Making this podcast brought me into a business ecosystem crisis. Very little of my output changed, but my inner understanding of my work needed to shift.
So in today’s episode, I’m sharing how my job description has changed since I launched this show. And I’m exploring how shifting your job description can transform your relationship to your work.
Tune in to learn about—
How to discover what you’re devoted to
What are the themes of your job
What is not your job
How to write your job description
Aligning your job with your values & interests
What’s next for Common Shapes podcast
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“The biggest way my job description changed was internally. In my twenties and my early thirties messing up in front of people was a huge part of my job description. It was like — look at me! I’m a tornado person! Look at me go! But that’s not part of my job description today. Today at 35 years old, I feel confident in the work that I do, the writing that I create, the offerings I craft, and I give them to the world.”
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Welcome to Common Shapes: Exploring the Creative Life
[0:00] Hello, and welcome to Common Shapes, a podcast about practices, systems, and rituals for a creative life. And today, a podcast about your changing job description.
I'm your host, Marley Grace. Thank you for being a listener.
This is the last episode of season one of the podcast, a nice short and sweet debut season of Common Shapes.
It has been the honor of a lifetime to host this little show and bring you a couple great guests and a lot of different thoughts, feelings, strategies, systems, rituals, et cetera, for creative living and art making and sharing that work with the world.
So I'll be taking the next couple of weeks off of the show, but leaving you with a lot of great things to dig into.
The Creative Ideation Portal for Project Visioning
[1:06] Throughout season one, I've been sharing about the Creative Ideation Portal, which is a three-day guide to help you vision your projects and bring them into the world.
It's free to download at marleygrace.space slash common shapes.
So grab that. it goes well with the first four episodes of this podcast and we'll support you in making your dreams come true.
Today's episode goes with a mini workshop called Your Ever-Changing Job.
And this is a mini workshop and notion template that you can purchase in the show notes, marleygrace.space.
That's where you can find it. and it is to bring everything I'm going to talk to you about today, truly into the forefront of your mind, to put it into action, to integrate it with your spirit and into the world.
So if you love today's episode, your ever-changing job is the mini workshop for you.
Let's dive in.
Shifting Perspectives: A Business Ecosystem Crisis
[2:21] So, this season, making this podcast brought me into what I might call a business ecosystem crisis.
Now, very little of my output needed to change.
But my inside business ecosystem needed to shift, right? Like the way that I look at my job needed to change internally.
[2:53] And externally, I don't actually think it needs to look that different.
So today on the show, I wanna bring us through how to write a job description and how to change that job description.
And so we're gonna look at what are you devoted to, what is it that you do and what you like to do, the themes of your job, and what is not your job.
And then we'll talk a little bit about how the workshop can bring you further into some of this knowing if you wanna dig in further. So I'm gonna talk about my own business crisis first.
So there's nothing like teaching something to make you wonder if you actually like doing it that way.
Right, so when I first started getting the show ready to figure out, okay, what do I wanna say?
What do I wanna teach about? What do I wanna share about? It was really, you know, I wanna share, how I craft the offerings of my art and my work, how I exchange those offerings for money, how I make money.
I wanna bring on guests for them to talk about the ways that they make money and put their own work out.
And I wanna just like peel back the curtain on how I do things so that more people can be inspired.
[4:19] To create their own art and create their own offerings around their art.
Bridging the Gap: Artists and Small Business
[4:24] I also knew I wanted to sort of bridge the gap.
[4:29] Between artists and marketing and small business, right? It's like sometimes that seems maybe only for the online influencer or a business person or service provider. And I really wanted artists, to see that they could expand their income and their offerings in the same way that I have found success in doing so. So that was sort of my, that's what the podcast is about. That's what what season one is about, you know, this little journey through those first four episodes with the creative ideation portal to really say, here's everything I know to sort of make a start, make a beginning, and then here's how I do the other things in my life.
And now I'm sitting here in a lot more not knowing.
Reflecting on Personal Beliefs and Choices
[5:24] And I stand by everything I said on the podcast. I stand by everything I shared about and believe in.
And I also sit here thinking, what if you didn't do any of that?
Finger pointed back at myself. What if I didn't do any of that?
What if you don't do any of that?
What if you stopped thinking about piecing together all of these different puzzle pieces and only chose one thing and just did that.
You know, something that emerged from the podcast this season was taking on one-on-one creative advising clients. So in the past, I was taking very little on in terms of one-on-one consulting around creative projects. That's something I used to do a lot more as part of my job. And I stopped in part because it could be a little bit draining for me sometimes.
And I also noticed that for a more accessible exchange, someone could take my online class and have access to me week after week. And it wore me out less to host a group. But I then found that I had to promote less to get new one-on-one clients.
[6:53] Like I really only had to post once and then my book sort of filled for the month.
Whereas in a class, you have to promote a lot to get people to sign up.
So I was sort of starting to look at, okay, what is the energy exchange in talking about selling, right?
Exploring Selling Fatigue and Promotional Strategies
[7:11] So I'm sort of bringing us through this creative crisis into some things that changed.
So I'm still sort of talking about my own journey this season of the podcast.
But I think it was, you know, I think something I experienced myself is like selling fatigue.
And, you know, in the shapes of our offerings and in my class teaching as a practice and other things that I do, I talk so much about marketing as a creative practice, right, we look at that in the creative ideation portal.
And I sort of hit this feeling with the podcast and talking about the podcast and my newsletter and my classes where I felt like all I'm doing, all I do is sell myself and sell my offerings and sell my work.
And because my work is so personal, I was feeling like, am I selling myself or something?
And something wasn't quite adding up.
So I was noticing the selling fatigue.
[8:15] And I think part of that was just like, I added a new project, the podcast, a new thing that I'm going to be telling people about.
Another shift that happened this season was that I stopped hosting Flexible Office.
And I think in part that was I added the podcast and it was like, it felt tiring to also promote.
[8:37] Flexible Office and the podcast and my newsletter and classes, like there were just too many different things.
And, you know, something I also wanna share is a lot of people have a podcast that they can use social media less.
[8:54] So my job description, I'm also thinking, what if it didn't include social media at all?
Embracing the Fluidity of Job Descriptions and Creative Practices
[9:02] Right, this also came up this season doing the podcast. So what I wanna say, first of all, is just that creating this podcast led me to a lot of crisis-like feelings.
And they were crisis feelings, not just, oh, this is experimental, because I forgot it was an experiment, right?
When I stay in the experiment of my job and my business and my life and my art practice, it stays fun, it stays curious, and it stays open to shifting, right? As soon as I'm like, well, I thought I was going to do this and it was going to go this way, that rigidity is going to keep me stuck when movement is actually possible and what is going to provide the most excitement to the listener or the reader or the student.
[9:59] So I'm calling it a crisis because I think because I was using a podcast to talk about my work and what I was doing, it felt like so much more set in stone.
But I'm telling these people these things, and they're listened to thousands of times.
That's a beautiful result of this podcast and the word-of-mouth nature, and it being shared far and wide is thousands of people are listening to each episode, whereas when I teach in a container, there's maybe 80 to 150 students.
In the podcast.
[10:43] Container, thousands of people are listening, and suddenly it feels more like fact. Like, this is my truth, this is my job, this is how I do it, you can do it too. So when I would pause, and think, you know what, actually, I want to do it this way now, not this way, my thought would be like, oh no, but I've already made a podcast episode about this thing, or I've already said this thing is true, but what if this thing is true now? People often ask me.
[11:18] Are you ever afraid that you're writing a book and you just won't believe the things in it anymore? I'm like, yes, of course, but it was true when I said it. And so everything in the podcast is true when I said it, but I'm allowed to be ever-changing, right? I'm allowed to have, my job description change? And so I have these questions that I dig into in the workshop, but I'm gonna share them with you here now. And one of them is our changing job description, right? How do you write a job description for yourself? And you might be asking, well, why would I do that? Like I just am an artist and I just do my job, which is art making.
But I think as we start to fold in these other offerings, whether it's teaching or your own podcast or your newsletter, I want you to get really clear on what you're devoted to and the themes that emerge throughout your work. When I teach about writing newsletters, this is one of the first things we look at is like what happens sort of throughout the newsletter, no matter what the topic is.
And so something that emerged in my work.
Defining What Your Job Isn't
[12:40] Was also what my job isn't. So that's the other thing I want you to start to sort of get clear on is like, what isn't your job?
I've done this exercise before.
I think it was the poet and my friend, Jacqueline Suskin, who I first saw make a list that was like, my job isn't.
And I was like, wow. And like a big one was like, my job is not to be a news reporter and I am not an elected official, right?
Right, these are important things for me to remember just because I'm a public figure and a public person.
If I'm held to any standard that is separate from my own, that was not decided on by me, that was maybe decided on by a person who had an expectation of me or my work or my values and how they were going to weave together that I didn't consent to.
So my job is also what I decide.
If you're starting to get the feeling another person is making a decision about what your job role is, this is a great opportunity to sort of bring the focus back on you and decide what your job is for yourself.
[13:52] Right? So in sort of stepping away from any feeling of being an elected official or public figure with responsibilities that I didn't sign up for, you know, one of the shifts I made during the season was that I left social media. I gave my virtual assistant, Hannah, my password.
I had her change that password and I stopped using Instagram myself. I wish I had like a a big, beautiful statement of how freeing it has felt, but I don't fully have that yet.
And I think partly it's because my job description hasn't fully changed with that change.
[14:34] So I'm still using Instagram, right? I will create a post, a caption, or stories.
I will text them to Hannah and she will post them.
If anything, I feel like I've lost a little bit of my creative spark, which I really did get from using Instagram, both the inspiration of people I love and people I love to follow, as well as using it and creating, you know, graphics or images or things to share there felt really fun.
It's a place that I have had a lot of fun in the last decade, more than a decade.
And I was feeling it not working. So part of my job description shifting was I no longer interface with Instagram.
And then I also had to set up an auto response for my DM.
[15:25] So if someone sends me a DM, they automatically get a message back that says, this inbox is unmonitored.
For more info and contact, go to marleygrace.space.
That's something you can do in the business suite of Facebook.
So you do have to have your Facebook linked to your Instagram as a business account, And then you can make that auto response happen.
Job Description Changes: Themes, Access, and Fatigue
[15:53] Here's where my job description changed, right? Here's what I'm devoted to change, the themes changed, what isn't my job and is my job changed was around access.
This was also part of deciding to no longer do flexible office or to take a season off of flexible office was I started to feel like I was extremely accessible, right?
[16:19] Suddenly thousands of people are listening to the podcast, Tens of thousands of people read my newsletter.
People DM me, they respond to the newsletter, and it was becoming so much, and I was putting a pressure on myself to respond to everyone.
And this is simply not sustainable, whether you have 10 subscribers or 100,000 subscribers to your newsletter, right?
If you want your job description to be, I respond to every newsletter response, that's great.
But I hadn't written that into my job description, I was just doing it.
And I was finding myself fatigued, again, in my accessibility.
I was having accessibility fatigue, right? So I needed to put some barriers between me, and people I don't know reaching out and my accessibility to them, right?
Now, of course, I could have just ignored the messages or not opened DMs or, you know, all the different ways that I hope you can also apply to your own process of engaging with people.
But for me, it's like I have to take big measures sometimes, right, so handing my password over, making an auto response, those were some ways that my job description changed this season.
Longer Breaks and Income Changes
[17:42] I also noticed that I needed a longer break between teaching live.
[17:49] Sometimes that's that output of new ideas was coming faster, but because I was bringing so many ideas to the podcast, I noticed.
[18:01] That I wasn't like inventing new classes all the time in the way that I have in the past.
Another way my job description changed was this year, I decided to take a break from teaching A Quilt is Something Human, and the podcast emerged.
Right, that was also an income change. You know, this is the other thing to look at with our job description is, where is our money coming from, right?
And is that working for us?
So not only did I take away the income from A Quilt is Something Human, also added in the expense of paying for podcast editing and guidance.
I also got a job teaching for Skillshare this year, making an original class with them.
That's something I hadn't done before. I've only ever taught through the Marley Grace ecosystem.
And so that's a way that my job description changed.
I became open to collaborating with an organization outside of my own and being paid for that work and doing that work.
[19:13] The biggest way my job description changed though was internally.
In my 20s and my early 30s, messing up in front of people was a huge part of my job description.
It was like, woof, look at me, I'm a tornado person. I'm, ba-da-ba-da-ba-do, all over the place. I'm messing up.
Look at me go. Here's the lesson, right?
It's maybe part of the relatability or why you are a listener in the first place.
But that's not part of my job description today. Today, at 35 years old, I feel confident in the work that I do, the writing that I create, the offerings that I craft, and I give them to the world.
Now, this doesn't mean that they're perfect, right? One of my core values of my job description remains anti-perfectionism and being in the experiment, but I no longer necessarily am here to write from the disaster or write from the place of complete not knowing and utter despair.
I'm more taking that into a private space and writing from more of a completed journey of the self.
Redefining My Job Description
[20:39] And that gets to also change back. Maybe when I'm 47, it'll be different. Maybe when I'm 37, it'll be different. But for right now, my job description changed from here is every single part of my life. Look, look, look, look, I'll show you how I do it, how I fuck it up and how I get through it. And now you don't see the inside of the house. And I mean that in both the metaphor and the reality. It's just private. You don't get to see the person I'm dating, that's just private. You don't see the inside of my bedroom, that's just private.
You see less pictures of my dog, that's private. And you see a little bit less of the mess, that's private. There's also just less mess than there used to be.
[21:31] And part of that is because I let myself have a weird job where I wove it all together. So you are allowed to outgrow your job description. You are allowed to outgrow, what you designed that was working for you before. You're allowed to say, you know what?
That's actually not working for me anymore. I want to do something different. And again, the output might not look different, right? I'm still writing a newsletter every week.
I'm making my podcast every week.
I'm teaching classes. I'm quilting. I'm thinking about things out loud and in public, right?
That's the job description, thinking about things out loud and in public.
[22:21] But how the things are framed is gonna start looking different.
It already does look different.
There is a seriousness I take more now than I did before with my work, but I'm still not taking myself overly seriously, right?
But my projects and the way they exist in the ecosystem, that part of my job description can change as the internal parts change.
Discovering Themes and Hidden Truths
[22:54] So I want you to ask yourself, what are you devoted to? What are the themes that are coming up?
I think a new theme is sort of, to stay hidden and are you allowed to stay hidden? Another theme is like bringing the people the facts, and in the container, bringing them more of like the juiciness.
It's like in the podcast, you get the beautiful outside skin of the orange and you can sort of like smell that it's really good, but you have to go to the class, to be invited into the container where it's like really juicy and you can make it into juice.
It's like on the podcast I talk about my online class and how my online class teaches you to make an online class or this episode is the exact example of I'm going to tell you about how my own job description shifted, but if you want to really shift yours yourself, check out the workshop and the notion template. It's like, let this be the formula that you can take.
[24:04] Right? And that's what the whole first season of this podcast has been about is here's the formula. Now you take it, but here's what else I'm saying is maybe don't Maybe make up a new formula for yourself.
I hope that season two is all about my next formula and how different it is, right?
Embracing New Formulas and Personalization
[24:31] So if you're like, gosh, I've listened to this whole season.
I thought you were giving me all the answers. I was giving you answers, but I want you to switch them up and figure out what's really, really working for you.
I remember on the episode about how we create our offering ecosystem and figure out what we give to people, it might just be a newsletter and one online class you teach over and over and over again.
I think we can get sort of caught up in like marketing world suggestions of you have to launch in this way and have your release runway and it all has to look like this, and your cart should be open for this many days, and don't forget to do blah, blah, blah, and make sure you have your lead magnet. And it's like.
[25:23] I'm glad at least with A Quilt is Something Human, I never really listened to a lot of that and just was like, here's quilt class and said it when I felt like it and people signed up.
Like, I want you to remember the simplicity of your job description.
It could just be, I make blank and I teach blank. You know, I want you to not develop a million offerings and then suddenly you're feeling overwhelmed and like you can't keep up with them.
[25:56] I also want you to remember that part of your job description doesn't have to be constantly selling the offerings.
Not just selling like exchange of money, but promoting yourself.
Like the selling of self and of offerings is exhausting.
It's what I think so many of us feel exhausted with about using social media, or if having a newsletter feels hard, it could be that way as well.
I think something I'm encouraging myself to do right now with my own job description is like sell myself less, and trust that the people are coming into my world, in a natural way, right?
So I'm like, oh, I wanna promote the podcast on social media.
It's clearly really helping, but it's like, maybe there's enough listeners.
I don't know. Maybe there's enough people listening and sharing it with each other that this is a marketing tool.
Like a podcast is a creative practice of marketing. I'm sharing my online classes and my newsletter and the other things that make money on the podcast.
The podcast is also an offering and a practice itself, but it's also a place to market things.
Same as my newsletter.
Redefining Your Job Description and Social Media Presence
[27:20] And so if part of your job description is to be on social media less and sell yourself less, I think the only way to do that is to just try and see even if it's uncomfortable.
It's like every single thing I do, I could choose to post about it.
Every single newsletter that comes out, I could say to Instagram, hey, go read my newsletter.
And I do usually in my stories at least, but I could pull that back even.
Because even when I'm sending my posts to my virtual assistant and she's posting them, I'm still in the tether between me and social media. I'm not fully free.
It's better, I don't even know if it's better. It's different to not be there, but I'm still using it for my business.
And that can really spike up the like, well, did anyone comment?
Did anyone message about it?
You know, wanting to ask for more information instead of fully relinquishing control.
So as you're thinking about your job description changing, what do you not want to control anymore?
What can you release control of?
[28:39] So just to sort of review, we're looking at what are you devoted to? What are the themes of your job? What is not your job, right? I'm not a scientist. I'm not a doctor. I like to write those things sometimes just in case I ever trick myself, right? I'm not a professional swimmer.
That's not part of my job. But I am a writer who writes about swimming. I am a researcher or who researches about quilts, but I'm not a historian.
Right, so how do you get clear on the labels that feel really good to you and nourish that part of you, that wants to have your job be in alignment with your values and your interests?
And I also, I want you to ask yourself, what is it that you do and what is it that you like to do?
So if you're like, well, hell, I don't know what my job description is. Get poetic with it.
If you're a painter, maybe your job description is the chemistry of color mixing, right?
Like maybe your job description is throwing paint at the canvas to see what happens.
If you are working with clay, the job description is tending to the earth and creating sacred objects of form and function.
Crafting Your Job Description to Align with Values and Interests
[30:07] And then if you have a newsletter about your ceramics, the newsletter can be something else, another job description.
Or maybe you want your newsletter to just be through Flowdesk, and it's just a marketing email.
And so that's not part of your job description. Maybe part of the job description isn't newsletter writer, but it's to have a marketing practice through a newsletter so that I can be on social media less.
And the next steps are getting clear on the core values of your job and how they, weave in with the description. I've been a lot of places on this episode sort of in and out, up and down, all around. But what I know is true is that inner job description, is what I want you to really look at for yourself. And for me, it was, you know, I have to be less accessible to people.
There's just too many who want my attention.
And in order to do my job and to be of maximum benefit and service, I have to limit those sparse, fast parasocial interactions.
Creating a Container for One-on-One Clients
[31:24] And really focus on the long-form connections, which brings me all the way back to wanting to create a container to see one-on-one clients again.
This doesn't mean I never want to speak to anyone who has an interest in my thoughts on their work, right?
It's creating a container that is my job where I can be of service to the individual.
That isn't in my email inbox.
And it might be some days. Some days I might read an email and think, ooh, yeah, I do want to respond to this.
But I also set up an auto responder on my email so that when someone reaches out, it's clear that I might not respond to them.
Right, so my job description changed in that I needed more boundaries around my time and my attention.
[32:23] And I needed to make that clear in a loving, detached way to the people who were reaching out to me.
And I needed to make offerings that made it so they could access me if I wanted them to.
And I can stop and close those books whenever I need to or whenever they're full, right?
So I don't always have to take clients, but I can.
If you're listening to this now, you can go to marleygrace.space slash creative advising and book a session if you so desire.
Finding fulfillment in diverse job roles
[32:58] Right, there's all these different ways, again, that our jobs can look and feel and be.
[33:05] And in that fatigue of feeling like I'm selling myself, I'm selling myself, it's so exhausting, it felt so good to open up my creative advising books because again, I just only had to post it once or twice to sort of get the people to come back into the orbit.
And that's where word of mouth is so beautiful and can really spread and expand, that service that I provide.
And then, you know, with promoting my online classes, I had to also get clear that part of my job description is to talk about the things that I do, not just to do the thing.
This is something I've talked about so much this season, but, you know, to really value my teaching as a creative practice, to really value my writing and my podcast as a practice of communicating how I do the things I do and why I do the things I do.
And that that ripple effect is worthy.
Right, your ripple effect is worthy. I want you to remember that as you go forth with your projects and creating everything that you do, to remember that the world needs it.
The world needs your online class. Go back and listen to the five reasons The world needs your online class.
[34:31] The world needs your book. The world needs your art.
The world needs all of the practices that you show us.
And we need you to get clear on what is private and what is public.
[34:49] We need you to get clear on what is no longer serving you because that is probably no longer serving your students, your readers, your listeners.
You might have to cut something out in order to bring something else forth.
And sometimes we have to cut the thing out before we even know what's next and what wants to be brought forth.
And that's really scary and juicy, worthy, orange peeling back to get to the juicy middle good work to do.
[35:26] So, my job description changed, and now I'm going to take a few weeks off of making this podcast and I'm so interested how it will change again.
It's going to keep changing. I imagine something else will emerge.
I imagine that more spaciousness might show me another class I want to teach or give me some space to work on the book that I'm working on.
We have to make the space for the thing to come through. Maybe that's a business retreat or a sabbatical from your job, from your self-employment.
[36:07] Maybe it's just taking out one part of what you do and adding something back in.
Maybe it's a website spruce up.
I'd love to point you to my new website, which I've been working on the last month or so, is now ready, an even better reason to go to marleygrace.space.
That was another thing I wanted to change my job description was also I wanted to change my website.
So your ever-changing job is the little workshop I made for you.
And I talk more about changing up your website, rewriting the copy of your About Me.
I talk about shifting around the shapes of your offerings. I talk about getting clear on those core values that go with your job.
So I'd love to invite you in this break between seasons of Common Shapes to go grab the workshop, hunker down.
[37:07] Take some time to look at your own job description so that when we come back on season two, we can keep moving forward with even more clarity about what we do and why we do it and why it is of service to not only the people who interact with our work, but to our own practices, our own creative process.
Your job description is always changing, and so are you, and that's beautiful.
And you get to change the parts of you that market and the parts of you that share, and all of that is in the workshop, and you are amazing, dear listener, dear reader.
I just can't thank you enough for making this first season of Common Shapes so special, so magical, so fun, I can't wait to keep going.
I can't wait to keep changing and holding myself to lower expectations so that I may exceed, at what I love to do, which is making art, teaching other people how to do it, and sharing the process along the way.
[38:15] So, grab the Creative Ideation Portal, grab the workshop for this episode, grab a copy of How to Not Always Be Working or Getting to Center, grab one of my zines, grab a print from the online shop.
Thank you for keeping my mighty little art career going. Thank you for keeping your own little career or hobby or passion project going.
You are amazing. I hope this feels like a hug and a pep talk and a high-five.
I want to thank everyone who makes this podcast possible. Thank you to Lukeza Branfman-Varissimo for the art.
Thank you to Saltbreaker for the music and to Softer Sound Studio for podcast editing.
Thank you for being a listener. I would love it if you shared this episode with a friend or shared it on social media or in your own newsletter.
Five star reviews are amazing. You can rate the show five stars.
You can write a review.
You can text it to a friend, shout it from the rooftops.
Thank you so much for being a listener of Common Shapes. May your job be abundant, and ripple out to all of those who may be sparked and delighted by your work.
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