Notes From My Creative Estates Notebook

Oh. Boy.

I'm not even sure how to start sharing all that I learned over the weekend at Creative Estates. I came home feeling refreshed and ready to hit the ground running with my blog and biz.

Throughout the weekend, there were several panels of beautiful, creative, and successful women who shared their tips, passions and wisdom with the rest of us. The panel that hit me with an explosion of inspiration and empowerment was the "Happy Chaos" panel, where Becki Crosby from Whippy Cake, Becky Higgins from Becky Higgins LLC, Megan Pyrah from Brassy Apple and Melanie Thornton from Above All Fabric spoke about their experience in struggling and learning how to balance their businesses with life.

Here are a few nuggets I gleaned from that panel.

-- Have a realistic competitive spirit. Don't measure your success by what others are doing, but against your own goals and aspirations. It's so easy to look at other people's numbers, sales, followers, successes but we are all so different that it's dumb to compare. Everyone started with one follower, one sale.

--Celebrate the seemingly minor goals and give yourself rewards to stay motivated! Uh, you know I'm all about celebrating, so this was a great reminder that it's okay to be excited about reaching 100 sales (I'm 4 away, woot!) and other such milestones!

-- If you are not truly passionate about what you are doing, you should probably STOP. This point made me smile. It's so true that if you are not passionate about your blog/biz, that it won't be long before you burn out. I'm happy to declare that I am passionate about painting, all things handmade, and blogging. It's so exciting for me to make happy, colorful artwork for people's homes. So, I'm not stopping anytime soon. ;) Whew, breathe a sigh of relief.

--Own the craziness, and learn how to manage your time. Find out what works for you. I loved how Becki from Whippy Cake admitted to having a creatively disorganized personality. That's SO me! I'm not type A, but rather something closer to type Z. And yet, she has an incredibly successful business because she has found what works for her.  That is so inspiring to me. (Not to mention, she is absolutely hilarious, sweet and gave us a ride to dinner in her car when it was pouring rain!)

More than ever, I am proud to be a part of this community of real, beautiful women that are bursting with creativity, inspiration and passion. My heart is full after this weekend. 

Did you go to #creativeestates (as we say on twitter)?? What stuck in that creative brain of yours? And if you didn't have the chance to go, make sure you get there next year, when it's held in Salt Lake City, Utah! 

PS. Once again, all of these pictures are courtesy of the one and only Sandyalamode. I was just the model all weekend. But I get to get behind the camera now, since I'm going to pick up my brand new DSLR camera this morning!