Ja-Nae Duane has worn many creative hats in her career. She started off as an opera singer where she performed at places like The Met and the White House, but soon realized it wasn’t a sustainable career.

So she branched out and started working for a social networking company, which was the beginning of her entrepreneurial journey. While working there she realized the major difference between the way men and women approached entrepreneurship. This led her to start a group called Wild Women Entrepreneurs, which grew to 55 chapters in nine months.

After a stint running her own companies, Ja-Nae realized other people probably needed help with their own entrepreneurial journeys too, which is why she wrote The Startup Equation, a book that helps owners throughout their business journeys.

In this episode, Ja-Nae talks about how vulnerability leads to great work, why you need to stay in touch with your creativity, and why your mindset is so important.

Here are three things you can learn from Ja-Nae:

Vulnerability Often Leads to Our Best Work

When it comes to our art, many of us take the easy road. We work on things that come easily to us. We work within our comfort zone. We work on things we think will be popular.

But the truth is, our best work comes when we open ourselves up to vulnerability. Our best work comes when we dive deep and create something personal. Our best work comes out when we feel anxious about it, but put it out there anyways.

That’s exactly what Ja-nae discovered about her greatest work.

“Whenever I start to feel anxious about something that I’m putting out, particularly something that’s creative, because when we’re creating something it’s usually personal. And what I find the more personal that you can get in all of your work, and that can be professionally, that can be in stuff that you’re doing artistically, but the more that you can actually gear it into diving deep and really getting it close and under your skin, and then exposing it to the world, almost like ripping off a Band-aid and just exposing that sort of flesh to the world, that’s really where vulnerability and fear can be drivers, and that’s usually what our best work is.”

Ja-nae feels like our work is concentrates too much on the surface level. She feels like a lot of people are creating just to put stuff out there. She believes we are creating too much fluff.

Ja-nae believes our best work gets to the heart of humanity. It explores boundaries. It helps us connect with other people. It transforms the way we live.

“I find that many people are just putting stuff out there to just put stuff out there, but if we’re not actually getting to the heart of humanity, what’s the point? If we’re not really exploring the boundaries of what life is, and what it could be, and how we can interact with one another, and how we can transform in the way that we live and breathe and create, that’s interesting. Everything else is just fluff and noise in my book.”

Stay in Touch with Your Creativity

Ja-nae began her career as an opera singer, but later transitioned into marketing after realizing how unsustainable being an opera singer was. She found a lot of success in marketing and even created her own marketing company. What she didn’t realize was that she was becoming depressed because she lost touch with her creativity.

“You know, I actually think there was a little bit of depression in there… You know, I knew something was wrong. I knew something was off for years and I didn’t necessarily know exactly what it was. And it wasn’t all of this, but it was a large part of this. And what I found was, I was the least happiest when I was known as a marketer, and I was viewing that as my primary living and running that company… I liked the challenge and I love strategies, so those two things fueled at least my brain, but there was nothing that really intersected with my heart. And I think that emptiness was really something that stuck out more than I knew. And sometimes when you live in it so long, or with something for so long… you almost forget that it’s there or life could be without it.”

Ja-nae forgot what drove her. She was so concentrated on her business and being successful that she lost sight of something that made her happy. So she decided to bring creativity back into into her life.

“I realized how far I had gotten from my roots, we’ll say, and how much that had affected me, and so that’s actually one of the things that I have really started to bring back into my life.”

What she discovered was that sometimes we need other people to point out the obvious. With the help of her husband, Ja-nae was able to get back on track with her creativity.

“I find that that type of reaction is something that, unless we have people to call us out on it or unless we are super self-aware all the time, that we fall in to the patterns, and we sometimes forget our potential and the potential of what life could be.”

That’s why Ja-nae advocates surrounding yourself with the right types of people. We need people who will help push us. Sure, you could rest on your laurels, but when you have people pushing you, you tend to create your best work.

“I am truly a firm believer in surrounding myself with people who will push me. Who won’t just allow me to sit idly by rest on my laurels but will really say… ‘Are you good with this? Is this what you want or do you feel like there’s more that you can do here say in the project or in life? I noticed this pattern.’ To me you have to surround yourself with people that won’t just allow you to go idly through life but will really be your… companions to help you to thrive, so that you get the most out of it.”

Mindsets Make All the Difference

Often times the hardest thing we have to overcome to be successful is the way we think. We hear things all the time that sound right, but are actually a deterrence to our success: We need to be thrifty. We are not good enough. We are stuck in our current situation.

One of the things Ja-nae had to overcome was growing up poor. She started off believing she had to horde her resources, but what she realized was that giving lead to great success.

“When a person grows up poor or has a lack of resources it becomes very easy to horde those resources and keep things close to you because you’re afraid that they’re going to go away if you don’t. And the thing is, it’s the exact opposite. If you’re looking for things and for more resources, being that connector and opening yourself up, and whether or not you’re volunteering time or you’re connecting people with one another or even if you’re offering up a bit of expertise to people… Being in a state of giving is one of the first things that I would say to people.”

But the most important thing Ja-nae did, was changing her negative self-talk. Instead of looking at things in a defeatist way, she looked at ways she could solve her problems.

“The other thing I would say… and this was huge for me. This would actually be number one is change your self-talk. So instead of I can’t or the world’s against me or I don’t have enough. Just switch that slightly to I will find a way. I have what I need for today. What are the ways that we can push this forward? Just change it to… it doesn’t have to be fluffy… but if you do change it to this almost problem solving verbiage instead of this defeatist verbiage, then it allows your brain to start to compare and contrast different ways, and find a solution.”

Another thing Ja-nae found helpful was surrounding herself with the right type of people. The people around you can have an immense impact on the way you think. So if you often find yourself in a negative mood, see if the people around you are affecting the way you think.

“If you’re looking for a change… you’re just not happy with where you are, then I would take a close look at who you’re surrounding yourself with and listen to how they talk to you, how they talk to one another. What is their work ethic? How do they contribute to the world? Are they in a constant state of giving? You know, we are the average of the five people we surround ourselves with the most.”

One of the biggest positive changes we can make in our lives is surrounding ourselves with people who push us to do our best.

“If you are unhappy with where you are, change your environment. Change the game, and surround yourself with people that you don’t feel deserve to be around or you feel like an impostor. Because again, that fear… will force you to be a little more vulnerable but will also open up more doors.”

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