Promoting your work? Be shameless!
Why should you feel shame about your talent, your skill, your creative work? Share it, show it, sell it. Without embarrassment
Let’s talk about shame.
I coach creatives: writers, artists, designers, musicians, makers. Most of them are experienced professionals, yet when they talk about pitching ideas or promoting their work, they often use words like ‘badgering’, ‘pestering’ and ‘nagging’.
They don’t see themselves as offering a service that could help their clients, a mutually beneficial collaboration. Instead, they view themselves as begging, needy, powerless. Or as unpleasantly pushy.
This is a mistake many of us make.
It stops us sharing, showing, selling our work. We hide. We’re timid and polite. We worry too much about what people will think. We’re scared of coming across as arrogant, pushy, full of ourselves.
We can see the flaws in our work, the bits that didn’t come out as well as we hoped — and we feel compelled to point those out, instead of just accepting praise when it’s offered.
Or we’re so self-critical, so afraid of rejection, of failure, that we don’t show the work at all. The same doubts and…
