An Executive Coach's Guide to Getting Back Into Art
I built an art practice to survive my career. And it worked.
I spent over a decade as an executive. Climbing, or trying to, the proverbial ladder. Travel, and lots of it. Managing and being managed. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I started making art. Not because I was an artist, although I'd always wanted to be, but because I needed somewhere for my brain to go that wasn't work.
Why I started making art
I'd always been creative. In high school, I had an art teacher who believed in my talent before I did. She told me to apply, as a senior, for the town's art association scholarship. I didn't. Imagine my surprise when I won it anyway. She had faith in me before I'd earned it in my own eyes. I'll never forget you, 'Ms. Us'.
Making art at night started as an escape. A distraction. A way to put my hands on something that wasn't a spreadsheet or a problem to solve. I taught myself to quilt, and when I couldn't make the corners meet, to modern quilt. Then I kept going. I started painting small, ACEOs, those tiny 2.5-by-3.5-inch art cards, and selling them on the side just to see if I could. I could. Over five hundred of them, as it turned out. They weren't masterpieces, but they were mine. A collector once told me I 'make creating art look easy. It isn't.' Maybe I was onto something.
What building a creative practice taught me
Here's what surprised me most, coming back to art: I got good. Not because I had talent to spare or time to burn. I had neither. I got good the way I got good at everything else in my career: a plan, protected time, and showing up. It turns out the same skills that built my career could build a creative practice. Nobody tells you that.
Today I'm an executive coach, and I make art in bursts. Some weeks a lot, some weeks nothing. And the nothing-weeks are okay. Sometimes getting back into it is harder than others.
Why Welcome Wander exists
I kept meeting people like me: accomplished, busy professionals, competent at nearly everything, with a creative thing they secretly wanted and couldn't get back to. They didn't want the woo-woo of some creative communities. They just wanted to make art and feel good before, during, and after. And then make more.
So that's what I build here. Welcome Wander isn't art instruction, there's plenty of that out there, and it isn't art therapy, I'm a coach, not a therapist. It's a coach's system for coming back to a creative practice: a plan, protected time, and zero guilt. The same way I did it, one small piece at a time.
Who Welcome Wander is for
If that's you, great at your job and rusty or guilty or stuck with the creative thing, you're in the right place.
A teacher once believed I could create, and do it well, before I believed it myself. Now I get to be that for people ready to begin, or begin again.
Start here → Creative Comeback Challenge
I kept meeting people like me: accomplished, busy professionals, competent at nearly everything, with a creative thing they secretly wanted and couldn't get back to. They didn't want the woo-woo of some creative communities. They just wanted to make art and feel good before, during, and after. And then make more.
So that's what I build here. Welcome Wander isn't mainly art instruction, there's plenty of that out there, and it isn't art therapy, I'm a coach, not a therapist. It's a coach's system for coming back to a creative practice: a plan, protected time, and zero guilt. The same way I did it, one small piece at a time.