Episode 6: Creative or Educator?

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I find that teaching and serving and giving back in this way actually just increases the happiness of people all over the world. And you know, when you teach, you will never know how deep it goes. You'll never know all of the ripple effects that are created from something that you put out there. I'm Bonnie Christine, and this is where all things, creativity, design, business, and marketing unite. I'm a mama living in a tiny town, tucked right inside the Smokey Mountains, running a multi seven figure business, doing the most creative and impactful work of my life. When I first set out to become an entrepreneur, I was struggling to make ends meet and wrestling with how to accomplish my biggest dream of becoming a fabric designer.

Fast forward to today, I'm not only licensing my artwork all over the world, but also teaching others how to design their creative life and experience the same success. I'm here to help you spend your life doing something that lights you up. I'll help you build a creative business that also creates an impact, changes people's lives, gives you all of the freedom you want and is wildly profitable.

Welcome to the Professional Creative podcast. Welcome to episode number six of the Professional Creative Podcast. Today we're talking about being a creative or being an educator, and why I don't think you have to choose between the two. I'll be answering questions like how do you manage the different roles of teacher and artists to find space and energy for both? And how do you separate what you share with your students versus what your own creative expressions are?

How did you know you could and wanted to do this, both art and educate? It feels like so many creatives add teaching to their income stream. Do you think it's possible to become as financially comfortable without teaching? And questions like, which role is your favorite entrepreneur, educator, designer, and why? I have a set of affirmations that I wrote about a year and a half ago that I read every morning.

We'll probably do an entire podcast on this one concept, but I wanted to share three of them with you today. The first one is I develop creatives. That's not something that I do, it's who I am. The next one is I am called to make an impact, and the next one is, my voice is needed in the world. But it wasn't always this way and I didn't always feel like these things were true.

In fact, I never set out to teach in the beginning. So before we get to the root of this episode, I wanted to share with you how I began teaching and what that looked like for me, because I've already shared with you that my biggest goal was to become a fabric designer. So how did I become an educator? If you would've told me 10 years ago, I wouldn't have believed you, but this is how it happened for me. So in 2013, I got an email from a company called Creative Live, and they were aware of who I was because of my blog, and they simp, but they didn't know what I did. They simply just knew that I had a little bit of readership and some attention in the industry and wanted to know if there was anything that I could teach.

Like I said, teaching was not on my radar. I would have said I was very uncomfortable being in front of people. I didn't feel quite like an expert, but I did know Adobe Illustrator like the back of my hand. And so that's what I said. The only thing that I know really, really well is Illustrator. And they said, Great, come and teach it. And so it was an opportunity that I could not turn down. At the time, Creative Live was fairly new, but they had gotten a lot of attention very quickly, and I did have somewhere in my heart the fact that learning was so hard for me, meaning there was nobody teaching surface pattern design at the time, and I very much piecemealed it all together.

I felt like I was entering a industry that really held all of their secrets very close to their chest. It felt like it was all very much an inner circle that I was standing outside of. And I did have somewhere inside of me, this desire to make it easier for other people who were interested in doing the same thing, saving them time and that kind of thing.

But I wasn't sure really how that was gonna unfold. And so this opportunity came way too big for me to say no to, but also like the biggest and most nerve wracking thing that I have ever done. So I was back living in North Carolina at the time, and what they do is they fly you out to their studio in San Francisco and you teach to a small audience that's in the studio with you.

I think there was about six people in the studio with me, but the entire thing is broadcasted live to thousands of people. And when I say live, there's no delay. And I was teaching this program Live Now, side note, something really cool that they did was let me work with a content producer for about six months leading up to the release of the course.

And so we had everything, you know, on paper down to the minute when I was gonna transition from this topic to this topic, to this tool, to this tool. I had notes and notes and notes about the flow of it, but it was still by far the most nerve wracking thing that I have ever done. They had a makeup artist on set and you know, it was just way outside of my comfort zone. And yeah, also very exciting. So fast forward just a bit, and I went and I taught this class on surface pattern design and it went really well. And I got home and thought, Whew, I'm so glad that's over. I don't ever have to do it again. And little did I know that it was one of the biggest turning points in my entire career, and this is why, because when I was home back safely in my comfort zone, I started reading reviews of this class and I started getting emails from students all over the world. They were women who had taken my class and for some reason experienced immense change. Like they had gotten permission for the first time to explore their creativity in a career setting. And within about six months, I was getting emails from people who had quit their day jobs that they had hated, or they were able to stay at home with their children and in a time that they never thought that that was possible and people's lives were being changed because of a class that I had taught. This started to crack me open to the idea a little bit, even though I still very much felt like it was way outside of my comfort zone.

So I resisted it, I kept doing other things that I found easier, but every time I would put out a piece of education, my audience would, you know, clearly be so receiving of it, they would just soak it up like a sponge. And so I remember the moment that I really decided to almost give in to education, and it always makes me think of Allie and Noah in the notebook when Allie comes back and just shrugs her shoulders to Noah and drops her suitcase and has chosen him,right? I shrugged my shoulders and I said, Okay, I'm willing. I'm willing to do what I find to be really hard. I'm willing to be vulnerable, I'm willing to teach. And that really just spun me into this whole other side of my business being a educator for surface pattern design and for creative entrepreneurs. But since then, I have learned so much, and there are some tricks about how being an educator actually really helps you perfect your craft and increase your purpose. And so that's what we're gonna talk about today. 

You know, I decided that sharing my secrets doesn't have to increase my competition. Instead, I think about it helping the entire creative industry evolve. I think about sharing my secrets as actually increasing happiness in the world, not only for you, but for those around you. Because if you do something that you love, you know how happy it makes you. In fact, I don't even feel like it's fair to tell people that I have a job or I'm going to work because I love what I do so much. And you know what? That's contagious. Being around people who love what they do, make the people around them happier too. It's inspiring them as well. 

And so I find that teaching and serving and giving back in this way actually just increases the happiness of people all over the world. And you know, when you teach, you will never know how deep it goes. You'll never know all of the ripple effects that are created from something that you put out there.

Developing others and turning around and teaching what you know does really two different things. First and foremost, it actually perfects your skills and we're gonna talk about that, but it also increases your purpose. I always say that I'm in a cycle of learning, implementing, and teaching. So you learn something, you implement it, and you excel or succeed at it, right? And then you teach it, which perfects your skills because the best way to perfect your knowledge is to actually teach someone else. And so it can almost be used as a trick to enhance your own performance and your own skill set. Now, the best way to increase your purpose and expand your impact in the world is also to teach. When you weave serving others into your creative practice, you actually sustain increased performance for longer. And you also find greater success and overall happiness. Because of it. You become driven to get things done more efficiently and at a higher level of excellence because you doing so in a quality manner actually affects others. It increases your motivation and your responsibility because others are depending on you. In other words, having a little positive pressure from the outside,

from those who are counting on you actually makes you perform at a higher level. Teaching leads to mastery. So when someone else is depending on you, you hold yourself accountable to higher standards and it leads to excellence and mastery of your skill. Henry David Thoreau says, Not only must we be good, but we must also be good for something. Sometimes I like to think we must also be good for someone, right? 

Like think about it from a team sports perspective. If you've ever played a team sport, you know that at some point your performance is actually more excellent than it would be if you were out there on your own trying to push yourself on your own because your entire team is relying on you for increased performance.

I think the same way about working out, I can go to the gym and I can think that I push myself just as hard as I possibly could, but with no external pressure, with no, you know, team effort there. I know that I haven't tapped into my highest performance like I would if there was more of a group effort. And the same is true with teaching.

Sometimes a little bit of external pressure can actually do us a lot of good. When people know you're going to help them, your actual motivation increases exponentially. I believe that we should all be contributing to the future for so many reasons, but one of them is that if we don't, we'll actually underperform. Now, I know that some of you probably don't feel ready to teach, but here I am to challenge that mindset because truthfully, we all have things that come very naturally to us that oftentimes can be life changing to others. Additionally, you only need to be just one step ahead of the person that you're helping to get both of these returns enhanced performance and enhanced purpose and impact. You know, we are all at least one step ahead in something than someone else.

And you know, our life is always like that. There will always be people both ahead of us and behind us. And so it's really quite pointless to wait until we've arrived at a certain level to start pouring into others because there's really nobody telling you when you've arrived because there are always new directions to go and new ways to grow and things to continue to learn, right? So if you're not sure what you want to extend to someone else, here are a couple of questions to help get you started. Number one, ask yourself, what do I get asked about the most? What do people in your daily life ask you? What are they curious about? What kind of questions do you get in your email? Or maybe questions on Instagram or in your dms?

What questions do you get asked the most? Oftentimes, this can lead to something that you're doing in a unique way that people would really be interested in learning about. Number two is, what have I been praised for? In other words, what do people kind of gasp? Or if you've had a job, like what do your managers or your boss really say that you excel at?

Number three is, what am I an expert in? And you really have to sit with this one because if you're like me, you're probably not sitting there feeling very expertly in all of these different areas. But this one requires really sitting with what are you an expert? You are an expert at probably several things. And so think about jobs that you've had in the past, or classes that you've excelled at in school, or things that you obsess over learning about, right? So what would you consider knowing quite a lot more about than the average person? 

Number four, is there a specific way that I do something or a specific way that I combine a skill set that is interesting? You know, in my own skill set, sometimes I think about how I uniquely use items from my yard, like ferns and foliage, and I scan them in and use them alongside my painted illustrations or my, you know, sketched illustrations by hand. And layering in these effects are part of what contribute to my signature style. And so sometimes we can combine different skill sets that, you know, produce something fairly unique and that makes it very teachable as well.

So sit with those questions again there. What do I get asked about the most? What have I been praised for? What am I an expert in? And is there a specific way that I do something that's interesting? Once you identify something that you are uniquely equipped to pass on to someone else, here's what I want you to do. Number one is start today.

You don't have to overthink this part, you don't have to develop a class, you don't have to develop, you know, anything very intricate. You just need to start pouring into at least one person. Number two is to choose another skill that you want to be an expert in. Then number three is to obsess over developing those skills. Again, obsess over developing those skills.

You want to excel or become an expert in this one area. And then number four is pass on your knowledge to someone else as quickly as possible. And then number five is, begin again. Start today. Choose another skill that you wanna become an expert in. Obsess over developing those skills. Pass on your knowledge as quickly as you can, and then begin again.

This will help you stay disciplined, it will help you push yourself to higher levels and find great confidence and subsequent success. It will also do these same things to those who learn from you. It will help them find higher levels of success and confidence, and that's pretty cool. People are counting on you and it's up to you to make a difference. So if you're thinking about possibly sharing what you know, I would urge you to not be afraid to share it. Don't be afraid to share your secrets. Don't be afraid that there's someone else doing it already. Don't be afraid that maybe you're an imposter and there's a better way, right? 

Because someone is gonna resonate with the way that you teach it. Someone is gonna resonate with the way that you share it, and they need you to do it. You are needed in order to help evolve this industry, your industry. You are needed in order to help develop other creatives and subsequently hire happiness in the world. We actually haven't even talked about the opportunity of this as an income stream. So as a creative, adding an income stream of teaching and serving others is a beautiful way to add just another layer of what you're already doing.

And like I said, it actually works to increase your skills and increase your sense of purpose. So if you are ready to just think about this, just play with the idea of developing someone else. Here are some ways that you can get started. You can choose just one person in your real day to day life to share what you know with this is often just like the lowest risk and the most rewarding way to get started.

Someone who's interested in what you do, but they don't know where to begin. Maybe someone younger or maybe someone who's just a little bit less experienced. Just offer to share with them what you know on a regular basis. From there, you could always entertain the idea of doing a workshop. Now, I love an in-person workshop. You could absolutely also do a online workshop.

You could also offer one-on-one coaching. So maybe you just do a one-on-one call with someone who's interested in learning from you, and just figure out where they're at, figure out where they wanna go next, and how you might be able to help them. You can also teach a class. If you're ready to put together, you know, even just a 20 minute class that's broken up into lessons, a great place to start for that is a place like Skillshare. You could also just do one tutorial. And so just one tutorial oftentimes is a great way to just kind of put some things out there and see if people are interested in learning that specific technique. So I love doing tutorials and emailing them to the people on your email list or posting them on social media like Instagram or doing a quick reel or something like that that just shares a tipper trick that you have.

Now, of course, you can go bigger, right? You can teach an entire course that lasts, you know, multiple weeks with big modules and tons of lessons. You can also host a community around your craft as well. Community is such an important part to us being creatives because so many times we don't actually have a lot of people in our day to day life that really understand what we do or speak our language.

And so I have found that community and the creative world oftentimes just goes so much deeper, so much more quickly, especially when it's founded on the philosophy of generosity and sharing your secrets and coming together because it's community over competition. Like truly believing that we are better together and we can do more when we come alongside others and serve them and help develop them than we could ever do on our own. People counting on us makes us perform well, but loving their success makes us do it with our whole heart. And it's something that I want every single one of you to experience. I can't wait to see what secrets you decide to share and how it helps develop your skillset and your impact on the world. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The Professional Creative Podcast.

Make sure to head on over to professional creative.com for show notes and a recap of everything that we went over in this episode. I hope that you are enjoying this show as much as I'm enjoying sharing it with you. Until next time, I'll see you next week. Same time, same place.