E104: Why the Invisible Work in Your Creative Business Matters

Running a creative business often looks beautifully polished from the outside. 

A new class appears, a newsletter lands in your inbox, a product launches or a finished collection is shared—but what about all the thinking, practising, planning and problem-solving that happened behind the scenes?

In this reflective solo episode, Delores shares what returning from a family camping holiday taught her about rest, creativity and the invisible work that keeps a creative business moving. 

From practising hand lettering beside the lake to reconsidering ideas for her upcoming Five Card Challenge, she explores why unfinished projects, changed plans and quiet thinking time are never truly wasted.

In this episode, Delores talks about:

•  Why creating without a commercial purpose still matters 
•  The hidden preparation involved in taking time away from a creative business 
•  What working with a creative team actually looks like 
•  Why successful businesses aren’t perfectly organised every day 
•  How stepping away can help you ask better questions 
•  Why abandoned ideas and unfinished work still have value 
•  The relationship between rest, clarity and creativity 
•  Building a business around real life—not the other way around 

If you’ve been measuring your creativity only by what you finish, publish or sell, this episode is a gentle reminder to recognise all the valuable work nobody else sees.

 Listen to the episode, share it with a creative friend who might need the reminder and support. 

Transcript

Delores Naskrent: [00:00:00] Hey there, my friends, and welcome back to Creative Joggle Joy, the podcast where we talk about the beautiful chaos of building a creative life and finding joy in the middle of it. I'm your host, Delores Naskrent, and as always, I am so happy that you've decided to spend a little time with me today. So today's episode wasn't exactly the one I had planned.

As a matter of fact, it came about because Kaylie sent me a message saying she needed another podcast episode, and I realized I just didn't have one waiting in the wings. Normally, I like to be a little more prepared than that, but after thinking about it for a while, I decided maybe this was actually the perfect opportunity to just sit down and have a conversation with you.

Sometimes the things that we need to hear most aren't the carefully planned lessons, right? Sometimes they're just honest [00:01:00] reflections about what life looks like behind the scenes. I've just come home from a family camping holiday. There were two holidays, actually. We went east for holiday time with my family, my children, and then west for holiday camping time with my husband's family.

I consider them all to be my kids. They've all been around for as long as Terry and I have been together, so for 20 years I've been a part of their lives, and it was just really great to do that in the way that we did. We spent lots of our days outside. I watched my grandchildren splash around in the lake in one instance.

I enjoyed a little bit of rain here and there, and I just slowed the pace for a while. It reminded me how restful it can be to step away from your normal routines, even if it's just for a few days. [00:02:00] And of course, if you know me at all, you're probably smiling because you know there was one thing that I couldn't quite leave behind.

Yes, I did take my iPad. I know I can almost hear some of you laughing. I never actually said I was gonna leave it at home. The difference was that this time I wasn't taking it because I had classes to finish or deadlines to meet. I wasn't answering emails on the beach or trying to squeeze in another YouTube lesson.

Instead, I found myself doing something that's become surprisingly rare lately. I was just creating stuff because I felt like it. You know that I've been spending quite a lot of time lately trying to improve my lettering. Those of you who have followed me for a while know that every now and then I become fascinated by a particular skill, and then I decide it's time to really learn it properly.

Lettering just happens to be that thing for me right now, [00:03:00] and as I'm getting ready, all of us are getting ready for the Greeting Card Challenge in the fall, I've been thinking a lot about hand-lettering my greetings, how I can make a card feel more personal, and how I can help my students feel more confident when creating them.

While I was away, I had the freedom to experiment without worrying whether I produced something that would ever become a class or a product. I was just simply playing. It reminded me of something I don't think we talk about often enough. As artists, we can become so focused on creating things that have a purpose that we forget the value of just simply creating 'cause it gives us joy.

Every painting seems to have a destination. Every illustration belongs in a collection, or every sketch is supposed to become something. We start measuring our creativity by what it produces [00:04:00] instead of what it gives back to us. I don't know what it was, but honestly, sitting by the lake with my iPad, practicing letter forms that may never appear on a greeting card, that reminded me why I fell in love with making art in the first place.

It wasn't because every piece had to have a purpose, honestly. It was because creating itself was enough. Awesome because when you think differently about it, you tend to give yourself a little bit more room to maneuver Ironically, that little holiday also reminded me how much work goes into taking time off when you run your own business.

I think people sometimes imagine that because I'm self-employed, I can simply decide to take a week away and close the studio door behind me. And gosh, the reality is so the opposite. [00:05:00] Before I left, I felt like I was trying to fit three weeks of work into 10 days. Every time I crossed one thing off my list, I thought of another thing that needed to be finished before I could finish packing my trailer.

I had to write the newsletters, get them all organized. Thank God Kaylie is there helping me to get stuff like that organized. I had to finish recording on some classes. In fact, there was two or three still sitting there waiting for me to finish. I had so many graphics to prepare and things for the emails, and then scheduling the emails, and I had projects to organize so that everything would continue moving while I was away.

And, at the same time, my daughter, who edits most of my videos, was also preparing for her three-week holiday, and you know how much I rely on her, [00:06:00] so naturally I wanted her to enjoy every minute of that break. But it also meant we needed to work much further ahead than usual. Videos that normally would have been edited next week suddenly had to be finished before either of us left.

We did plan ahead as much as we possibly could, but despite all of the planning, there was still a lot left to be done on that last few days And as I was working through all of that preparation, I caught myself thinking about how little of this side of the business anyone ever really sees. I do talk about it here and there, but I don't really, share everything, of course.

Why would I? But when someone opens one of my classes, it simply appears, right? It's just there. When a newsletter arrives in your inbox, it looks effortless. A podcast episode pops up on your phone, or a new brush set becomes [00:07:00] available, or another YouTube video is published. From the outside, it probably seems as though those things just happen naturally, or that there's no stress behind them, that I plan so far ahead that it's, really easy.

But what isn't visible are all of the conversations, and all of the planning sessions, and all the revisions, and the tiny decisions that take place long before any of those things reach you That's true whether you're running an online business like mine, or you're selling paintings at a local market, or you're licensing your artwork, or you're illustrating a children's book, or you're designing greeting cards.

Gosh, every finished piece of work has a long story behind it, and most of that story just never gets told I can tell you though, my husband or my daughter, people that work for me and with me, [00:08:00] they probably can imagine it a little bit more easily than you can. One of the things I've been learning over the past couple of years is that having a team doesn't eliminate that invisible work.

It simply changes what the work looks like, if I could say it in an easier way. Years ago, I was doing absolutely everything myself. Now, I'm incredibly fortunate to have wonderful people that help me. Kaylie looks after the marketing. Lindy helps me with the community.

Brooklyn works on advertising. Abbie helps with the countless little details that keep us moving forward, and of course, my daughter Ché handles a lot of the rough editing of my videos. When I say rough editing, she is the first person who gets her hands on it after I've recorded it, and what she does is she really improves it to the [00:09:00] point that quite often I can be looking at the video or the class or the skill that I'm teaching, and I can really just make, simple kind of, , adjustments here and there to make it even better.

But she does the bulk of the video editing. She spends way more time on it than I do I am so grateful for that and for every one of the people who helps me keep this business going. I really don't know how I could do it. I couldn't do it on my own anymore. What I didn't fully appreciate when I first started building a team was that collaboration has its own rhythm I'll think of an idea while I'm working on a course and immediately send someone a message because I just don't wanna forget it.

So I think Kaylie is probably the recipient of most of these random thoughts. I'll move on to something completely different and, a week [00:10:00] later she responds or, I add something to it. She must think I'm crazy at times, I'm sure. I'll be maybe in the middle of recording a lesson, or designing a pattern, or I am actually working on this week's newsletter, but by the time Kaylie has had a chance to reply, it might be a week later.

It might be a day or two later. It might be, that same day. Who knows? Because we all have lives and families and responsibilities. I've often moved on mentally. You know what I mean? I've just moved on from whatever that thing is. It still has to be done, but I'm already on to the next thing.

Suddenly I'm rereading my own message to her trying to remember exactly what I was thinking at the time, and I'm sure this is what happens to her too. I've learned to laugh about that because it's simply part of working with real people. Nobody on my team is sitting beside their computer waiting for my next [00:11:00] email, and honestly, I wouldn't want them to be.

They deserve their holidays. They deserve their weekends. They deserve evenings with their families. The business has to be built around real life and not the other way around. I feel bad that they have to cope with my ADD tendencies, and just knowing myself and knowing how easily I can forget something, I literally wanna write it down immediately.

So sometimes things that I send out or ask for seem really disjointed. I do have a bigger plan in mind. They don't necessarily know what that is yet. That thought really stayed with me through the holiday because I started to realize that maybe we've all been sold a slightly unrealistic picture of what running a creative business really looks like.

We see the polished Instagram feeds, the beautifully organized studios, the [00:12:00] perfectly photographed products, and the carefully planned launches. It's easy to imagine that successful artists have somehow figured out a secret system where everything runs smoothly all the time. Is that what you think?

' Cause let me tell you- It's not true. It really isn't. I really do wonder about some of them, 'cause, some people just seem so polished and so able to make it look like a breeze. Maybe their teams are bigger. Who knows? I may get there at some point, but I honestly don't think that it's true, at least certainly it isn't true here.

Most of my days, my work is a wonderful mix of creating stuff, planning, solving issues, problems, answering questions. I do get a lot of email now. I try to spend as much time as I can recording lessons well in advance, so that's something that's [00:13:00] always on my mind is that next class, when to schedule it, when I can get Ché working on it, what else has to be done when I'm working around something like that, what marketing is gonna have to be done.

I'm always sketching ideas, making lists, changing my mind, rewriting something I thought was finished, or trying to remember why I left a sticky note to myself that says butterflies or something random. I came across one the other day, and whatever it was, I had no idea what it meant the next time I looked at it. , Maybe that's exactly what a healthy creative business looks like. I don't know. Tell me about it. I would love to hear how you, analyze this sort of thing. But I don't know. Maybe it's just not supposed to feel perfectly organized every single day.

Maybe the beautiful work we eventually share with the world is built on hundreds and hundreds of ordinary, messy, imperfect [00:14:00] days that nobody else ever gets to see You know, when I came home this time, I found myself thinking about something that really surprised me. I expected to come home feeling rested, and I did, mentally especially, but I also came back with a little bit more clarity.

It's amazing what happens when you step away from your desk for a few days. When you're in the middle of a busy season, it's so easy to become completely focused on what's directly in front of you, and I don't know, I'm always thinking about the next class, the next email, the next deadline, , the next live session that I have to do, the next problem that needs solving.

I become so busy moving from, , one task or challenge to the next one, that I don't always give myself the opportunity to ask whether I'm still moving in the direction that I really wanna go, if that bigger picture kind of thinking. [00:15:00] And sitting beside the lake, I think that's when I took the opportunity to do that, and I realized I had missed it.

One of the things I kept thinking about was the Five Card Challenge coming up. So yes, I know, I'm not supposed to be thinking about business, but there's something about it. It's different when you are actually relaxed somewhere and thinking about business as opposed to you're thinking about business, you're sitting at your computer, you have your lists, you have your binders, you've got your, emails, all kinds of stuff that you're lumping all together and you're trying to focus on all these different things.

So different than thinking about something like that when you're sitting at the lake. So just imagine that for a second. Now, if you've been with me for a while, you probably know that my Five Card Challenge has become one of my favorite events of the year. I think it's become [00:16:00] a favorite event of a lot of my students, a lot of my members in my membership.

And, every single time that we run it, I'm reminded about how much people can accomplish when they- just give themselves permission to create for a few days. I think that is so valuable, and I am so glad that I had that chance to think about that as I was relaxing. 'Cause this year has been different because instead of just dusting off last year's material and running it again, we've been looking at every little piece of it and asking whether there's a better way.

So that's what I've been doing and what that sort of distance away from all my technical stuff that I'm doing has helped me to focus on We've been talking a little bit more just within my little work group

and with Kaylie and with anybody who's involved in [00:17:00] anything that I do, we've been talking about the customer journey. So you've probably heard me mention it during Thrive meetings, also during my Mastering Surface Pattern Design and deep dive live sessions. It came up today. We've been doing things like questioning offers and questioning pages, emails, bonuses, even some of the ideas I've been quite excited about only a couple weeks ago.

If I'm being honest, there were moments when I caught myself feeling a little bit frustrated because I'd already spent time building things that we may not even use now. Have you ever felt that way with anything that you've been creating? You spend hours exploring an idea 'cause you're convinced it's the right direction.

You sketch or paint or, I don't know, experiment, and you slowly begin bringing it to life. And then one day, you step back and you look at it with fresh eyes [00:18:00] and you realize, "That isn't exactly what I hoped it would be." Years ago, I think I would have looked at that and thought I'd wasted all my time, but honestly, in this day and age now, and after so many years of putting this kind of stuff together, I am seeing things a little bit differently.

I don't feel like the work was wasted at all. It just helped me get to a better answer, I think. That realization felt important enough that I actually wrote it down while I was away. I wanted to remember it because I think it's true for almost every part of a creative life. The paintings that don't get framed.

The ideas that never get recorded, the color palettes that just didn't quite work, maybe patterns that never made it into a collection, and even business ideas that just got set aside. All of these things have [00:19:00] value. They teach us something. They sharpen our instincts. They help us recognize the right direction when we finally see it.

I think artists understand this- instinctively when we're creating, but sometimes we forget that when we're running our businesses. We expect every idea to succeed, every launch to work perfectly, every decision to be the right one the first time. But that's not how creativity works. Creativity has always been about exploring possibilities, and sometimes we discover wonderful things.

Sometimes we discover what doesn't fit, and both are valuable. So the older I get, the more I appreciate that invisible part of the creative process. I celebrate all the different things. I'm happy when I complete something. I'm happy with the practice pages of lettering I've been doing. I'm just feeling like all of those [00:20:00] things are particularly productive at this moment for me As I've thought about it- it did occur to me that maybe we don't give ourselves enough credit for the thinking we do.

We're very good at measuring output because it's easy to count. We count how many listings we have, how many classes we've made, how many products we've got for sale, how many followers or how many sales we've got. Thinking doesn't show up on a checklist, unfortunately, and yet I honestly believe some of the most valuable work I've ever done has happened when I'm actively not producing anything at all, if that makes sense.

This little holiday reminded me of something I used to know instinctively, and that's that rest isn't the opposite of creativity. Quite often, it's where creativity quietly catches up with us. I wasn't sitting beside the lake trying to solve [00:21:00] problems, but somehow my mind kept wandering back to them in the gentlest way.

Without deadlines and texts and messages coming in, things I absolutely had to do, I found myself asking better questions

Maybe that's why stepping away matters so much. It doesn't stop the creative process at all. It just gives us room to breathe

After all these years, that's one of the greatest gifts that we can give ourselves, room to breathe. Thanks so much for spending part of your day with me. I feel like this was a long ramble. Whether you're listening to this while you're painting or driving or walking your dog or, I don't know, folding laundry, or just enjoying a cup of coffee, maybe you've got your iPad on your lap, I always appreciate the fact that you're there listening.

I feel like I've had a conversation, and I think [00:22:00] this little podcast has become one of my favorite places to just sit down and have an honest conversation. And I hope today felt a little bit like that, not too much of a long ramble. I'm not even sure where I was going with all of it, but I hope it made a little bit of sense.

If this episode resonated with you, I would love to hear your thoughts. Come and find me over on my website or on social media and tell me about some of that invisible work that you've been doing lately. I would love to have a further conversation about this. I'd love to know what you've been creating, what you've been thinking about or learning, even if nobody else has seen it yet.

And if you know another creative friend who might need this reminder today, I'd be so grateful if you'd share this episode with them. I know for myself that the best things I've ever listened to or read or seen, I've done so [00:23:00] because somebody has referred to it or someone had, has told me, "This would be good for you."

So sometimes the best encouragement we can offer other artists is just letting them know they're not the only one figuring things out as they go. Until next time, keep creating, keep learning, keep finding joy in the journey, and as always, keep finding joy in the creative juggle. Take care, my friends. I will see you again very soon