Stop Shrinking: Why Creative Business Owners Can’t Afford to Play Small
A school superintendent told me to be meek and mild. I thought he was helping. Twenty years later, I know better.
There’s a particular kind of silence that isn’t chosen. It’s assigned.
I was a new school administrator, eager in the way only someone who genuinely loves the work can be. I sought out my superintendent, a man with experience and authority, and asked him to mentor me. I wanted to learn. I wanted to grow. I was ready.
What he gave me has stayed with me for nearly two decades.
We were talking about women in leadership when he leaned in with the tone that says I’m about to give you something valuable. He told me that women who enter leadership make a mistake. They get loud. They get bold. They try to play in a man’s world and lose their way doing it. They become bulldogs, aggressive, mean, and hard.
Then he smiled and said, “Tricia, the best thing you can do is remember you are a woman. Be feminine. Be meek and mild.”
He meant it as a gift, and I received it as one. He’d been raised by a strong single mother. He respected women. He was trying to help me.
It took me years to understand what he actually said: Be quiet. Be small. Know your place, and make it a pleasant one.
There’s Always a Label Waiting
No matter how people, especially women, show up in leadership, there’s a ready-made word waiting to cut them down to size.
Too bold? Bulldog.
Too nurturing? Mother hen.
Too blunt? Aggressive.
Too composed? Cold.
Too passionate? Unstable.
Too strategic? Calculating.
The words change, but they all do the same job. They tell you you’re taking up too much space and should adjust.
Before I left my most recent job, I spoke up for my colleagues. I saw how decisions hurt people I cared about, and I said so. I wasn’t aggressive. I was direct and honest, and I advocated for my team.
My boss told me to quit being a mother hen.
In one sentence, my advocacy became interference, and my care became control. I’ve thought about that moment a lot, not with bitterness, but with clarity. What it revealed wasn’t something about me. It was a system that’s very good at making people feel like the problem when they’re actually the threat. Give someone a nickname, and suddenly they’re the one who’s supposed to feel ashamed.
I won’t. Not anymore.
Creatives Get Their Own Version
If you run a creative business, you’ve probably heard your own version of “be meek and mild,” whatever your gender.
Keep it a hobby. Have a backup plan. Don’t charge too much; art should be accessible. Don’t be so self-promotional. Let the work speak for itself.
Like my superintendent’s advice, it usually comes from people who believe they’re helping: teachers, parents, mentors, and friends who love you. And it arrives sounding like wisdom. Stay humble. Don’t make waves. Be grateful anyone buys anything.
But it’s the same instruction underneath: be small.
What Shrinking Costs a Studio
Here’s what I want you to understand. Every time you make yourself smaller to make someone else comfortable, you practice smallness. You rehearse it. Over time, it stops feeling like a choice and becomes how you run your business.
In a studio, shrinking is expensive, and it shows up most in your marketing:
You soften the class description until it doesn’t say anything.
You post the class once and never mention it again, because posting twice feels pushy.
You don’t ask happy students for reviews, because it feels like begging.
You don’t pitch your private events to the office down the street, because who are you to call them?
You hide behind photos of the pottery and never show the person who made it.
Then the classes don’t fill, and you decide the market isn’t there. Usually, the market is there. It just can’t see you.
“Let the work speak for itself” is lovely advice for a gallery. It’s terrible advice for a business. Work doesn’t speak unless someone carries it to the people who need to hear it. In your business, that someone is you.
You don’t lose your voice all at once. You lose it one softened sentence at a time.
You Were Never Too Much
The boldness they warned you about isn’t a flaw. It’s a feature.
The people who refused to be meek and mild, who were loud and direct and got called every unflattering name there is, weren’t doing it wrong. They were doing it first. They cleared a path that cost them something real, so the people who came after could walk it a little more easily.
Your instinct to speak up, to lead with both courage and care, and to tell people what you’ve built is not a liability. It’s one of your greatest assets, and it belongs to you. It doesn’t belong to the organizations that benefited from your strength while pushing you back into your lane. It doesn’t belong to the leaders who slap a barnyard nickname on your boldness. And it doesn’t belong to the voice in your own head that has rehearsed smallness so long it sounds like common sense.
It belongs to you, and your studio needs it.
Take Up Space This Week
I believe action is the only thing that truly cures fear, so here’s your assignment.
Believe your worth now. Not after the next win, and not when you finally feel ready. Believe it right now, as someone who has already survived every attempt to make you small.
Use your voice in your marketing. Rewrite one class description without softening it. Post the class a second time. Ask three students for reviews. Put your face next to your work.
Take one bold step. Whatever move you’ve been circling, whether it’s the price increase, the pitch, or the event, take one action toward it today. Not perfectly. Just forward.
You were never the problem. You were always the point.
— Tricia
Ready to Be Seen?
If your studio is great and too few people know it, book a free call with us. Chase and I will help you build marketing that sounds like you at full volume, not at half.
About Tricia Fox
Tricia Fox is a creative business consultant who helps artists and studio owners build profitable creative businesses. She and her son Chase co-founded Mud Hut Pottery & Art Studio in Riverside, California, where they run classes, studio memberships, private events, and school programs. Tricia brings ten years in sales and more than ten years in marketing and digital advertising, and Chase brings the craft and day-to-day studio operations. Together, they advise studio owners on the decisions they’ve already lived through. Learn more at triciafox.org.
