Girl Gang Craft Podcast Episode #65 “Follow What Delights You”

Phoebe Sherman interview with Sarah Faith Gottesdiener

INTRO
Phoebe Sherman:

Welcome to the Girl Gang Craft Podcast where we dive in deep to all things business, wellness, creativity, and activism for artists and entrepreneurs. We talk with impactful female driven companies and founders for an inside look at the entrepreneurial experience where you'll come away with tangible steps to elevate your business. Are you ready? I'm your host, Phoebe Sherman, founder of Girl Gang Craft, artist and designer, and marketing obsessed. We're here to learn together how to expand our revenue, implement new organizational techniques, and cultivate best business practices as we work towards creating a life doing what we love. Let's get started.

Hello. Hello. Welcome back to Girl Gang Craft the Podcast. Here we are. Somehow it is November. It's literally almost the end of the year. How on earth did that happen? I have no idea. But today we have a special episode for you. I mean, every time, especially. But we have Sarah Gottesdiener on the podcast today, and she is the founder of Moon Studio. And you've probably used her planner before. It's special because I have been listening to her podcast for a long time, years and years.

So it was really special to be able to turn around and interview her. This is the reason I have a podcast. I mean, yeah I want to help all you all listening, and it's a great way to connect, but selfishly, I got to talk to really effing cool people here on the podcast. It's like an excuse to DM anyone I want and be like, you want to chat for an hour? and it's wild all these people say yes. So anyways, this is a treat she has wisdom to share as always. And go ahead and give her a follow if you don't already follow her and listen to her podcast. Before we get started into this episode, just a couple announcements. The day that this is released, the next day, our holiday gift guide is live.

So our holiday gift guide is something we've been doing since 2020 as a way to when we didn’t have craft fairs, have crafters to be able to connect our small business lover community with our small business owner community. And it's really special. And we've continued this tradition because it's a really fun shoppable guide. Like, I get excited to shop it every year. I pass it around to my friends and family and they all get excited to shop it.

If you're listening now, don't only look at it yourself, but like put that in your Slack channel. Like, go ahead and send it around to all the people because it's a really beautiful way to support the small business owner community this holiday season, and to shop yourself and have really amazing, unique gifts because who doesn't love something special and unique from a small business owner?

I mean, I promise you it'll be a better gift than something from Target. I mean, I love Target, you all know that. But supporting a small business for the holidays and giving someone a unique gift, it's really magical. It's really potent. There's anti-capitalist mentalities in there. There’s like fighting the patriarchy in there, and it's really beautiful, community driven thing when we all support small businesses.

So that is live now. And it is live until January 10th. So you really have time to shop for a while and like maybe even after the holidays are done to like continue shopping for yourself. And so that is on our website now. GirlGangCraft.com/giftguide again GirlGangCraft.com/giftguide

I think we have like over 160 small business owners on this. You all really came out to be on the gift guide and it's going to be a really fun comprehensible gift guide to shop. And I can't wait. Anyways, go check it out. GirlGangCraft.com/giftguide. And the cool thing about it too is you can shop from your couch if you don't have access to any of our other events. So really cool.

And then we have some events coming up right around the corner. We have Salem and that is on small business Sunday, November 26. Small Business Sunday. We are making up this new holiday, y'all. We have small business Saturday. And now there is Small Business Sunday. So we're in Old Town Hall, both floors. We have about 45 to 50 vendors for that show.

And yeah, you can RSVP for all of our shows. GirlGangCraft.com/events. So we have Salem, we have Oakland, which is December 2nd, Scottish Right. About 100 vendors. And then we have Providence, Rhode Island. This our first event in Providence. We are so excited and that is on December 10th. That is also a Sunday.

So East Coast events are Sunday this year. That's just what happened to work out. Oakland show is Saturday. We are charging entrants for our east coast shows. Our Oakland show is free to attend the first 200 attendees coming through the door, get a gift bag and it's a really cute little tote with some goodies in it this year.

So make sure you're first in the door and we are doing a raffle again too if you are paying for entrance, that gives you one raffle ticket as well. And of course you can buy some extras. The raffle goes to our scholarship fund which funds low income artists to have booths at our events and also have access to our programming.

So check it out. You can RSVP to all the events and buy tickets at GirlGangCraft.com/events and we are so excited for this holiday season. I hope you love this episode. Let's get into it.

00:06:05:22
Phoebe Sherman

Hello hello creatives. Welcome back to Girl Gang Craft, the podcast. Today we have Sarah Gottesdiener on the podcast today.
It's truly an honor to have her here. I've been listening to our podcast for years and years and years. I had her planner back in the day and now I'm more of a digital girlie, but still an avid listener of her podcast. And yeah, thank you for being here Sarah.

Sarah Gottesdiener
Thanks so much for having me, Phoebe. I'm excited to be here.

Phoebe Sherman
So excited to have you. So why don't you tell the folks listening who don't know about you a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Sarah Gottesdiener
Sure. Presently, I am the owner of a creative studio called The Moon Studio. We serve thousands of people a year with classes that range in topics from everything from boundaries to intuition to energetic hygiene, to tarot and archetypes, to how to make a decision. We help people who are creative, who are sensitive, who are intuitive, and who are really focused on wanting to build a world all of their own.

We help those kinds of people do those kinds of things. We want to help people live their most aligned life, utilizing all aspects of their consciousness, all aspects of their creativity, all aspects of basically their superpower’s that, a lot of us have lived in a world in which, if we're sensitive, if we're intuitive, or if we're creative, if we're outside of the mainstream, we've been taught in explicit ways or implicit ways that those qualities are not positive qualities.

So we really tend to attract people who want to recover and reclaim those qualities and utilize those skillsets, whether it's their intuition. They might want to become an energy reader or a tarot reader or their creativity. They might want to start their own line of apparel or something. They might want to write a book. These are the kinds of people that we serve.

We've served over 4000 people through our classes. I just did a past life regression for 50 people last night. We're always teaching. We have a ton of digital downloads that are available, everything from classes on money to classes on tarot. And we also sell products. We sell carefully made products for your home, for your altar, for your body.

And we also self-publish a lot of got– We're also probably known best for our yearly guides, our spiritual guides called Many Moons. I've also written a book called The Moon Book, and that is all about utilizing the phases of the moon in a holistic fashion, utilizing different aspects of your energy in your consciousness in order to transform from the inside out.

So we do more. I won't go into it. Like you said, we have a podcast as well. We have a wonderful patreon community where we have a lot of things going on there. But yeah, we do a lot of different things in a lot of different ways and it's pretty interesting and it's just been a pleasure and an honor to get to do this work.

00:09:15:06
Phoebe Sherman

Well, I think a lot of people listening probably have already heard of you or a lot of those things tickle their interest upon hearing it from the first time. I'm wondering how you got into this work. How did your studio start? Maybe what came first and what were you doing before this?

Sarah Gottesdiener
Yeah, I've had a lot of jobs. I've worked since I was 13. I've spent probably about a decade being a waitress. I've worked in offices, I've worked in advertising, I've worked in very well-known places. I've been a designer and I really wanted because I worked like since I was 13, because for such a long time, you know, I was raised middle class or lower middle class.
I didn't come from a lot of money. I always knew that I was going to have to work. I was very used to working multiple jobs in order to pay the bills. I really started in my late twenties. I really realized that I needed to make a change. I knew that I was going to be working for most of my life.That was going to be something I had to figure out. I made a Venn diagram of what I wanted my work to be for, and the Venn diagram was service was one money was another, creativity was the other. It was really simple how I got started in terms of like, Well, what do I want to do? What do I want my working life to consist of in terms of my values and ethics?

And I went from there. I was a freelance graphic designer for quite a while. I was a graphic designer for corporations, for brands. You've absolutely heard of and for small businesses you have not. At one point I wanted to be a professor like a feminist art and design, so I was an adjunct professor at about three or four colleges. So I taught and then I started after working for a lot of different people as a freelancer. I also Segwayed. I'm realizing like I'm trying to figure out how to explain this in a very fluid way, but I'm just not going to actually also just recorded a podcast episode that talks about this a little bit more in a more coherent way.

So y'all can check out my podcast for that. But I began through a series of events, so another aspect of me is that I'm psychic, I'm an intuitive, I'm psychic. I started doing psychic tarot readings. When that happened, I was doing this hybrid mix of art and design and my own work and work for clients and seeing clients one on one and then through their The Moon studio kind of came out of that. It's this mix of art, design, intuition, serving people mind, body, spirit, soul, creative force and so on.

I also think it's really important, you're not asking me this, but I also think it's so important when you first start working to really work one on one with people. And because I think the last few years with the rise of like digital online classes and like make a million dollars selling online classes, like all of that that we've been hearing about and sold to, if you don't know who the people are that you're serving and you cannot successfully facilitate one on one live and or like in a small group, like a small workshop, you're really going to be doing yourself and your clients, the people who take your larger offerings a disservice because you're not going to know who they are. You're not going to know what they need and you aren't going to know what you're good at. Part of what we do when we're service providers, which is all business owners, I don't care what kind of business you run, you're still a service provider.

One of the keys of success is to really understand what your strengths are, what your unique gifts are, and the only way you will be able to do that is through doing it. And maybe there is cookie cutters like cookie cutter templates. You can like hack to become like a super successful digital business owner. I don't know about that personally, but maybe there is.
I'm not saying that there isn't. I'm not saying that there's best practices. And also you kind of just have to learn by doing it and figuring out what you're good at, what your gifts are, what you enjoy, what you have a knack for, and what people are attracted to you for. Like Phoebe, you probably attract different people than I do.

We all have our little groups of people and understanding that, understanding ourselves, our strengths, our gifts is really, really, really, really key. And so I feel really lucky that I never had some large, sweeping, grandiose like, I'm going to make $9 trillion. I didn't have that really concrete vision in my mind. Visions are very important, but I didn't have that.
I was more follower and threads of what I enjoyed, what I was good at, what people came to me for. And then I started thinking more about after about seven years of doing that, I started thinking more about what is the collective need, what do people need the most help around, and then how can I create products and services that speak to that in terms of creating a new paradigm?

Because that's also the other thing that the Moon Studio is very much interested in, which is creating new paradigms. We're in the ways that things have been going. They don't work. They don't work for the collective, they don't work for our thriving, they don't work for everyone's betterment. And we're being tasked and we're being asked to think about these larger questions of the future of who we want to be in the world, what we want our gifts and talents to be in service of, even if that is self evolution.
That's the other thing. Like, I think that if you're an artist and you're listening to this and you're creative and you're an incredible knitter and you make amazing patterns. That's also very much one of your tasks in this life is to become as self-actualized. We were all given gifts, so it's to become as self-actualized as you can. And if that means just really honing in on your craft and honing in on your artistic gifts, that also is you being of service to the greater world.

00:15:49:03
Phoebe Sherman

Yeah, we could go in many different directions from what you just said. I think there's a lot of alignment here with our audience, with this sort of our social justice service aspect. And I think a lot of people are trying to piece those specific parts together in the community listening. And I also kind of want to tie that into money because I think that's top of mind. I don't know. I mean, you've created this space, this company, this movement based on these principles with social justice and paying yourself, paying your team. And could you give us some advice about how do we sort of start to match our desires with our finances and while also staying aligned with our mission and serving the community? And I know there's a whole lot in there, but do you have anything to say about those things?

00:16:47:19
Sarah Gottesdiener

Yeah, sure. I wouldn't necessarily say I am. I mean, I guess I'm concerned with social justice only in the sense that I'm like a human on the planet in 2023 and I'm awake and aware. Over the years people have consistently insinuated that I'm some kind of activist only because I have values. And sometimes I am open about those values.

Sometimes I share about those values because in fact, my values are how I live my life. Because if I didn't live my life in accordance with my values, I would not be able to sleep at night. And that's really just all it is. It's like when I'm totally out of alignment with my values. I don't feel good. I feel good when I'm like, Oh yeah, this is a values based choice.
And the other thing I want to call out or like parse out that you said is this idea that we can't make money and have values. I think that's a little bit of an indoctrination in terms of like, Oh, well, got to join the rat race. Oh yeah, got to hustle, got to take those values away. That's not true.
It's just simply like something we've been sold. I also think if we have worked in corporate or we do come from a background where we've worked at jobs that absolutely were not values based and we didn't feel like we had any meaning, and now we want to create all this meaning out of our work. That's a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful impulse and something I've been thinking about lately, which I think we've all been thinking about post 2020, is like our work will not necessarily give our lives meaning.
Our work will not necessarily be the only thing giving our lives meaning. And because as Americans, as I'm just saying this, I'm an American, you're an American. We've been taught like work has taken the place of spirituality, work has taken the place of community, work has taken the place really for a lot of us, has taken the place of a self like who am I without my job?

Like, who am I if I'm just a human being not doing anything in the world? These are all things I've been thinking about. I'm sure listeners have been thinking about. So I just want to like set that up here too. With all of that, making money does not mean you have to like, sell your soul and become like evil Kermit. You can remain slightly more angelic Kermit and make money. And I think that you have to be really clear about what your non-negotiables are. I also think that it can be a spectrum and a sliding scale, like there's some places, say, where you will not under no circumstances do X, Y, Z in your business. Like that's just not what you're going to do or you're not going to take money from like whatever, whoever there's that.

Then there's also more subtle things like, okay, well maybe this raw material is more ethically made. It's a little bit more expensive. That means I'm going to have to raise my price. Okay, then I'll just do that. Or I'll take less because it's made more ethically. This is things that I think about all the time because we make products.
And if you're going to make products moderately, ethically, they're going to cost more money like they just are. We could never charge like $19 for our planner because of the way it's made, because of how we pay everyone involved. The time it takes like all of that stuff. The first thing I would say is start with your non-negotiable values.

Start there. And then really watch where you're going into black and white either or thinking, because that is immature thinking that is an immature part of you. That is like a dramatic part of you. That is the part of you. I'm not saying you, Phoebe, I'm just saying like the greater you that is a part of you that is perfectionist and thinks that if they can't do everything perfectly in alignment with your values, then you're a failure or you should be ashamed. Like, there's a lot of shame there, I think, when people are like, But it has to be this way or I have to do it that way, or else… really watch your brain when it's doing that and start with where you are and start with what you can do. The other thing I just want to pull out that you said, and again, I'm just putting it out there because I feel like this could be an objection from a listener.

We have to get over this idea that making money is bad or that we're bad if we want to make more money. That's just not true. We've been given a lot of examples of people using money in incredibly nefarious ways, but that doesn't mean that we need to work with money in the same ways. I also think that getting really comfortable with understanding what you want to make and feeling okay with that and feeling excited about that again, not having money, be like a stand in for self-worth or something like that, but treating it as a tool and or treating it as something that's like fun and cool.

I have undergone years of working through workaholism and under charging. Like to this day I undervalue my services. To this day, One of my biggest Achilles Heels is like giving things away overgiving, under charging. It's something that I'm working on as well. And I also think to take the shame away from it is understanding that we're a work in progress and when we can do shadow work around these things and we can kind of understand that maybe some of our thoughts around money and work are actually ancestral inheritances, as well as societal projections that we've absorbed, then we can understand okay, well, there's all of this stuff, there's all of this material, but what do I want? and what do I need? and what feels good to me? And then we can move accordingly. That's a lot of the work I've done in my life, and that is a lot of the work I've done with my clients.
Quite frankly. I used to do money coaching. I've taught classes on money. I have a longer class on money. I have a really affordable digital download on transforming our relationship to money. Because if you're in business as the other thing, like I went from getting either paychecks or like cash at the end of that, then I have a shift to like really having to think about and be in deep relationship with money and time and energy and worth and all these bigger, bigger questions.

When you're in business, you cannot avoid money. You cannot avoid it, I mean, you can avoid it, but it's not going to go very well if you do that. And so you have to change the way you think of money. You have to change the way you work with money. And that's all specific and unique to the individual. But the other thing I tell my clients, people are always asking me, like the number one question, I should do a podcast episode on this.

Where do I begin? Where do I even begin? This is such a big topic. I have so much fear, I have so much shame, I have so much confusion. I wasn't taught about money, were you? I wasn't taught nothing about money. I was not taught anything about investing. I wasn't taught about budgeting like I was not taught anything.

I can add sometimes on a calculator, you know what I mean? That's just not how my brain works. You know, I was always kind of afraid of money. I have learning disabilities around money. I understand. It's like overwhelming, and we'd rather not. And also when people are like, where do I start? Where do I begin? I always say with anything, start with what feels doable for you. That might be in looking at your bank account every Friday. That might mean drawing up a budget. That might mean really writing down everything you spend and watching it and watching your emotions alongside it. If you have a business, it might mean like quarterly seeing what kinds of income were the biggest chunks for you and be like, Oh, okay, what is that data telling me? Just kind of starting slow and consistently, or, you really want to go into the fire. I'm a bit of an emotional edge lord, So like just going right where you're like, I am so scared of this thing. Like I'm terrified of ___. and just like going right in and understanding where it's happening in this subconscious understanding where it's happening in your behavior, understanding where it was learned behavior.

Because for most of us, this is simply just learned behavior that we've to be like, Oh, right. My parents were always really tense around money or they always argued around money or they never talked about money. Maybe I didn't get a lot of love or attention, but I always got stuff. Just parsing out what was going on. Like really beginning to think about what the scripts were in your house of like, Oh, we can never get ahead. Or like if there was comparison with other family members or whatever these like through lines were, were so impressionable. So much of our worldview gets shaped between like zero to, I would argue, 13. Child psychologists say seven. I think we're going to see a real resurgence not in inner child like there's a lot of inner child talk. It's great. Do it. Life changing. I think the next frontier is like inner teen because that's really where we start coming into our own and where we start getting shut down. It's where we start encountering a lot of harm, a lot of really confusing messages, particularly if we're like women femmes, like socialized as more feminine, if we're queer, all of that.

So really like from zero to, say, 19, What were the scripts going on in your house or around you, and how might those be informing your behavior and your relationship to money?

BREAK
00:27:00:22
Phoebe Sherman

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00:27:51:29
Phoebe Sherman

I want to back up a little bit and talk a little bit about your beginning days and sort of the structure that you created for yourself to start to grow your business. Like when you were reading tarot and where you still at the restaurant, like what are those sort of beginning days look like and how did you give yourself structure in those beginning days to actually make your business happen?

Sarah Gottesdiener
In the beginning of my business, I did everything from, I should just say at the beginning of working for myself. I did everything from freelance graphic design to adjunct teaching to catering to I wasn't being a waitress anymore. I didn't do any waitressing, honestly, because I couldn't get a job waitressing. This was the other thing at the time. I really couldn't get a job job or a job that would like pay my bills. So I cobbled things together as I think a lot of people do and are doing now as well. And then I started reading tarot and I think I just started paying attention to what was working well and what I enjoyed and went from there.

There was very much one thing I will say to people listening and it might be helpful and applicable to them. There was a very distinct moment where I realized that my dream, which was being a tenured track professor like that, was my dream. I got my master's in design to be a professor, to be a full time professor was my dream since I was like 12 years old or something.
I'm a nerd. I've always been a nerd. That's what I wanted to do. Life of the mind. Writing papers, reading books. That's like my happy space, teaching, so on and so forth. I realized that while I was teaching at some very well-known colleges in L.A., and while my students loved me, and in fact, I had students, like, petitioning the school for me to teach more, right?

I'm a brilliant teacher. I'm very, very good at facilitating. I care a lot and I'm just really fucking good at it. I couldn't get hired. I kept applying for jobs, applying for jobs. I went on interviews, a couple of interviews. I just realized, it wasn't going to happen. I wasn't making any money teaching. Adjunct professors make almost nothing. It's a travesty. It's horrific in this country. It's terrible. And I had to quit. I had to say goodbye to that dream because it was taking up a lot of my time. I was getting treated not well, and I was getting paid almost nothing. So I really it like, didn't make sense and it didn't make dollars, you know what I'm saying?

I had a lot of feels around that. I had a lot of feels around that. But a weird thing happened because when you're a magical person and you take risks and you listen to your intuition, things start moving. I quit, but I was still teaching. I had given my notice. It was like I had a month left and out of nowhere, like a dream freelance client just came in my inbox and it was super random. It was a referral and also a very good designer. You know, I have a lot of skill sets. It came in and was like, Hey, we want you to be our on call designer. And it was a dream. It was like I could work from home. The wage was really good.
It was super easy work, it was ongoing, and consistent, and it was like I said goodbye to one thing, not knowing. It wasn't also like I had money or anything. I just was like, I can't do this. It's taking up all my time. I need to have more time to make an income so that I'm not constantly living paycheck to paycheck.

And then this freelance client came in. So that actually gave me the structure to be able to work when I needed to for them and then do my other stuff, make art, make design, see clients, teach workshops in person. And the other thing is, is that I also think post 2020, a lot of people have forgotten the power of relationships and I would reach out to people I liked, to people I was friends with, to people I felt like-minded around and people I connected with. And I would like maybe teach a class at their store. And it was all word of mouth. It was all organic in the beginning, it was all referrals to this day. If I were to open my tarot books again, like 85% is all just word of mouth, all referrals. I don't read for people that I don't know anymore actually as well.

And the very similar with my classes or even with the planner. Like people just see it, their friend has it, they want it. It's all kind of been that way. I never took a business class. I never did all those like hack things. And in fact I'm actually working with people now one on one. I'm coaching them in marketing and they're all like, Oh. And we're really customizing it for them. really what their strengths are, what they want. All of these frameworks I teach in this class called Clear Channels, it's like around ethical, intuitive of marketing that works. And they're like, Oh, I took all these marketing classes, but now I'm realizing why they didn't work because it wasn't like tailored to me and what was going to work for me.

That's the other thing I would say to folks who are spinning their wheels, who have taken all the classes, who've listened to all of the like marketing podcasts, who follow all the like, whatever. I don't know who these people are because I don't follow them. Take a quarter off from listening to all of that. Tune into your intuition, follow what delights you, follow what you're interested in.

Really, really decrease your inputs in terms of social media, screens, advice, everything. See what wants to come forth for you in terms of sharing about your work or what to do next for your work. It might not be that cookie cutter template. For example, one of the people I'm working with as I've been working with her in old school that she taught at a while ago, reached out and wants her to teach and she's like, Oh, I didn't even think about pitching myself to like colleges to lecture or be a guest lecture or whatever, you know, like to literally get herself in front of students for what she's an expert in a marketing class will not tell you to do that, but it's often based pm relationships. It's often based on authentic relationships. It's based on your skills, it's based on paying attention. It's based on like seeing what ideas come up again and again, what things will not leave you alone. And when you're like, no, I have this, email this and are like, No, I have to get through the week.
And there is this like voice in the back of your head that's like, Do this thing are like reach out to this person or like, launch this class or focus in on this Oracle deck or like whatever is coming up for you. You have to follow that voice. You have to trust that. And yes, it might mean that you're not immediately making money.

That's the other thing I want to say. Like I wasn't making a lot of money from the jump. I pay myself okay, but I'm not Scrooge McDuck over here dancing around in gold coins like it's been pretty difficult the last couple of years. And I want to be really honest about that too, because a lot of business owners don't talk about that, but they talk about it to each other behind the scenes. I literally just spoke to a tax person this week and I told him it's been a really hard year and it's been a hard year for me just personally, because I have long COVID. And that of course, affects my business. But anyway, I was telling him that it's been a really rough year financially, and he's like, that's everybody.

You know, this is someone who does taxes for a living for 20 years. And he's like, It's not you. And also his client base was mostly influencers and he's like, It's everybody. It's not just you. I think there's ups, I think there's downs. That's the other thing too, is you have to kind of think about this balance between what you love to do and also income. And that's a whole other conversation.

00:36:00:29
Phoebe Sherman

I guess I just want to echo what I'm hearing from you too, is that like in the business that you start is not going to be the business that you end up with if you're following your intuition. I started off as a product based business and here we are mostly doing events and a podcast and service. And I wrote down Follow What Delights You.
And I love that because I say Find Joy. Same, same. But you know, really figuring out like what feels good in your body, what feels fun, like what works with your day to day. And I do believe the money will follow. It might be fucking hard. And so here I am six years later and money is tight. We keep trying, keep throwing spaghetti at the wall, figuring out what works, figuring out what doesn't work, because that's also super good information.

Sarah Gottesdiener
Yup! Uh huh!

Phoebe Sherman
And like, see what happens. And I think that's what's so cool about running your own business and being a creative is like, literally the world is your oyster. You could do whatever and you can keep doing whatever and your business can like change and grow and stretch and be a totally thing than what you started with.

Sarah Gottesdiener
Absolutely. Absolutely. I love that you brought that up, too, because I think that when you're a creative of any kind, whether you are a business owner or not, you have to get comfortable with failing all the time. Even the word failure you know, I want to put in bunny ears because you're not really failing. You're just trying something and it didn't work.

But that doesn't mean it was bad or wrong. Maybe it's a timing thing. Maybe it's a marketing thing, maybe it's I don't know. It just needs like– often creatives are visionaries, they're often innovative and they're often like a couple steps ahead of the crowd. That's the other thing. If you're like a future-seer and you're a couple steps ahead, it'll take a while for people to catch up to you or to even like understand what it is you do.

To this day, people don't really understand what I do. Even people in my they're like, What do you do? You post on the Internet? I'm like, No, I wish that was my job.

Phoebe Sherman
I’ll do that sure

Sarah Gottesdiener
Yeah, I mean, that happens too. But, you know, I'm not an influencer or anything like that. I've never tried to monetize any of that stuff. But anyway, yes, to your point, it's evolving. I also want to name what you said in terms of you saying, yes, things are tight. This is very much a year of gearing up like this is very much a crossroads year. We're in a seven year, we're in a chariot year. This is very much about having to really take like a hard, cold look at your life and say, okay, what do I really want my life to look like, feel like, be like, what are the things that are draining that? What are the things that are contributing to that? And for a lot of people I've been talking to who are business owners or creatives that looks like taking a break, that looks like either going back to something that they don't necessarily want to do in their business, but they have a lot of people asking them to do like I've been thinking about doing one on ones again, just because a lot of people want me to. And I'm like, well, okay, for now, not that I don't love it, but I want to do other things.

For some people that looks like they had a team and now they don't anymore and they're going back to being like a solo preneur. For some people that looks like expanding and it looks like, Oh wow, we're really taken off after five years of traction or whatever. But this is the year to if this is going to air in 2023, this autumn is the time to get really serious and declutter and be like, okay, what am I not going to do anymore? What am I going to do? What am I going to try? What am I going to risk? Where is that delight? Where is that new pocket of joy?

Because if you're listening to this and you’re a creative, which I'm assuming everyone here is, because humans are also just inherently creative, but I'm sure everyone listening Phoebe to you is going to be as creative as you are. We need that thing that's going to excite us. Like that's the other thing. Like we didn't go into working for ourselves to just do the same thing over and over again. We want that excitement, we want challenges, we want the right kinds of problems. And I do think that the last couple years, if you've been in business for a long time, I have. I’ve been in business since 2013. If you've been in business the last couple of years, we've had so many curveballs and so many problems we didn't want like, I'll take a problem I'm solving on my own. Like, how do I make this deck look like this? Or how do I make the most bespoke candle scent? I like those kinds of problems. Do I make the label blue or purple? Like those are fun problems and that's why we got to business. But the problems we've been facing as business owners who are not corporations, who are tiny, who are micro-businesses, who often just support ourselves, and maybe one or two other people, our businesses are problems we really have not wanted to have. And a lot of us feel like exhausted, dejected. And I want to name that because people aren't talking about it and it's real. It's real because I have other friends who are business owners and we're talking about it. I just want to talk about that publicly so that people don't feel ashamed and don't take it out on themselves. Because the other thing about being a business owner sometimes, but not always is. It's very lonely. A lot of times like your friends aren't business owners again or your friends are like, What do you do again? You're just like, you just get to post all day on your couch eating bonbons and you're like, Yeah, no, it's not like that.

Oftentimes our partners work for job jobs. It's just a different thing. Our problems are different than the average, so we feel like we're alone or we feel like we're not doing good or enough or whatever. So I'm just putting that out there that this is a rough patch for many people. I really don't think it will be rough forever. I think that the things we learn at this time are going to be really useful and helpful. And I do think that really listening to your intuition and if that means you need to scale back for a little bit or rest, if that means you're like, you know what, fuck it, I'm going to do this project. I've been like thinking of doing like, I just want to try it.

Maybe it's not even going to make money for me, but it's just going to get me out of bed or it's just going to give me something to look forward to personally. Like do those things. Or if it's something not related to your work, if you're like, You know what, I'm just going to do a half marathon or I'm really excited about taking a cooking class or whatever it is.

That's what a lot of us need to be doing and thinking about this year, because next year is the year where things are going to start to flow again. If we really make some decisions about our time and energy like now into like February, we'll start to see things kind of come back in for ourselves in a exciting way in 2024.

Not that it's not going to be difficult or hard. I'm not saying that. But a lot of us are in a place where it's crossroads feeling. It's feeling like, okay, I have to make a pivot or I have to make a decision. It's not without emotions, it's not without ego, It's not without kind of feeling a little dinged up. But just going back to the hard decision I had to make, quitting one aspect of how I made money was the absolute best thing that I could have ever done. And I think about that too. Like creatives, when you feel really dejected and you feel really down, think about what past you did, the risks you took when you invested in yourself, when you followed your intuition.

Think about what happened. Even if it didn't necessarily work out exactly the way you want, because it often never does. It probably give you information about yourself. You probably got to learn a cool new skill or experience something interesting, like you learned something or experience something as a result. And you can keep doing that and you're allowed to keep doing that and where it's at for a lot of us right now.

00:44:11:00
Phoebe Sherman

Okay, Sarah. Well, this has been amazing. Where can listeners find you?

Sarah Gottesdiener
Listeners can just hop on over to my podcast, my beautiful little baby podcast called Moon Beaming. You can subscribe there. We also have a newsletter. That's the best way to get in touch with us so you can just go to Moon-Studio.co or you can Google Moon Studio and then sign up for our newsletter. That's where I share all my tips secrets, what I'm thinking about. It's where you get discounts. It's where you're the first to know about classes and new products and all that stuff.

Phoebe Sherman
And we’ll put all those links in the show notes. Thank you so much, Sarah.

Sarah Gottesdiener
Thank you, Phoebe.

OUTRO
Phoebe Sherman
Thank you so much for listening to the Girl Gang Craft Podcast. Head to Girlgangcraft.com/podcast for show notes and more. See you next time.