What to Do When It’s Hard: How Your “Why” & Values Can Keep You Going

Lyric Kinard (00:03.886) Hello, friend. I wanted to talk to you about something I've been thinking a lot about lately. When things get really tough in your business, because inevitably they will, what is it that keeps you going? What keeps you from giving up? Why don't you quit? This is Lyric Montgomery Kinard. I'm coming to you from the Creatives on Camera podcast. We work with artists and crafters and quilters and all kinds of creatives to build online teaching businesses. You know, and sometimes it's not easy. Sometimes we feel stuck or overwhelmed or we have a course and things just don't work out the way that we wanted to. We can be overwhelmed by tech, not enough people can sign up. It's not always easy. Every one of our previous guests has talked about how success doesn't come overnight. It's work. It's a lot of work. You know, so this is a really common experience. And how do we keep going? Why do we keep going? That's the better point. Why do we keep going? Because your why is what keeps you going. Do you know why you are working in your business? Do you know why you want to teach? Do you know why you do what you do? Have you thought about it? Have you written it down? If you understand your internal values, the core of what you are, the core of your reasoning behind teaching, behind serving the people who you are teaching creativity and joy to. That is what can keep you going. Your values and your motivations can sustain you. Lyric Kinard (02:14.476) Have you taken a journal? Have you written down? What drew you to this work in the first place? What would it matter if you stopped? Why do you keep coming back to doing this? Values act like guideposts when things feel unstable. I have been teaching for years and years and there have been a lot of ups and downs. Some of them are my own doing. I have had many years where I completely overbooked myself. I mean, that's a good problem to have, Until you completely collapse because you can't keep up. with the expectations that you've set on yourself or that your students have of you. I have had times in the academy where we've barely stayed afloat. Why would I keep going? Why do I keep working to make this succeed? Well, my teachers are my example. And I go back every time that I'm struggling to thinking about the joy that comes into their lives when they are able to reach the students who they can then turn around and bring joy to. Right? That's what we do as teachers and as creatives, as makers, as artists. We teach people creativity. We teach them to make beautiful things and it brings them joy. I look at Lyric Kinard (03:55.156) my teachers when their businesses grow and succeed and I see them breathe easily. I see them have more time to create and make beautiful things. That's one of the reasons why I keep going. Knowing your why helps you to face reality. And reality is really important, right? Understanding your core values. helps you when reality hits and sometimes it smacks you in the face. We have this big romantic idea of how wonderful everything's going to be when it's finished. And yeah, we should absolutely imagine that. We should absolutely embody that and seek for that. And then the reality of doing the work can sometimes smack us in the face. I want to remind you, Joseph Campbell had a quote in The Power of Myth. Let me read it to you. says, follow your bliss. If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while waiting for you. Doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be. So if you understand your why, you'll know what your bliss can be, right? You understand why you're teaching the thing you do and who you teach it for and what joy it brings to you. Now here's the thing, later on Joseph Campbell joked around and said, maybe I should have said, follow your blisters instead. Because work that is worth doing involves struggle. There's always going to be something that is Lyric Kinard (05:58.681) difficult and I don't want to paint a depressing picture at all. The work we do is wonderful. I love almost every part of what I do in the teaching and the creativity that I bring to my art students and that I get to share with my fellow teachers who are building online courses, right? But if you are out of alignment, And even when you're in alignment, that doesn't always magically create ease. Can you think of a moment when you felt the friction? When working on your business, when teaching your students, when doing the business-y part of it felt most exhausting? Why did you keep going? Was it because you wanted to grow? Did you want to have deeper impact? Did you understand what a successful business could open up in your life? Have you seen that moment of joy when the people get it? When they understand what you're teaching and whole new vistas open up for them. Doesn't that fill your soul? I wanna give you an example. This is something that has fascinated me for a long time. So in... 2009, a paper for Administrative Science Quarterly by Bunderson and Thompson studied zookeepers and found that the profession was about the closest anyone in the modern world has come to to a job being a calling, the sort of intensely meaningful career that Martin Luther said can turn work into a divine offering, right? Zoo keeping. Do you know what zoo keeping involves? Zoo keeping is shoveling a lot of poo. It's repetitive. It doesn't pay well. It is hard physical labor. And it goes on and on. You have to repeatedly do the same things again every day. Lyric Kinard (08:19.968) And sometimes it's heartbreaking when you lose the animals that you're caring for. So why do zookeepers feel such workplace satisfaction? Why are they willing to make major sacrifices in their personal lives in order to be able to do it? A survey of 311 zoo and aquarium professionals showed that many described their work as meaningful, but also cited stressors like emotional strain, limited resources, organizational challenges. What keeps them going? what keeps them going. It's their love for the creatures they're serving and that deep sense of purpose that they're doing something meaningful. Many of them are working with breeding programs, keeping animals from disappearing entirely from this earth. Conservation, preservation, keeping animals from going extinct. Lyric Kinard (09:31.175) And that to them gives them a sense of purpose. So what conditions do we work in? I honestly think our avocation, this career that we've chosen is so much easier than zoo keeping, right? But what gives it meaning? Why is it meaningful to us? Why are we willing to embrace the hard work? A small tiny example is my artwork that I make is technically quilts. I dye and paint and print fabric. I design a piece and then I layer it and I stitch the layers together. And I have to admit that that's the part where I cringe and I'm like, I've designed and created this beautiful piece and now stitching it is not the fun part for me and I'm afraid I'm going to mess it up and I just don't like it. So why do I keep doing it? Why don't I just frame a piece of fabric that I have painted, right? Why don't I just frame that as a work of art? Well, because the outcome is worth it to me. In fact, that layered texture, that extra stitching, that depth and those new things to discover, that layer of line and design are part of the reason I've chosen this medium. So it's worth it to slog through to deal with the stress of, my gosh, what if I don't get it right? To get that outcome. And that's just a tiny little thing. That is not even close to the depth of meaning and satisfaction that I personally get. from helping teachers build their business. So in your workshops, in your business, where do you tolerate difficulty? Because it holds something deeper in the meaning of why you do this. Okay, let's do some practical tips for how to hold on when it's hard. Well. Lyric Kinard (11:50.873) First of all is write down your values. Figure out what your values are. Figure out why you're really doing this. I'll have a PDF for you in the show notes and in the links that is just a very quick worksheet that helps you write down and figure out what your values are. and it's the first task I have. All of my students do, whether it's the virtual teaching master class or the video making crash course or the 30 day launcher workshop challenge. We figure out why we're doing this. Write them down, make them visible. Put them up somewhere where you can see them. And when it's hard, you look over there and remind yourself why you're doing this. Okay, that's a really good step, a practical thing to help keep you going. Another thing. Do you have any quiet reflecting time? Do you journal? Do you have a time at the beginning or the end or the middle of the day where you look over what you've accomplished and you think about the bigger picture when you look at the work you've done? I have kind of a yearly ritual where every December I open a big notebook that I rarely open the rest of the year and I gather all of my data and my numbers and I look at what I thought about last year and I just write a lot and I think deeply about what my business has done the last year and where I want it to go. There's also like the easy little reset at the end of the day. I keep, because I am extremely ADD, I keep a little Post-It note at my desk. And every task I think of during the day that I need to get done, I write it there instead of going and doing it. And at the end of the day, I go through that note and I cross off all the things I've accomplished. Sometimes it's not very many. And I write a new post-it note and it kind of resets the day. It also breaks work into manageable tasks. That's a really important thing because sometimes we see a task or somewhere we need to get to, Lyric Kinard (14:09.547) big thing that we need to accomplish to make our business go and it feels overwhelming. The thing is you don't get there in a giant leap. You get there one small step at a time. Do you remember the North Star episode? I think it's episode 31, September 9th of 2025, where we talked about you have to have that big vision, but then you have to pull back and look at where you are and choose the tiniest next step in that direction. So break the big task down into baby steps. You climb a mountain by lifting your foot and putting it in front of the one that was still on the ground, one step at a time, right? Okay, and are you tracking your winds? Do you have somewhere where you can write down or keep track of the things that are going right when we're stuck in the middle of, this is so hard. We often forget to take a minute. When you're on a hike up a mountain and you're sweating and your muscles are sore and you look and you have so much farther to go, the best way to refresh yourself is to sit down and turn around and look at where you've come, how far you've come, the beautiful view behind you. It gives you a sense of purpose. It says, doing better than I thought. I can get up and turn around and go again. If you do this with tracking your data, your numbers, it can help in your business get you out of your head, out of the emotions, and you can clearly see where the systems you have built are working and maybe where they're not. We'll have to have an episode about data and tracking at some point in the future. Lyric Kinard (16:13.61) Another really, really important thing is to build a community. Have some accountability to somebody beside yourself and your students. Be with the people who get you. Share your struggles with a peer or a mentor or a small group. In the Academy for Virtual Teaching, in our free membership, we have monthly round tables. It's just a live Zoom meeting where all kinds of teachers get together and we just share our wins and we talk about our frustrations and we just support each other. It can be so helpful to just get it out and to talk to people who really get it. To talk to people who understand exactly what you're going through because they're doing it too. In fact, that's one of my favorite parts about the virtual teaching masterclass is at the end of each cohort, form accountability groups that keep going and going. And they're groups of people who started the journey together and go through the struggles, go through the ups and downs, but they encourage each other. That's so important to have people who understand support you. All right, last one. When you have a setback, reframe it. You can look at it and say, that was a complete failure. Or you can look at what just happened and learn from it. Failure is only failure if you refuse to learn from it. If you throw your hands up and give up and say, I'm terrible, I'm failure, this is never gonna work. Well, the people who succeed in business are simply the ones who didn't give up. One of my favorite sayings, I think it's from James Wedmore, was that every time you try something, you get one of two things. One, the result you wanted, or two, the lesson you needed. So what are you going to learn and do differently when you have a set? Lyric Kinard (18:33.614) All right, what do you think? Why do you do what you do? Why do you keep going? Because things are not always smooth and easy. The struggle is a reality. It's universal. Every guest here has struggled at some point in their business, but we keep going. Why? Because we don't give up. We understand where we are going, and we understand why we're Doing this, we have a meaning, we have a purpose. You have a meaning, you have a purpose. All right? We are here to learn, not to give up. So I'm gonna challenge you, do one thing this week. Pick one practice that we talked about, revisit your values, maybe download the PDF worksheet. Do one thing that will help you prepare for one. You're in struggle that will help you keep going because you don't have to do this alone. You never have to do this alone. We're here with you every step of the way. So my friend, what you do is worth doing. You as a teacher of joy and creativity and making things, you bring goodness into people's lives. You bring them joy. You make the world a better place. So don't give up. Keep doing it. Drill down into why you do it. Okay? I can't wait to hear what it is that you're doing and how this helps. Feel free to leave comments. I would love it so much if you left a review wherever you're listening so that more people can find the Creatives on Camera podcast. And as always, keep creating, my friend. Take care.