How to be a real artist (or writer, musician, designer..)
Clue: Don’t wait for a formal invitation to the club!
I’m a life coach, working with creatives of all kinds.
It’s a job that’s not easy to explain. You challenge. You have deep, life-changing conversations, and you call people out on the stories they’re telling themselves, the ones that are holding them back.
Let me give you an example.
Last week, I talked to a brilliant woman who’d left a prestigious corporate job in Dublin because she felt called to do something completely different. She wanted to paint, and to write. So she moved to Budapest, where she could live cheaply and hang out with other creatives. And she painted, and she wrote.
The writing, she’d discovered, was a way of feeding the art. It helped her shape her ideas. But she still wasn’t a real artist, she told me.
Artists are trained, by doing an art degree. Artists belong to some exclusive, secret club that you need an invitation to. Artists have a gallery, and exhibitions, and collectors. She was still a marketing executive, really. She was just dabbling.
