CherylAnnHillsArtist

People who share your values are part of your tribe. As a creative, these people are your true audience. I read Seth Godin, Brene Brown, Simon Sinek and Malcolm Gladwell and their wisdom has certainly helped me to streamline my thinking and therefore my actions in my art business. In thinking about my true values I came across an article by Brene Brown It lists human values and prompts the reader to choose only two, just two that we hold as most important. I’d first selected authenticity and integrity, but then after researching those found that if one has integrity its not possible to be so, without authenticity. So now I have Integrity and Courage as my most important core values. Are you surprised that Creativity isn’t on my list of two? Well, it is because creativity requires courage, lots of it. So, its there, its just contextual. I believe all humans have equal value – with equal rights regardless of culture, language, gender, age, income or whatever other “category” human...

Its somewhat a tradition in spring to go through the stuff you’ve accumulated and make decisions on what to keep and what to sell, giveaway or discard. As I’ve become older there is often less things I need to discard because I’ve taken more care in what I choose to include in my stuff. Curating your own stuff is an interesting journey sometimes. Each thing may or may not have some sort of significance, a particular memory attached to it. Stuff that has no emotion attached to it is easy to discard. Stuff that has happy memories even if the thing is no longer useful might be more difficult to include in your spring yard sale.  But its just stuff. And in the end, none of it will be coming with us. An internal spring cleaning is also important for us to do occasionally. Sometimes we carry around ideas, beliefs, thoughts that once may have been true but now are no longer true nor useful. When we continue to carry around these untrue beliefs they will often bog us down from moving forwa...

Failure. It’s a word we’ve been conditioned to dislike. It makes us uncomfortable. For some it can be the source of sleepless nights and hours of therapy. Yet, failure is the doorway to progress. If we never fail we cannot grow, move forward, improve, and eventually excel. It’s a big topic. And it tends to draw mostly negative connotations but as noted, without failure there are no successes. Ask every single successful person if they’ve ever failed at something. The answer is always YES. Its not the failure that will hold us back, its how we respond to failing. Let’s read that again: Its not the failure that will hold us back, its our response to the failure. That’s the really hard part. Our natural response is to hide the failure. Cover it up. Put it into the back of the closet. If it’s a terrible meal you made, you throw it out. And tell no one! Those of us who are creators are told “only put your best work out into the world, never show your failures”. That’s terrible advice....

You’ve already heard this; Stop selling on social media and start telling stories!! But very few are actually paying attention to this directive. So, I want to say first; I am not an expert . I am an observer of human behaviour and interaction and I have the ability to see patterns and shifts in patterns. My own communication style is; think - think - think – speak/write. And when I write, I will read and re-read before I hit send or post. I do this because I know that written language is not the best way to communicate in every situation. Written words lack context unless it’s provided. Written words do not indicate body language, tone of voice and facial expressions. This means that written words can and often are easily misunderstood . I belong to hundreds of groups on Facebook. In the past year I’ve seen a major growth in the number of small business groups . Based on the comments and questions I see I would guess the vast majority of these members are new to running a b...