just make enough money to be able to continue on creating, and your support and trust in us, means the world. Allowing yourself to receive and feel 100% of a persons creative juice and passion, is one of life’s greatest gifts! And it’s why us CF’s get up every morning, and do it all over again, because the thought of not sharing the things the creatively fulfil us seems like much time wasted, and not a lot a fun.
I hope this helps you understand us! And I count my lucky ducks that I get to put my many thoughts into a somewhat disarray of beautifully chaotic action every week.
I hope the disco found you today! Sprout sends her love, as do I!
P Mami xxxx
