52 Weeks of Flying the Plane While Building It

What I Learned About Leadership by Becoming a COO

Hey friend, happy Memorial Day weekend, especially for those of you who are on the US side. We over here are keeping things really low-key this weekend by playing lots of pickleball and frisbee.

Have you had a chance to catch up with Lana Abraham-Murawski's episode (E139)? Well, as a visual artist, Lana shares her creative journey and how her cultural heritage shaped her artistic style.

She talks about developing a thoughtful approach to balancing artistic ambitions with family life. Lastly, she takes us behind the scenes of the themes behind her paintings.

While prepping for this week's newsletter, I realized I was weeks away from celebrating our 1-year Creative Matters anniversary. This will be 52 weeks straight of sharing lessons learned from the podcast and from my personal life with you.

Man, what a year it’s been. So much growth. So much frustration, and I’m still bad at chess.

One particular memory comes to me. There I was, standing in my kitchen at 6 AM, clutching my third coffee of the day and wondering how exactly I'd gone from someone who disliked juggling too many projects to someone managing a team of people.

If you'd told me five years ago that I'd be a COO of a business my husband and I launched during Covid while simultaneously running a podcast, my photography business, AND trying not to mess up raising a tween completely, I would have laughed. Not the polite kind of laughter either, but the full-body, “Whatchu talkin bout Willis,” kind.

Isn’t it funny the stories we tell ourselves? We have ideas that we could never do X or Y. Boy, do we underestimate ourselves! If you don’t watch out, your limiting mindset will clip your wings.

The Surprise Choice

About a year ago, when Creative Matters was just an idea brewing in my overwhelmed brain, I made a choice that seemed counterintuitive: I decided to write about my struggles instead of pretending I had my life together.

I hit many a wall while juggling a business. Suddenly, I was managing 120 people while keeping my creative work alive. There I was googling, ‘What does LTE mean or what does EBITDA mean?’ at 5:30 am.

Then it was dealing with my nerves while learning how to fire someone without my voice shaking.

Taken together, while trying to be emotionally present for my Tween after a day of putting out work fires, I’d write about the systems I developed to cope.

The creative work of writing became my processing work. Turns out Creative Matters and our podcast mini episodes became public therapy with better formatting.

The Outcome (Still in Progress)

Looking back, I can see a pattern in all this chaos which I didn’t expect to see when I started writing the newsletter.

Five weeks from now, Creative Matters will hit its one-year mark.

That’s fifty-two weeks of building something I didn't know I was building: a real-time feedback loop between my internal chaos and whatever passes for external success.

Here's a theory: most of us have this huge lag between learning something and actually applying it. We go to conferences, we read books, and we hire coaches.

Turns out passive learning creates a comfortable distance between insight and action. When you process your struggles every week, you can't hide behind theory. You're forced to deal with your issues.

I've created the messiest way to figure out leadership. It's like executive coaching, but make it vulnerable and add weekly deadlines.

But I'm doing it and figuring it out while doing it. I like to say, we’re flying the plane as we're building it. Thank you for coming along for the ride.

Your Turn

What are you learning that you’re not applying? What insights are you hoarding instead of sharing with your community?

Here’s some Black auntie knowledge for you: Courage has nothing to do with having your life together. It’s about sharing your work anyway. Documenting the messy middle enables you to keep moving through it. Remember, you don’t have to be perfect; after all, no one is. Just show up and do your thang.

Have a good long weekend.

Stay Creative,

Martine