E67 Transcript
Here's a question I want you to sit with before we get into today's episode. When someone asks you what you value in your creative work - and I mean really asks, not the cocktail party version - how quickly does the answer come? And more importantly, how confident are you that the answer you give actually matches the decisions you've been making?
Because those two things - what you say you value and what your decisions reveal about what you've been putting value on - are frequently not the same list. And the gap between them is worth examining.
Today we're going into the first of ten principles for building a stronger creative practice. And this one sounds simple on the surface. ‘Know what you actually value.’ But I want to warn you upfront - this episode is going to raise more questions than it answers. That's deliberate. Some of what we're going to talk about might feel a bit uncomfortable. And I think by the time we get to the end, you're going to be looking at some of your recent decisions a little differently.
"Do what you love. Love what you do."
You've heard that before. Probably more times than you can count. It shows up on coffee mugs and Instagram graphics and in the kind of advice people give when they want to say something encouraging without saying anything specific. I’ve said it myself. I’ve offered it as advise. I’ve used it many, many times. Even included it inside some of my programs, although I added a bit of depth to it. Because, well, it is a saying that is somewhat true but extremely oversimplified…a little distorted.
And to be honest with you - I almost didn't include this as one of the ten principles in my creative practice framework because of exactly that association. It sounds like a platitude. It sounds like the kind of thing that belongs on a motivational poster, not in a serious conversation about building a body of work.
But I kept it. I kept it because underneath the bumper sticker version of this idea there is something genuinely important. Something that most textile creatives have never examined with any real rigor. And when you haven't examined it, it costs you. Sometimes gradually, sometimes radically, always eventually.
So I want to be clear about what this principle is not. It is not an instruction to follow your bliss. It is not a suggestion to restructure your life around what excites you. It is not a feeling-based exercise in self-discovery. What it is, is a practical tool. A decision-making framework. One that only works if you've done the honest work of figuring out what you actually value (notice I didn’t say love). You must figure out - not what you think you should value, not what sounds right when someone asks, but what your actual decisions over time reveal that you've been prioritizing.
And I want to acknowledge upfront that this sounds simple as well. ‘Know what you value.’ Of course. Who doesn't know what they value? But stay with me here, because it’s a bit more complicated than you might expect. I think by the time we've worked through this you're going to find that the honest answer to that question is more revealing.
Let's start with a distinction that I think is worth considering carefully, because it changes the way you look at this entire principle.
There is a difference between what you perform as a value and what you actually value. And most people, if they're being honest, have spent more time on the former than the latter.
Performed values are the ones that come quickly when someone asks. Creativity. Freedom. Authenticity. The work itself. These answers sound right. They feel right when you say them. And they may genuinely be your values. I'm not suggesting people are lying when they answer that question. (We’ll get to mine in a minute and you’ll find all of those right in there.) But values are not what you say in response to a question. Values are what your decisions reveal over time. And those two things are frequently, and quite uncomfortably, not the same.
Here is what I mean. The maker who says they value the work itself - the making, the process, the craft - but who only feels genuinely motivated when someone is watching, responding, praising or when inspiration is at an all time high. Who loses momentum completely when they're working without an audience, or they become bored, or they don’t feel inspired. What that pattern reveals about values is worth examining honestly. Is it ‘the work itself’ that is valued, or the dream of the work? The maker who says they value creative freedom but keeps taking commissioned work they resent because it pays steadily and saying no feels impossible. The one who says they value authenticity in their work but is quietly making things that look like everyone else's because that's what gets attention and attention feels necessary.
None of these are character flaws. They're patterns. And patterns reveal something.
There is solid research in psychology on this distinction - between what researchers call intrinsic values and extrinsic ones. Intrinsic values are things like autonomy, mastery, genuine contribution - the kind of motivation that comes from inside the work itself. Extrinsic values are things like recognition, income, status - motivation that comes from outside the work, from how other people respond to it. And what the research shows, consistently, is this: building a creative practice primarily around extrinsic values is a strong predictor of burnout. Not might lead to burnout. Predicts it. Regardless of how successful you appear externally. The work can be going well by every outside measure - the pieces are selling, the response is positive, the body of work is growing - and it can still feel completely hollow. Because the foundation it's built on isn't actually what you value.
So the question I want you to sit with - and I'm not asking you to answer it right now, I'm asking you to just carry it - is not "what do I value." It's this: what do my actual decisions, my actual actions, over the last six months tell me I've been valuing? Write down those two lists and see how they compare. Because that gap, if there is one, is important information.
Now I want to talk about what values misalignment actually costs. Because I think people understand the concept intellectually without fully reckoning with what it does to you in practice. And I can speak to this from direct experience, so I'm going to.
I spent more than twenty five years in the garment industry as a designer and director of product development. I built a career I was genuinely good at and genuinely engaged by. And then I was downsized. Which is a clean corporate word for something that is actually quite disorienting when it happens to you, regardless of how professionally it's handled.
And in the aftermath of that, I took work in a completely different industry. Respectable work. But Repetitive work. Highly regulated. Six days a week. Structured in ways that had nothing to do with how I think or work or what I need from my days. And I want to be honest about what that did. I became ill. Not burned out in the casual way people use that phrase now - as a synonym for tired or overwhelmed. Actually sick. Symptoms, Doctor visits, Diagnoses. My body registered what my mind was trying to rationalize. That is what sustained values conflict costs at its worst. It doesn't stay in the category of professional dissatisfaction. It moves into your physical life.
And then COVID happened. And the particular set of opportunities I had been considering - opportunities I had been telling myself were reasonable next steps, responsible choices, practical moves - those disappeared. And I was forced into a re-evaluation that I had been avoiding.
What do I actually value? Not what do I wish I valued. Not what would make a good answer. What do I actually value, evidenced by what I know about myself and what I need to function well and build something real.
My list, when I was honest about it: freedom - specifically time freedom, location freedom, financial freedom. Independence. So being personally responsible for my own busy and my own direction. Creativity as a daily practice, not as an occasional indulgence. Joy in the work, not just satisfaction with the outcome. Authenticity. And contribution - the specific kind that comes from helping capable people do better work.
And when I looked at the opportunities I had been seriously considering before COVID eliminated them, I could see clearly - better pay, wrong direction. Every single one of them would have moved me further from that list, not closer to it. I would have been trading one misalignment for another. And I had almost done it. Because the pay looked better and the path looked more obvious and I hadn't stopped long enough to ask the right questions.
Knowing my values didn't make the next steps easy. I still had obligations to work through. I still had a gap between where I was and where I needed to get to. But it gave me criteria. It gave me a way to evaluate decisions that went beyond "does this seem reasonable" or "does this pay enough." It let me ask: does this move me toward or away from what I actually value? And that question, consistently applied, changes everything about how you make decisions. Even the ones that require you do something not quite aligned until the alignment happens. Decisions start becoming helpful to your well being.
Which brings me to the practical part of this. As Jon Acuff likes to say – what can you do with this on a Tuesday?
Values clarity is not a feel-good exercise. It is a decision-making tool. And for a working textile maker, that matters in concrete ways.
When an opportunity comes in - a commission, a collaboration, a new direction for the work, a course, an exhibition - you need criteria for evaluating it that go beyond "does this excite me." Excitement is nice but it’s not reliable criteria. Excitement is easily manufactured by novelty and very easily deflated by the first obstacle. Values are more stable. They don't change much over time, and they don't respond to trends or external pressure the way enthusiasm does.
The real question to apply to any significant decision is simple: does this move me toward or away from what I actually value? That question cuts through an enormous amount of noise very quickly. The maker who can answer that question clearly can decline things without guilt, pursue things without second-guessing, and build a body of work that has coherence because it's coming from a consistent place.
The maker who hasn't done this work is making decisions on the fly, responding to whatever feels most urgent or most appealing in the moment, and wondering why the body of work feels scattered or why the practice feels unsustainable, or unfulfilling, even when individual pieces are going well.
So I want to make one thing clear, because I think it needs to be said out loud. Values clarity does not mean you only do work that aligns perfectly with your values at all times. That is not real life for most people and pretending otherwise is not useful. Sometimes you must take misaligned work because you need the income. Sometimes you do the less interesting project because it funds the more interesting one. Sometimes you work in conditions that aren't ideal because the conditions you actually want aren't available yet.
That is not failure. That is strategy - if you're doing it consciously. The critical distinction is between sacrificing temporarily and strategically - taking work you don't love because it finances the work you're building toward, with clear eyes about what you're doing and why - versus moving through your creative life with an "I have no control over this" mentality, where things just keep happening to you and the work you actually want keeps getting pushed further into the future because the conditions are never quite right.
One of those is a temporary detour with a direction. The other is a permanent wrong turn that you keep making more comfortable rather than correcting. And the difference between them isn't circumstance. It's whether you made a conscious decision or handed the wheel to whatever came along next.
And the only way to know which one you're doing is to have done the honest work of knowing what you actually value.
So here’s the bottom line.
The phrase "do what you love" has begun to bothered me, and I think I've finally figured out why. It assumes the hard work is already done. It assumes you know what you love, that you've examined it honestly, that the values you're operating from are actually yours and not inherited ones, not performed ones, not the ones that got you praised or paid or validated over time until you stopped questioning whether they were really what you were after.
Most people haven't done that examination. And I include my earlier self in that. The evidence is in the decisions – the things you keep doing, the work you keep avoiding, the opportunities you keep taking that leave you feeling nothing, the directions you keep starting and abandoning, the persistent low-level resistance that you've been blaming on everything except the actual cause.
You cannot build sustainable creative work on a foundation you haven't examined. The work will tell you eventually. The question is whether you're going to ask it now, on your own terms, or wait until the misalignment forces the question for you.
That's an uncomfortable place to end. I know that. But it's an honest thought.
If you want to work through this in a structured way, the Ten Principles for a Stronger Creative Practice download walks through a real values clarification exercise - not a vision board, not a list of things that sound good, but an honest examination of where your values actually are and where your decisions have been taking you. The link is in the show notes. It’s free so get that link or you can find it at virginialeighstudio.com/learn
So let's bring this back to what actually matters here.
We talked today about the difference between what you perform as a value and what your decisions actually reveal. We talked about what misalignment costs - not in the abstract but in real, physical, professional terms. And we talked about values not as a feel-good exercise but as a practical decision-making tool that lets you evaluate opportunities clearly and build a practice that has a genuine foundation under it.
The question I want you to carry out of this episode is not just "what do I value." But also: what do my decisions over the last six months tell me I've actually been valuing? What have I moved to the top of my list, knowingly or not? And does that list match the one you'd write down if someone asked you directly?
If the answer is yes - good. You have clarity that a lot of makers don't have. Use it.
If the answer is no - that gap is worth examining before you make the next significant decision about your work.
Now I'll be back next week with principle two. The download is in the show notes, and it includes all ten of the principles. We’ll cover several more in the coming weeks.
Have a great week everyone and I’ll see you right here next week.
