Sherrita Niles

I attribute my success to putting my energy into work that brings me joy and that I am passionate about while helping community servers restore through art and creativity. Over 20 years working in the nonprofit space has given me the experience, insight, and tools to bring the therapeutic art approach to my audience. Someone once told me to ensure that I am doing everything with joy, and I feel like that is kind of the momentum of how I live and how I work. If it doesn't bring me joy, then that brings me to a point where I need to look into this and figure out if there's something else I need to be working on, because if it doesn't give me joy, then it's going to eventually turn into burnout. I also had someone recognize from the outside that I was giving away my greatness for free and that people actually pay for this, which helped me turn my ideas into a business. Knowing where my heart is has given me direction and helped me remain aligned and anchored to what I believe and where I feel like my work is centered.

The best career advice I've ever received came from someone who was just an associate at work who looked at me and said, 'You are giving away your greatness for free, and people actually pay for this.' Having someone recognize from the outside that what I had to offer was beneficial was really important. Another piece of advice that was most important to me came from a woman I worked with. We didn't talk much, but I remember her saying one time in a meeting, 'All that you do, ensure that you are doing it with joy.' I feel like that is kind of the momentum of how I live and how I work. If it does not bring me joy, because joy is definitely different from happiness, then that brings me to a point where I need to look into this and figure it out. If it doesn't give me joy, then it's going to eventually turn into burnout.

The first piece of advice is, know where your heart is. Entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart. Knowing where your heart is will give you direction. That will help you to remain aligned and anchored to what you believe, where you feel like your work is centered. And even if it doesn't get you there immediately, at some point it is going to lead you to where it is that you are ultimately supposed to be, because that's what I feel like has happened for me. I started at just strategy for organizations, and being a person who was about community and helping people, I've now figured out who those people specifically are.

My biggest challenge is I don't want people to view this work as just a cute art session that people are participating in. Making sure that I am using the right language for people to understand, but at the same time, I don't want it to come across as another professional development program, because people who work in community are either currently burned out or very close to burnout in most cases. With budget cuts and resources that have been lessened, that means less people doing the same amount or more work for the community, so people are overextended. Finding that sweet spot of making sure people understand what it is that I'm offering, that it can be fun, it should be, and it's going to help you develop a level of joy, but it is not a paint and sip or some of those things that people do just for entertainment. This is actually for restoration. This is to bring you back to your center. This is to make sure that you can continue working in your passion for as long as you determine that you want to do that. That's the biggest challenge for me, finding that space where communicating what I do demonstrates the importance of what I do.

The things that I value most are, number one, joy. I honestly believe that if there is no joy, then there needs to be some reflection. I definitely value family and the alignment of family and what family is. Family is a source of community, so community is big for me, but family is a smaller community than the broader community that we work in. It's just as important because the connections that you have to other people help to realign you to joy, honestly, because we weren't meant to do things alone. We weren't meant to be alone in general. I feel like just remaining connected, whether it is in the community, in my family, in the business community, because there's different silos of community, those are the things that are most important to me. Connections and joy rank very high for me.