#95: What Are You Feeding?
Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Jeweler's View. I'm Courtney Gray. I've spent nearly 30 years in this industry, running schools, doing custom work, coaching, consulting, and working with makers at all stages. Over time, I've started to see the patterns, the things that actually move a creative career forward and the things that can quietly hold it back.
I built this podcast to cut through the noise. Less time in your head or down the research rabbit hole and more time building something real. Let's get into it
What keeps a creative person going for 20 years, 30, even 40? Talent helps. Business skills help. Experience helps, but none of that protects you from life. Kids grow up, relationships change, bodies change, the industry changes, Technology changes about every six minutes, my friend.[00:01:00]
Sometimes the life that you're living looks nothing like the one you thought you were building, and somehow we keep making things anyway. Welcome back to The Jeweler's View. I'm Courtney Gray. Next week, I'm so excited, is Evolving Creatively. This is a free online gathering brought to you by The Jeweler's View, and I've put this together with three women I really admire: Holly Gage, Francesca Watson, and Teresa Kiplinger.
I picked each of them because they see this stuff from a different angle than I do. Holly has spent years working with burn survivors through Healing Phoenix, a new nonprofit that she's co-founding.
She's watched what happens when someone's appearance changes overnight,
And all of a sudden they have to navigate being seen differently, being looked at differently, being judged, and wanting to honestly just hide. We're calling this [00:02:00] talk or conversation of evolving creatively Vulnerability Out Loud. It's about what it costs to let yourself be seen and when to stop managing everyone else's reaction to you.
Now, Francesca's a jeweler, a teacher. She runs a school, kind of like I did. She's a community builder whose studio actually, if you didn't see, burned down a couple years ago. Now, I'm less interested in the fire than in what came after. How you keep moving when something you built is just gone, and how you rebuild it without demanding the next version look exactly like the last one.
We're calling her talk Resilience in Motion, because my friend, she is living it. Now, Teresa has spent decades as a working creative while navigating some major upheaval in her personal life.
We're gonna talk about creativity as an anchor, [00:03:00] how it holds you down when shit hits the fan, and something that she believes in really hard and practices, radical acceptance. Not liking what happened, just getting honest about what's true now, so you can actually decide what to do next, how you wanna move forward.
And here's a layer of timing that I did not plan, September is the anniversary of my own house fire. Now, I picked that date for Evolving Creatively because it worked for the speakers, it worked for my schedule.
I didn't even look or clock how close it landed to that. Holly works with burn survivors. Francesca lost her studio to a fire. I've lived through one myself. Now, that's not the whole gathering. This isn't just about fire, even though we do work with fire every day, it's a powerful element, But that's not what this whole gathering is about, not even close. But I can't pretend that I didn't notice this when I was looking at the calendar. Being seen, continuing when the [00:04:00]plan falls apart, having something creative to come back to, to anchor you, none of that is separate from the business stuff that we talk about here every week.
We bring ourselves into everything that we build. That's the whole reason I put Evolving Creatively together. Now, if you haven't registered, it's online, and you'll find it at courtneygrayarts.com. . I would love to have you there.
Okay, so here's what I actually wanna talk about today. What are you feeding? A little while back, I did something I haven't mentioned on this podcast. This may sound a little woo, bear with me. I got a Sak Yant tattoo. I hope I'm s- pronouncing this right. Probably not. Now, if you don't know about this, it's a traditional Buddhist tattoo, hand applied as part of a ceremony where each symbol carries a specific intention.
So going in, I thought hard about what I wanted mine to mean [00:05:00] or represent. And if you know me, you can probably guess the shortlist, right? I was going in with ideas of let's remind myself how strong I am, strength, courage, resilience, independence.
I've had plenty of practice with those, honestly. Maybe too much practice with independence if you heard the motorcycle episode. You already know how that's been going. Apparently my preferred method of personal growth at 47 years old is buying something that weighs 650 pounds, and then refusing to admit I need help lifting it off my foot. So maybe strength wasn't actually what I needed more of, even though that's kinda what I was thinking when I went in.
The word I kept landing on actually was softness. This surprised the heck out of me. It's not a word I've ever used to describe myself for most of my life. Nobody else has used this word around me.
I'm a figure-it-out person, a get-it-done [00:06:00] person. If something's broken, my instinct is to fix it, preferably five minutes ago or yesterday. But I've started thinking about softness differently. For me, this means listening before reacting, letting people help, knowing when pushing harder is actually pushing things away or making it worse, letting something unfold for a minute before I decide what it means.
Now, of course, this tattoo does not make me softer. It can't. It's just a reminder. I still have to practice the thing, and I think that's true of every quality that we say we want more of.
You don't become patient because you decided patience matters
You practice it. You don't trust yourself because you wrote confidence in a journal or a Post-it Note like I do on my bathroom mirror. You build the evidence. Same with curiosity, same with creativity. [00:07:00] We practice them, and what we practice gets easier to come back to, or we say just return to it.
Now this gets me thinking about attention. We talk endlessly about time in this business. How many hours do I have? What can I get done today? What has to wait? These are important questions, But you can have two wide open hours in the studio and still have no room in your head.
Maybe you've been fighting the same solder joint for 45 minutes, and you're starting to wonder if you've ever soldered anything correctly in your entire life. Maybe you open Canva, I just went through this one, to do one simple thing, now you're 45 minutes down the rabbit hole with tutorials because they moved that stupid button again.
Perhaps something's going on at home, or maybe nothing dramatic at all. Your brain is just full. So you have the time, you don't have the attention, and [00:08:00] usually we respond by managing time even harder. Another list, another notebook, another calendar, another system.
Now, sometimes that's exactly right, but sometimes the calendar was never the problem. So instead of only asking, "Where is my time going?" I've started asking, "What has my attention?" Because whatever has your attention, you're feeding something, and that can work for you or against you.
I think about this like a musician thinks about rehearsal. Whatever you rehearse, you get better at, and we rehearse things about ourselves constantly. . I hear this one all the time from creative business owners. I am terrible with computers.
I'm just not a tech person, and especially from people starting this later in life. I'm too old to learn all this over again. Now, I get where this comes from. Technology is infuriating. You [00:09:00] finally learn how to do something, and somebody moves the damn button. But the second you say, "I'm bad at technology," you've stopped describing something that's hard and started describing yourself.
Now what if the sentence was just, "I haven't learned this yet"? That's not positive thinking, it's just more accurate. You learned to solder. Think about that for a second. Someone handed you a torch with flammable gas, a couple of tanks attached to it, scary, right?
And a scrap , of precious metal, and said, essentially, "Heat this to almost exactly the point where everything goes wrong," and you figured it out. Trust me, my friend, you can figure out Canva. We do the same thing at the bench. One bad soldering day becomes, "I'm not good at fabrication.
Everybody else is ahead of me." One awkward sales conversation becomes, "I'm terrible at selling," or, "My work has no value." [00:10:00] One new technique that flops the first time becomes, "Maybe I'm just not good at this." Those are not facts, they're conclusions, and conclusions get very convincing once you rehearsed them enough times.
So what story have you been rehearsing so long it started sounding like a fact? What might change if you stopped feeding it?
If attention is something we're always spending, what do we actually want to spend it on? But the business does need feeding too. So what have you been feeding in your business?
Most of us give more attention to whatever we're already really comfortable doing love making? You can make for six months straight and end up with enough inventory to outfit a small village, and never actually get it in front of a customer.
You love learning? There's always another class, another [00:11:00] technique, another tool, and at some point you have to use what you already know instead of collecting more maybe you're great at talking about your work, but haven't actually checked whether your prices make sense. Maybe your bookkeeping or your books are immaculate, but visibility or marketing makes you wanna crawl underneath the bench. We all have the parts that come easy and the parts we keep pushing for later, but a business gets lopsided fast when you only feed what you're already good at.
Now, this is exactly why we look at the whole business inside Transform. We look at pricing, customers, visibility, financials, systems, and underneath all of it, how you're actually defining success for you, for yourself. These things are all connected, And often the part of your business that's asking for attention is not the part that you'd choose.
It just helps to notice because your [00:12:00] attention is not unlimited
Now that's part of what I wanna make room for evolving creatively next week. Not one more list of things to add to your life. I think we're good there. Room for conversation, for listening, for being present with each other, for hearing how other creative people have actually navigated the stuff that we recognize in our own lives.
I don't expect Holly, Francesca, Teresa, or me to hand you a tidy answer because that's not really the point. Some questions are worth carrying around for a while, and I hope this gathering gives you a few of those. It's free. It's online. Go to courtneygrayarts.com and grab a seat. I would love to see you there, and share it while you're at it because there's a lot of creatives who may not see this and need to come and be with us this day.
So here's your bench note of the week. Pay attention to your attention just notice for the [00:13:00] next few days. Just notice where it goes. Not just your time, your attention. What thought do you keep circling back to? What part of your business keeps getting pushed to next week?
What are you curious about? What have you decided you're just bad at? And what have you been giving a lot of yourself to that maybe doesn't deserve it anymore? Don't turn this into homework. You don't need a spreadsheet. Just notice. Then ask yourself, "Is this something I actually want to keep feeding?"
Because guess what? We have a choice. I keep coming back to my tattoo. The fact that I landed on softness still makes me smile. It's not going to make me softer. That's still my job. It's just a reminder that this is the thing worth my attention this season of my life. We don't have to work on everything at once, and you don't need to go get a tattoo either.
That's not what I'm saying. We just get to notice [00:14:00] what needs us now. So what are you feeding, and does it deserve your attention? Next week, a different angle on all this. Creative people rarely run short on ideas.
Usually, we've got the opposite problem. So let's talk about what happens when you already have plenty of ideas, and you need to figure out which one actually deserves a yes. Until then, I'm Courtney Gray. This is The Jeweler's View. Thanks for being with me today. Onward and upward.
Speaker 5: This episode is brought to you by Bonny Doon Tools. Good tools should last, and they should make your process cleaner and more predictable. From forming to cutting to custom die systems, Bonny Doon builds equipment designed to keep working use after use, year after year. Visit bonnydoontools.com to get educated on what's possible
Speaker 6: I'm glad you're here. This path takes a lot, [00:15:00] especially when you're building something of your own. If you wanna go deeper, I share key takeaways and additional teaching through my email list at courtneygrayarts.com. Keep going. This part matters. I'll see you next [00:16:00] week
