This interview for my research into Perceptions of Coaching in the UK Creative Industries was with Jill Fear, Continuous Professional Development (CPD) Manager for the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA).

The IPA is the industry body and professional institute for leading advertising, media and marketing communications agencies in the UK. Collectively, IPA members handle over 80% of media spend (worth £13 billion in 2004) and a large proportion of the £43 billion spent on marketing in the UK each year.

The role of the IPA’s 55-strong staff is to serve, promote and anticipate the collective interests of IPA members; and in particular to define, develop and help maintain the highest possible standards of professional practice within the business. The IPA’s CPD in Advertising Standard is the industry’s training and people development standard, launched in 1999. Commitment to achieving the standard is now mandatory for IPA membership.

Jill Fear spent eight years at full service agencies (DMB&B and J Walter Thompson) before moving into the design industry as Group Marketing Director of Coley Porter Bell and Client Services Director of Springpoint.

In 2003 Jill joined returned to the advertising industry when she joined the Professional Development Department at the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising). There she manages the CPD (Continuous Professional Development) Accreditation Standard.

Jill’s experience of agency life as well as her current developmental role enabled her to give a well-rounded overview of the issues involved in managing and developing people in the advertising industry. She argues passionately for greater recognition of the quality of informal development practices in advertising agencies, as well as the need to balance these with more formal programmes. Towards the end of the interview she gives some excellent examples of informal coaching by managers going about their day-to-day work.

Click the ‘AUDIO MP3′ icon below to hear the interview.

 Interview with Jill Fear: Download

Image by ForsterFoto

We all want to be confident, don’t we? It’s a word that crops up fairly often in coaching sessions, even with people who are very talented and successful. We’re all human, and for most of us there are times, places, audiences and situations where we feel we’d like to be a little more confident. For creative professionals, these typically include high-pressure performance situations, such as presentations, pitches, interviews, auditions and stage shows.

Of course we want to perform at our best in these situations, but I think the word ‘confidence’ creates more problems than it solves. I usually advise clients to change the word to ‘enthusiasm’. Here’s why:

1. Confidence is about you - enthusiasm is about your subject

As long as you’re focused on ‘being confident’, you are the focus of attention. And when it’s all about you, it’s very easy to get caught up in self-doubt (”Am I really up to this? Will I be able to do it?”). But when you focus on a subject that’s important to you - the work you’re presenting, the information you want to share, the message you’re trying to get across - then chances are you’ll find yourself overtaken by enthusiasm. You’ll be energized, your voice will sound stronger, your hands will start gesturing, you’ll find your whole body moving as you warm to your task. You’ll lose your self-consciousness and be lost in the work itself, in the words and ideas you want to get across.

2. Confidence is about you (again) - enthusiasm is about others

I repeat - when you’re trying to be confident, your attention is on yourself. But when you focus on your audience - whether one person, a roomful or a whole stadium - you stop worrying about your own performance. Instead, your attention is on the audience’s experience: How are the ideas coming across? How do they look? Engaged? Confused? Intrigued? Have they ‘got it’ yet? If not, what can you do to help them? What feedback are they giving you? How can you use this to make it easier for them to learn, to enjoy or to see your point of view? How can you get them to share your enthusiasm?

3. Confidence is impressive - enthusiasm is infectious

How many times have you watched a presenter or met someone and been impressed with their confident manner - but without really warming to them? Confidence can be impressive, but beware the kind of impression you’re leaving. Enthusiasm on the other hand, is highly infectious. Think of a time when you heard someone talk about a subject you had previously no interest in, but they were so enthusiastic about it, you couldn’t help being intrigued, even fascinated. There’s something contagious about the body language of enthusiasm - when you see someone talking excitedly, smiling, gesturing, full of energy and keen to share what they know, you can’t help responding. It’s as though at some level we look at an enthusiastic person and think “That looks good, that looks fun” and can’t resist the urge to join in.

4. Confidence is certain - enthusiasm is creative

You can feel confident when you know what you’re doing, and are sure you can do it well. There are lots of times and places for this kind of confidence, but too much certainty can be stifling. With enthusiasm, there’s always an element of uncertainty, the excitement of not knowing exactly what you’re going to say next and looking forward to surprising yourself. That’s why scripted speeches are so dull, and why the atmosphere at an improvised show is electric. Accounts of the creative process abound with stories of images, ideas or words ‘popping into’ someone’s mind - and invariably, the subject or medium is one for with the person has huge enthusiasm.

5. Confidence is serious - enthusiasm is fun

When you start talking or thinking about being confident, you’re likely to start taking things a bit seriously. When you want to be confident about doing something, it’s because you think it’s important. And when something is important, it means Bad Things can happen if you get it wrong. Thinking about Bad Things is enough to make anyone serious. But when you’re enthusiastic, importance translates into passion - and the whole thing becomes fun. There are few things more enjoyable than talking enthusiastically about something you’re passionate about, and feeling others share your enthusiasm.

I’ll climb off the soap-box now. Enthusiasm is one of my enthusiasms. What are yours?

EDIT: in the comments below Ludivine has asked a really good question:

what about when worrying about practical & financial issues stiffles enthusiasm ?

I’m answering this question with a short series of posts: How to Maintain Your Enthusiasm When Things Get Tough, 7 Ways to Stop Worrying When You’re Under Pressure and 7 Ways to Tap into Enthusiasm.

I discovered this video of the Reactable, a new music-making interface, via City of Sound and Peter Marsh.

Why do I find this so fascinating? I think it’s the way it opens up new creative possiblities via artificial synaesthesia.

According to the scientists, ‘true’ synaesthesia is a neurological condition in which one sense is involuntarily translated into another - e.g. colours are experienced as sounds or vice versa. It is popularly associated with psychedelic drugs, but can also result from a stroke, blindness or deafness. I encountered synaesthesia in my work as a hypnotherapist, as it’s a fairly common occurrence in trance subjects.

Synaesthesia and Creativity

Less extreme versions of synaesthesia, sometimes called ‘pseudo-synaesthesia’, are reported by many people as part of their normal thinking processes. This kind of everyday synaesthesia seems to be particularly common among artists and other creative types. Like a lot of poets, I experience a kind of grapheme-colour synaesthesia, whereby words (and numbers) are associated with particular colours. Louis MacNeice describes the phenomenon in his poem ‘When we were children’:

When we were children words were coloured
(Harlot and murder were dark purple)
And language was a prism, the light
A coloured inlay on the grass,

Another of my favourite examples of synaesthesia is the artist and writer Mervyn Peake. A brilliant draughtsman and illustrator, while writing his novel Titus Groan Peake made sketches of characters in the margin:

As I went along I made drawings from time to time which helped me to visualise the characters and to imagine what sort of things they would say. The drawings were never exactly as I imagined the people, but were near enough for me to know when their voices lost touch with their heads.
(Mervyn Peake, ‘How a Romantic Novel was Evolved’)

Read the rest of this entry »

Having recently interviewed Ben Demiri of SIX Showroom, I’m delighted to hear from him that SIX’s London b-store has just been awarded ‘Shop of the Year’ at the British Fashion Awards.

Congratulations to all at the company - I heard from Ben how much passion and hard work go into SIX’s business, so it’s good to see them rewarded. Here’s a video of the awards ceremony - b-store’s is the second award on the clip.

I had a great time on Tuesday evening at the Creative Business Club, a new initiative from the Cultural Industries Development Agency (CIDA) which aims at ‘providing knowledge through networking’.

The theme of the evening was ‘Exploring Online Opportunities’ - we heard presentations from four very different organisations with the common theme of exploiting the opportunities of the latest phase of web development. The presentations were followed by questions and networking.

The phrase ‘Web 2.0′ was handled with care - none of the presenters seemed to like it but there was a sense that ‘we have to call it something’. User-generated content was a common thread running through the presentations, which thankfully emphasised the social aspect of ’social software’ - technical explanations were kept to a minimum and there was a healthy focus on the implications of the new technology for people and businesses.

First to speak was John Parnell, Business Development Director of the digital agency Head, best-known for Webcameron, Conservative Leader David Cameron’s online home. He began by painting a dramatic and slightly disturbing picture of a world in which ‘everything is disappearing into a browser’. He cited YouTube as an example of success through using technology to provide a solution to a widespread simple problem - with the growth of video phones, camcorders and desktop editing tools, how can we share all these video clips with our friends? He also highlighted the changing role of the creative agency, away from purely client-oriented commissions and towards self-generated content - with reference to Head’s World Cup website England All Stars, which they are now looking to develop via other media channels.

Next up was Victor Omosevwehra, Label Manager of Eastside Records. He began with an overview of the technical and media landscape of Web 2.0. and gauged the audience’s knowledge levels with a quick ‘hands up if you know what this means’ - terms such as ‘pay-per-click’ and ‘RSS’ got about a quarter of the hands up in the audience. Eastside are an interesting example of working with technology within the grasp of your audience - because their target audience includes a lot of teenagers, band pages on MySpace feature prominently in their marketing strategy. And because most teenagers don’t have a credit card, but inevitably have a mobile phone, they use something called ‘reverse SMS billing’ (my hand stayed down for that one) to allow them to buy downloads via their phone.

Penny Wrout from BBC London talked about the corporation’s use of the web and user-generated content to provide a much more comprehensive and interactive local coverage than is possible on television and radio. So public events such as the Remembrance Day parades are increasingly seen through the public eye, via camera and video phones, and a film by Bexley teenagers about ASBOs, which would struggle to get an airing on television, can become a popular feature on the BBC website. As Penny said, it’s ‘not TV exactly’ but ideally suited to a niche audience on the web. Which chimes in with my sense that much of the debate about old vs new media seems to miss the point that it’s not necessarily an either/or question - a lot of new media is simply different, and not necessarily in direct competition with established media channels.

Finally, Andy Townsend of Second Run DVD did an excellent job of describing the impact of the internet on the world cinema market. A self-confessed ‘grumpy old man when it comes to technology’, Andy said Second Run ‘became a long tail business without realising it’, by focusing on arthouse films. Neglected by the large video and DVD distributors, world cinema enthusiasts previously had to go through a convoluted process of ordering obscure catalogues and sending international money orders to small dealers scattered across the globe. Now Second Run streamline the process on the web: they are active members of online film messageboards such Criterion where they have a dedicated Second Run forum featuring a ‘wish list’ of films people want to buy; when he sees sufficient demand for a given title, Andy negotiates the rights and puts the DVD into production, which is then marketed through the forums and other key websites - a beautifully effective feedback loop.

Overall the presentations were varied and full of interesting stories. Even if there wasn’t quite as much about blogging as I had hoped, it probably did me good to have a look at the bigger picture of online marketing. To judge from others’ reactions, the audience were left with plenty to think about.

The networking afterwards was an excellent idea, and really helped to make the evening worthwhile. Firstly it was a great opportunity to meet lots of interesting people from different creative disciplines and business backgrounds. And secondly, it was a good way of digesting the ideas in the presentations. It was inspiring to see the reactions of people who were new to online marketing as well as those who were already immersed in it - the first group were full of curiosity and the second full of enthusiasm.

Among the people I met were Mike Brett of Archer’s Mark, who is involved in all kinds of literary and commercial writing, Suki Foster who is producing some beautiful portrait photography, and Dave Sharman of the Woodlands Farm Trust - billed as ‘the farm on your doorstep’, it’s on mine so I’ll be paying them a visit soon.

I believe this was the first meeting of the Creative Business Club, but CIDA are planning to run these events once a month. If so, it’s a flying start and I’ll definitely be going back for more. If you’re a creative professional in London then I suggest you go to the CIDA home page and sign up for the e-mail newsletter for advance warning of future events.

Thanks to Liz Strauss at Successful Blog for a very enjoyable chat on the phone yesterday and for featuring me in her Blogger A Day (B.A.D.) series.

Picking up from our blogging conversations, it was great fun swapping stories and ideas with Liz, about creativity, coaching and writing. I’m really impressed with the summary she’s written about my work - and I’m particularly pleased she picked up on the links between my blogging and poetry.

If you’ve not seen Successful Blog yet, you really should. Different bloggers have different strengths - with Liz, as well as producing a constant stream of thought-provoking content, she’s got a phenomenal ability to build a sense of community around her blog. Stopping by her comments section is like popping into a cafe in the middle of a lively discussion. And no matter how many people are there, she’ll remember who you are and give you a warm welcome.

This interview for my research into Perceptions of Coaching in the UK Creative Industries was with Sian Prime, Training and Development Manager for the NESTA Creative Pioneer Programme. Through this programme, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) provides funding, training and mentoring for early stage creative entrepreneurs, helping them turn their ideas into viable businesses.

Sian gave a fascinating account of the challenges facing creative entrepreneurs, particularly those moving from a hands-on creative role into a leadership position. She challenged the stereotypical dichotomy between creativity and commerce by emphasizing the potential of creative skills to translate into business success. She also highlighted the pitfalls trainers and coaches can encounter when introducing ‘management’ concepts to creative entrepreneurs - and gave some memorable examples of how she overcomes these problems and engages delegates on the Creative Pioneer Programme.

Click the ‘AUDIO MP3′ icon below to hear the interview.

 Interview with Sian Prime: Download

I’ve been sending out lots of e-mails listing basic blogging tools for creatives and companies who want to set up their own blog, so I’ve put these together on a single page about Blogging for Creative Professionals.

There’s more to go up when I get a minute, but so far it gives you a basic introduction to blogging, what it can do for you as a creative company or freelancer, and some of the tools and technology that are available. I’ll be updating it with more information so keep an eye on it if you’re thinking about getting into blogging - it’s with the other Books + Links pages in the left sidebar.

The Creativity Group is currently at No.5 in the Squidoo Top 100 ‘Movers and Shakers’ - so thanks to all everyone who’s been doing the moving and shaking with their creativity lenses.

We’re now up to 29 lenses - recent new members include Needham Fatica Ad Agency from Key West, Florida, Busto Graphic Design from Copenhagen, Plasmic Studio from New Jersey and Nela Dunato with her wonderfully macabre artwork from Croatia.

Adam Graveley has added a lens about his e-book for aspiring graphic designers, 23Squidoo points us to some useful creativity links in Creativity for Life, and the Weird and Wonderful section is bristling with artwork and art materials made out of weeds, courtesy of Alienweeds: The Invasive Plant Harvest.

Voting is underway in the poll - ‘Creativity: Inspiration or Perspiration?’. The hard-working advocates of Perspiration are edging it at the moment, although there has been a swing towards Inspiration over the past few days.

Visit the Group to cast your vote and browse through the lenses. And feel free to make your own lens, about your company, creative work or any other aspect of creativity.

More info my original Creativity Group post and the Squidoo FAQ.

I’ve just booked a place at this event for next Tuesday - looks like a great opportunity for creative professionals to learn about blogging and web marketing.

Apparently remaining places are very limited but if you’re interested then you can try contacting Jessica Green at the Cultural Industries Development Agency (CIDA) by e-mail or on 020 7247 4710.

Sorry for the short notice, I’ve only just got this information myself. Rest assured I will be blogging the event next week. Let me know if you’re going and want to meet up.

Creative Business Club - Exploring Online Opportunities

6pm - 9pm Tuesday 14th November 2006
Royal Institute of British Architects
66 Portland Place, London W1B 1AD

Do you want your business to have an online presence but don’t know where to start? Whether you are bamboozled by blogging, daunted by downloading or want to open an online shop– the Creative Business Club can help you translate the latest technology.

A lively panel discussion will enable you to ask questions of the e-commerce experts and creative business owners who are increasing sales through raising their profile and selling online.

This session will be followed by networking, which will be attended by a range of web designers and developers, providing the perfect opportunity to identify suppliers who can help develop your business.

The Creative Business Club is open to creative businesses in London and attendance is FREE.

Speakers include:

Penny Wrout - Communities Editor BBC London
Penny runs a team of journalists and producers concentrating on grassroots stories as well as specific programming responsibility around issues such as diversity, current affairs and communities. Penny will be discussing how developments in digital technology are impacting on broadcast journalism, news, blogs and reportage.

John Parnell - Business Development Director, Head
Over a 20 year period, John worked in advertising, direct marketing, PR, and production – all within large agencies. For the past 6 years, John has helped grow Head into a leading digital agency. John divides his time at work between developing new business, steering creative direction, and mapping out brand strategies across a wide variety of client briefs including MTV, Microsoft and the recent high profile Webcameron for The Conservatives.

Andy Townsend - Second Run DVD
Second Run DVD is a label that specialises in releasing important and award winning films from around the world that have not been made available on DVD before. Just over a year old, they have quickly gained a reputation for producing exemplary releases of classic world cinema. Second Run are an example of a small, niche business that have used the web and associated technologies to very successful effect.

Victor Omosevwerha - Label Manager, Eastside Records
One of the most innovative urban record labels to grace the scene in the last few years, Gridlockaz novel approach to releasing records focuses primarily around use of the internet and mobile media. Gridlockaz has now merged with Eastside Records to form Eastside/Gridlockaz Records and created a new venture Eastside/Gridlockaz Projects (EGP), a business specialising in the online project management of artists. EGP already has an impressive client list and recent campaigns have secured front page features on sites such as iTunes, HMV Digital and MSN/OD2 for in-house artist Natalie Williams.