Split Personality No More
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know I try to practice living an authentic life, experimenting and following intuition. Recently this practice has been educational so I wanted to share the story.
I started this blog under the name “Product: Humans” as the home for the content I create to inspire people to live an authentic, intentional and creative life. In parallel, I was working on a website under my name, “Yael Gavish Art”, for my paintings. You don’t have to be a great marketer to know that you can’t put different offerings for different audiences under the same brand, so I created two.
Writing 40+ blog posts so far felt, well, not easy, but right. In contrast, posting to my “Product: Humans” social media accounts felt off. I didn’t enjoy it, and it wasn’t getting much traction. Something about it felt artificial, like I was speaking through a façade.
I pay close attention to areas of stuckness in my life. When things don’t flow, I always ask myself why and what would make them easier. I knew something was wrong for a while - but I couldn’t figure out how to change it, so I let it go, knowing something would eventually shift and reveal the answer.
Last week a friend told me about a startup blogger who, in addition to writing, also organizes events and travels to various cities in Europe. I tried to understand why I should care about these extracurriculars. “It makes him more interesting - he gives me a sense that he does different things!” was my friend’s response.
The next day another friend filled in my readers’ survey, saying: “What if you talked more about becoming an artist… how you began your journey back to it?”
Living in alignment means listening when the universe tries to tell you something (through friends, your conscience, your gut, your mom, God - whichever entities you believe in or pay attention to). Within 24 hours, the universe told me twice that putting more aspects of myself into my work would make the work more interesting.
That shift I'd been waiting for was happening. After another day of thinking and journaling I realized: I was cutting myself in half and putting one half under “Product: Humans” and the other under “Yael Gavish Art”. I was writing to you about getting in touch with my creativity through art, while composing an “artist statement” about my desire to live more authentically. That’s why a lot of the work on the art website was duplicative. That’s why the social media barrier of another name between me and my audience felt forced. The answer was unifying all my work under one “brand” - me.
My mind went into overdrive. “People who like my art won’t necessarily want my blog posts. People who like my blog won’t necessarily want to see my art. I’m going to confuse everyone. Everyone will unfollow. It doesn’t make any sense.”
But it felt intuitively right. I created new problems, but solved everything that felt off about my work in the past few months.
My mind can’t explain it. I don’t know what my Instagram account will look like. I don’t know if all of you blog readers will unsubscribe en masse once you see my paintings, which some may consider too risqué, ugly or boring. This decision doesn’t align with any marketing textbook ever written. But if I encourage people to live authentically then I have to be authentic in the content I create and the way I live my life, and this is what feels authentic right now.
It’s a lot easier to follow the known, set path than to live in the unknown. But to me it’s more exciting to go with my intuition and see what I learn from the experience. My next gig could be a 9-to-5 job if this creative path fails.
Or it might be rewriting some marketing textbooks.
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