Jessica loves guesting on podcasts!
Hi podcaster —
Is your podcast audience made up of creatives, freelancers, and/or creative entrepreneurs?
If so, I can help your audience feel seen and give them tools to finish and launch their big, ambitious projects.
I’m an author and indie cartoonist-turned creative business strategist. My coaching specialties are helping mid-career creative professionals to solve income gaps with business model design and offer development, as well as with creative productivity and executive function.
That means I help creative people build businesses designed from the ground up to meet their financial needs without burning themselves out or sacrificing their creative integrity.
And also I help creatives carve out time and focus for their own highest-priority projects (you know, the ones that always get back-burnered for client-led “emergencies”).
What sets me apart from other business strategists and productivity experts is that I work from the assumption that we are not widget-cranking machines. Productivity for its own sake is useless (and soul-killing).
Creative work is different, qualitatively, and finishing and launching require specific strategies to reinforce self-belief and understand the typical pitfalls of the creative process.
And creative businesses need to start from the baseline assumption that they should meet our needs comprehensively: Starting with our financial needs, but including the need for flexibility, autonomy, and creative engagement.
As a creative pro myself, I bring a deep, personal awareness of the difficulty—and necessity—of putting future-building, speculative work ahead of the day-to-day demands others make on our time.
The hardest things to achieve are those that are on no one’s agenda but our own! But those are also the most important.
Some of my key topics:
- The foundational principles of starting with your own needs and building your creative life and business around who you are (instead of living reactively)
- How being stuck in the “Dark Forest”—the hardest part of the creative process—can be a very good sign (It means you’re trying something ambitious)
- The four-stage Creative Engine framework for diagnosing where you’re getting stuck (and how to use that info to get unstuck)
- The three paths to financial sustainability for creatives
- The importance of creative people getting paid for their work (and the cultural reasons why this is so fraught)
- How to face down perfectionism and finish giant projects that scare the heck out of you
- What it means to be a finisher, and how that can change your life in ways you don’t expect
- Why scarcity thinking short-circuits your ability to make good decisions, and how to sidestep that trap
- How to make confident decisions about what is most important to you, so that clarity can become a litmus test for which projects to focus on
- How to face your fears about visibility and get clear about what you’re sacrificing by hiding
About me:
I’m Jessica Abel, author of Out on the Wire: the Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio, and Growing Gills: How to Find Creative Focus When You’re Drowning in Your Daily Life (as well as nine other books of and about comics that are probably less relevant to your podcast!).
I’m the founder of Autonomous Creative, and leader of our three primary programs. The Creative Focus Workshop teaches creative productivity and executive function in a highly empathetic framework. Authentic Visibility is non-grody marketing for marketing-averse creatives. And the Autonomous Creative Incubator is a business accelerator for serious creatives who are ready to quit being so broke and turn their amazing creative expertise into a sustainable and profitable service-based business.
My own podcast, the Autonomous Creative, is a virtual studio visit with creative people digging into the truth of how they’ve built their careers. I also produced a single-season fully-scripted podcast (Out on the Wire) about telling compelling stories that hit Apple’s New and Noteworthy when it dropped.
I’d love to help your audience get unstuck and making the work the world needs!
Sample Interviews:
The Grown-Ass Woman’s Guide with Jackie MacDougall
What Works with Tara McMullin
The Creative Penn with Joanna Penn
Think Again by Big Think
CopyBlogger with Sonia Simone
The Broad Experience with Ashley Milne-Tyte
Entrepreneurship Elevated with Mike Michalowicz