Prized for what you do, but the creative work feels wrong

One of the most unsettling moments in any creative career is realising your skills are on fire, but your relationship with the work isn’t. You still deliver and impress, but something about it just feels "off". Not a clear-cut walk out the door "off" – nothing that easy. You probably question if it’s even a real feeling. Trust me, if it’s impacting your confidence and motivation, that feeling is real. 

It could be that you are ready to do some work on evaluating your values and skills. At the risk of stating the obvious, skills and values are not the same thing. I say this as I’ve asked enough people to tell me their values, and the first thing they tell me is what they are good at. Skills are what you have learned to do well. Values give meaning to doing them. 

When your work no longer reflects your values

When you started out, you probably found your values and skills overlapped quite naturally, or at the very least, the discordance was easy to spot. For example, I value community, but no, I don’t want to be a police officer – that sort of thing.

Later on in your career, it is very easy for skills to outpace values, especially in commercial creative industries that actively reward dexterity and output often over talent. Ironic as your natural talent likely got you the job. And so, over time, you become super proficient at delivering things you might not always deeply connect with. Simply because the rewards are seductive and high. And because you become very good at these skills, nobody questions it, least of all you.

It is very, very easy to stay functional inside work that no longer matters to you, for a while. I work with high-performing creatives who command rooms and stadiums. They know how to navigate difficult personalities and show up and shine, but they talk to me about boredom, resentment and feeling small. They’ve adapted for so long, they’ve stopped checking in on what they have grown into.  

What happened to those values?

Values don’t disappear, they just get lost in practicalities, paying the mortgage, holding on to status and yes, staying employable. Revisiting your values doesn’t mean you have to blow up your world. It just means giving yourself permission to ask yourself a few questions and ground yourself in the process.

What matters to you now? What work drains you the fastest? Where do you still feel energised, engaged or useful? What have you been putting up with for too long? 

How can creative coaching help?

A good creative coach will support you through the questioning process and allow you the space to work on your values. It’s energising work that gives you a fresh blueprint for how you want to show up, be it in your existing role or a pathway to a new one. 

If you want your values to really mean something, invest in working with a coach who uses techniques that go beyond listing words. Finding and owning your values is good foundation work, but so much of it is done too quickly. So do invest in a process that really goes deeper than ticking off words you like.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a place for words and lists, but you’re not a commodity. I’ve worked with enough brands and people over the years to know that owning a handful of words isn’t enough to set you apart. Which is why I trained in a tool known as The Collage Coaching Technique™ (CCT). In short, the CCT is a three-stage process that uses imagery, play and storytelling to connect with the unconscious brain and trigger a deeper, more honest relationship with what motivates and what doesn’t.

Unlike words, which can be shaped to sound right, images can feel more unexpected and emotionally revealing, with meanings that are personal to each of us. CCT can be a helpful way to challenge unhelpful narratives that develop over time, particularly around your role and identity in the workplace. And because CCT connects with intuition, it can flag up that all-important misalignment between a skill and a value.

And there’s one more thing, perhaps the most vital thing of all for anyone advanced in their careers. It’s never too late to learn a new skill or to let go of one that no longer fits. Be guided by your values, and the rest will come.