The 7 Myths About Following Your Creative Pursuits

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0:52Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantz and my guest today is Kate Volman. She's the CEO of Floyd Coaching with over 20 years of experience in developing and leading life-changing programs for entrepreneurs and leaders. She has a passion for helping people grow. And today we're going to talk about her new book, Do What You Love, a guide to living your creative life without leaving your job. So Kate, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me, John. It's such a pleasure to be here. So I want to start with what I see as a bit of a twist.

1:29I think the do what you love mantra has certainly been out there for quite some time. But this idea of without leaving your job, you know, I think most books are like, no, go for it. Like, you know, you can do this. And so, so talk to me a little bit about why you built that caveat, if you will, into this book. Yeah. So it's so funny. That is your first question because I spent so much time thinking about this book and how is it different than all these other books that are basically saying, go out and live your dreams and do your thing. And what I've discovered over the many years that I've had in coaching so many people, and obviously in the work that I get to do at Floyd Coaching, so many of the clients that we have, they have a full-time role.

2:12And when we are coaching them, what is uncovered is they are unsatisfied for a number of different reasons. They think it's work. They think that they need to kind of change their entire life and go do something completely different. When really, when we dig deep, it's like they've given up playing the guitar. They used to sing. They love to dance. They want to create videos. Maybe they want to start a blog or a side hustle. And they feel as though it's all or nothing. They either have to leave their job and figure it out, or they have to stay there and be miserable. No, you get to live your creative of life and pursue your creative passions and stay in a role should you choose to.

2:56You know, it's interesting. I could see a lot of employers. I think this mindset's changing, but certainly a lot of employers that would say, no, I want you all in to your job. This is like, this is your, everything, your growth, all of your extra reading, everything should be focused here. And you could make a case for saying, I would guess if somebody, you know, for a lot of people, jobs, I got bills to pay and, you know, I'm trying to, you know, raise my children and send them to college. So having actually that creative outlet in some ways, I would suggest to employers might actually make for a better employee if they actually encouraged it.

3:34Right. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. I mean, that's so much of what I talk about in the book is when we, if we're, if that's all we're focused on is business and we're sometimes the best ideas come from when we're out in the garden or we're taking a walk. There's so much data and research that shows we have to get out of our work environment sometimes. And it's those things that bring you so much joy. And what's so beautiful is when you start to pursue your creativity and some of those passion projects, you become more engaged. You become more engaged in your personal life, which then in turn, you become more engaged in your professional life.

4:11So you automatically, not only are you becoming a better team member, you're becoming a better parent and spouse, significant other, friend, coworker, teammate, all of these things, simply because you're getting so much energy out of those creative pursuits. And it's just a beautiful thing to watch. I mean, And Matthew Kelly wrote The Dream Manager, and that's the basic concept of the book. Your organization can only be the best version of itself to the extent that your people are becoming better versions of themselves. And when we are encouraging our team members to explore their creative passions, all of that stuff is going to be infused into the other areas of their lives, including their business.

4:48Yeah. And I think sometimes personal development is missing in a lot of, you know, certainly in job descriptions, but in actually a lot of workplaces. You know, one of the things that I think is great about being an entrepreneur, owning your own business, I think it's probably the greatest personal development program ever created. I mean, because you have to evolve as a person or you're going to die, you know, as an entrepreneur. And that's not necessarily true, you know, when here's your paycheck, you know, show up nine to five. So I think a lot of people that are in careers, you know, their personal development sometimes suffers unless they're in a workplace with a culture that really develops it.

5:22Yeah, I think it's important as leaders. I mean, as leaders, our number one role is to help our people grow. And how do you do that? Of course, you want them to get better in their role and you want to provide that kind of development and training so that they get better in the role that they're in and the tasks they need to do. but then also encouraging them to explore those other passions, those other things that really light them up and really bring joy to their life. Yeah. We, I didn't want to, I wasn't going to spend this much time on this, but I think it's a fascinating conversation. I mean, do you think that actually as a leader of a team or of an organization that you really should be trying to like find out what are those passions?

5:58And, you know, is there a way that we could actually participate in you, you know, realizing some of those? I mean, is that crossing the line or is that something that you think would be a healthy, you know, business relationship? Oh my gosh. Absolutely. Oh yes. Those are conversations that should be had all the time. So one of the things that I think is so beautiful. So I run Floyd Coaching, which was founded by Matthew Kelly, who again wrote the dream manager. And in that, in that, the whole idea of asking your team members about their dreams, right? Like what are the dreams that you have for your life?

6:29And you start to see them become more engaged. And then what's so great is as a leader, when you know what their dreams are, you're getting to know them a little bit more. You get to know their mindset and you get to encourage them to pursue those dreams. And when they do that, think about the relationship that you're building with that person. Oh, John cares about me as a human being, not just that I come into work and do this job. And in the book, he shares the 12 areas of dreams. We have dreams in all areas, professional, physical, material, psychological, character, and we have creative dreams and we lose sight of those.

7:04It's kind of easy in business, right? We have professional dreams. You want to get promoted and we have financial dreams and we all know about those. And so those are ones that we think about our material dreams. Those are ones kind of in our face all the time. But when we think about these other areas, like our character dreams, your legacy dreams, your creative dreams, and the creative one, I have to say, most of our clients have such a hard time putting the those filling that box up because we've stopped feeling like we can be creative and i believe that we are all artists like you are the artist of your life and so yes as a leader we need to know what our people care about when we know what our people care about we can lead them better we can coach them better we know what drives them we know what's motivated what's motivating them and we can build better relationships with not only that person but within the entire team.

7:53Yeah, I suspect part of what holds people back is the very narrow definition of creativity, meaning I have to have a paintbrush in my hand, you know, or I'm not, you know, creating art. I mean, I think most people, if they really reflect on what their day looks like, they are creatively making decisions all day long, you know, and I think that's expanding that, you know, I think helps people. The book is essentially outlined or set up around seven myths that you must hear from time to time when you encourage people to follow this dream. And so let's just kind of, we don't have to cover them all.

8:25Maybe we will see how far we get, but obviously by the book, you get the full display of the myth, but let's just, I'll just kind of tee it up and you kind of talk about how this shows up in some of the folks that you work with. So the first one is people just feel like I got a job. I got, you know, that's crazy. It's not possible. So, you know, how do you bat that myth down? Yeah, I mean, myth number one is not possible. I mean, we think about, we go through life and especially as we get older and things get a little more challenging, we have things that get thrown in our direction, right? We used to be more carefree living and now we have kids and bills and all the things that we need to do.

9:03And so we actually have this mindset sometimes of it's not possible. Like it's not possible for me to make money and go and have a job and do these things. and also pursue my creativity. Like it just, it's not possible. If we don't believe it's possible, then we're not going to be encouraged to take any steps towards making it happen. All right, number two, I'm going to debate a little bit. You're not good enough. My dream is to be a left-handed major league pitcher. And first off, I'm not left-handed. And secondly, you know, my fastball is very hittable. So I just don't know. But again, I'll tee that one up.

9:40You're not good enough. Okay, so you're not good enough. Now, this is in the sense of pursuing your passions, right? So maybe you're not good enough to become the NBA player that you want to become, but you are good enough to play basketball, to go out with your friends, to go hang out, to get in the league, to, you know, and that if you really love something so much, you're doing it for fun. You're doing it for the joy of it, right? So that myth is really around, I see so many people stop themselves from starting the podcast or writing the book because they think, oh, my ideas don't matter. I'm not good enough yet.

10:18They're waiting for the right, they're waiting for the time where they're feeling like, yep, here I am. I have everything in place and I am enough when really you're enough exactly as you are right now. And whatever those creative pursuits are that you're interested in going after, hey, go for it. You're not going to be like, you're not going to have a John Jantz podcast where it's, you know, he's done so many and he's at a very different level, but you're good enough to start your own podcast right now. Yeah. I mean, there's a whole lot of teachings, mostly Eastern teachings about how valuable it is to actually be a beginner at something and to, you know, to experience the fact that you're not good at something is because you will eventually get there.

10:59Cause you know, this whole talk about do what you love and the money will follow, you know, all of that. I think that there's a little bit of misleading information in that sometimes there has to be a demand for what you love and things like that. But I also think that when people get good at stuff, like there's things that I didn't love in the beginning that I love now because I'm kind of good at them. And, you know, had I just said, oh, I'm not going to be a writer or I'm not going to be a speaker, you know, because I'm not good at them, you know, or because I don't really think I love it, you know, now.

11:29And obviously those have been, you know, huge parts of my business and my growth. Yeah. I mean, I, and look, it's part of what the myth is, right? I mean, one of the, well, myth number four is you need a reason. We're kind of skipping, we skipped over myth number three, but you need a reason. And one of the reasons why I put this one in there is because of what you just said, which is, oh, do what you love and the money will follow. So that's not what the book's about. We're not talking about like making this your career. We're talking about you, you don't need a reason to pursue your creativity.

12:00If you love to write, I love, I started writing and writing poetry. I never was really into poetry. Do I want to be a poet for a living? No, but you never know if I start writing poetry now, what's, what is my poetry going to look like 10 years from now? If I practice it every day, simply for the joy of it. Now, how does it make me a better leader? It makes me a better leader because poetry is so interesting. You have to find things that are fascinating and put ideas together and make something work. And that's what you do in business. It also helps in my writing. This helped me write the book, studying poetry and what that was like.

12:34And I wanted it to feel like a very good flow moving book, which is a lot of what poetry is. And so this is why it's not about the money. Now, obviously, if somebody wants to start a podcast and make money, for sure, be more strategic about it. But we're talking about two different things. This is why I have that caveat of without leaving your job. Do you, if you want to one day leave your job, the myths in this book will still help you with that goal down the line. But you know, it's really giving people permission to explore their creativity a little bit more than they are used to. And now let's hear a word from our sponsor.

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14:42Look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create, and you can have them today. Check it out at dtm.world slash certification. That's dtm.world slash certification. Well, and I wonder how many people that started like that, oh, I'm not going to be a poet or I'm not going to write music or, you know, whatever it is. And then all of a sudden, like three years later, they're rocking it. It's like, that's what they decided they were meant to do. And now they've actually, you know, instead of putting it off because they needed a reason, they just did it. And who knows, it turned into something that wasn't the intention, but it turned into something.

15:24So we did skip over you need permission. And I think that that's an interesting one because there's a lot of people we think we need permission from. I mean, you think about all of our roles and responsibilities in life and a lot of, you know, right or wrong, we probably assign the need for permission to all of those responsibilities that we have. Yeah, we feel like it's almost like we want to get picked, right? Like we want somebody to reach out to us and say, hey, you should start a podcast or you should go pursue that creative project or you should go try out for the play. When, no, we need to give ourselves permission because nobody else is going to do that for us, right?

16:09Like we have to give ourselves permission to start creating. And then what you just said is when you start putting yourself out there, when you start giving yourself that permission, that's when other people might find you. They might want to collaborate with you. They might find your content and really find it interesting and want to do something with you. But when we're waiting for permission, we're going to be waiting a long time if we're waiting for somebody to call us up and say, Hey, here, do the thing you keep saying you want to do. Well, and sadly, you know, as part of the human condition, there are people out there that maybe don't want us to grow that way or to succeed that way.

16:43And so, you know, sometimes you've got to just like bust through that too. There's not enough time. I mean, I'm sure that one probably ought to be number one, probably to tell you true, because I'm sure a lot of people would say that now a lot of those same people fill their lives up with time wasting, but, and I'm sure that's part of your myth busting, but what do you tell people when they say, I got this and I got that. I don't have time. Yeah. I mean, you hit the nail on the head. It's, I used to run this workshop called Inspired Action and it was a group, it was a mastermind group. It was specifically for women, eight to 10 women.

17:14And this one was so fun because we, this section, we would always have a good laugh because what did we do? I had them do this exercise where they had time wasters and time enhancers, right? Like we both know both of those different things in our lives. And those time wasters are the things that have just over the years gotten even harder to get over, which because of social media, we scroll on social media, we do online shopping for things we don't need. We do all of these things that waste so much of our time when really we should be investing in our time differently and so i always find it so fascinating how we all say we need more time yet when something is truly important to you you figure out how to make it work you figure out how you're going to squeeze in five minutes here ten minutes there and that's another piece is i think that oftentimes people say people especially when they talk about writing a book they think oh i need 10 hours a day or four hours or two hours a day.

18:10No, you can literally, hey, if you have 10 minutes, great. If you have 30 minutes, great. And what usually happens is when you give yourself that tiny little block of time to start writing or pursuing something, you'll notice you'll stay there a little bit longer because you're realizing that, oh my gosh, I actually really do enjoy this. I actually am now excited to finish writing the book or the article or whatever it is. And so we have to really identify what are those time wasters and what are those time enhancers, and then figure out how do you limit or get rid of some of those time wasters?

18:43Because, hey, we all do them. We've all spent a little too much time scrolling on social media when we could be doing something else that we would feel much better about at the end of whatever amount, length of time that is. Well, and I think there's a name for this theory, but just that we're going to fill up the space that we have. And we're either going to fill it up with doing something we love or we're going to fill it up doing something stupid, you know, but you know, I, a few years ago just decided to stop doing much on Fridays from a work standpoint. And I'm every bit as productive, you know, it's like, wait a minute, whole, like one out of five days, I'm no longer working or taking appointments and I'm still getting as much done.

19:19What happened? You know, I mean, exactly. It has to be perfect. This is a great one because I'm an amateur woodworker. And I, you know, I, I try to build furniture and I watch what other people do. And I, you know, I always tell my wife, Oh, I couldn't get this part, right? It's just not perfect. And she's like, is that why you built it? I was like, no, but there is a little bit of that, right? It's like, I can't, I don't want to be no good. I know. Yeah, we don't. We, I mean, because mediocre work is not the end result, right? We don't want to be mediocre at anything, but everyone has to start somewhere.

20:01And right. Like I love why I love when somebody had somebody online who I've followed for years and years. I'm like, oh my gosh, they've accomplished so many things. And we look up to those people and then we go back to maybe their first blog or their first podcast or YouTube video. And you're like, oh, they were really not that great. Right. But after so many repetitions of doing it. And so it has to be perfect. We all, for a lot of especially very driven type A individuals, we have this like perfectionism complex and we can, we know that perfect doesn't exist, right? We can say that and have that conversation yet we're still striving for it.

20:38We're like, no, we could get it perfect. And this is a challenge for us and it stops us from actually starting. And so in the book, I actually talk about the passion loop. So we have this passion loop where we have this idea of this passion or creative pursuit that we have. And then we say, I want to do that. Like, I actually want to do that. And then we make these excuses, right? Like, we immediately think, I want to do that. And then we make excuses. And then we don't do anything about it. And one of those excuses is, like, I'm not ready. There's not enough time. It has to be perfect. All those things.

21:11And then what happens, like, a week later, a month later, we have that same idea again. like, oh, I want to start that podcast. I'm going to do it excuses. And we're stuck in this passion loop when really how to get out of the passion loop. The simplest way to get out of the passion loop is take the first step. Like that is all you have to do is take one step, even when you're scared, even when you don't think, you know, you take that one next step to towards that passion project. And what's so awesome is that when you're, when you do that, all of these things, when you're breaking through that passion loop, you start to uncover new opportunities, new passions, new relationships, new skills, confidence, all of this stuff.

21:56And so unless we're doing the work and showing up every day, we're never going to get better. We're never going to be able to, I mean, we'll never attain perfect, right? But we're never going to even get better. And so this idea of, hey, it's okay to be mediocre. It's okay to have, you know, my first podcast isn't going to be stellar. If you love it and you're putting all, every single bit of energy and passion that you have and you know it's the best that it can be right now, that's amazing. Put it out into the world. I've never met an author that said I would never change anything from the books that I've written.

22:28They've all said to me, when your book is out into the world, you read it and you're like, oh, why did I say that? I should have done this. I could have done that. It's the same thing with all of our work. Yeah. Plus the feedback you get, you know, people actually do tell you how to make better so you know what's what as i listen you talk about that loop you know there's a part missing out of that is then regret starts dropping you know because like i've told myself a hundred times i'm going to do this and uh 99 times i haven't done it and so then you're like well see i'm a loser you know so it's like a vicious cycle isn't it yeah yeah and it's like that's the thing.

23:08That's why we got to break out of that passion loop as whenever we're dealing with these myths, it's just, Hey, we got to go for it. So inspiration will strike is the seventh myth. And I'll just let you tee that one up. Okay. So what's so funny about this myth is this is, I was so excited to write this chapter and it was probably the hardest one to write. Cause I was like, there's so many things about this. Inspiration will strike because I think so many of us, we feel as though we're going to have this epiphany moment of, and I talk about muses in the book and I'm like, oh, I love this idea of muses.

23:44And we think they're going to come fluttering down from the sky and pour magic pixie dust on us. And all of a sudden we're going to feel like writing, or we're going to feel like recording something, or we're going to feel like getting up and playing guitar, even though we love guitar. When really, when we get home from the office or a long day, sometimes we just, you know, we think I just want to veg on the couch. But what's so interesting is that, so inspiration doesn't just strike out of the blue. It strikes when you actually start doing the thing. So when you start playing the guitar or when you start writing, like I know so many writers.

24:18So especially when I started writing the book, I studied so many incredible writers like Anne Lamott and Stephen King. And I was reading, and Margaret Atwood. And I was so fascinated by the creative process and how they talk about writing and how so many writers actually don't love to write. Like they say, I love to have written. And it's like, you have to sit down and write. So when you sit down and do the work and you start that project, that's when inspiration comes. Like on the days I didn't feel like writing, I gave myself this goal of writing at least 250 words every day. So I sat behind my computer, at least 250 words.