Passionate Values: Life as a Working Artist

Recently, a local writer reached out to Sage hoping we could provide some advice and tools for working artists striving to maintain passion for their craft, reconnect after burnout, and stay inspired while balancing creativity with career demands.

As a former freelance, rarely-paid, “it will be good exposure” artist myself, I decided to field these questions and see if I couldn’t come up with some helpful thoughts and tips to give a bit of the guidance that might have benefitted my younger self.

It seemed, to me, that at the root of these questions lies a matter of personal values.

In the work I do with clients, when we talk about personal values, we're talking about three things:

• Who we want to be
• How we want to show up
• What's important to us
  

The ability to identify our values, and manifest those values, in our daily actions is a core component in building a sense of fulfillment within our lives.

Read that again - fulfillment requires the capacity to identify our values AND to see those values expressed in our actions.

The very act of living authentically requires BOTH of these things. And, one of the most clear things I learned as an artist - and from my work with artists - is that authenticity is at the center of creative fulfillment.

For an artist, feeling disconnection between their authentic selves and the work they do to “earn a living” can certainly lead to burn out, loss of passion, and lack of inspiration or motivation. 

When these things arise, returning to our values is a beautiful place to start. With a bit of exploration, compassionate curiosity, and committed action, we can begin to bring more of our authentic values into our work, both artistic and professional.

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Here are a few steps to begin that process:

Create a list of your own personal values when it comes to work/art - who do you want to be, how do you want to show up, and what's important to you. A very helpful tool for values exploration can be found here.

The next step is what I call "sprinkling". Once you've identified some of your personal values, ask yourself how you can begin to "sprinkle" more of those values into your life.

Often, when we think of changes we’d like to make in our lives, we begin making lists of things we want to get rid of (I.e., how to quit a bad job, drop a bad habit, etc.). The challenge with this approach is that our nervous system won't allow us to simply get rid of behaviors or habits it's learned to rely on without a replacement.

We’ve got to give our nervous system something to do. And, until it’s got a new something to do (ideally values-aligned), it will continue to choose the behaviors and skills it’s already developed.

Our goal, then, becomes, not to tear down old, but to BUILD UP new. What are the things you want to ADD MORE of to your life? Rest? Creativity? Boundaries? Authenticity?

How can you slowly, as if brick-by-brick, add your own values to your work/practice in order to build new approaches?

Strategies to Adding Value:

There are any number of strategies to begin adding more of our values to our lives, and different approaches will work differently for each of us. Here are a few that have been especially effective for my clients:

• Write a list of some of the values you'd like to focus on, and place copies of that list in various places of visibility
• Begin each day by saying "today, I'd like to sprinkle in a bit of...", and choose a specific value
• Communicate your values and intentions clearly. For example, communicate to a supervisor that you'd like to add more creativity/flexibility/variety to your current role
• Make a list of "tiny turtle steps" - a go-to list of actions that you can pull from to add more of your values to your day
• Notice and repeat - be mindful of the fulfilling ways your values already show up in your life and keep bringing those back

One of the greatest challenges facing artists is finding a way to meet basic needs in a capitalist system that increasingly devalues artistic endeavors. It is, in many ways, a shitty situation.

The beautiful thing about values is that we can always bring them with us, even in shitty situations.

The beautiful thing about artists is that, more than most anyone I know, we have an intuitive connection to the creativity and authenticity that can help find ways to do just that.