Written by Lance Hall, actor, director, creator of Launch Pad Casting Workshop and a participant in The IAE‘s inaugural class.
Since sessions at The Institute for Arts Entrepreneurship started, we’ve been working with a lot of introspective discovery and self-reflection. In the past few weeks, we’ve begun to tie it all together. The layers and layers of light bulbs keep switching on. Here are a few things that stand out in my memory:
A part of the brainstorming activity.
If you’re like me, you’ve been a part of plenty of brainstorming sessions. This past month, though, we did a brainstorming exercise in which we actually made use of our personal characteristics. I’ve never done anything like this. Things like my Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, personal preferences, shortcomings and strengths all made it into the mix. It was really amazing to see how my personal identity could sharpen different ideas, create new fronts for personal growth, and reveal where my difficulties are going to lie.
We talked about money. It might seem painfully obvious in a school for entrepreneurship, but we didn’t talk about bookkeeping, budgeting, or anything like it. We worked with our own personal history with money. There were definitely some tears among us. I think all of us were surprised how deeply our financial heritage has affected who we are and how we act.
When we started at The IAE, we were told one of the biggest goals is to cultivate whole-brain thinking. The reason for this really hit me when we started talking about money in emotional terms. An entrepreneur has to balance analytical (left brain) activities with creative (right brain) processes. A big part of that is learning to navigate the numerical (left brain) aspects of capital, and master our emotional (right brain) connection to money.
Meet the artists of the IAE.
If you’re interested in careers in the arts, finding out more about the IAE, or just discovering one of the most innovative and essential ways we can get our economy back on track (come on, one of these has to concern you), come meet the IAE:
