Finding the Balance Between my Creative Life and Business Goals

When it comes to multi-tasking my life, work, and creativity demands, finding balance is my goal for 2025. When I wrote out my goals for 2024, there was a lot more on my list and I didn’t even touch some of those items. LOL, this year I’m only focusing on the one thing: Balance.

I’m the sort of person who likes both creative and analytical activities equally. This can be both blessing and curse, depending on whether or not the desire to engage with one is intruding upon the time needed for the other.

It’s easy enough to see that I’m a creative person, if you consider all of the art-making I’ve done over the years. Perhaps not so easy to see the other side. I’m very good with organization, but don’t look at my house or office for evidence(!). Instead, look at my spreadsheets and record-keeping… my organizational skills are hidden from the casual observer, haha. I enjoy the very analytical and methodical aspects of running my businesses even if most of that part is behind the scenes.

Finding the Balance Between Right-Brain vs Left-Brain

Right brain activities are generally considered anything that draws on creativity, intuition, and emotion. Left brain is supposedly engaged with analytical, intellectual, and factual things. Also supposedly, people tend to gravitate towards one side or the other. In my case I equally am pulled toward both. And this creates a problem because the state of mind for each set of tasks is completely different.

While I long to live in the right-brained state of mind, I also long for and enjoy the tasks requiring the left-brained state. The two cannot peacefully co-exist within me, it seems. And this is the source of a problem that has plagued me for as long as I can remember. It’s always about finding the balance.

No Laughing Matter

You might find it amusing and think I should just pick one or the other.

I’ve tried, believe me. Didn’t last long.

Some of this may have to do with my personality type, if you put stock in that sort of thing. I’ve taken this test more than once, many years apart, and it still shows me as INJT.

On one hand, if all I did was right-brained things like paint and garden, at first it would be wonderful. But there’s also a very strong drive in me to be ‘successful’ at the business side of any endeavor I’ve ever undertaken, and that requires me to also spend a lot of time to the left.

The problem is that I can’t find a way to make a smooth transition from one side to the other or operate in both realms simultaneously. I’m not sure it would matter if I didn’t ‘need’ an income. I don’t think it would matter, but can’t say for sure, because I’ve never experienced that situation, lol. It would be nice to try that out, though, right?

To run a business, whether it’s my art or my real estate, requires the analytical mindset. Everything about the real estate leans heavily left, and everything about making art leans heavily right. Everything on the backend of this website is left, whereas the content I publish is derived mostly from the right. Both sides are necessary if I want to do ‘more’ than paint, garden, or homestead. And I do want to do more. I want to also generate an income.

Life Interference

It’s not really fair to call ‘life’ an interference. But when the life experience isn’t pleasant, or when it brings stress, anxiety, and pain or difficulty, it does feel like an interference. I think the whole point in life is to live it in a way that amounts to less regrets at the end of it. Or maybe it’s to learn from past mistakes so that future ones present new learning experiences. I don’t know. I’m just doing my best with all that. And I’m getting a lot of practice ‘learning’.

I’m working at finding the balance to allow these experiences to add to my life, rather than feeling like they are a detraction or distraction, or intrusion.

I’ve tried scheduling my time into blocks that allow me to focus on one type of activity or the other. But life has a way of interfering with my schedule and I don’t know how to mediate that. Granted, now that real estate is a part of the equation, everything to do with giving myself time to indulge my need for the right has become much, much harder.

Real Estate is Rewarding Work

And yet, I’m loving the real estate business even though so far it’s not producing any income at all. What it does produce at this point is debt, but eventually it should turn around. However, with real estate, I am getting the benefits of results that generate a right-brained stimulation.

Connecting with clients, helping them navigate what can be a highly stressful gauntlet to accomplish what amounts to relatively high-stakes goals gives me good emotional rewards in the same way that spending time at my easel does. I imagine that a successful closing will feel as good as the sale of a painting.

I’m currently working with clients who have had an offer accepted on a home and are now ticking off the task-list with a timer countdown for deadlines. As their agent, I’m basically their liaison between all of the moving parts in the process. I’m helping them keep their sanity throughout the process – because there are always problems and in some cases there are also solutions. It’s the organizational, analytical, problem-solving mix of left-brained euphoria in this endeavor that attracts me.

Finding the Balance

It’s just that the path to both of those ends (real estate closings or sale of a painting) are drastically different when it comes to which type of activities I perform to get there. The path in real estate is mostly left-brained, and the path toward a painting sale is mostly right-brained (except for all of the things that aren’t actually painting).

I think this is why my goal for 2025 is finding the balance and relax into my life with the assurance that everything is going to be alright. Can I have my cake and eat it too? That’s my plan, but it’s going to involve finding a balance to do so.

What’s your main goal for 2025?