Show Us Why You’re Awesome

I’m starting this monthly wrap-up with a call to action. I know…I’m doing it backwards, but if I want you to take anything away from this month, it’s to not be afraid to share your work with someone. It can be your best friend. It can be your club. It can be the entire internet. You’re doing something. If it isn’t utterly, completely, mind-blowingly awesome, that’s fine. There are going to be elements of awesome in it, and someone else might be able to spot it and help you bring it out. That’s why we gather into communities of practice, to help each other.

So, that’s what I want. I want you to show to an audience size you’re comfortable with what you’ve been working on. (You can even share it with me if you choose. I like seeing what people are working on, but I feel I should warn you that I have a very difficult time shutting up either my inner teacher or my inner editor and the feedback might be a bit more thorough, questioning, or direct than you might be expecting.)

All right. Let’s wrap up this month correctly. We haven’t covered a whole lot of ground here, simply because so much of it has been covered in other ways on this blog and because so much of it is advice that can be applied at many levels of experience. When you put in the time doing research, doing work, bringing something into existence, then you should put it somewhere where the right people will see it and help you improve it or will look at it and think, Holy taco! This person has an amazing grasp of this idea or skill. I should tell them, or hire them, or approach them to collaborate.

When we share our projects, we’re telling our audience, “This is what I can do. This is what I’ve learned. This is what I think. I’m choosing to share this with you.” And that’s pretty awesome.

So, as we wrap up this yearlong study of the personal learning environment, I’m challenging you to show off your awesome.

 

As I said last month, I am shifting away from the monthly theme format after this month, so thank you for indulging me this year while I experimented with the format. I’m still not sure how I’m going to proceed from here, but so much in my life has changed over the last year and it’s time to align my blog to my new life. Hopefully, you’ll stick around and keep reading. If not, I understand and appreciate your reading this far.

Tools to Show Off Your Knowledge and Skills

So…we’re about to run into the same problem we had back in the Processing Phase: Different industries have different means of doing things. That makes it difficult to really explore on a general level the best tools to demonstrate knowledge.

So, we’re just going to avoid the problem by looking at general ways to show off…so to speak.

Thanks to advances in all sorts of technology, we actually have a collection of tools that can benefit most industries when it comes time to say, “This is what I can do. This is what I know.” Many of us either have, or have access to a friend who has, some sort of image capturing device, be it a still photo or a video. We have ways to record ourselves talking about things. We have tools that allow us to write about what we’ve done and to journal about how we did it.

In all fairness, we’ve had these abilities for quite a long time. (Well…maybe not for audio capture. That seems to be the slowpoke in the pack.) What’s changed is the means available to display what we’ve captured. We now have this tool, for better or worse, called the Internet. Maybe you’ve heard of it…

What makes the Internet such a game changer for us is that it allows us to share all those textual, image, video, and audio captures we’ve made of our work easily and on a grander scale. If you make a beautiful wood-turned rocker, you can take a picture of it and post it online. You can make a video of yourself working on a section of it and share it as part of sharing your process, or even to teach that technique to others by video. You can blog about your process, where the wood came from, where you learned your skills. You can create a podcast about the non-visual elements of your craft for people to learn from. You can even choose your favorite social media platform and curate a publicly available set of resources on your craft.

So, when we talk about tools meant to help demonstrate our skills and knowledge, we’re talking about capturing key details of not only the end product but also the process that allowed us to create that end product. You can demonstrate your knowledge by writing about your craft and curating images, videos, and links on it. There are so many options. You just have to find the one (or ones) that best suit your style, your industry’s style, and your visitors’ style, and then make it work for you.

This is a great time to experiment, to be transparent in your work, to really show off yourself and your abilities.

Why Do You Create?

While we’re on the topic of sharing what you create, let me ask the question: Why do you create? What was the point of all that work you’ve done? What is your goal?

I’ve spent a lot of my free time over the last several years hanging out around various writing and video production communities, where there’s a healthy mix of those who are looking to share what they’ve made and those who pale at the thought of having another person see their work. I grew up in the performing arts, which is attention seeking by nature (although I know, and have been, people who are perfectly content never having an audience). I’ve seen creatives have a vision and execute it. I’ve seen them have a vision, and then alter it with audience feedback. I’ve even seen them threaten to not make anything else until they get a specific form of validation.

And it got me thinking. I wondered how I truly view the relationship between what I do and what other people think of it. As I’ve noted, I’ve been known to give in to my introvert tendencies and keep work to myself, preferring to be comfortable with the knowledge I was making something. But I’ve also had a vision and worked it all the way through, sharing the results. I’ve started projects intended to explore a specific skill, technique, or topic, and just smiled politely at feedback that insisted I had to do things their way. I’ve started projects with no clear destination, and let feedback inspire development. I haven’t threatened to take my ball and go home yet, and I don’t think that’s likely to happen based on how I respond to analytics data.

I look at those who create according to audience feedback, and I’ll admit it – I pale at the thought of working like that. Yes, I do periodically ask for suggestions or prompts, but if I’m asking, you can bet I’m experiencing some kind of creative block. People who can go with the feedback flow, though, are interesting. From what I’ve observed, they create a skeleton or spine and a starting point for their project, and then develop along that spine according to what the audience suggests or how they react to what’s come before. If the audience offers a better idea, the creative breaks the spine to explore that idea. There’s a flexibility there that’s downright admirable (even if it completely scares me).

There are even creatives who put something out there, and then say, “Tell me what happens next”, to the audience. Those people are truly crazy. 😉 But the results can be spectacular when done well.

As for me, I create to get things out of my system, or to play with ideas, or to learn and practice a new skill. I don’t necessarily need an audience for that, but it’s nice when one shows up. That’s my answer to the above questions. How about you? How would you answer those questions?

Showing What You Know Beyond the Classroom

The average person spends right around seventeen years or so of their life in a formal classroom. That really shouldn’t come as much surprise, but it often ends up being the hang-up as we talk about sharing and putting ourselves into a position to receive feedback. Of course, when you think about performance evaluations in a corporate setting, we really do put ourselves in a position to receive feedback throughout more of our life than we realize.

Beyond the classroom, projects come from one of a handful of places: our boss/workplace, our friends and family, and ourselves. Work needs a solution to a problem, so you create something and you’re given a pass/fail rating on it once your solution is implemented. Friends and family say, “OMG, you’d be great at this,” and so you do the thing…again to a pass/fail rating, and maybe some deriding if you fail. You pick up a side interest or a pet project, and you work on it until it’s where you want it. Then you display it in your home, in your workspace, or maybe you wear it around. And again, you get feedback that tends to be of a pass/fail variety.

The point here is that in both our professional and personal lives, we’re constantly doing things, bringing things into existence. And when we choose to put them somewhere they can be seen (be it offline in our professional and personal spaces or online in our professional and personal spaces), we’re saying, “This is something I did. These are skills I can use to do something productive (or destructive, depending on what you’ve created).”

When we style our living room, we know it will be presented to visitors to our home. When we make a wearable object, we know it will be presented to those who pass us in real space. When we write, be it a blog post or a book of some format, we may expect it to be seen by someone, even if it’s just a close friend. (I am excluding here those who create with no desire to show their work. Seriously, people, let us see your awesomeness!) We’re leaving ourselves open to feedback.

We live in a time where what we do is constantly on display, with or without our being able to provide some context. Professionals and amateurs can show off their work side by side, and connect through seeing each other’s work. Fans and fellow producers comment on the same work. We never really stop being in a position to receive feedback.

Creating a Social Media Platform

There’s a lot of talk around creative industries about the need to build a social media platform to help build your fan base and keep them informed about what you’re working on and what you’ve recently released. It’s not bad advice, and sometimes creators and companies even manage to put that advice to work without making things worse. But it’s something we should be encouraging students to embrace and think about as they start testing the online waters for themselves.

For all of us, social media really is a running Demonstration Phase. Everything we say, do, share…all of it ends up in front of an audience of one sort or another. And we post a lot without really thinking about it beyond a sense of, “OMG, you have to check this out!”…when really…we probably didn’t need to check it out. If you’re primarily using social media to share things with friends, then it’s not as big a deal. And for many students, this is exactly how they use social media, without any thought to future impact or what constitutes “public” and “private”. But that’s a discussion for another time.

If you’re using it to show off work, to share information, or to do anything that reflects on you or your skills, then you might want to take a slightly different approach. One that not only shows you off, but also leaves visitors with a better understanding of who you are and where you’re coming from. And isn’t that the point of the Demonstration Phase?

When setting up your platform, though, it’s not particularly helpful to just plaster everything across every social media platform you have access to, or to make them all the same. Each platform has a different etiquette, a different set of expectations, and may provide you with a different audience looking for something different. So, it’s best to keep to the platforms you enjoy using, or where the audience you most want to connect with is hanging out, and then to really tailor that platform toward that audience. You also have to interact with that audience so they’ll really get a chance to know who you are and what you haven’t already told them.

Working to build a social media platform that reflects you and your work can be time-consuming initially, but the more you work on it, the less time it can consume. It’s an opportunity to paint your own portrait of who you are, how you want people to view your work, and encourage people to feel comfortable about approaching you about your work.