# Unlocking Your Potential - for Creative Professionals ## Метаданные - **Канал:** Philip VanDusen - **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vd_OP_9Rv2k - **Дата:** 21.02.2026 - **Длительность:** 1:00:36 - **Просмотры:** 456 - **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/17327 ## Описание If you’re an independent creative professional focused on professional development, career growth, and mindset optimization, this live stream is for you. In today’s competitive landscape, talent alone isn’t enough. You can have strong skills and still struggle with client attraction, confidence, direction, or visibility. In this live stream, I unpack the hidden barriers that quietly stall career development for designers, freelancers, and agency owners and why they have less to do with talent and more to do with strategy, environment, and mindset. I’ll share lessons from my own unconventional career path, including multiple pivots, setbacks, burnout, and rebuilding from scratch, and connect them to practical frameworks you can apply immediately. We’ll talk about upgrading your skillset for a changing market, strengthening your professional network, sharpening your decision making, and building the kind of personal brand that creates real agency in your career. If you’re serious ## Транскрипт ### Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) [] As a creative entrepreneur, it can feel isolating to go it alone. Imagine being surrounded by other accomplished creative colleagues eager to accelerate the growth of their business and personal brands. I'm Philip Van Dusen and I'm launching a membership community called Bonfire for creative pros like you because I believe in the power of building a meaningful network. Bonfire is a hybrid coaching, training, networking, and accountability community. A place for us to share, grow, and ignite our potential together. Need more confidence about your next move? With our fire milestone success map, you'll know what your next step should be and exactly how to get there. You get bi-weekly video sessions, private online community, a deep resource library, and exclusive access to yours truly and other amazing benefits. So, come join Bonfire, a community of like-minded individuals who are as passionate as you. Visit phipandusen. com/bonfire to learn more about the launch. Let's fuel your creative future. Hey guys, happy Friday. Well, we started off this live stream with a tech kicup right off the bat. So, I hit my countdown timer, which I did not mean to do. And — [clears throat] — um so there you go. So, hopefully it will uh the rest of the stream will go without incident. Well, welcome. I appreciate you're coming and hanging out with me today. Um this is going to be a really cool stream uh live stream. Uh we're going to be talking about unlocking your potential as a creative professional. So, um, if you're here in the chat and you want to check in, say, "Hey, um, let me know how long you've been a creative professional. " And also, if you've felt like you've been hitting any barriers at all, like, are you up against any challenges? What are those challenges? Because I'd love to address those uh, directly and, you know, really focus my talk today on what it is that you're struggling with or what you're finding to be a barrier. But I'm going to be talking about some key barriers uh that lots of creative professionals find themselves coming up against and also some really key unlocks, some real tactical things that you can do in order to overcome those barriers. And if you haven't uh connected with me on social, make sure you do that. You can subscribe to my newsletter at philipandon. com/muse. You can link with me on LinkedIn. You can uh follow me on threads. There's a lot of places to um to get in touch with me. Instagram as well. Not as active on Instagram these days, mostly on LinkedIn, YouTube, and my podcast. And so um I'm Philip Vanusen everywhere. So easy to find. Not a lot of people with my name thankfully. Um and so one thing about today, if you have a question as I go through the presentation, make sure you type question in all caps so I can see that question in the chat. So when I come back to it, um, you can, uh, I'll be able to find it and, uh, answer your question directly. And if you haven't checked out my podcast, uh, I have a podcast called The Brand is in. It's not coming up for some reason now. Um, all right. Well, there you go. Uh, second tech hurdle of today. Anyway, podcast is called the Brand Design Masters podcast. I published a really great episode this Monday. It's actually the audio from last Friday's live stream. And you know, the live stream is an hour and 15 minutes, but the podcast all edited down and condensed is about 35 minutes. And I have to say, in editing it and listening to it, it's probably one of the better podcasts I've done in a while. Really tactical and a lot of insights as it relates to building your personal brand on LinkedIn. So, you should definitely check out that podcast. And um so I think we should just sort of jump right into it today. It's snowing here in the northeast up in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. And uh it's absolutely beautiful. But I tell you, man, the snow is just relentless this winter up here. It's really something. Um I'd love to know where you guys are hailing from. Where uh it, you know, do you have any snow where you are? Are you down in the tropics? Um, my brother is actually teaching in Egypt right now and he's texting me pictures on WhatsApp of him at a pool. It's really killing me. Um, anyway, I think that we should just jump right into it. Am I coming through loud and clear? Is the audio good? I always have to check that. Um, I've had tech hiccups with that in the past as well. But so if you're listening on the podcast, when I publish this on the podcast, we're going to be talking about ### Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00) [5:00] unlocking your potential as a creative professional. Some key barriers that creative professionals hit and some key unlocks. And so with that, I think that we should just jump right into it. Okay, let me move some windows around here. Hold on a second. Okay. All right. So, let's set the stage a little bit. Let's say you're a creative professional. That's why you've shown up here today. You're a creative pro. You have some key talents, some key skills that have been getting you through your career up until this point. And maybe you felt like you started to hit some challenges or some barriers along the way. You work in a highly competitive and now very quickly evolving industry and you might have experienced some barriers in your career um some limitation in your growth. Maybe barriers are hindering your success. Maybe you have some kind of key hard skills that you're hitting barriers with. Maybe you have some soft skills that are hitting you're hitting barriers with. Um some of what I'm going to be talking about today are hard skills. Some are soft skills, some are definitely mindset based. And we're going to be talking about five key barriers and five kind of key unlocks that can really get you moving through those barriers. And then there's a big bonus at the end and that is I'm going to share with you one big badass barrier killing unlock that's going to really catapult you forward. So I want you to stick around for that. So, first of all, what do barriers look like? Barriers can be things like a lack of clients. That's the one a lot of creative professionals come up against, right? Low budgets, no funnel or a funnel that's not really performing that well. You could have tra tr trouble uh attracting clients. You might have low client retention. So, your clients are coming in for a oneandone, but they're not coming back. Maybe you're not getting referrals through your clients. Maybe you're experiencing some indecision, some low confidence in your decisions or perfectionism or what I like to call and what I have a tendency to do myself sometimes, which is procraste, but you telling yourself that you're working really hard, but what's happening is you're kind of doing the easy stuff and maybe not moving the big rocks in your business. Maybe a barrier that you have is imposttor syndrome. Maybe you don't feel worthy or you are comparing yourself to your competition in an unfavorable and unmotivating way. You [snorts] could uh be struggling with lack of decision-making confidence. So maybe you haven't set goals for yourself or you haven't really planned out your year or you haven't shared those goals with others to establish some sort of accountability so you can really keep moving and progressing in your business and in your career. Maybe you have, as I mentioned a second ago, gaps in your knowledge. Maybe that's a skill set gap. Maybe that's how to apply that skill set that you have in a way that's really going to benefit your business. Or another barrier can be a lack of a really meaningful peer network. So you [snorts] might have peers or connections, but are those really benefiting your business? Is that a really meaningful connection to you? Is that a monetized connection? Those are just a few of the barriers. Um, another one could be negativity. So that's having just basically a defeist mindset. not being able to really get past that mindset barrier that you have. Another one that a lot of people struggle with and I'm going to be talking about this a little bit later is personal brand building. So there's a lot of you know awareness with creative pros that we have to develop a personal brand but sometimes there's confusion exa exactly about how to go about doing that. What are the steps? Personal branding can be, you know, very complex to think at think about or look at as a whole. But when you kind of break it down and you get a 30,000 foot view on it, it doesn't have to be so complicated. But there is a lot of fear and confusion about building a personal brand. That can be a barrier for creative pros. And I tell you, I am no stranger to barriers. I faced a lot of challenges in my career. If you look at my LinkedIn profile and read through my CV, you may think I have this flawless career. Well, sometimes things look that way on LinkedIn or on a CV, but they aren't that way in reality. And I've had some really major career hurdles and barriers in my career. I actually started off ### Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00) [10:00] with a masters in fine art. So, I have my degree in painting, which actually at the very beginning was a bit of a barrier. But, I didn't start my design career until I was 32 years old. I spent a lot of time in the fine arts and didn't really get into design or um you know as a creative professional until I was 32. I've been laid off three times in my career. I've had to move across the country for work three times in my career. I've been [snorts] jobless for over a year twice in my career. I've had four major career pivots. I've gone from fine art to in-house in the fashion industry. Then I went back across the street to the agency world. Then I came back across the street again and started working in CPG um as an executive in a big global CPG company again back inhouse. And then about 10 years ago, I went sober uh solo. And but just before I went solo, the biggest barrier that I had that I as I hit a really serious burnout and I seriously burned out of my last big corporate gig and when I burned out and when I kind of hit the street after that, I had seven major barriers. I kind of thought about this week and I was thinking what were these barriers that I had coming out and so I came up with seven of them and one was that I was unemployed at 54 years old and to a certain extent as an executive I had kind of aged out of the industry. It was going to be very difficult for me to reenter the industry at a serious you know senior level. Second barrier was I hadn't designed in 15 years, right? I'd been managing large creative teams for the majority of my career and had not been hands-on designing for a long time. So, I was like super rusty. I never freelanced before. So, I'd never had to get my own clients. I had no idea how to get clients. The fourth barrier was that I had a huge skill gap. like I didn't know anything about creative entrepreneurship or building an email list or developing content or email marketing or how to get clients, right? I was a babe in the woods. Fifth barrier was I had no meaningful network. And this is an important one because I'd been in the industry for 25 years and I had a lot of connections, but all my connections were in big global agencies, big global in-house companies. they weren't going to be a meaningful network for my now, you know, launched consultancy. They weren't going to help me get clients really because they were operating at an enterprise level and I was really focusing now on small to medium-sized businesses and creative professionals. So, I had no real meaningful network that was going to be able to get me clients. My sixth barrier was that I had some serious imposttor syndrome. like I was an accomplished creative executive out there in the world with agencies and in house but as an independent as a you know a creative entrepreneur I had no idea what I was doing and I really felt like an impostor. The seventh barrier that I had was the first thing that I did was I actually started an e-commerce company an accessories company with a colleague of mine and we built it and we branded it and we marketed it and we got the products and we started selling the products. it that per that took about a year to do and when we got into it we realized that we really didn't want to be shipping products all day and we dropped the company after just a few months and but the thing that had done was it got me through that burnout. It got me back into loving design and really interested in creative entrepreneurship. So while it was a failed endeavor, it were actually really um formative in terms of setting me up for the next 10 years in my career. But all of those were really significant barriers. So let's talk about five key barriers, okay, in um that creative professionals see a lot. Barrier number one is having a limited skill set. So this could be limited or outofdate skills. A lot of us are starting to feel a little out ofdate right now with the tsunami of AI functionality that's coming down the pike both in terms of design development as well as uh you know copywriting and strategy and all the different applications web development of AI. there's a challenge that we have in terms of you know what kind of skills to build like what is it that we should actually learn that's actually going to help us kind of move through the next phases of our career as our industry evolves so quickly what um we may be experiencing these are barriers I'm kind of listing off these you may have limited resources right you might not have a lot of funds in order to uh kind of see you through this or invest in ### Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00) [15:00] upgrading your skills you may have a lack of mentor mentorship or a lack of, you know, kind of coaching or peer support or guidance through your career to help you with this decision-m, you may have, you know, kind of a lack or a gulf of any kind of learning programs set up or available to you. So looking at those kind of barriers, those limited skill sets, those market challenges that we have, if you've been feeling any of those things, here are just a couple ideas, a couple unlocks that you can use to push your way through that barrier. And the biggest unlock is continued professional development, an investment in your professional development. Sometimes you have to spend money to make money. And one of the things I share with my coaching clients a lot is that most companies spend anywhere from 15 to 20% of their gross revenue per year on marketing. Meaning they spend that 20% of their revenue on promoting their business to get more business. One of the things I see in creatives all the time is that we don't do that, right? We just are, you know, we work our network, but it's not like we're actually investing in order to build our business. So sometimes you actually have to invest, but you can actually upgrade your skill set and do professional development on the cheap too, right? There's, you know, one of the things that it just blows me away constantly is the explosion of available free content and training that's available on YouTube. So YouTube if you don't have and there are you know people in developing countries around the world that make massive use of the learning that's available on YouTube and we can do that as well. So if you don't have a lot of resources YouTube is a great resource for you. Um, LinkedIn Learning is also a really great resource and there's tons and tons of really focused creative professional level professional development learning on LinkedIn and there are a number of different AI certifications that are popping up all over the place. Some of them are kind of bogus, but actually pretty strong programs. So, you could look into AI certification, too, depending on your curiosity around that and how you see that could benefit your particular career. There's um a guy who I um have always been very close to. His name is Daniel Scott and he has a Adobe training program called Bring Your Own Laptop. And I'm an affiliate of Daniel's and if you go to byol. me/fillip, you can sign up for Daniel's entire access to Daniel's entire catalog of Adobe training. And he is one of the best Adobe trainers out there. He's spoken as a keynote speaker at the Adobe MAX conference. He is no slouch and his trainings are absolutely incredible and he's got a really amazing vibe to him and he's keeps totally up todate on what is um what's coming out in the Adobe sphere and I know there's a lot of negativity around Adobe right now and I share it right because they are really squeezing people by upping their monthly subscription to $89 a month. I mean, it's crazy. And so, a lot of people are jumping ship on Adobe, but like myself, I've spent 30 years in the Adobe sphere. And so, keeping up on Adobe does make sense to an extent if that's the way you want to go. And a lot of people who are in-house in global agencies or in-house in um in large corporations are still in the Adobe sphere. So, Daniel Scott's trainings are amazing and they're like $12 a month. I mean, for $12 a month, you can get access to his entire training suite. It's incredible. So, go to yol. mefilip and sign up for Daniel Scott's Adobe training if that's something that you want to invest in for your professional development. And another thing that you can do is you can do some one-on-one training with me. I do professional coaching for creative professionals. And if you go to phipvanddusen. com1, you can learn more about how I work with creative professionals for coaching. Another tactic in learning how to overcome the barrier and um kind of unlock your professional development is to I'm backing up, sorry. Is to assess your skill sets. So assessing what kind of skill sets do you have? Do you have a T-shaped skill set? Meaning are you super talented in one particular area? Most people who work in global agencies or in-house are have T-shaped skill sets because those sorts of organizations hire for T-shaped skill sets. They want you to be an expert in ### Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00) [20:00] one thing and they will surround you with experts in other things. But when you're a creative professionals who's independent, you really have to think about developing more of a V-shaped skill set. So that's your one superpower, but then a number of different ones that are in varying other degrees. So think about how you could expand your skill set. And in a previous live stream I did a couple weeks ago, I talked about it in terms of what is your design plus. If you are a video editor, could you get into audio editing? motion or 3D design? If you're a copywriter, could you start doing some graphic design? could you learn about paid advertising? What is the um added skill set that you could tack on to what you're currently doing in order to make yourself more viable and more attractive in the marketplace? And one of the you can do this by learning these things yourself or you can do it through strategic partnerships and that is making network connections who that's with people who do things that you don't do. So essentially you are expanding your ability to offer more things but you're doing it through partnerships with others. people who are white labeling their services under your umbrella or acting as a partner for you and you're using them as a subcontractor. This also goes both ways. You can offer yourself out to others as a subcontractor. This is just one of the ways that you can um overcome that barrier and really start thinking about your professional development and investing time and energy in your professional development in a different way. All right, the next barrier that I want to talk about is when your network isn't working. Here's a very important slide. And I shared this in a live stream a couple weeks ago, but I want you to really take note of this slide. And that is where do clients come from for creative professionals? 60% on average of new clients for creative professionals come from your network and referrals. Only 15% in general comes from promotion and outreach or cold outreach. Then there's content marketing. So attraction, content, inbound marketing. Average [snorts] of 25% of new clients come from that. But 60% on average your network and referrals. And I challenge you to look at your own kind of new business and you know incoming new business and new client prospects and see if it reflects this. See if you are getting that kind of major volume from your network and from referrals. And if you're not, that's something that you definitely want to look at. [gasps] You may feel isolated. You may feel that you have a lack of connections. These are the sorts of barriers that creative pros feel around this. You may have no meaningful network, one that actually results in the sorts of client referrals that I'm talking about. You may not be going to events or conferences. developing or nurturing or finding new connections. That's what this barrier looks like. So let's talk a little bit about what some unlocks for the barrier of your network not working for you. One of the tactics is to join a mastermind group. Just going to be really upfront about this. The mastermind group that I run, Bonfire, is just one of those areas that can really, really unlock a lot of challenges and barriers with networks very, very quickly. It brings you new opportunities, an overnight um network of peers who can act as strategic partners, who can refer you clients, who can um you know increase your skill set, your soft skill set, give you that kind of peer feedback that you may be missing. Joining a mastermind group is a really great tactic to start working on the problem of your network not working for you. Another tactic is to join a professional community. There are a number of them out there. Um, some of the members of Bonfire that are part of my membership community are also members of BNI, which is Business Network International, which is a networking group where uh you meet with other professionals in different industries and you network with each other to the benefit of each other's businesses. There's the DMI, so if you're in design management, that's the design management institute. There are AIGA chapters all over the country, American Institute of Graphic Arts, a number of professional communities. And if you're not involved ### Segment 6 (25:00 - 30:00) [25:00] in any kind of professional community, I challenge you to try to really explore the possibility of doing that. Another tactic, and I was shocked by this, I've been kind of polling the creative pros that I work with a lot around how many conferences or events they go to per year. And I'm really shocked with how little people are actually showing up in real life to these amazing networking opportunities. And so I challenge you to look into where you might be able to go to a local conference or travel to a more national conference, things like VidCon or Social Media Marketing World or Adobe Max or Fuse or South by Southwest. There's a whole ton of conferences that creative professionals have a tendency to congregate at. Now, yes, I know you're then networking with people who are in your industry. They're not outside. They're not going to be direct clients immediately, but the thing is that they are going to be a meaningful network for you. that design plus. They're going to be those people that you could develop strategic partnerships with and possibly work with, right? or bring into projects that you have. You could also connect with peers through LinkedIn groups or Facebook groups. You can exchange ideas and leverage each other's networks that way. Another way is to expand your offering, and I spoke about this just a second ago, is expand your offering through strategic partnerships. So, you're networking with other creatives who do things that you don't do, and then you're using those people as subcontractors. So, if you're a graphic designer, you might be able to offer video editing and audio editing. If you're a copywriter or if you're a, you know, ad creative developer, you might be able to network with someone who actually sets up ad campaigns and runs ad campaigns on LinkedIn or Facebook. And doing those sorts of strategic partnerships can really expand your ability to offer more and therefore have a much broader possibility of prospective clients out there. Broadening that top part of your funnel. That is a great tactic as you look at how you can expand your circle and how you can build a network that is actually working for you and bringing you those referrals. The next thing, the next barrier that I want to talk about is indecisiveness and what I like to call the confidence gap. What this barrier can look like is you have to think about the fact that decision making is a critical skill. So what is the confidence gap? The confidence gap is kind of the distance between knowing what to do and then how to get it done or feeling like you have the skills and the motivation and this decision-making confidence to actually start moving that confidence gap. You know in your head what you want to do or you may have an inkling of what you need to do but you're not able to really kind of put the wheels in motion and get those gears turning. You may have trouble making decisions how to get new clients, how to market yourself, how to price your work, how to arrange the copy and the customer journey on your website. Maybe you have questions about how to organize your business, how to build an email list, how to uh establish some sort of financial infrastructure or project management infrastructure in your business. These are big decisions that we have to make as creative pros and they're tough decisions and if you make the wrong one it can kind of lead you down the wrong path or establish a real false start as you kind of grow and expand and refine and improve how you run your business. Another l uh another barrier can be lack of guidance or lack of mentorship. you don't have a a career sherpa to kind of lead you up to the mountaintop right to advise you. All of this leads to a level of decision paralysis or if you are making decisions sometimes making poor decisions those are the sorts of barriers that you could categorize under the inde categorize under the indecisiveness or the confidence gap. So let's talk about few a few of the tactics that you could use in order to kind of surmount that. Again, building a network of trusted peers. the getting feedback on your ideas, getting feedback and uh on your challenges, growing that circle of confidence. Networking to establish a level of business leverage in a really purposeful way is one of those things that you can do that can really bridge that confidence gap. You can engage a coach ### Segment 7 (30:00 - 35:00) [30:00] like me or find a mentor through LinkedIn or through some professional network, someone who can advise you as a guide to help you make those decisions and someone who has experience longevity in the industry that can give you some perspective that you may not have. Another [snorts] way you can bridge that confidence gap is internally and that's by setting goals and holding yourself accountable to those goals. sharing those goals with others so others also are keeping you accountable to those goals. I encourage folks to set smart goals for themselves. Smart goals are um specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. That's smart, the acronym. And there's if you search that on Google or on chat tpt you can get any number of kind of worksheets or charts that help you set smart goals for yourself. But that's something that I encourage you to learn how to do. It can be very effective in giving you some direction and setting out a path for you to make progress and work your way through some of these barriers. And here's the really big unlock for this in setting goals for yourself. And that is setting up accountability for your goals. As soon as you share your goals with others, they become very real. It's very easy to cheat on yourself. If you're setting a goal and saying, "I have this goal. This is my thing that I'm going to do. " And then you don't tell anybody about it. Those kind of goals can really slip and you can cheat on yourself. As soon as you share it with somebody else and establish some sort of transparency to your goal and some sort of uh accountability that you have to others, there's this very invisible and incredibly powerful thing that happens that can help you really move through this confidence gap um and this barrier which is you somehow subconsciously feel that someone's watching and that really helps you kind of move forward and make progress really quickly and really get the gears in motion to accomplish these sorts of goals. And that's the sort of thing that comes also with a peer network or some sort of a, you know, a network uh group that you're part of is sharing those goals and being held accountable to those goals. All right. Next, the next barrier we're going to talk about is limiting beliefs and selfdevaluation. What this barrier looks like is just feeling less than. It can be comparing yourself incessantly to others. And in that comparison, feeling less than and finding that and having that turn out to be very debilitating or very immobilizing. Creatives tend to be very sensitive and emotional people. That's what makes us creative. That's what gives us our superpower. But it's also our Achilles heel. Sometimes we tend to suffer from self-doubt. We have imposttor syndrome I think in many times more so than some other professionals. We compare ourselves to others a lot. You may have the pressure of having the sole responsibility for the success of your business and feeling very alone in that kind of professional isolation. Those are some of the things that characterize this barrier of limiting beliefs and self devaluation. Some of the kind of key unlocks you can use is to feed your mindset. Finding a network of supportive peers who you can share your struggles with and who you can draw positive um positivity and motivation from is one of those unlocks that's it takes a little work, but it doesn't have to be as difficult as you think it is. And it's practicing what I like to call mindset mirroring. By associating yourself and gathering with peers and sharing challenges, sharing your goals, sharing accountability, it sets up something that I that is called mindset mirroring. And I have um a quote from a guy named Ehart Tole who wrote a very powerful book called The Power of Now. And that quote says, "When a log has only just started to burn and is placed next to one that is already burning fiercely, after a while when they are separated again, the first log will be burning with much greater intensity. After all, it's the same fire. " And that's the thing. If you have people who are on fire and motivated and moving and growing and progressing in their businesses, they're on fire and you put yourself in proximity to them. You can't ### Segment 8 (35:00 - 40:00) [35:00] help but catch on fire, too. It's mindset mirroring. It's bringing that proximity together, and you can't help but be infected by that kind of positivity, energy, and motivation. And so finding a network of supportive peers is one of the quickest and most powerful unlocks or tactics that you can use to overcome that barrier. Another one is to feed yourself really good brain food. And Ekarolei's book, The Power of Now is a really great book. There's a million great mindset books out there. Another one that I really like uh which is very helpful in helping you really understand how your brain works and those kind of negative power pattern loops that can happen in your brain and how to kind of shortcircuit those. There's a book by a guy named Richard Carlson who wrote uh don't sweat the small stuff and it's all small stuff. That was the sub subtitle. incredibly uh you know kind of influential book millions and millions copy of copies sold around the world he also wrote a book called and it's a really stupid California self-healthy self god I'm stumbling a lot today stupid California selfhelpy sort of title which is you can feel good again but that title completely does not do justice to the level and the intensity and the depth of the content that's inside of that book. And so that's another really good book that I recommend. You have to feed your brain really good food in order to get that motivation in, you know, in the lack of having a supportive peer network or in concert with to do that sort of thing. Also, getting an experienced outside perspective can also really help you with this. getting a mentor, getting a coach, establishing a relationship with some sort of trusted adviser. It could be a skip level manager at the job that you have. It could be someone that you connect with on LinkedIn. It could be, you know, hiring someone as a coach, professional coach. But to get some outside perspective to help you really see from the outside what it is that you're doing and maybe the blind spots that you have can really help you kind of break through that barrier of limiting beliefs and that kind of selfdevaluation which can be incredibly immobilizing for creatives. Barrier number five is feeling powerless. We in our industry have lots of opposing forces that come at us. There's globalization of our industry, the downward pricing pressure that comes with globalization. There's the commoditization of the work that we do. There's, you know, if you're mid to late career, there's um very strong and powerful agism in our industry that can threaten your career. there's the, you know, tsunami of AI that's coming at us right now. And, uh, that can feel very threatening if you don't address it in the kind of most aggressive way really. Um, you can feel invisible. You can feel a real lack of agency. You might not have a personal brand or feel visible in that way or credible in that way that you haven't established any kind of um, you know, free level of agency that you own in terms of your digital um brand. You could be creating content um that's really working to attract clients. So maybe you're not doing that, but you know that you kind of should probably be doing that. feeling powerless around that kind of dynamic of the ability to find your voice and to start establishing some level of visibility and credibility and delivering value online so you can really attract clients through what you know there can be you know the fear that comes with the idea of starting to do this stuff there can be a lack of commitment to even if you are starting doing it to kind of doing it very consistently. So lacking that commitment, you might have challenges in like where do I even start? Like I don't have any ideas. I don't know even where to start with this. What to write? Whether it's writing, whether it's other audio content, video content, like what should I even do? the barriers of building that creativity muscle when it comes to the creativity that's necessary in order to start building a personal brand. ### Segment 9 (40:00 - 45:00) [40:00] Those are some of the barriers that I would characterize as feeling powerless. those opposing forces, that lack of agency, that inability to understand where to start or even if you have started how to stay consistent with that, a lack of understanding of like or ideas around being inspired about what to even talk about, what to even share, what kind of value to put even put out there. The tactics around, you know, kind of um getting over that barrier of feeling powerless look like this. It's building a personal brand and establishing a voice around that personal brand. I'm going to share with you a tool that I developed and it's uh it the personal a brand positioning statement is a construct of develop that they use in brand strategy and I've kind of tweaked it. So, it's geared towards developing a personal brand positioning statement. statement is pretty simple. It's who are you? What do you offer? What's the value that oh, sorry, what do you offer? Who do you offer it to? What's the value that it delivers? Why you're better and why you're different. Those are what's included in a brand positioning statement. And I have a tool. It's a lead magnet that um is a PDF. You can type right into the PDF. It's very cool. And the URL, I apologize about this, but the URL is really long, but I'll put it on a slide for you. It's phipvanus. com, but it's brand-ositioning-statement- optin. Okay, I didn't think much about this URL, and I didn't do a shortened URL. Sorry about that. Um, but essentially it's a PDF tool and you can download it if you go to this URL and [snorts] uh you can type right into the tool and it's really easy. There's some instructions and it's a way for you to kind of get your head around who you are, who you're offering value to, what is that value, why is it better, why is it difference is establishing you and positioning you in the market. There's another tool, take a screenshot because I'm going to switch your slide. There's another tool that I want to share with you and that is another tool called the personal brand wheel and this is a super powerful tool. Personal branding can be kind of overwhelming. There's a lot of moving parts to it and this is a tool that I developed that is loosely based on the idea of the um uh it's uh of the life wheel that life coaches use. And I've kind of shifted it and changed it so it really focuses on personal branding and the 12 different kind of key aspects of personal branding. So you can get a 30,000 foot view of what it is that you need to build and also assess what you've done or what you may need to do in order to kind of really look at how to build a personal brand. It's essentially kind of a targeted road map for where to start. Helps you build your credibility. It helps you understand where you are in the process and building that personal brand will really help you attract the colleagues and the peers that you need in order to kind of start building that referral engine that's going to really ignite your business. Another tactic in terms of another tactic you can use to you know kind of surmount that barrier is stop consuming and start producing. I get asked by people a lot like what kind of content do you consume? what it is that you consume, Philip. And I said, I say a lot of times, you know what? I actually don't consume a lot of content. I produce So, I don't spend a lot of time surfing, ingesting content. I have made a you know very clear decision to not consume as much and really focus on putting out value, producing value for people to help transform people, help add give value out into the world. And so a tactic that you can use in order to kind of jumpst start this process is try to limit how much you're actually consuming and put a little more time and energy into thought about how you could start producing. Start a content ideas list. What do your clients need to know? What are the questions that you're constantly being asked? come up when you're going through the process of the creative process that you do with your clients? What do they ask you? What do they stumble with? What are the sorts of things that you think ### Segment 10 (45:00 - 50:00) [45:00] everybody knows but turns out a lot of your clients don't know right? What kind of education do they need? This is one of the things that I hear also from my coaching clients a lot and that is like I am so sick of having to educate my clients. It's so timeconuming. It's so wow wow. Right? Here's the thing. Educating your clients is the absolute best thing that you can do because you're controlling their understanding of the value it is of what you're doing. So having that opportunity to educate your clients shows them the value of what it is that you do. And that's what you can do in developing content. you can start putting out into the world an educational platform for what it is that you do and the value of because that's going to attract people to you. So, think about it that way. Another way to think about it is to if you want to help people who are um in your industry who do what you do, think about where you were a year or two ago. What was it that you've learned in the last year or two that really helped you move to where you are now? What were the challenges you had? What were the questions you have? What did you just learn? And try to share that back with the people who were just one, two, three steps behind you. It's a really great way to start thinking about how you could get started developing content. If you think about the problems or the questions that people have and [snorts] start answering those questions, another challenge or tactic I have for you around this is to just publish something right now in that podcast that I uh published on Monday about LinkedIn and AI's effect on LinkedIn and that platform and how it's changing the power of the LinkedIn platform. One of the things I talked about was carousels. Carousels on LinkedIn are still the highest engagement um format of content on LinkedIn. The cool thing about carousels is that they are snackable. So, it actually doesn't take a lot of writing, copy that you have to develop to do a carousel. And there's a lot of templates for carousels out there. So you could write like 150 words, 200 words of content, break it [snorts] up into a dozen slides, have some cool visuals around it. Your last slide is a call to action with content um you know, contact information for you. It's a really low lift way of starting to get into content. LinkedIn is the best platform to do it and carousels are the best format to do it in and it's a great way to get started. You want to start, you want to start to be heard. visible. You want to start to share what you know. [snorts] That is one of the best ways to get over that barrier of feeling powerless. All right. Now, I want to share the biggest badass unlock of all, and that is a mastermind group. I run a mastermind group called Bonfire. It addresses almost all of the things that I was talking about here today. It addresses growing your skill set, moving from a T-shaped to a V-shaped skill set. It addresses marketing challenges. So, the threat of AI and all the changes that are happening in our industry because of that. Being part of a mastermind group also helps you network and build a peer network literally overnight when you join. You have a series of peers who are in your industry who are going to have your back and give you feedback and help you get over that kind of that confidence gap in your decision- making. They also can act as a referral source for you. They can also act as a collaborative or strategic partner resource for you. Uh the feedback that you get can really help with those limiting beliefs and that level of selfdevaluation that I was talking about. It can help you make you feel less powerless. You can feel less victimized. You can ha feel like you have more agency in your career. And also I run Bonfire and it's a group coaching and mastermind platform. So I provide group coaching to all the members in that group. Depending on the level that you're in, you can also get one on-one direct coaching from me at about a 50% discount to my usual rates. And so you can get that level of mentorship from someone who's been in the industry for 30 plus years, both on the agency side, client side, and also building my own personal brand, my own content engine, and my own business. And so I do I've done coaching with hundreds of creative professionals and mentored ### Segment 11 (50:00 - 55:00) [50:00] hundreds of creative professionals through my career. I've hired more than 4,000. I figured this out. interviewed more than 4,000, hired more than 400 creative professionals in my life. So, I've been there and done that. And I bring that knowledge and that depth of experience to my bonfire group. And I want you to keep this in mind. The people that you surround yourself with are more critical to unlocking your potential than anything else. You have to be in the room with the right people to really establish that level of mindset mirroring that is going to move you forward and merely make true fast substantial changes in the barriers and the tactics you're using to get over those barriers and to unlock your potential in your career. That story that I told you from Echarolei in his book, The Power of Now, when you surround yourself with other people who are on fire, you cannot help but catch fire too. Which is why I named my group bonfire because we gather around and we give each other power. insight. We give each other support. It's an amazing group. You're surrounding yourself with a group of peers who are on the same journey. You have access to me as a mentor and a coach. You will get guidance and inspiration and accountability to your goals. It will add rocket fuel to your development and your ability to unlock your own potential. You get tools, you get motivation, and more than anything else. You're just not alone in this journey anymore. Mastermind groups were one of the things that when I burned out of my big last corporate gig and I was up against those seven barriers that I told you about, mastermind groups were the thing that got me over that. I joined a paid community and got really active in it and I moved forward so much more quickly and unlocked my own potential that really led to my doing what I'm doing now. It and that's why I'm so passionate about I've run mastermind groups for the last five years. It really changes people's lives and I'm super passionate about that. And bonfire is held on Zoom. So we meet four times a month. Two of them are mastermind sessions, one is an office hour section session and one is either a visiting expert or an inspiration session and you get group coaching from me and you get these mastermind zoom meetings, office hours, etc. All of this is recorded. So the sess session recordings are online on the community [snorts] and uh it's a private online community. It's gated so if you're not a member you can't get in. There's a tremendous resource library of playlists and downloads and checklists and PDFs and toolkits and tutorials that are available hundreds that are available to people who are members of the group that you can download from the moment that you walk in. You also get a substantial discount, a 50% discount on my brand strategy 101 course. So, if you're interested in learning brand strategy, it's a great way to get started with that. The other cool thing about it is that because I am leading this group, if you take brand strategy 101, I am there to help lead you through the implementation of that strategy capability within your own business. And so this is just a smattering of some of the kind of resources uh that are available within Bonfire. Uh it's an incredible value ad. I think it's the resources inside of there. The fact that they're all aggregated together is an amazing benefit on top of the building of a peer network and those in-person interactions that happen on Zoom. And in terms of an investment, investing in your business, at the beginning of the presentation, I was talking about how most businesses invest anywhere from 15 to 20% of their annual revenue in promoting their business. The membership fee for Bonfire is $97 a month. It's 291 quarterly. Uh, so there's a discount and uh, so it's extremely affordable and I highly recommend that you check it out. If you go to philanusen. com/bonfire, you can read about the different levels of Bonfire. Um, but the base level membership is all you really need and it will it'll be the best investment that you've ever made in your business. I can guarantee that. If you I challenge you. If you become a member of Bonfire in 3 months, if you don't feel like it's the ### Segment 12 (55:00 - 60:00) [55:00] absolute best value you've ever gotten, I will refund your money. Money back guarantee. If you join and are an active member of Bonfire for three months and at the end of that three months, you don't feel like it's really moving you forward much more quickly than you ever could have on your own, I will refund your money. Okay? So just check it out. Really, it's an amazing group and I and if you are experiencing any kind of barriers in your business and you feel like you really need to unlock your potential, I guarantee you it is a fantastic place to do that. And so again, if you're interested, go to philipfandusen. com/bonfire and check it out. If you are interested and serious about possibly becoming a member of Bonfire, hit me up either through email or via LinkedIn. Let me know that. We'll jump on Zoom. We'll talk about where you are in your business and we'll see if Bonfire might be a right a good place for you and we'll just chat about it. No pressure. And um you can decide for yourself. And with that, um, if anyone has any questions about today's presentation, um, be happy to answer them. Uh, Jorge, good to see you here again, man. Um, too late. That's okay. You'll have to check out the replay. It's, uh, I think there's some really valuable information today. I think that we all experience um you know uh barriers in our business and I know that I have had some significant barriers in my career through uh you know barriers and pivots that I've had to make throughout my career as well as barriers that happened when I kind of hit my huge burnout 10 years ago and then had to start my independent career. Um I think that you'll be interested in hearing about that. Um, procrastin heard it somewhere. I love that term because it really is. It's like I I'm very ambitious. I'm also kind of a workaholic. So, I work a lot, but I also have a tendency to procrastinate and be a perfectionist. And so I will put off trying, you know, getting involved in moving the actual big rocks that are going to move my business forward. And sometimes just tidying things up, working on my to-do list, you know, answering my email, trying to keep it at email box zero. That's the kind of thing that makes me feel like internally like I'm working, you know, I'm working so hard, but what I'm doing is I'm kind of procrastinating on the big things that I need to do. And it's a it's it self procrastinating is kind of like a self soothing mechanism and it makes you feel like you are you're in there, you're doing it, but when it comes down to it, you're not really addressing the big things that are going to move your business forward or your career forward or your mindset forward. You're kind of nibbling on things. And I'm I that's one of the things that is one of my biggest challenges. And uh so I'm just putting that out there. I don't know if you can identify or not. Um, so you guys, this has been great. I'm not seeing a lot of questions coming in, but that's totally cool. Um, we're actually hitting right on the hour, which is pretty amazing. My uh assistant Josel Tech has a tendency to uh to tell me that I couldn't do a one-hour live stream if my life depended on it. So, um I think we're hitting it right on time. But uh this has been really awesome. It's great to see you guys today. Um, I hope you have a fantastic weekend. As I said, it's like snowing up here in the Catskill Mountains and upstate New York and it's beautiful out and I'm going to get outside, get out in the snow a little bit. And I hope you guys had a fantastic week and um, you got some ideas and some tactics and some ideas about how to address look at differently these sorts of barriers that we have as creative professionals. And I hope that I was able to kind of supply you with some ideas and tactics and methods that you can start to use to get over some of those hurdles for yourself. And uh if you are struggling with uh anything that's a barrier for you, subscribe to my newsletter, phipvandusen. com/muse. I will put that up on the screen right now. And uh when you get the welcome sequence three or four emails after you join my email list, if you just hit reply, comes right to me. So if you have a challenge or a barrier that you're struggling with, subscribe to my newsletter or my email list and then just shoot me a note. Let me know what that is. I'd be really curious to know. ### Segment 13 (60:00 - 60:00) [1:00:00] And so you guys with that, this has been awesome. Thanks for joining me today. Um, I appreciate your being part of my world and uh this has been fantastic and I hope you have a great um a great weekend and a great week next week. So with that, take care. See you next time.