CreateHER: Naomi Smith

Naomi Smith is a name you want in your rolodex. Affectionately referred to as Noms, she has built an entire career creatively helping artists and brands come up with strategies that deliver results. Here at REC, we’re no strangers. Noms has been a member for over three years and we’ve had the pleasure of watching her grow as a creative entrepreneur and truly carve out a lane of her own.We sat down with Noms to cap off Women’s Month and talked about navigating full-time freelancing, staying inspired as an independent creator and of course, self care.What do you love most about being a woman in the creative industry?Being a woman in the creative industry well - I need to break that up, being a woman itself is already top-tier like top two and not number two so being a woman that’s a creative allows me to show up in my nature, being soft and nurturing in my feminine energy. It also allows me to use my vivid imagination and visualize beauty and creativity in absolutely every and anything so combining those two things allows me to show up in a lot of these rooms. Especially when business comes into play in a softer way that’s still stern because the artist doesn’t play about their work. It’s also nice to “prove people wrong” just from existing. We live in a male dominated world, so a little flex in their direction is always cute.You are a freelancer and navigate your own successful consulting agency. How do you balance multiple projects while taking care of yourself at the same time? Well I'm a multi-hyphenate creative or as some would say a creative entrepreneur. Aligning my gifts with what I've been called to do just worked. My day to day is really easy going because I never go against myself. How it feels is always at the top of my mind. So balance is ever changing,and honestly, there’s been multiple times where I haven’t had multiple projects and it was pretty scarce. I realize that God, whatever higher power you believe in, will remove you from spaces until you have worked on yourself so that you can silence the noise.So a combination of time management, and of course, knowing the clients that I wanna take on, then understanding the value that I can offer these clients. It all looked a lot like me getting to know my self first and that way I’m able to show up better in my business and I’m also a lot smarter when I can like understand my own thoughts and also as a consultant/strategist, you need to be able to explain those dots and show someone else you know what you’re thinking. Your job literally relies on you being creative. Who/what keeps you inspired to create?I’m really a person that’s inspired a lot by my experiences and I also find lessons in everything, a lot of my concepts specifically, when it comes to my creative direction comes from lessons that I’ve learned and ideologies that I’ve created from past experiences.  I believe that’s what I’m supposed to be seeing. I also find beauty in the smallest things so I may get an idea for a certain camera shot just from seeing something while I was on the bus in the foreground and now I’m using it for body of work. As for those who inspire me, this is gonna sound real Leo of me, but I really inspire myself. I have a really extensive crazy story thus far on this journey of life and so I’ve been able to pull a lot of inspiration from once again those experiences. Beyoncé also inspires me - shout out to the Beehive! Just seeing other women flourish really does it for me, I'm the girl in the comments to complete strangers like ‘YASSS bitch!’. I love to refer to the girls as “it girls” and I literally created a series on Tiktok about this. It’s really just women for me.What advice would you give your younger self?  I would tell my younger self so many things. She was so broken and so hurt and so lost and yet she found so much peace in being with herself. So I would tell my younger self that her current self has way more power than she recognizes. And that little feeling that she has inside of herself that’s telling her that she’s way more, she has to keep following that feeling even the small gestures. As we grow up we are going to do it more and more and more and she is doing us a big fucking favor starting now.What’s a song that you have in rotation right now? Jvke - Golden hourWhere can we check you out?Instagram Link tree