Creativity, Coaching and Business with Annie Wong
Balancing creativity and business can be tricky. Prioritizing creativity as well as making a living can be hard at times, but it is a path that many of my clients choose to take because the rewards are entirely worth it!
I recently interviewed one of my clients, Annie Wong, on the Leap Like Me Podcast about her business journey, and how coaching has helped her to keep creativity and business in balance with each other.
Annie Wong (also known as Headexplodie), is a mixed media artist and storyteller who works in the mediums of sculptures, illustration, and stop motion animations.
This particular animation has quite a story behind it…
“Very early 2020, Paul Reubens was touring the US for the 35th anniversary of the movie Pee wee's Big Adventure. And so when we found out that was happening, my partner and I instantly bought tickets and we bought the VIP meet and greet package.
A couple of years prior to that, Pee-Wee Herman had posted on his Instagram account, my strawberry ice cream with a face on it, which I thought was like super, super cool.”
Annie decided to recreate the GIF in the form of a necklace for her meet and greet…
”So he stares down at the necklace, and I could see like the gears turning in Paul Reubens's head. And then he recognized it and he's like, Wait a minute. I know that. I know that ice cream. Did you make that?”
“He gave me a hug and he just said that like, you know, you're very talented. Like, you know that, right? You're very talented. In that moment I felt like I had been knighted by the Queen and I just died and was so happy to have shared that moment. This person who had been very influential in a lot of the work that I do, to have him recognize my work and then to meet him in person, it was the best week ever!”
Annie’s creative journey has been full of ebbs and flows, and magical moments just like this! In this episode of the podcast, I talked to Annie about how coaching has helped her deal with the challenges of a creative career and what plans she has going forward.
How Do You Know You’re Ready For Coaching?
During our interview on the Podcast, I asked Annie to share with me how she knew it was time to work with a coach. It’s something a lot of people are unsure about, and it can really help to hear how someone else decided to take the leap:
“So I had been running my art business for already four years at that point, and I had started a little bit of teaching and my partner and I took a trip to New Mexico. We are getting to that age and that point where we're like, ‘It'd be great to have a house’, which is very difficult to do in the Bay Area. So we began to look at other areas.
I think there is something about physically being in a new space and a new land, and being inspired by the landscape. Making that potential vision, that potential desire, that potential goal feel more real, by being physically there. And then I got hit with the hard realization that, I'm not making house-buying money at the moment, but I feel like I could be.
The commercial work that I'd been doing, I feel like I had kind of hit a wall or it was starting to feel stale because I hadn't really had a break from it for four years. I had at that point developed so many different income streams and experimented with a lot of different things. But I didn't know what to focus on.
So I reached out to you specifically because you have shared that you are a clarity coach. And it was just kind of that moment on that vacation where it was like, okay, well, if this is what we want, then I need to figure out like some kind of focus. I remember writing to you that the weird problem that I had was that I felt like I was good at a lot of things, but I don't know what to focus on.
Like maybe I could go in this direction, maybe I can go in this direction, or maybe I can go in this direction. But I don't know. It felt like I needed to find the reason underneath or the purpose underneath that would help me figure out a more cohesive path forward in my business and in my life.”
Annie was feeling burnout just doing all the things, she had so many different things going on, but she wanted to find the thing that was aligned with her passion, and also with her dream of buying a house in New Mexico.
Together during our coaching sessions, Annie found new directions for her business that she already knew about, but having that safe space to talk through ideas helped her to figure out what really aligned for her. And I think when you are able to do work that is so aligned with you, the making the money income is going to follow because it really resonates with people, because it's really coming from a supercharged place inside you.
Coaching can help you understand your why and gain the insight and tools to make it happen. Following your creative energy, finding community, and getting a coach when it feels right will help you take a leap into shifting to a more creative path.
Annie says this about finding her why: “Now that's kind of a North star of just like, what opportunities do I want to take on or say no to or what opportunities do I want to build that are new and exciting for me?”
Magical Opportunities: Being In Alignment With Your Values
In our coaching sessions, we often talked about ‘magical opportunities’; opportunities that come about as a product of our being in complete alignment with ourselves. Annie shares her experience like this:
”Magical opportunities - it's not necessarily that they were magical (I didn't do any sort of spell or have my crystals out or do any kind of incantations). But they were not linear. That was for sure. They were seeds that I had planted when I was in a happy, creative, productive mode maybe years ago. Then someone saw the thing (whatever it was that I had created) and would invite me to whatever the opportunity was that I wouldn't have had otherwise. I didn't pitch myself for that. It's a little bit like putting some faith in the forces that be, that maybe someone will see it and will reach out. And that to me is like a sort of magic.
I recently had a couple of paintings in a group show that I was invited to because the curator bought a sticker of mine at one of the local gallery shop spaces here. So that's how we met. And there was a curator that went to that show then then reached out recently to ask if I wanted to do a studio visit for them. It’s amazing. It's just very interesting how that can happen, but one has to kind of plant the seed.”
I hold this philosophy overall in my coaching - visioning and dreaming about what's possible, so that we can be in our happy place and be aiming towards something which is a yes. It’s a mixture of taking intentional action and also having faith that it's going to lead you closer to that place that you would ultimately like to go.
How Coaching Clarified Annie’s Future Ideas
I have an ideal day exercise that I do with my clients, to help them clarify what it is that they really want. Annie took this further and wanted to do a similar exercise but for a whole year. As a creative business owner, there is always a natural ebb and flow of work and ideas.
Annie described it like this:
“I think that we found that with me it might actually be more helpful to do like what is my ideal year.
Maybe there are seasons or chunks of the year where maybe I'm a little bit more focused on the moneymaking work, and then maybe there are micro sabbaticals or something that I can take throughout the year where I'm like, okay, I've saved up enough. I don't have to take on any more client jobs at this time. I'm just going to make a bunch of new things or really dabble in some new things. I’m not having to worry about external obligations for the next week, or month, or maybe a summer. I'm finding for example, with the teaching schedule, that I'm now looking forward to the summer time this year to see like, okay, maybe this is like a comfortable chunk of time that I can I don't know just go wild in the studio!”
Being in business for the past eight years, I've noticed that there are a series of ebbs and flows. Learning how you can take advantage of those so that they are actually restorative or useful times for you is really important. Rather than having times of stress or times that feel like a dead zone where we haven't really fully made the most of it.
Annie shared how much clearer her future is looking after our coaching sessions:
”I want to start creating either some new offerings or a new body of work that's a little bit more of me mixing in the realms of creativity and mental health self-care.
And it's so cool, how I feel like that came out in coaching, and I kind of already knew probably that I wanted to do this thing, but the coaching helped me to bring it out! I remember when I was trying to come up with ideas for some potential workshops, and there was this one that I think would probably sell really easily. But then there's this one that's a little bit more on the witchy side. I'm excited about it, but I don't know if anyone else will be excited about it. And you were like, “Let me hear the idea”. And it was that encouraging support from another person that makes the difference. And then you can see, because I see this in some of my students sometimes, they light up.
That was actually the thing that I wanted to do, but I was a little bit afraid about if it would work or not. So one of those ideas was about how your creativity is like an inner child. So I'm currently taking a public speaking program where we're kind of practising developing a five-minute talk around this. It's just r fun, this performative side of me. I get to talk about these ideas that I'm really interested in, and then I would love to at some point also develop a workshop where I'm helping people build like an altar for their, inner child.
I've done a couple of them for myself and they're really sweet and fun, and I love the idea of just connecting with people in that way and just encouraging their own creativity. Because as much as I've talked about how long I've been doing creativity professionally and the ways in which it's working, I've also deeply experienced the flip side of that, of just being extremely frustrated and stressed out and burnt out. So I'm very happy that now I feel like I have a lot more tools to kind of deal with the harder parts of being a creative professional. And I would just love to share those tools with people that are basically like the younger version of myself.”
As this post portrays, in order for our creative ideas to unfurl and take their true form, they need an easy, playful and no-pressure kind of space. It isn’t always easy - but if you are wanting to head in a new creative direction, it can make the world of difference.
