Professional Ethics: Knowing Where to Draw The Line
Making a distinction between personal and professional life
Practicing as a creative can be quite the experience. Unlike other professions where your person can be kept separate from the role in which you function, it can be a little tricky to make that distinction as a creative. When your process, workflow, and creative outlook are shaped by personal anecdotes, experiences, and the like, it is easy to find overlaps in your personal life and the representation of your creative journey and process. While this is one of the things that makes you unique as a creative, there are downsides to this overlap that can be harmful to your creative journey and how people experience you professionally when you are not mindful enough to keep personal life separate from your creative work and related affairs.
The creative scene largely operates on an informal framework; deals are brokered over phone calls and chats, a random mention by a friend in a conversation can get you your best-paying gig of the quarter, and creative huddles when you have to collaborate are filled with as much banter as work-related conversations. Sure, this air of warmth and friendliness fits right into how the creative space functions, but many a time, it blurs lines. You can begin to feel a sort of indebtedness when clients then turn to friends. And on the flipside, it can breed a sense of entitlement in the creative towards the client.
As commonplace as it is to find client-friend relations in the creative space. Very few are protected by boundaries. Although relational experience differs from one creative to another, there are some things you can do to keep your personal life from overlapping too often with your life as a creative professional.
Recommend people only when you can vouch for their work. One of the ways we see personal relationships come to play in the creative industry is in referrals. It is a lot easier to refer someone because you know them than it is to refer them based on the excellence with which they conduct their creative work.
Refrain from sharing extremely personal details with clients and collaborators when they have no impact on the work at hand. This would protect people from carrying burdens that ideally aren’t theirs to carry. However, if you are navigating a difficult moment (like loss, grief, an illness or family crisis) that has a direct impact on how you show up creatively, it helps to communicate this in an honest manner without overwhelming your client or fellow collaborators with extensive details.
Despite what might be going on in your personal life, practice fair pricing. It is a knee-jerk reaction of sorts to make moves to price projects highly when you have a lot of operational expenses to cover. As much as your financial life is important, it should not lead to a great distortion of your pricing model or how you typically navigate pricing conversations.
Regardless of how tempting it might be, when you are at loggerheads or in a conflict with another creative, it is advisable to contain the situation and not bring that conflict into your relationships with other collaborators. Using professional relationships and interactions to air personal grievances would seldom look great on you.
It is understandable if it feels rather impossible to separate your person from your work and creative process; it is necessary to hold them distinctly from time to time, especially when the overlaps start resulting in both parts of you melting into one. This distinction protects people around you from carrying unnecessary burdens, it protects you from being taken advantage of due to proximity, it protects your reputation in the long run, and lastly, it keeps a part of your life as yours alone to experience.