Why Teaching Is One Way To Support Your Creative Practice

In this week’s video, I talk about two ideas for day jobs: teaching, and having a business that uses your creative skills but isn’t your art practice.

Lots of people choose teaching as a day job.

If you’re a full-time, preschool through high school teacher already, this idea that teaching is somehow so easy and undemanding that you can plop a 20-hour a week artistic practice on top of it, may make you feel like screaming.

I get it. Even if you “only” teach ten months a year (and spend the other two months worrying about how to pay your bills instead of being free to lie on the beach in Maui), teaching is tough.

Yet, I am recommending teaching as a day job. Why would I suggest it?

You don't have to teach at a large institution

‘Teaching’ can be more than working at a school, if you want to take it in a different direction.

If the work of teaching appeals to you but working at a school does not, ask yourself these questions to spark your creativity about how you would like to teach.

1. Who do you want to teach? Adults, children, adolescents, dogs, cats, gardeners, ukulele students, painters, photographers, travelers? Who are your students on the inside and out?
2. What do they need you to teach them?
3. How would you teach? In person? Or using Zoom or Skype or other web-based tools?
4. Would you teach individuals only, or could you teach people in groups?

Technically, personal growth coaches like Tony Robbins, people running for office, public relations people, religious ministers and pretty much everyone marketing their work, are teachers. They’re teaching us how to grow, teaching us about why they need our vote, why we need to believe something or buy something or do something.

When you start looking at teaching through that lens, opportunities to do it are everywhere.

The other topic in the video is the idea of applying your creative skills and making them into a day job. My favorite example is the standup comic who combines his writing talent with his irreverent wit in his webpage and marketing communication writing business. There are businesses and people who actually seek out writers who can make their customers laugh (and come back for more).

There are myriad possibilities, especially when considering whether teaching as a day job could work for you

What have I learned since I shot this video a month ago? That when I step back and allow my brain and eyes to let go of the focus on How Things ARE, how things COULD BE starts to emerge.

If you want help designing your own day job, I still have one opening in my day job pilot.

I am also starting a new beta program: How to Peacefully Sell Your Art. If you’d like to learn more.

Let me know in the comments below: would you consider teaching as a day job to support you and your creative practice? Why or why not?