Office Hours with Patrick
Stuck on your website, portfolio, pricing, marketing, or business strategy?
Office Hours is a one-on-one, 60-ish minute conversation to help you work through whatever you’re trying to figure out. No agenda. No curriculum. No pitch. Just honest feedback, thoughtful questions, and a fresh perspective.
Learn more or book your session:
https://theterriblecreative.com/office-hours
Have you ever sat in a high-stakes room, looked around at the expensive titles and corporate validation, and quietly wondered when the actual adults were going to arrive to take over?
Eventually, you realize they aren't coming. Everyone is waiting on everyone else.
In this episode, Patrick Fore breaks down the messy, internal reality of managing high-stakes commercial sets when self-doubt is screaming in your ear. From a midnight operational collapse in a mildew-ridden Chicago elementary school to the quiet realization that authority isn't announced—it’s just transferred—we look at why the room doesn't actually need your internal confidence. It just needs your presence.
Audio Clip
Mark Watney (The Martian): "You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem. Then you solve the next one, and the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home."
What We Cover in This Episode:
- The Silent Room Rotation: What happens when an agency producer panics, an interpreter doesn't show up, and a room full of people quietly decides you are the grown-up in charge.
- What Clients Actually Buy: Why a commercial day-rate isn't an invoice for an f-stop or a camera body—it’s a premium insurance policy to absorb chaos and shield the client's timeline.
- The Insecurity Tyrant: How to spot the director who treats authority like a volume knob, and why micromanaging your crew forces them to let you fail.
- Borrowing Nervous Systems: The psychological power of co-regulation on a stressful set. Why clients don't hire cocky geniuses; they hire stable anchors.
- The Universal Shift: Why the Impostor Filter isn't a photography problem. How teachers, parents, and business owners all navigate the exact moment responsibility arrives long before certainty does.
Deep-Dive References
- The Impostor Phenomenon (1978): Shifting the perspective on the foundational study by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, and exploring why the people who feel like frauds are often the least fraudulent minds in the room.
Resources
The Book
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Podcast written, produced, and hosted by Patrick Fore.
Music licensed through
Epidemic Sound and
Blue Dot Sessions.
Recorded from my garage in San Diego, California.
What is The Terrible Creative?
The Terrible Creative is a storytelling podcast for photographers, designers, and creative professionals working through the parts of the creative process no gear review or business course ever covers.
Each episode is 30 to 40 minutes. Solo. Story-driven. Built around mental health, artistic identity, and what honest work costs in a career rewarding performance over truth.
This is not a photography podcast about cameras, presets, or client strategy. This is a podcast about the inner experience of being a creative professional, made for the mid-career photographer or designer who has mastered the technical side but lost the thread.
Hosted by Patrick Fore, commercial photographer, author, and former lead photographer and brand designer for Taylor Guitars. His work has appeared globally for clients like Nike, Petco, and Verizon. He built this show because none of the podcasts he found addressed the real problem.
If you are a photographer or creative professional who feels competent on the outside and quietly lost on the inside, you are a Terrible Creative. This is your podcast.