We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Naomi Vladeck. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Naomi below.
Hi Naomi, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.
In the speech my father gave on my wedding day, he remarked on what he described as my, “beginning of new ventures.” I was, he recalled, “A child who was very frighted by a new adventure.”
I grew up with that story about myself. That I was afraid of change.
I was the kid who didn’t go to sleep overs, school trips or rollercoasters. Instead, I was a planner that preferred to stay close to home.
My childhood home was chaotic in ways that led my young mind to make up a contract that I would remain close to secure my own safety and the continuity of my family.
Before his death, and for a period in-between, I began to test my life-long assumption around change.
I co-founded my first non-profit, Rivertown Artists Workshop, making myself the center of something instead of the “best second” in the business, always supporting other people’s success.
Seven years after my husband died from symptoms related to his alcohol addiction at the age of 44, was I finally able to take a risk I avoided for much of my life.
As I became more certain of my courage, and my children more stable in their lives, I quit my full time job, took out a home equity loan, and decided to pursue my coaching business full time. The risk to claim my my gifts as important and put them center stage in my life was a massive shift. Less than a year later, I have a growing practice and will have published my first book, Braving Creativity; Artists that Turn the Scary, Thrilling, Messy Path of Change into Courageous Transformation,” to be published in May 2023 by New Degree Press.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
Twenty years ago, on the lunch line at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, my graduate performance studies professor approached me. “What I am about to say is important,” he said, Then he said, “You must teach.”
At the time I had no place to file his message. Being a teacher didn’t fit any idea I had of myself. Until then, I had very little vision for my life at all. I pursued a Masters in Performance studies because it combined my love of artists with my passion for creating opportunities for the artists I knew and admired. But what I would do with it, was still so unclear.
I started out as a grant writer with the avant- grade theater director Anne Bogart and the SITI Company in New York, followed by fundraising jobs that included a five years as the Director of Development and Planning at Dance Theater Workshop in New York. I followed a career in fundraising in the arts because it put me squarely in the middle of a community that I had always felt at home with. I was good at drawing stories out of artists and also innately committed to nurturing their success. During that time I performed as a theater artist, but I never wanted to pursue a career as an artist. I knew that my talent sat somewhere in between the art and the artist.
In 2013 when my children where five and eight, I put my intuition to a test and founded my first nonprofit to support mid-career performing artists working in dance and theater who were looking to test new work in small settings.
I was a planner, so finding the spaces we would perform, raising the money, building the membership for the business and promoting the mission was second nature to me. But what I cared about was the artist herself. Identifying the artists and drawing them out to brave the creative expression of something new was thrilling.
Now, my coaching business is dedicated to supporting those same artists and creators, people who want to test the assumptions and beliefs that have kept them from reaching for all they know in their heart they desire.
When we have reached mid-life and later, we have been through big-life-change and transition. People we love have died, parents became ill, children struggled or flew the nest, marriages ended, careers ended. This is the stuff of life that impacts the whole life of the artist.
With out attending to that whole life, it can be hard to find our courage for change. That is what I want for my clients. I want them to have the courage to attend to the parts of themselves that are calling for creative expression and to have a champion in their efforts.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
I think the lesson I had to unlearn is that the fear of failure was reason enough to not risk trying.
When I was training to be a coach 25 years ago, I showed up at the in-person trainings (before anything like zoom existed and before smart phones). I took a train from New York City to D.C. and spent five weekends in a hotel for monthly intensives. I participated in dyads, in triads, in group games and group coaching sessions. I did it all with vigor.
Except for one thing. One thing triggered my fear of judgement with such intensity that I froze every time: The fishbowl.
A fishbowl is a training tool in which two people sit across from each other to demonstrate a new skill while everyone else watches.
I was a theater minor in college. I had spent plenty of time on a stage.
But in this performance, there was no script. Just the thought of being in the fishbowl triggered a part of me that believed that I was not smart enough to “get it right.”
Unfortunately for me, at that time, I didn’t know what was causing such profound and painful resistance to jumping into the bowl.
It was a really sad time, because it left me feeling that something was wrong with me. It made no sense to my rational mind. I was making every other effort but the one I wanted to the most.
The only conclusion that my mind could find for my fear was the thought that if I allowed my coaching to be observed in the fishbowl, everyone would have the proof that I wasn’t good enough.
And that unconscious belief – that I wasn’t enough – was so powerful and effective enough to keep me playing small for another 20 years.
I have taken hundreds of thousands of baby steps over the past twenty years until my husband’s death catapulted me into a space where I could finally release that belief.
Now (seven years later), I still have to tend to that fear of being found out as “not good enough” on occasion. But I don’t believe that doing a mediocre job will kill me. In fact, the lesson I have learned since is that being “good enough” is part of the creative process that helps us manifest all that we are capable of becoming in our lifetime.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
Hands down the most rewarding aspect is watching my clients move from contraction and doubt to liberation and fulfillment. Every day I get to spend my time working with the stories that hold even the seemingly most brave creatives back from fulfilling their heart’s desires. When I look back on my life so far, it makes so much sense that I would focus my creativity on champion other artists to take risks, because that was what I feared the most in my own life. I had to unlearn being afraid of being as true to myself as was possible because I was afraid that my truth and my success would cause some kind of rupture. Somethings have been lost along the way, yes. But so much more has been gained. And having lost so much, I know the time we have to commit to our life’s work is limited, which makes it even more essential to start trying.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.creativitymatterscoaching.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/creativitymatterscoaching/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/naomi.vladeck/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/naomi-vladeck/
- Others: I would love you to join my Author Community (https://www.
creativitymatterscoaching.com/ bookrelease )
Image Credits
Alison Sheehy Photography Hannah Duncan Photography