Field notes for creatives: How to find the key message at the heart of your work
What’s this about?
I started hosting free and open Green Room Sessions to meet with, learn from, and, with some luck, help people who are often wading through the ocean of their lived experience and expertise in hopes of finding treasures that may resonate with their communities.
In this first Green Room Session a photographer + business owner and a public artist + author + illustrator jumped on the call, both seeking help with a similar challenge:
Which stories and messages underneath my work will help me connect better with my audience?
What follows is a little bit of what we discussed and the practical takeaways that they felt were helpful, and maybe you might, too.
Insight 1: Seek patterns and messages in the transformational experiences that your customers / clients share with you.
Setup
The photographer expressed that as she’s been growing her business and has achieved high quality in her authentic portraiture work…
Complication
…But she hasn’t found a way to talk about her work and her business in a way that feels compelling. Photography is a saturated market and customers may find photographers difficult to compare. How can she stand out?
Stakes
This photographer is a remarkable portraitist. Yet, without a resonant story about her work that will help customers connect, she feels held back in her business' potential to grow, expanding the reach of those who may benefit from her work, and establishing a secure financial footing.
Insight
During the session we explored experiences her customer’s shared with her during and after sessions. After a handful, a pattern began to emerge: The photographed go through a transformational experience that has a genuine and deep impact on them.
Here is a quote from her as she described the portraiture experience:
“[As we] would photograph their images, they would do their hair and makeup, which is actually empowering and confidence building... they'd be like, 'This was so much fun. This was really good. I haven't felt this way in a long time about myself.'"
She described another moment when she reviewed images with a client, who said,”Oh my god, I haven't seen that person [referring to herself] in so many years. Is that really me?"
Is there an underlying need that experience fills? Selling a photograph is selling a function; however, when she genuinely shared the moving experiences her customers shared with her, I noticed within her invoked emotions of passion and care. I can see in that moment why she does this work.
I believe that people connect and resonate with someone when they feel the "real" passionate version come through.
Action
We landed on a few actions that I believe can be applied broadly and I look forward to using them with clients who are struggling to find the right message emanating from their creative work:
- Gather stories and quotes from past or current customers. Ask them what the experience meant to them. Start with those clients who you remember had a particularly important transformation.
- Journal about the question above if reaching out to customers is a challenge. Just remember, though, that there is nothing like picking up the phone and chatting with them IRL.
- As the messages build up, look for patterns and consistent themes. Tell these stories and shared language when engaging with customers and to shape your branding, key messages, and pitch.
Insight 2: Every story you tell needs to answer "So What?”
Setup
The illustrator / author shared his stories rising from his work in murals, public art unveilings, writing, and his in-progress exhibition series about Chinese-American immigration and identity. He simply asked, “How do I get better?”
Complication
After he shared a handful of the stories he often shares with his audiences, I asked, "So what?"
We (humanity) ask this question when we listen to someone tell a story or share information, but we do so often silently, unconsciously, and in the millisecond of a moment decide whether to tune in our out. We are wired to sense for an answer to "Why should I care?", "Why am I being told this?", and "So what?"
These are stakes questions, and they are the most common and most important questions asked and answered during my speaker coaching sessions.
Stakes
The artist's audience is gifting him their time, presence, and attention, altogether their rarest and most valuable of resources. Sadly, if the artist, or any speaker or communicator for that matter, doesn't answer the stakes questions in their talk as quickly as possible, the audience tunes out. That 15 minute talk is now competing with the dozens of other thoughts flowing through a person's mind.
Insight
Make asking and answering this question a critical litmus test for your talk and any stories and messages within it; however, there’s a catch: You can’t answer it on your own. You must collaborate with someone else. Someone you trust to bounce ideas off of and who will honestly tell you when the story or message or work or study your are talking about matters to them…or when it just isn’t landing yet. A quote from the session:
" [Your stories] should always end with answering ‘so what.' Always, whenever you're about to tell a story, just always ask yourself: What is the ‘So what'? Why does the audience need to care about what I just said? What can they take away from this that's important to them? What's the gift?"
Underlying this question is the need for the artist / speaker to shift their belief of who their talk is for: Is this talk for himself or for others?
I’m often left wondering whether a speaker’s idea and talk is their deep exploration of their life and personal narrative or their goal to be in service of an audience and their hopes for change. The fundamental difference is whether this stakes question is answered clearly, early, and often.
The lifelong illustrator shared his stories again, but from this new lens. To prepare for an upcoming talk at a college, he focused on what he hoped could help college-aged young people. What is at the heart of his career, his work, and his life story that could empower them to navigate an evermore complicated and disrupted world? He realized that he has been navigating a similar world his entire life. It may look and feel different on the surface, but there are distilled principles he could lift out of his stories and gift to these students. We found his “So What?”
Action
- After every story or anecdote in your talk outline or script, literally write "So what?" in the margin and attempt an answer.
- Then recruit a friend. Just because you answered the question for yourself doesn’t mean it actually matters to your audience. For your work, stories, and messages to matter to someone else they must be shared.
- If you’re having a hard time, which most do, then ask yourself, “If I woke up tomorrow and stopped doing this work, what would happen? Why do I give so much of myself to this?” I find that imagining the absence clarifies the central purpose and drive.
