Motivated, confident, or having the ability to appear confident, resilient, open minded, aware of surroundings and people, optimistic and positive.
When becoming a freelancer and combining my creative practice with business, ensure my work is not compromised. The quality of my work is still paramount and the driving force behind the business.
Investment - start local but don't limit myself. Where would be the most appropriate for me to look for funding?
Look into NESTA, Welcome Trust and Social Finance.
Critical behaviours for success:
- Values led - about me and how I like to be treated and how I treat other people.
- Conceptual thinking - ability to have and play with an idea, be able to imagine and listen to new ideas.
- Strategic thinking - planning, recognising external trends and opportunities, understand implications of actions.
- Commercial aptitude - seek the best practice, seize opportunities not obvious to others.
- Project management
- Risk taking - hope for success, don't fear for failure.
- Customer sensitivity - built long term relationships, exceed customer expectations.
- Networking - start conversations, meet people and talk to them.
- Leadership
- Innovation - be able to think of new ideas.
In ten years time, where do I want to be?
I found this question hard because I do have goals for my life but I know that they will most likely change as life goes on. At the moment I am thinking that in ten years time I will be working as a freelancer in my own studio space. I will not have to work an unrelated part time job because I will be making enough money from what I enjoy doing to support myself.
It is not uncommon to have to work part time to support a freelance career. Have a confident sense of what I want before freelancing full time and make sure I will be able to support myself.
As a freelancer, working alone means you are selling you as well as your practice. It is a good idea to build your brand identity around your name to keep things personal and not give the false impression that you are a bigger organisation than you are.
Finance -> Branding -> Customers
Trust your instincts, don't be afraid to ask questions, be confident and clear about what you want and need.
Trusts and foundations are more likely to offer you funding if your intentions fit with their aims.
Values that are relevant to me...
Honesty, open-mindedness, motivated, respectful, optimistic, hard working, positivity, helping society, reliability, joy.
Narrowed down to five values... Honesty, positivity, hard work, respect, motivated.
Narrowed down to three values... Positivity, hard work, respect.
This task came easier to me than I thought it would which I suppose is a good thing because it means I have a good idea of what my values are and which ones are the most important to me. I feel like these three final values could be used to sum up my personality as well as my practice which is ideal really because I want my work to be a reflection of who I am.
Creative industries are split into service providers, content providers, experience providers, original producer.
Where do I fit within this?
I think these categories are really broad and there are a lot of crossovers to the point that I think my current practice could fit within all of these categories to some extent. I suppose the strongest connection would be to content providers because I am making visual content to be applied onto things. However, I would also like to create original pieces of work and as soon as any of these products come into contact with a consumer, they will hopefully evoke some sort of emotive experience which I suppose makes me an experience provider too. I think it's impossible to categorise people's practices into one specific box.
Risk - managing and assessing risk is all about knowledge. Inform yourself before making decisions.
Reflection
This is the first life after college session I have been to so I didn't really know what to expect but it has been really useful. A lot of the topics mentioned are apparently being covered in more depth in other sessions, some of which I did not get onto but am on the waiting list for. I now know where to find relevant resources on estudio though to find the content of other sessions which is helpful. I am definitely feeling more informed about what it is like to be a freelancer and have your own business and I still feel like this is the route I want to take with my practice. Since we have been selecting briefs for our extended practice module, it is becoming clearer to me that I want to make work in more of a self directed way rather than changing my work to fit commercial briefs written by others.
My dad is self employed and it seems silly that I have never really spoken to him about what it entails because I didn't really appreciate that although what we both do is very different, the fundamentals of the business set-up will be similar. This session has made me realise that I could get a lot of useful information from him by talking to him about this and it also made me understand that I know more about the self-employed lifestyle than I thought I did because I have grown up living with it.
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