Welcome to the first Peer-To-Peer exchange between the talented Tara Joyce and yours truly.

My question for Tara

How do you apply the advice and suggestions you offer your clients to your own projects and endeavors?

Tara’s wisdom for me!

This is a really interesting question… and I found myself a bit perplexed when answering it. At first, I sat and stared at the question for a long while, trying to frame my answer, and then I wrote the beginnings of an answer twice but each time I got jumbled up in my thoughts.

What I’ve come to realize is that I need to re-frame the question a bit in order to answer it as I don’t necessarily apply the suggestions I make to my client’s to my own projects. If I do suggest applying advice, it almost works in the reverse, with me first applying the suggestion to my own projects, and then subsequently sharing these findings with my clients.

As a designer and writer, it is undeniable that my own experiences and perspectives shape everything I create, or co-create with others. But, what I strive to be conscious of when working is to not fall into the trap of reliability. What I mean by this is I avoid employing solutions whose relevance is reliant on the fact that the idea worked in the past. I truly believe that just because something has worked before, or more specifically, has worked for me, does not mean that it will work for my client’s specific problem.

If I were to verbalize my problem solving approach it would be to see each client, and their problem, with complete openness and refrain from giving answers until the right questions have been asked. Once we’ve done this together – framed the problem – I may find a solution that worked in the past is applicable, and I will make that suggestion. But, I may also find that I’ve got no idea what next steps are needed, and in that case, I will continue to explore next actions collaboratively with my client.

So, to summarize my long answer to what seemingly is a simple question of “how I apply past experience to my own projects or my clients” is… very carefully! I do the work first to understand the unique situation presented – either my clients or my own – and then I determine if past solutions could apply, and if so, in what ways?

Before I stop writing this answer, I do want to say that when I am designing with my clients, my eyes, ears and heart are always open to the cool solutions we create together and how they could apply to what I am creating in my own world. I suppose a cool thing about what I do is that inspiration and growth flow both ways — from me to my client, and from my client to me. I learn from them as much as they learn from me! I suppose in a way I need to say thank you to each of them for what I have created in the world!

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Interested in cultivating meaningful female relationships in your personal or professional life? Visit Elastic Mind to read about Tara’s question for me!

Mentors

If you missed what mentors mean to us, check out Tara’s experiences and mine here!