WEEK 15 - don’t ignore your green flags!
This week’s HOMwork is all about green flags, inspired by an Instagram post I stumbled across about Friendship Green Flags.
While I was reading that post I realized that the whole concept of green flags was exactly how I ended up adding mural work to my creative skillset + business.
(ICYMI: Enrollment for my mural painting course opens on Monday 4/26! Get on the waitlist before then to get access to special bonuses I’ll be sending out next week.)
Many of you will be familiar with my philosophy on trusting my gut: I love it and I do it as much as possible. But trusting my gut can be a reactive way of making decisions so it isn’t always the *best* way to strategically plan for a business, you know?
Enter green flags.
Green flags are the opposite of red flags. Where red flags are a warning or an indicator that something is going wrong, green flags are an encouragement, an indicator of things going right.
To me, green flags are the signs that I should keep going - scratching a specific creative itch, pitching that dream client, even pursuing a culinary education. And my green flags are usually based on some kind of evidence - either my own prior experience or knowledge I’ve gained from my fellow creative entrepreneurs.
So how does this relate to the addition of mural work to my business?
I've always admired large-scale painting, so my creative gut was already “hell yessing” the shit out of murals. But when I started thinking about mural work as a potential new revenue stream in 2016 (rather than a few one-off projects), I had some concerns about whether murals made sense from a business perspective.
Unlike crafting or culinary projects (which I can do pretty easily in my own home on a free afternoon), murals require a decent amount of resources for even the initial experimentation phase. And that kind of resource-heavy creative work can work for a passion project but it doesn’t always make sense as a source of income.
Having some kind of trial period and getting more information about murals out seemed like a thing I should do. But I didn’t really have a system for testing things out (business-wise) other than my classic “trust your gut” and “follow the fun,” and I needed more than that in the case of mural-work.
So, instead of throwing the proverbial (mural) stuff onto a wall until something stuck, I paired my creative “trust your gut” skill with business-oriented green flags.
My green flags weren’t complicated. Most were a version of:
it fulfills me creatively,
it’s (still) fun, and
the effort vs. payout makes sense for my business
I planned out a series of things to try with mural work, in increasingly resource-heavy scenarios. After each step in the process I would check for the green flags.
As long as those green flags were waving, I kept going.
The result was that I learned a ton about what parts of mural work would make sense for my business. I also had a really positive experience working out the details because I was oriented towards the positive - green flags instead of red.
Which brings me to this week’s assignment...
Your assignment: Design or illustrate green flags for your own life (or creative business).
Thought starters: You can do one green flag or ten - the number isn’t the goal for this assignment.
Instead, focus on what kinds of signs make your gut go “hell yes!” in a given situation. Those are the green flags!
Then, reflect on why your gut is saying “hell yes” in these situations - that’s where the positive power of green flags really shines. It’s one thing to be like, “this feels right” and another to be able to say, “this is definitely right, because ______.”
(Try to stick to one kind of situation or scenario for this assignment: work, clients, relationships, etc...)
Examples of creative work green flags:
Get into flow state, could do it all day
Feels natural, challenging and enjoyable to learn (enjoy the process)
Can't stop thinking about it for 1+ month
Examples of freelance client green flags:
They have a mood board with your work in it
Name specific things they like about your work
Have clearly outlined details about the project
Caption idea: Explain how you discovered your green flag(s). Did you have a great client experience? Maybe you tried a few passion projects and always stuck with the ones that gave you a certain type of feel?
Make this an opportunity to share how you know what you know. Give other creatives the opportunity to go, “huh. I really love that too - maybe that’s a green flag for me!”
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Don’t forget to tag me @homsweethom and use the #HOMwork & #HOMwork2021 hashtag when you post on Instagram. I love looking through your brilliant creations and sharing a few of my favs every week in my IG Stories before the next assignment is posted.
