Happy New Year everybody! January is a month of good intentions and fresh starts. And the best way to start off a New Year is with a confidence boost!

To that end, Drawn & Drafted hosted a panel on our crowdcast channel on that topic, called New Year, No Apologies: A Confidence Tuneup for Badass Creative Babes. Don’t let the “Babe” throw you off if you do not consider yourself a babe — the conversation was open to all genders, and going back and listening to it, very little of it is gender specific. The panel was all female because I hosted my two best creative business lady friends. First was Allison Cimino, CEO and Head Designer of RockLove Jewelry, which creates high-end jewelry for licenses like Marvel, Disney, Star Wars, Studio Ghibli, Star Trek, and more. Second was Mallory O’Meara, author, filmmaker, and podcaster. (Mallory also taught our recent Art of the Pitch class). I really wanted the crowdcast to be a peek into the many ways our outward confidence in our creative fields is created and enforced by the little support team we’ve made of each other.

As three people who can network the sh*t out of any situation, bust through the doors of opportunity that are barely cracked, and have 37 creative irons in the fire at any given time, we really wanted to show that it’s not magic. Confidence is learned. Confidence is never 100% (even if it looks that way from the outside). Confidence on the outside depends on having people you can show your insecure irrational fears to. The whole talk was recorded and you can watch it here: New Year No Apologies Crowdcast

 

We got some great questions in advance, and you can skip around the recording by the tagged questions, I time-stamped them as we tackled them. Just click the “Ask A Question” section at the bottom of the screen and you can scroll through the topics. We covered the problem with the idea of confidence as “fake it ’til you make it”, how to form your own creative support team, how mental health gets in the way of confidence, tricks we use to schedule & tackle to-do lists, and how to deal with overwhelm & burnout. We also share a lot of links and resources and books that have helped us.

The talk ran for 90min, and we had over 200 people join in live. We’ve had such great feedback that I think we’re going to make it a recurring feature, so if you want to hear about the next one follow @drawnanddrafted on crowdcast and/or sign up for the Drawn and Drafted newsletter here.

Confidence is a great topic and we can probably talk around that indefinitely, but let me know in the comments what other topics you’d love to see more creative panels like this tackle. (Marc is working on a complimentary talk with some of his creative confidants, and I’m looking forward to what topics a guy’s version would cover as well).