The entrepreneur with the artist’s heart & the nature of feminine creation

I have found that many women with a strong draw to connect with their feminine nature, also resonate with the artist archetype within the business realm.

Which means that many traditional “‘business-y” aspects of creating and growing a business can feel quite heavy and overwhelming to their nature.

This is because the artist’s heart is inspired by beauty, connection, perspective, relationship and subjective experience, rather than the more logical, clear-cut, tangibly measured solution model that traditional business is based on.

If you resonate with the archetype of the artist, you may not be motivated by entrepreneurship in terms of how quickly you can grow and how large a profit you can create. You have likely had experience in traditional workplaces that have taken their toll on your creativity, energies and heart- and because of this, you are not striving to create a business that mirrors the expectations, linearity and pace of the traditional workplace.

Instead, you see business as a vehicle that can support a life of freedom, creativity and doing things that feel purposeful and enlivening to your soul. You see business as a path to create, express and share in ways that mirror your deeper heart.

Yet so often this natural expression is diminished by the belief that we must follow the unspoken rules, timeframes and collective benchmarks around what creation should look like in the business world.

The formulaic strategies and quick pace of the business landscape that we so often find ourselves traversing as we seek to share and sell our heart’s work, do not tend to be conducive to the flourishing of our creative heart.

The hyper focus on income, sales, marketing and growth can be tricky to reconcile with the inner visions of our heart and the sensibility of our feminine soul.

For many of us, we feel exhausted and unmotivated because we judge ourselves for not wanting to do things in a certain way that we have been taught is ‘right’. We spend energy trying to figure out what is wrong with us, instead of focusing on what we do want to do, what we do know, and how we can nurture our gifts in a way that is right for our unique hearts.

As a teacher for many years, I saw this reflected in what I refer to as the ‘deficit model’, which is rife in schools. Instead of focusing on nurturing a child’s gifts, talents, artistry and natural interests, the education system tends to hone in on what is wrong, telling teachers they must put pressure and focus on where a child is not achieving to ‘standard’.

Yet in order for our artist’s heart and feminine creativity to thrive, we need to throw out the ‘standards.’

read more

If you’d like to read on, the full piece of writing now lives in the Gentle Creation ebook.