Designer Michelle Workman asks the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up,” and it’s a complicated answer. By Dianne M. Pogoda

 

It’s a question we start hearing when we’re about five, and the answer often changes countless times over the course of our lives: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Designer Michelle Workman, principal behind Michelle Workman Interiors, who presented one of the keynote speeches at the Design Bloggers Conference, reflected on her own answer to that query when she hit a crossroads in her life.

“I started thinking about that question, and my answer was always ‘Fabulous,’” she began. “I wanted to be an actress and I supported myself doing interior design while pursuing my acting career. But the angst involved with acting made me miserable. Interior design, however, was effortless. It came naturally to me, and made me happy. The lesson I learned was that you don’t always know what your dream is — even though you think you know, sometimes that’s not it.”

Workman offered some things to consider when trying to find your path.

“Think about this: What did you love to do as a child? I loved building forts,” she said. “And I always noticed the colors of the sky. This led me to design.”

She advised the audience to keep asking questions that narrow the path and take actions that help define passion and purpose.

  • What activity do you feel most confident about? “For me, it was always interior design and fashion.”
  • What brings you joy? Quite simply, what activities and environments make you happy? “We need to eliminate those activities that make you doubt yourself. For me, that was acting.”
  • Don’t be stopped by self-doubt. “For instance, I wanted to get into licensing and could have had an agent and jumped right in. But instead, I took about two years to learn about the whole licensing process. This made me much more confident about this area.” Workman currently has two licensed lines, including a wallpaper collection and furniture for French Heritage, and is working on others.
  • Play on your strengths — be determined. “The main thing with determination is to establish goals and figure out your path,” she emphasized. “Make a plan and follow it. You have to explore a lot of ideas, but don’t get distracted. Each step has to get you closer to your goal.”
  • Don’t comparison shop. “By that, I mean don’t compare your path to someone else’s, and don’t compare your success to others’ successes. Your path is your path!”
  • Enjoy and share your success, and help others along their path.
  • Handle things as they come along — don’t put things off for later, tackle them quickly and completely.
  • Define who you are. “When I meet a client, I look in their closets and at their quirky collections and the things they love to find out who they are. This brands them. Do this for yourself, too. Write down the qualities that most define you — that’s your brand. Live them and show them to the world. Look and act your brand, stay on message. And position your brand with others of similar characteristics.”

She added, “I design for my client, not myself. That’s important, because you don’t want all your interiors to look the same, and as a blogger, you shouldn’t be doing the same thing over and over, either.”