For many creatives, there’s a constant tension between the need for stability and the desire for freedom. Balancing your own creative spirit with the demands of a structured workplace can be challenging when your day job feels worlds apart from your passion for creative work.
In this blog, we will explore how to thrive as a creative within a traditional job, embracing a sense of freedom that doesn’t depend on changing your job, but on shifting how you think and engage with the world around you.
I have been fortunate in that most of the jobs I have done through my life, for the most part, were enjoyable. The day job has enabled joy (in-joy-able). It has always saddened me to hear how often people don't enjoy the work they do, given how much time they spend working. This disconnect is particularly strong for those who feel their creative work is sidelined by the demands of a conventional career.
Table of contents: |
Aligning with Organizational Values: A Balancing Act |
A Higher Source: Redefining Your True Employer |
Embracing Impermanence: Knowing When to Move On |
Creating Autonomy in a Constrained Environment |
The Role of Freedom in Self Leadership and Work |
Breaking Free from Mental Frameworks That Limit You |
Transformative Work vs. Transactional Work: A Creative’s Dilemma |
The Inner Work of Clearing Mental Structures |
Creating Space for Your Creative Nature |
Aligning with Organizational Values: A Balancing Act
What I became aware of while working, was that when you were employed by someone, you had to align yourself with their values and their processes of how things got done. I spent years of my life working hard to ensure that the organisation or businesses that I worked with would be successful. I did my best to honour their vision and be a valuable, contributing and loyal employee. In return for focussing my creative efforts on their vision, I was remunerated and given many diverse and interesting work opportunities. That often involved finding ways to integrate my creative work style into my day job. This felt like a win win, until something would shift either within me or within the work environment and then it was time for something new.
A Higher Source: Redefining Your True Employer
One thing that I never voiced out loud was my philosophy of how I thought about work. The internal narrative of how work was for me. I always said to myself that I was working for a higher source. My day job was in a sense a contract role (not literally) with the company that employed me, and the real employer (in reality) was bigger than me and bigger than the vision of the company. This higher source provided a lot of space to play and create. When I reframed my day job as an avenue that supported my larger life mission, it helped me to find new meaning and purpose in both my structured job and my creative work.
Embracing Impermanence: Knowing When to Move On
While I was employed in this organisational contract, I felt it was my responsibility to give of myself 100% and yet I knew that it was likely the day would come when it was time for us to part ways. This philosophy kept me present to the now and it also gave me the freedom to know I could leave, because I never believed a job would be forever. I have no idea how this philosophy came to be, but it is likely that it was nourished through a Celtic, Catholic upbringing. Understanding this impermanence enabled me to more easily embrace my day job as a temporary container for my creative work rather than a permanent structure that defined me.
Creating Autonomy in a Constrained Environment
Thinking this way reciprocated me with a gift of freedom in any workplace. A felt sense that this is the place for now. I never felt that the company owned me, rather that I was able to consciously navigate the external reality of workplace structure and hierarchy, while internally being as creative as I could be in finding ways to do the role in a way that worked for me. Autonomy was one of my core values. I found that even within a structured day job, there was room to infuse my creative work style into the day-to-day tasks.
I was in a consensual, intentional working, evolving relationship with my real employer i.e. a higher source. This relationship allowed me to bridge the gap between the structured day job and my more spontaneous creative work.
The Role of Freedom in Self Leadership and Work
Through the past twenty years of coaching leaders, while being in corporate and then beyond in my own business, many of the conversations have explored aspects of freedom. Supporting leaders to explore ways to free themselves from workloads (by delegating), to free themselves of guilt (I should be doing more or should be at home more), to create career pathways free from peer norms, to find ways to be able to speak more freely and authentically in the different contexts of their lives. Understanding and exploring the true meaning of harmony allows me clients to dissolve the inner conflict between their day job responsibilities and the yearning to pursue creative work that fulfils their deeper desires.
Freedom is your birthright. You are free because you are here. You exist. While you are contained in human form which does have limitations, while you are part of humanity evolving itself, freedom is your nature. Being as you are. Understanding this can help ease the conflict between a structured day job and the unstructured flow of creative work.
When you truly realise who and what you are, you will naturally be more spontaneous and freely engage in creative ways of working and living. You will be more open and ready to say yes to work and live in ways that are more aligned with your creative nature. This way of working and living will feel easier and simpler than what has come before. Sometimes simply knowing this can help relieve some of the tension experienced by the internal conflict of what to do when you feel constricted and unable to tap into your innate creativity.
Breaking Free from Mental Frameworks That Limit You
Many people start out working in areas that their parents or teachers suggested to them. Many follow in the footsteps of their siblings or family members who have gone before them into the workplace. While they may be similar to you, have good intentions for you, there is no one like you.
Things will change for you when you start to honour your own wisdom and knowing. When you begin to discover what you love to do and how you love to be. When you feel free, your innate creativity has space to breathe, has space to express itself, in infinite forms.
It is a common human experience to feel frustrated and limited in your workplace. I experienced that too. I noticed it happened particularly when I had a lot of detailed work to do with numbers and data with limited access to being in conversation with people either virtually or face to face.
Transformative Work vs. Transactional Work: A Creative’s Dilemma
A common human pattern of thinking (cause and effect) is to project blame or cause onto the structure of the organisation, the job spec, the hierarchical nature of society, the operating system within our families, workplaces and community spaces. In reality what is likely to be happening at a deeper level within you, is that you are simply outgrowing your thinking patterns. You are maturing and more ready for more transformative rather than transactional work. For many, this means finding ways to make your creative work more central to your life, even while you maintain your day job.
The Inner Work of Clearing Mental Structures
One of the biggest structures that can limit you from feeling free to create work that matters to you, are the mental frameworks in mind that tell you that you can't be this, you shouldn't do that, that you aren't enough as you are and that you are not worthy of rewarding and fulfilling work.
These limiting mindsets are at the heart of the reason why you feel limited to seek out and create work that you truly love. The inner work of clearing mental structures is intentional development work. This is the work that will transform you. Developing on purpose is an exploration into your interior to explore and discover who and what you truly are. This journey of self discovery opens the doorway to personal freedom and creativity.
Creating Space for Your Creative Nature
For now do what you can do in order to be able to pay the bills and simultaneously carve out more space for you. Making time for you to get to know your creative nature so that in time freedom will no longer be a concept that you seek, but a reality you simply live. Integrating small moments of creative work into your day job can be a powerful way to bridge these two worlds for now.
Eimer Boyle
Conversational Coach & Teacher of Human Development
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