What does balance look like?

Back in March of this year I was invited to speak to a group of creative and entrepreneurial women about the evolution of my weaving business, and to answer their questions about some of the decisions that I have made. They asked great questions! It really got me thinking about the winding road that I am travelling on, and sparked far more thoughts than I could share at the time, so I thought I’d put some of my musings here on my blog.

I posted some thoughts on starting out in my business here. This second post is my reflections on the eternal question…

How do you balance running a business with developing your own creative practice?

If there is anyone who finds it easy to do this, I have yet to meet them. For most people this is a continual work-in-progress, and inevitably so because nothing is ever stationary for long.

I know that I have been in the place of thinking “aha, I have this all worked out now, and I have a lovely balance in my life between these diverse interests and pursuits” and five minutes, five days, five months later something in the environment shifts and changes (oh hello, pandemic, fancy meeting you here) and I have had to shift and change in response. And if there’s ever a moment when the universe isn’t changing around me, then it’ll be me doing the changing, as my interests evolve and develop. So my perspective on this is that balance is never achieved, there is only the act of balancing.

As it happens this is something I have been giving a lot of thought to lately. For the last two and half years I have been working on a big project which has (i) sucked up most of my time and attention, and (ii) given me a way of working that has been fairly stable. It’s been a very creative project, but it has also been a very outward-directed one, and I think this is an important point. Because running a business can in fact be a very creative experience, and I have learned to enjoy all sorts of things that I never imagined could be enjoyable. No, I’m not yet a passionate enthusiast for the filing of tax returns (an area of business where creativity is perhaps regarded less positively). But thinking of ways to present information on my website, streamlining the booking process for workshops, working out how to get yarn and dye information onto labels: these can be quite niggly things, but there is also scope for learning, for fun and for experimentation there.

So a really important aspect of the balancing act is expanding my ideas of what creative work looks like. It turns out that those three things I mentioned — learning, fun, experimentation — are key elements that help to make work feel creative and energising for me. But it is also the case that the majority of work in running a business is focused on the experiences of others: the experience of people who visit my website, who join a workshop, who purchase something from me. It matters enormously to me that I make those experiences as good as I possibly can, and so my antennae are always tuned to the response that I get to my latest experiments.

Making icons, presenting course material, arranging cakes for contextual photos… All part of the job.

However, I also need space and time just to listen to myself and to explore my own ideas. This is the aspect of creative practice that is perhaps most difficult to incorporate into running a business and yet, for an artist or a maker, it is also the most essential. My intention, not always achieved, has been that 20 per cent of the time I spend working should be spent on my own creative work. And, now that my all-consuming project is moving into a new phase, I’d like to increase that proportion to 40 per cent.

Because, ultimately, my own ideas are basically all there is here. If I don’t have those to offer, then what is the point?

When I think about this, the story that always pops into my mind is one told by Grayson Perry when he gave the Reith lectures. His series was entitled Playing to the Gallery and you can still find it on BBC iPlayer or buy it as an audiobook. There’s a section towards the end of the final lecture where he describes the work that goes into putting on an exhibition, and he conjures it up very vividly. He describes the empty white room at a big museum which he has to fill with work, for everyone to look at, and for the press to review and comment on. And this work has to sell, because his income, and potentially the income of several other people, depends on it. But on top of all of that, he notes, there is the expectation that he will go into his studio and create this work “with the carefree joy of a child”. The audience laughs, as well they might, because it sounds like a recipe for insanity.

And yet, and yet… that is basically the act of balancing we are all trying to pull off in life, isn’t it, whatever we work at? Perhaps the question is less about time constraints and more about the fear that I sometimes hear people express, that “if I had to do it, it wouldn’t be fun any more.” I think that might be a topic for another post.

What does balance look like? was posted by Cally on 12 June 2025 at https://callybooker.co.uk