How healthy is your relationship with your industry?
Connection, Collaboration & Power.
The need for Collaboration
If there is one word that comes up whenever I talk with a creative about what they want more of in their career it’s collaboration. When we think of how we would like things to be, as creatives, rarely do we imagine ourselves separated from the professional community, yet this can often feel like our experience. The ebb and flow of freelance work means that we will naturally find ourselves in periods of aloneness. For many of us it is a needed and necessary part of our creative process. But when we neglect the relational aspects of our careers it can be like cycling with two punctured wheels; we may well be moving but everything is harder, slower and a lot less enjoyable.
We need connection with others on a fundamental psychological level and we also need it to sustain a creative career. When I work with creatives in coaching I weave the perspective of relatedness and connection into every conversation. I'm constantly checking for ‘punctures’ and ensuring the way forward is supported and cushioned by healthy professional connections - Who can help you with this? Who might you need to have a conversation with next? Whose support will you need to manage this long-term? are all questions that regularly crop-up to ensure collaboration is used to facilitate development. But, taking a relational view of your career means a lot more than just the people you want to work with. The real work is often to do with examining our relationship to our industry as a whole and seeing how healthy or not that is.
Do you talk about your industry behind its back?
Social constructivism presents the theory that we literally construct our sense of the world and ourselves by how we interact with our environment. Our ideas of ourselves will be informed by our parents, what others have said about us, by how we have been treated by others and the meaning we have made of their treatment. Even our sense of what we might be capable of can be informed by social constructs of class, occupation or any other socially attributed labels. If you've been doing what you do for awhile now and people have paid you for it but you still have a hard time calling yourself by its professional title, you might be butting heads with a construct you haven't quite befriended yet. It often sounds like "I X for Y but I'm not a real X I'm only... [insert diminishing qualifier here; new, young, giving it a go, starting, small time, local etc]. An old construct or way of thinking of ourselves that we’ve grown beyond is still clinging on for dear life.
One way I begin to challenge these constructs in coaching, and update them, is to ask how someone feels about their relationship to their industry? How do you see your industry, what does it feel like to be a part of it, how would you describe your relationship with it. You will over time have developed you own idea of what 'your industry' means to you. You may see it as a soulmate, mentor, nemesis or even a torturer. Acknowledging this relationship as it is now is key, as how we perceive our industry will play a big part in how we engage with it. We can dream of new futures and create strategies to help develop them, but if at the heart of it we don't like our industry we will consciously or unconsciously be disengaging from it at every turn. Which is fine unless what you actually want is to be connecting to it more.
You can spot this in yourself and others through the language we use regarding it: 'this industry just chews you up and spits you out', 'it’s a closed shop', 'the whole thing glorifies youth to the expense of experience’. Of course you can find elements of truth in every perspective, but if your core beliefs about your industry are continually negative ones that's going the thwart your progress in unwanted ways. A first step in loosening a negative perception of your industry is simply to recognise that it will have many sides and to adopt less of a black and white view. It is neither good nor bad but (you guessed it) thinking makes it so. Good and bad are attributions we place on it and therefore we have choice over. So if you want a better relationship with your industry, like any relationship, don’t talk about it behind it’s back. Best to have a frank and open discussion with it and see what needs to change instead. So, step one of taking a relational view to your career is taking the bird’s eye view of how you relate to the big concepts. Step two is to take the worm’s eye view of one-to-one interactions at ground level.
Rankism, Dignity and Equality.
Typically when someone talks of feeling ‘outside’ of their industry they often talk of feeling ‘below’ it too. If I feel apart from and less than my industry I will likely adopt the same view of myself in relation to the key figures within it. This can be akin to jamming a stick in the spokes of our own front wheel of our professional development. I may assume, wrongly, that the very people who could help me most may not be interested in me because of this un-named and unwanted feeling of being less-than.
Every relationship will have power dynamics at play and while these aren't usually acknowledged it would be naive of us to imagine they aren't present. A question to ask yourself here is, are you adopting a less-than position from the outset? When we disengage from connecting with those who we admire in our industry we are often working from this less-than position. If you’ve ever not reached out to someone you thought it might be useful to, you will recognise yourself adopting this less-than position in how you justify it to yourself; ‘they’re probably too busy to be bothered by the likes of me'. Best to hold off for now’. It's a false assumption. No one is less than another of course but it's a fallacy we’re often mugged by. Collaboration is fundamentally about equality. We can't collaborate creatively if we're making ourselves less than equal or if we permit ourselves to be treated as such. When we begin any relationship we must check in to ensure we are adopting a position of equality, no matter who we’re connecting with.
But what of the very real abuse of power that we can sometimes fall prey too. The cruelly rejected letter, the admonishing feedback or the dull sting of simply being ignored. In his book 'Somebodies and Nobodies: Overcoming the Abuse of Rank', writer Robert Fuller defines the act of being taken for a nobody as rank based abuse or 'Rankisim'. He argues that power differences are not bad in themselves; people with suitable strength, skills and capacities should be put in relevant positions of authority over those with less experience, but that authority in one area of life should not bleed into others. The famous singer should rightly be admired for her musical ability, but shouldn't be allowed to jump the queue at the supermarket just because of it. Excellence in one area does not equate to unequal treatment in any other. One should not use their status or authority as an excuse to abuse, humiliate, exploit or subjugate in any situation. Fuller suggests that rankism is rife in our society (I have a hard time arguing with him on this) and that we are all likely to be both victims and also perpetrators of it at some point. Power ebbs and flows too and we must be vigilant to our own abuses of it as we are of others’.
So what is a reasonable assumption to have when reaching out to someone for the first time for advice or collaboration? We can't expect to always get a reply or indeed for that reply to be exactly what we hoped for. We can, I believe, reasonably expect any response to be respectful and dignified. The concept of equality in communication was summarised by psychiatrist Eric Berne in the phrase 'I'm okay, you're okay'. A far cry from in temperament from its troublesome cousins 'I'm okay, you're not okay' and ‘I’m not okay, you’re okay’. While we are not in a position to control how others behave we can be aware of the fallacy of our being less-than in whatever ways its offered to us, and reject it openly. This can also be done from the ‘I’m okay, you’re okay’ position of equality without losing any of its impact.
Connection and PERMA
Another reason for developing your connections with others is the firm evidence-base for it being crucial to our psychological well-being, functioning and motivation. . The founder of Positive Psychology, Martin Seligman, places it among the following in his PERMA model of human flourishing. Our careers aren’t just where we work they’re where we spend our lives too, so it makes sense to borrow from what 20 years of research has to say about living well:
Positive emotions
Engagement
Relationships
Meaning
Achievement/ accomplishment.
Connecting more: Facing forwards and outwards.
As much as we are informed by our environment, it is informed by us too . If you’re in doubt of this just consider the people who’ve inspired you most. Many will have notable accomplishments to their name but many will be people who have connected with you in ways that left a lasting impression. The teachers, mentors, family members, colleagues who’ve reached out to you and made your day a little better. If you reflect on these sources of inspiration you’ll often find they were actively doing something they loved while creating space for you to be a part of it. When wanting to create more connections a great place to start is considering how you might do the same. What can you give? When I deliver training on this I ask participants to consider how they want the following categories to benefit from them being a creative in the world? What could you give to each, as a creative, that could change them for the better?
Family
Friends
Community
Online community
Country
Heritage
Profession
Society
World
If you give this exercise a go, once you’ve generated a few options pick one or two that speak to you most and commit to experimenting with them in the next week. Make them small and enjoyable experiments. Afterwards, reflect on how you felt having brought your little experiment to the world and ask yourself what else might be fun to try?
You're likely to feel pretty good about engaging with others in ways you find personally meaningful. You may even feel an unexpected sense of achievement or accomplishment from what comes of it. All of which would coincidently match up to Seligman’s PERMA definition of flourishing. But who cares about definitions when you're doing more of what you love with people you respect and care about.
Our careers, like our communities, are made up of living, breathing interdependent people. How and why we choose to connect with them will determine the course of our careers. The health of each individual relationship as well our relationship to our industry as a whole will make the difference between a career that feels rich but empty and one that feels rich and full. We instinctually gravitate towards wanting to connect and collaborate more with our professional communities. While this is not always easy, it is essential and if we take a relational view of our careers we can ensure we avoid feeling less-than while seeking more.