This week on Common Shapes, I share four practices for checking in with your creative pace — internal seasons, intuitive sharing, weather systems, and the earning pathway.
This episodes feels like an updated version of How to Not Always Be Working, and I hope it serves your practice, your pace, and your deepest alignment.
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“Marketing as a creative practice is about getting creative. It’s not about constantly sharing the thing.”
Listen in to learn—
🌸 Why lists are how I orient myself in my life
🌸 How to identify & live by your internal seasons
🌸 What it means to share intuitively
🌸 How to cultivate your earning pathway
🌸 Why it’s so important to find your own pace
After you listen, go get my free Creative Ideation Portal, and join me in making our art and pacing ourselves.
Links
🪐 Get the Creative Ideation Portal
🪐 Sign up for my weekly newsletter, Monday Monday
🪐 Take my class, Organizing A Day
🪐 Find all these links & more at marleegrace.space/commonshapes
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[0:00] Hello, and welcome to Common Shapes. You are listening to episode six, four ways to pace your work, marketing, and creative practice.
I'm Marlee Grace. I'm a writer, a dancer, a quilter, a teacher, the host of this podcast, and also the author of the book, How to Not Always Be Working.
I first self-published How to Not Always Be Working as a zine in 2015, and it later became a book in 2018.
This is to say that for at least the last eight years, I have been deeply dedicated to understanding the gray areas in my own work and job and art practice.
I am dedicated to following the flow of my intuition of when to invent the next offering and decide what shape it will make.
[1:07] But I've also created this system to check in with myself about the pace.
Am I releasing too much publicly, whether it's using social media or my newsletter?
Is the frequency of my email marketing too much?
Does the frequency or consistency of my podcast match my current capacity?
So the four ways I use to check in are internal seasons, intuitive sharing, weather systems, and the earning pathway.
This feels sort of like an updated version of how to not always be working.
And I'm so excited to share it with you today.
I hope that it serves your practice and your own pace of creation and consuming, and public sharing and private sharing.
May it bring you into greater alignment with your own seasons.
[2:15] If you're looking for more support to vision and dream up your projects, download the free creative ideation portal at marleygrace.space slash common shapes.
This guide pairs nicely with the first four episodes of this podcast, walking you through making a beginning to your projects, creating the creative containers that they will go into, to, the art of making a newsletter, and your art as an act of service. So check out the guide. It's really fun. There's a project database to help you organize each project and sort of look at it as if they are the boxes that Twyla Tharp uses to create her dances. So enjoy the Creative Ideation Portal. Again, you can grab it at marleygrace.space slash Common Shapes.
That's also where you can find the show notes and more details about each episode of the podcast.
[3:15] Common Shapes is a podcast about practices, systems, and rituals for a creative life.
And today we're gonna really dig into a system of mine, which is an inventory practice.
It's something I talk a lot about in my class, Organizing a Day, where I bring you through these different inventory practices of a day, a week, a month, a season, et cetera.
So the system of understanding the pace of our work is an inventory practice.
I suggest that anything I bring to you today, you bring it to a list.
So list-making is the primary way primary way that I understand where I'm at in my life.
[4:05] Whether it's my relationships to other people, my relationship to my work, my relationship to my home, my relationship to myself, list-making is how I understand my lived experience.
So if you wanna grab a pen and paper and start thinking about lists or just integrate that later, Go ahead, otherwise, take what you like and leave the rest.
Use whatever practice or system works for you. So I wanna just start with the first way to pace our work, which is our internal seasons.
So as a person who has a menstrual cycle, I like to track it.
I like to track each week and how it affects my creativity differently, my capacity changes, right?
So as my hormones change throughout the week, so does my ability to focus, my physical stamina, right?
Right? So all these different things change for me week by week.
And even if you are a person who doesn't menstruate, start paying attention to just week by week, how does your energy change?
[5:20] I would think that maybe some weeks you notice that you have more interest in reading or watching documentaries or consuming art.
And other weeks you might feel like you're in more of like an output time, right?
So in week two and three of my cycle, that's usually when I'm really excited about writing and inventing. And it's like kind of like the springtime of my cycle. Whereas in week four, especially as someone who struggles with PMDD, that is like a wintering season, right? To sort of borrow Catherine May's language of seasons, you know, I'm in sort of like a hibernation phase. I usually don't want to host any public events during that time. I don't want to overly commit myself during that time.
[6:10] So there's a lot of different resources out there about the different phases of the menstrual cycle and I also find that it helps me as a non-binary person because it can definitely be dysphoric to be a queer person or a non-binary person or trans and have a menstrual cycle. And so tracking the cycle helps me see it in sort of a different way. It's like I'm not identifying at all with like, I tap into the goddess nature of the womb, like that's not happening over here. But I do really appreciate it more as this sort of tracking system for how my mind works and how my body works and and how I interact with other people, places, and things.
So internal seasons, you can check out how does your menstrual cycle link up to that, and then also just start paying attention to the times of day of your internal season, right?
So I'm recording this in the morning. I generally like to do my sort of best thinking and creative practices in the morning that require my brain, my magic, my creative spark.
[7:29] So if I'm writing my newsletter, I'm doing that in the morning.
If I'm recording my podcast, I'm generally doing that in the morning.
When I teach, I usually teach sort of midday for me. I still have the energy that I'm looking for, but I'm also matching time zones, right?
So that's another part of how we pace our work, how we choose the timing of our work.
I'm on Eastern Standard Time in Michigan, but I was just looking the other day at my newsletter subscribers, and I have the most newsletter subscribers in the state of California.
[8:06] So a lot of times when I'm picking times for my classes or my offerings, I'm actually thinking about what is the best time for those in the PST time zone, but that still links up with my internal season of creation. So I felt that when I first hosted Flexible Office, the timing was really early for people on the West Coast. It was at 8am. But I knew for me my best time to do the the kind of work I wanted to do in flexible office was at 11 a.m.
So I had to make that choice that served my practice first, right?
Maybe that wasn't the best business move, but it was the best move for me in my internal season.
And I actually wanna share a little bit about a pivot that I just made in flexible office.
I know some of you joined that space, and I actually made a decision to end it earlier than I originally intended to.
And part of that is because of my internal seasons and also the weather systems.
So we'll jump to that in a little bit, but the weather system of summertime coming up.
[9:19] And being honest with myself that I didn't wanna be tied to two chunks of time a week, when I actually love to have that time as being outdoors.
And my own needs for my own creative practice and the projects I'm going to be working on in the summer season, it didn't quite make sense to have those hours for myself blocked out.
And so when I first started Flexible Office last year, I made a decision to have it be in seasons, two month seasons, so that I could have breaks and tap in to another of the ways of pacing our work and sharing, which is intuitive sharing.
I would have the season of Flexible Office, it would stop and then I could wait to intuitively feel when the next time I wanted to host Flexible Office was.
[10:11] So people love Flexible Office. People love coworking.
I love coworking. It's a beautiful community. And I felt this deep desire from the community to be more consistent with Flexible Office. And so I thought, you know what, I'll give it a try.
And pretty quickly, I realized as the summer changed, as the weather system shifted, that it wasn't in alignment for me to host that over the summer.
[10:39] So again, I'm sort of going to bring us through a really nonlinear way of sharing about these four, different ways to pace ourselves in our work because they're really all interconnected. So.
[10:52] Just follow me here. Just keep following me here. So again, our first one is internal seasons. Pay attention to what times of day spark you around what types of projects and modalities and mediums you want to work in. Maybe there's a time of day that you best love listening to audiobooks or podcasts. That could be a great time to sew, to paint, to do something that doesn't involve words, right? Writing or podcasting. Just start to sort of track your time throughout the days and throughout the weeks, throughout the month to say, yes, I love to do X, Y, and Z at these times, right? You can also track the moon. Around new moon days, dark moon days, when there's truly no light in the sky, my depression often gets a little bit turned up. Nothing is illuminated, right? It's like I'm just sort of in this vortex of like the void. And I can either resist that.
[11:51] And try really hard to make something and push something, or I can see what I can do to even just 1% let myself sort of empty out and be a little bit more of a vacant, void person, right?
That doesn't always have to be a bad thing. I think we sometimes name that lowness or that rest or that low capacity as being bad when really it's just a sign that we get to pivot and shift.
[12:27] Before I keep going, I just want to name, as always, I'm not a therapist, I'm an artist.
I'm just a person who is trying to understand my own relationship to work as a self-employed person for over a decade, and there's a lot of privilege in the act of self-employment and the act of.
[12:54] Being able to shift these things without a boss who is demanding a different timeframe of me.
So I just wanna name that.
And if you are listening and struggling with not being able to pace yourself.
[13:10] Because of the demands of being a parent or having a job or a relationship or obligations and responsibilities that are outside of your control, I just wanna say that I see you And I invite you to apply any of these principles, again, even 1%, even one degree.
A reader on Substack recently mentioned that part of how they rebuild their self-esteem is just like the one degree method.
Like, what can I do today to just bring me one degree closer to my goals, to my dreams, to my vision?
So I just wanna name, you know, that I'm speaking as someone who works for themselves, That obviously also comes with its own challenges and hardships of inconsistent earning and fear around people not signing up for things or just there's no one else to report to other than yourself.
So I don't wanna glamorize it at the same time. I think that being an artist is a job and being an artist amongst artists is being a worker amongst workers.
And yeah, I just wanted to name that I also understand there is a very different struggle.
[14:24] Of having constraints that aren't your own.
So again, with every episode, take what you like and leave the rest, but I just wanted to honor that fact.
[14:37] So the second part of how to pace our work, our marketing, our creative practices is intuitive sharing.
So something I definitely like to study as an artist is intuitive business.
I'm a student of holisticisms classes.
That's a place where I learn a lot about intuitive business.
I definitely have just a huge community of other self-employed artists and writers who I talk to about the pace of our work.
So on this podcast, you will often hear me suggest that you find other artists to be in community with and to talk about, to sort of check in with them about what's their intuitive sharing process like and how do they take the inventory of understanding.
[15:29] What their intuition even is.
So if you're like, I don't know what my intuition is, how do I find my intuition?
Well, the best way that I know how to find mine is to do my morning pages.
So the morning pages as a practice comes from Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, and it's three pages of journaling every morning.
So if three pages feels like a lot, try one. Try just making a list.
Try a daily gratitude list. Whatever sort of gets you in to the practice of looking at what's working, what's not working, what needs to shift, et cetera.
Part of intuitive sharing for me is really about the pace of my offerings.
If you're thinking about making a newsletter after listening to the episode, the art of newsletters, or thinking about making an art show, or writing a book, or teaching an online class, or starting a membership community, or the objects that you're creating or wanting to launch a new series of products on your online shop, whatever it is.
[16:37] Whether you're one month into your self-employment journey or five years or 50 years, we're always going to want to be taking new inventories to figure out, is the pace working for me? And so part of the intuitive sharing process is looking at leading my readers to their desires.
So in marketing language, you'll often hear like, find the pain point and give them the solution.
And I don't necessarily wanna name that as like bad or good.
I think we can always learn from different spaces of marketing and teaching, but I really like to reframe it as like, what are my readers desiring?
And how can I use my tools and my knowledge to guide them in a way that is generative for both of us and all of us and the people they may benefit with their work?
So, what that means is...
[17:53] I really notice when people respond to my newsletter, what are they excited about?
What are they feeling drawn to? What am I feeling drawn to, right? So when I'm developing, a longer form class, I usually within like a month or two before that will maybe teach a less expensive, less time commitment, two hour class.
[18:19] That might sort of prep and excite them for the journey that would lead them to wanting to take a longer class.
And for me, I have found that the pace is, I usually do two to three longer classes a year and then quilt class a couple times a year. And then I'll sprinkle in a few two hour classes.
And then I'm experimenting with lead magnets, which is a word from the marketing world, or the business world, which is a free something.
[18:59] Whether it's a guide or a class or a checklist, something that is given to your audience or your readers or your community.
And usually it is in exchange for their email address.
And those few things sort of make up my income earning system.
This is where we'll get to the earning pathway is our last part of the way that we pace our work.
But for now I'm drawing them out as these are the different things that I'm intuitively on the pathway for, right?
So the earning pathway for me looks like my newsletter, book writing, my online classes, and the occasional creative advising session.
So my earning pathway directly relates to my intuitive sharing.
So I have found that in terms of...
[19:58] Preserving my energy and not having to overly market so many times in a year, I have found that it works best for me to have these sort of longer, bigger courses where I can really dig in with my students a couple times a year. So I don't teach a three week course every month. I do it maybe every few months so that it gives my students, my readers time between the offerings to decide if another offering is correct for them. It also allows me to be of service to them in between those times with my newsletter. My newsletter is also a place where I offer free resources and writing and inspiration so that my students start to pick up these little breadcrumbs of, oh, this interests me, this makes me want to dig into this topic more myself. And then after a few weeks of sharing about something in my newsletter, and noticing that my readers are excited about it, I get that information that oh, this would probably make a great online class. Right? So recently, the art of beginning was created through writing about my own practice of beginning and notice how how much my readers were gravitating towards that material.
[21:23] Right, so I write in my newsletter, I notice what people are excited about, I develop courses outside of that, and then with my intuition, with my list-making practice, I decide, is this a two-hour class, or is this a three-week class?
Is this a five-week class? Is this a 12-week class? Is this an eight-month class, right?
You get to check in with the weather systems, the earning pathway, the internal seasons, and your own intuition to decide what length of time do I wanna commit, to this subject and this teaching matter.
And in terms of the other creative containers that you have outside of the earning pathway, so this could be your podcast, a newsletter, a subscription service, anything you have that's ongoing and more consistent, you get to decide how often that comes out, right?
So for me, the weekly newsletter is the correct pace for me.
For you, it might be every other week. You might wanna send something out every new moon, every month, every other month, right? There's no wrong way to do a newsletter, a podcast, et cetera.
So before this, my yes, yes advice column existed in podcast form and it was once a month.
[22:51] You know, and often you'll hear people be like, a podcast needs to be every week on the exact same day. When I did the Have Company podcast, it came out whenever I felt like it. Sometimes seven episodes would drop at once in a season. And that was just how that project worked. It wasn't a huge part of my earning pathway. It was just a part of Have Company, my bigger project. So I really used intuitive sharing when I was doing that. And so I do think that consistency can be a beautiful way.
[23:26] To not stray from a container, right? It's like my newsletter comes out every Monday.
Every Monday I sit down to write it. That pace works for me. Now again, when I added Common and shapes that comes out every Wednesday.
It added another ongoing project, which made Flexible Office feel less relevant and important and a part of my process, because that was also ongoing, happening every Tuesday and Thursday.
So even though it wasn't public, it was still another ongoing practice in my business ecosystem.
And suddenly I had too many ongoing projects. I needed more things that were in these seasons.
So tap into your intuitive sharing. Just believe yourself when you're like, you know what?
I think this needs to be a three-week class.
I had to really check in when I first shifted from Patreon to Substack because I knew I was gonna take a big pay cut.
[24:33] But I could feel that spirit was like, this isn't the container for you anymore.
There's a new container and it's gonna take a while, but you're gonna build it up and it's gonna be bigger and better and more abundant and that was true.
So there have been many pivots and shifts in my own career that maybe I did take a cut in my income or my resources went down for a little bit, but it made space for something new to take its place.
And that's part of learning that intuition is also practicing pivoting.
[25:07] And seeing where the new thing will emerge.
So, we have our internal seasons and our intuitive sharing. The next one is weather systems.
And I mean this both about factual weather and about the systems that we weather around us.
Okay, so a little play on words here. But the first part of weather systems is, you know, I'm living in the Northern Hemisphere in Northern Michigan.
It's a place of extreme seasons, right? So we have hot, hot summers, a beautiful freshwater lake to swim in, and in the winter it's very cold and very snowy and sometimes dangerous to drive on the roads, right?
And then of course we have spring, which we're in right now, where the leaves are popping out and the flowers are coming through.
[26:06] And then we have fall where the leaves fall away and things get crisp and the apple orchard are full and vibrant.
So I'm speaking a little bit from the perspective of someone who's living in those seasons, but I noticed that this is true for my students who live in California or in the South or in the desert, in the Southwest or in the foggy, rainy Northeast.
So I notice that in the summertime, My own internal season really matches the weather system of like, that is a time that I'm not teaching quilt class.
Quilt class. I will usually teach one class, maybe in July.
[26:57] Where it maybe preps people for their own future season. So like I might teach a class helping artists develop their own online class or services or newsletter class or something that helps artists create their own offerings in fall and winter.
I find that fall and winter, just like we're kind of programmed for school seasons, It's when class is in session.
It's when people want to sign up for online classes and be in community spaces.
Summer is like fast-paced, we're outside. I want people to be outside and swimming and using their weekends, right? So I won't really usually teach on Saturdays and Sundays in the summer.
I won't promote as much on Saturdays and Sundays. It's like I'm really letting myself have a weekend and encouraging my students and readers to have a weekend as well.
So the pace of the weather system is guiding me to decide my longer term vision of the year.
[28:09] So because I use intuitive sharing, I don't always plan out a full year at once.
I generally am looking at the next couple months. So I'm sort of matching that intuition with the weather and what I know about business, which sometimes feels very little.
And then sometimes I can be honest with myself of like, oh, I've been doing this for a few years.
I notice these things work.
So, for instance.
I've taught quilt class in May, the last two years, not this year, and that's always the least amount of signups, right? I think once we reach towards spring, we're not thinking as much about warm blankets, right? But in November or January, I can sell out multiple sessions of a quilt is something human. So I notice, okay, what am I teaching, right? If you're teaching a class about swimming, you are going to want to teach a class in the summer, right? So, I'm, again, I'm speaking about my offerings and the seasons that I follow, but I want you to sort of apply it to whatever seasons you're in and you're teaching. So, if you want to do a project where you swim every day for the month of July and invite other people to do that with you.
[29:31] You'll do that in the month of July, right? That's you following your weather systems and and intuitive sharing and deciding how to invite people in to your orbit and into your ecosystem, right?
So we're gonna get to the earning pathway next, but this is also an example of how to invite people in.
[29:54] To your ecosystem, which is often with a free offering. So whether it's your newsletter or a podcast or leaning into this lead magnet world, a lead magnet doesn't have to be like a downloadable guide.
It can be an invitation to do something together for 30 days or for a hundred days or a book study, right?
Just something that invites people in who then become nurtured and loved and cared for by you, an artist, a singer, a musician, a writer, an herbalist, whatever you are, you bring people into your creative ecosystem and say, hey, I would love to share this thing with you.
And then they feel like warmed up to being in your world. And those people will probably want to buy a two-hour class or sign up for a longer course. And we also want to do this because.
[30:55] It aligns us with the right people, right? So I want to like pause to say, I'm not saying like make a bunch of free work and work for free. I think it's really important to be paid for our offerings and for our work with our clients, readers, audience, community, etc. But I do find that sharing generously has brought the best people into my world of creation. So something to consider as you're sort of mapping out the different shapes of your offerings and the pace of putting them into the world. So it's like, you know, my newsletter is free every Monday, And then once a month, there's the free advice column.
And then I started doing the Friday threads. So every Friday, paid subscribers can share with each other resources about a specific topic.
So the weather system, however, as it changed into spring, I started thinking about, oh, I really want to do a book study.
So I launched the Artist's Way book study for paid subscribers of my newsletter.
And we'll use that same system. We'll use the threads in Substack to share every week.
[32:12] And it also sort of took the place of flexible office, right?
I needed something that supported my creative process, but was also of service to the people.
And I wanted it to be accessible, but I did want some closer container of the people, which is why I made it available to paid subscribers of the newsletter.
[32:34] It's also a great way to boost my paid subscribers who I then hope continue to be paid subscribers and engage in the newsletter in that way.
So these are some of my systems, practices, and rituals for how I create offerings, the pace of putting them in the world, et cetera.
[32:59] I want to circle back to sort of how all three of these integrate for our marketing before I jump into the earning pathway, which I've sort of already touched on. So for our marketing, you know, I really pushed up against this a little bit just having the podcast come out where I was like, should I send another email every week, every Wednesday when the podcast comes out. And you know, that is too many emails for me. I don't want to overwhelm my audience.
I don't want to create audience fatigue. And there are some people that I interact with their work where they send a lot of emails, like they're sort of in that email marketing teaching world.
And I just get so many emails from them. And sometimes I like that. Sometimes I like like that many reminders, but I think for me as an artist and a writer and a teacher, I don't want to.
[34:04] Encourage constant consumption of the email form.
And so to me, it's really important to just make my Monday newsletter really be this container that holds so many different things, right?
It holds my writing, it will hold the new episodes of the podcast and it will also hold the things I'm paying attention to and the things that I wanna promote that are happening in my own business ecosystem.
And then on Fridays, I'll send something to paid subscribers of the newsletter or I might take a break and take a couple Fridays off, right?
And just send the one email a week and check this out.
I have permission to not send a Monday email if I don't want to.
That is a free offering. That is a free part of my business ecosystem and I don't need to send it every Monday if I need to take a break. So that sort of pacing is important.
When we're launching an online class, when we have a book coming out, when we have an art show happening, a new line of products, whatever it is that we wanna be sharing about, we're gonna be turning up the volume on the pace of sharing, right?
[35:23] And that can be overwhelming. And sometimes, and I'm really speaking to myself right now, I just had this experience promoting my last two-hour workshop, The Art of Beginning, was like, I was really using my Instagram stories and the art of beginning was like, I was really using my Instagram stories it got me in my head a little bit and got me a little bit exhausted utilizing that app so much.
And I did see a little bit of an increase in sales for the class, but I almost wonder, if I hadn't been putting my mental energy in that bucket, in that container, would I have had more time to focus in on my own deep work? Maybe I would have emailed a couple friends to to say, hey, could you share this this week?
That reaches so many more people having even just five friends share my class to their audience, rather than me pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing to the people who have already seen me share it so many times.
So this is where part of picking the pace is also understanding that sharing more Power isn't always how we bring in more people.
Marketing as a creative practice is about getting creative. It's not about constantly sharing the thing.
[36:51] So more emails, more Instagram posts, I don't think are the answer.
And this is something I'm really learning to accept and embrace within myself.
Because I think we don't even know what that time and energy and resource could go towards until we experiment and try it.
Maybe you'll take that time and make a cool slideshow for your class.
Maybe you'll take that time and make a brochure that goes with your series of paintings.
Maybe you'll make a small zine that goes along with the release of the quilts that you're putting up for sale on your online shop.
It is, I really believe and I'm wanting to dig in myself to seeing where can my energy go that isn't this app or that isn't sending a million emails?
How can I be really, really intentional and thoughtful and craft one really good email a week that serves my readers in the best way that I know how and serves my own practice, and vision for the world that I want to see.
[38:03] The last part of the four ways to pace your work, marketing, and creative practice is the earning pathway. And I've talked about this a little bit already. And again.
[38:16] I want to just name that everyone who is listening to this podcast is coming in with very different platform size, earning capacity, salary, income, right?
Some of you are millionaires, some of you are scraping by to pay rent this month, and I just value each of you and where you're at. And you might be a millionaire and also have a ton of debt. I know that right now I'm in this balance of my debt is really high and my earning is a little bit lower than it was at this time last year. And that fluctuates, right, as self-employed people as artists, as freelancers, our income fluctuates season to season and year to year.
And that can be scary. And you might have consistent income, but be unhappy in your job and your work. And so the earning pathway is going to be different for all of us. I'm going to speak to what I know as a self-employed artist and writer and author, and I hope you can take what you like and leave the rest, as I say, and apply what works for you to your own earning pathway.
[39:37] Only you can know what you want to be a part of your job. This is what How to Not Always Be Working really brings us through, is really naming what is my job, what is not my job, and what are the gray areas.
So for me, as a writer and someone with a newsletter, it's sort of a beautiful way that I tricked myself so that I can write about any of my hobbies and writing is my job.
So the thing I do might not be part of my earning pathway, but I let myself write about it.
Swimming is my greatest example, right?
I have a promise to myself that swimming will never be my job.
I will never train to be paid for swimming. I will never teach someone to swim in exchange for money.
Swimming is not my job.
But I take a lot of pictures of the lake and the ocean. I share those pictures in my newsletter and I share about swimming as a part of my practice of understanding myself and understanding the world that I walk through.
[40:48] So my earning pathway doesn't include swimming, but it does include a newsletter that I do earn money making.
That newsletter comes out every week with a paid option every month.
I've shared this already on this episode, But I say this to say, okay, this is one container of my earning, and I also use that container to share about my projects.
If I have an art show or a new book coming out or a class I want people to take, those things exist in my newsletter. That's the place that I tell people about the things that I do and the things that I want to invite them into.
The pace of my earning pathway with my newsletter is weekly.
Now, every other part of my job, about the other 2 3rds or so of my income, comes from teaching.
[41:39] And the way that I understand this pathway is really by integrating my internal seasons, intuitive sharing, and weather systems. However, they don't always match up.
And sometimes I am suddenly like, I need money for this thing, right?
Whether I'm saving up to do something in my house or when I had my radical reduction top surgery last year, or having a mortgage now to pay for every month, right?
It's like when I know that a big thing is coming up, it might spark me to push myself for promoting and marketing, right?
I might put an old class recording on sale. I might see a dip in my income and be inspired to create something new, right?
And I try not to ever do this out of scarcity or need, but to really follow that intuitive sharing practice.
So sometimes the earning is down and we have a sale or the earning is down and we're like, okay, I want to push myself to teach a longer form class that maybe would increase my earning in these different ways.
And this is the part where really all four come together.
I want you to trust that the systems are in place.
[43:00] So once we put these systems in place, right, having channels for speaking about our work, whether it's on social media, newsletter, podcast, a flyer at the coffee shop, we trust that they will reach the people, okay?
And this is such a dance of not spiritual bypassing, not gaslighting ourselves, not just being like, yeah, manifestation is great, right?
But when we put the work in to having these channels of communication, We need to trust that they will reach the people they are supposed to reach.
So this goes back to like, if I'm feeling like, oh, I wanna put a class out, that doesn't mean email people every single day and constantly tell them the class exists.
Trust that maybe a week after you send the email out, they will open it.
Trust that maybe a month after you put your podcast episode out, someone will listen to it and buy your book that you mentioned.
The earning pathway is both checking in with the realities of your bank account and your desires for earning and wanting to invest in yourself or your home or your relationships or your travel needs or invest back into your business.
But it's also about trusting that you have created structures that work.
[44:27] So also the earning pathway could look like emailing one to ten people who you think might be interested in being a client of yours, right? That one-on-one relationship marketing or way of, selling your services that isn't just broadcasting to the world.
[44:48] I had a friend recently who wrote a really popular article and they sent it to me in a text.
And I remember thinking, wow, you thought to text me this article to make sure that I read it, even though it's in a major media outlet and tons of people are sharing it, but it felt so good to have a friend who's a writer be like, hey, I think you would really like this.
And I was like, I do really like this. And so I encourage you to reach out one-on-one to people that are a part of your earning pathway and a part of your ecosystem of creativity, hobbies, relationships, right?
Everything in your orbit and your world.
And we decide our pricing, right? That's the other part of the earning pathway is like how much do things cost?
We can decide that based on what other people in our industries are doing, based on our own selling history, and based on our intuition.
So you'll absolutely see some classes that look like some of mine be $3,000 or be $40, right?
[46:00] And my class might be $425. That's a price that I've chosen based on what other people in my field are doing.
That's a raise in price of my first online classes that were four weeks long that were $195 in 2017, right?
So I try to raise my prices intuitively and also based on the own level and success of my career.
So as I have more successes and books that are published and features in media outlets, whatever it is, landing on the Apple Arts Podcast chart and the Spotify Arts Podcast chart, these things that I can point to and say, look, my work works and I want to invite you to understand your work in the same way that I understand mine through this teaching portal.
You know, I gain that confidence and price things in a way that both pays myself fairly for my time and matches my desires for my income and my earning and my spending, and chipping away at my debt, and being generous to my family.
[47:14] So these are all the questions to be asking yourself with the earning pathway, and then creating systems and seasons that make sense for you.
Maybe you teach a dance class and you teach it five days a week, and that's the pace.
If I were you, I would probably then take a week off every other month. Something like that.
Make sure you're giving yourself downtime in marketing and then coming back to make sure you say, hey, classes this week at these times.
It makes sense to maybe share more often when you are doing these ongoing things more consistently.
But also trust that the people who come to dance class tell other people to come to dance class.
Make it easy for them to tell people.
Make it easy for them to tag you on Instagram or share your newsletter or whatever other resources you have to offer.
Maybe you have a free 30-minute dance class that anyone can download to get them into their body, so then they really want to desire taking dance class with you live, right?
So these are the different ways we start to put all of these containers together for the.
[48:31] Pace of sharing our work. There's no right way to do any of this.
I speak again from my own experience of the last decade of working for myself and tapping into my own intuition, the seasons of my life.
That's the other thing about our internal seasons. That also includes grief.
That includes joy. Maybe you've experienced a death of someone close to you, and it's time to go inward.
Maybe you just got married or are celebrating a huge win in your life, in your personal life, and you want to do that privately, off the screen, away from the public eye.
Right? That's part of our seasons. What is our life asking of us?
Because really the point of all of this is to be in our life.
[49:29] I was just reading a Thich Nhat Hanh book and he talks about when we wake up being so grateful and celebrating our 24 hours to live. What a gift to have 24 hours ahead of us to make our work and to rest, right? Don't forget that part of your internal seasons are knowing when to hibernate and when to rest and when to close the computer and pay attention to your family and yourself.
Thank you for being an artist. Thank you for even thinking about pacing yourself because having burnt out, stressed out, broke, suffering artists is not what we need in the world.
You have the tools and the resources to pace yourself in a way that makes sense, while honoring your needs for money, for earning, for living in systems of oppression that are not built for your success.
So if you're struggling with anything that I named today, you're allowed to be mad at me, but also remember to question the systems and the structures that are in place to break us, not to serve us.
So may you put an anti-capitalist lens on everything I talked about today.
[50:57] Your hat of dismantling systems of oppression, of work addiction.
[51:03] And may you find a pace that really works for you and works for yourself and works for your audience and your readers and your community.
Pay attention to how people are interacting with what you make and if it feels good to you or if you need to shift, permission to pivot over and over and over again.
[51:29] Thank you for listening to this episode of Common Shapes. Thank you to Lukeza Branfman-Varissimo for the art.
Thank you to Saltbreaker for our music and to Softer Sound Studio for editing.
If you want more support, remember to grab the Creative Ideation Portal, a free three-day guide to help you vision and dream your projects that goes along with the first four episodes of this podcast.
You can find that at marleygrace.space slash Common Shapes.
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