#26: Lemonade stands
The not-so-fine line between making and marketing
Hey friends,
I hope you're all having a great week. I love April. The temperatures have dropped (a little), the birds are back in abundance, and the red flowering gums are blooming as I pass them on my daily bike rides.
In the wake of the fire, I've been reading a book about eucalyptus trees, aptly named Gum. It’s been cathartic reading about how elements and forces like fire have long shaped this huge island and led to a greatness of diversity.
There are nearly 900 species of gum trees here. I've read accounts from sailors that say you can smell Australia long before you see her; the rich, spicy-sweet scent of gum trees carried on the salt breeze and the ocean currents.
The fire has also been another good lesson in impermanence.
In Buddhism, impermanence is the understanding that everything is always changing and nothing lasts forever. Suffering comes when we can’t accept this and try to hold onto how things were or how we think they should be.
Over the years, my life (lives, really), and my loves - people, places, things - have all been through many iterations, but holding this concept of impermanence has helped me find ways to meet them where they are and love them regardless.
One thing I've always struggled with, though, is self-love, especially when it comes to work. And even more so when it comes to backing myself above all else - loving my work and seeing my worth enough to push through the discomfort of self-promotion.
It's something I've been butting up against a lot recently as I've been transitioning into more creative mentoring work.
I love doing it, I've had some amazing feedback, got some great clients, and it lights me up like nothing else. But, I still find it really hard to talk about it and promote it - even though I know if I don't, it'll all just fizzle out and be another dream left on the cutting room floor.
I know I need to learn to back myself; to give myself and my creative projects the same love and energy and attention that I put into my creative mentoring clients and their art and creative businesses.
I need to build my own lemonade stand. To tell people who I am and what I do and the promise of change I can offer. But for some reason, it still feels icky. Sticky.
For more than 20 years, I've been working for other people in at least some capacity.
As a freelancer, I've been wholesaling my lemonade to a very specific hand-picked group of editors, and letting them not only have first dibs, but, if they didn't like it (for whatever reason), pouring it away and starting again, rather than backing the idea, reworking the pitch, and sending it out again.
Although I did alright in my decade of freelancing, I was never able to make it to the lofty heights I aspired to. Not because I couldn't write or because my ideas were bad, but because I gave up too easy. I let rejection get in my head. I made it personal, not professional.
By the time I realised the error of my ways - and that it was all just business - the sheen had long worn off writing, anyway. I didn't have the same passion for it. I wasn't hungry, I was just tired. I didn't want to play games and jump through hoops to be picked, I didn't even want to share the work I had written.
I just wanted to write what I wanted to write - which is how this Substack came about. It was the swing of the pendulum after 10 years of pitching stories and canning 90% of my ideas (50% because they weren't good enough to pitch, and maybe a further 40% because they were rejected).
Writing here, like this, has helped me fall back in love with writing again. I like just showing up week after week and writing what's on my mind. But as a marketing strategy, it's… pretty terrible.
If I was helping a client and this was their Substack or my social media (Instagram/Facebook) was their social media, I'd probably say, it's great if you just want a place to write and share, like a little legacy-building home on the internet. But, if you're trying to build subscribers and make a business, you'll need to be a bit clearer about what your readers and clients will get out of subscribing or buying your products or services.
Do as I say, not as I do, right?! Haha. I've joined enough masterminds and watched enough workshops to know how I should be doing everything.
And honestly, if I was actually running a lemonade stand, I have no doubt I’d find some pithy angle, write signs saying “Come try the best lemonade my mum's ever tasted!”, and shout about it from the rooftops.
But, backing my own creativity and my own work feels like a whole different ball game. Especially after spending most of my life being told not to blow my own trumpet; not to be “too much”; to hone it in, lest I make other people feel bad.
The more stories I uncover, the more I see how deep this internal conspiracy goes.
As part of the “un” learning process, I've decided to join a promote your art April challenge on Instagram. This means every day for April, or most days, at least, I'm going to try and publicly talk about my art and my work.
Practice makes perfect, hey?
The actual aim of the challenge is not to necessarily get more clients or subscribers or sales or whatever - although that would be nice, of course - but to practice talking about our art. To show up day after day. To back myself publicly. To experiment and play and find what feels good. To move past the sticky icky and into the sweet spot.
Five days in and I'm definitely not out of the sticky spot yet, but I do feel like I'm getting closer.
I've finally concluded that I need a lemonade stand that isn't just a parked truck like my website (e.g. an email list and a strategic social media presence that will help direct people there), but I also don’t want to put too many constraints and structure around how I show up here on Substack. I like the freedom, the flexibility, and the randomness.
And so, I think I've concluded that this Substack will be where I make the lemonade, and then I'll set up a separate newsletter to market it.
One with lead magnets, more purposeful content about creativity, creative mentoring, running a creative business, journalling, and writing, and maybe even some free workshops, although I also kind of want to run them here, actually… Anyway, we’ll see.
But at least then I can also repurpose those emails into SEO blogs on my website and social media posts. I've never been a one-trick pony - or a one-niche creative business - and I hate feeling backed in a corner, but if I want to make this work properly then I know I have to be a little more strategic.
I figure if I see this space as an experimental Rube Goldberg machine where I get to play and have fun and write freely, then maybe the other lemonade stand will feel less of a trap, and more like an engaged way to promote myself and my services, and help me find more people who I can help.
After all, that's the whole point of all this. Getting over my fear around self-promotion isn’t just about me, it’s also about all the people who I can help live better creative lives or grow their creative businesses - because for some reason I’m much better at helping others than I am at helping myself.
Truth is, I feel like I’ve finally found that thing I’m good at, love doing, and feel others will benefit from (my Ikigai) after years of searching, but now I’m the only thing standing in my way.
Maybe I just need to be my own case study and take a leaf out of my own book - though that’s also easier said than done. My inner critter feels especially loud at the moment, but it usually does before any sort of big breakthrough, and I guess that’s exactly what I’m aiming for.
Anyway, sharing all this has now given me a big old vulnerability hangover, so I’m going to go and take the cat for a walk and try to give the old brain box a little break.
And, if you need some help with your own creative projects or creative businesses, please feel free to reach out. I promise I’m full of tips and tricks and will be your biggest supporter.
Now, I just need to find a way to be my biggest supporter, too.
All my love,
Cassie x