Well, it’s been a minute since I found time to make a blog post. Honestly, I’m still trying to find a rhythm with writing my newsletters and I always forget that if I’m doing a blog post as well, it takes about triple the time! My goal is to do 10 newsletters this year, so you’ll be getting a newsletter every month the rest of the year and a blog post with the majority of those. Little side note: These photos literally have nothing to do with art or goals. I went to Maine recently and just thought everyone could use some fun travel/nature photos:)
Bar Harbor, Maine
Speaking of goals….I think about them a lot. Then I try to not think about them so I don’t get overwhelmed. And then I try to think of different ways to think about them so I actually work towards them. And then sometimes I throw the goals out because I made way too many for a normal human to possibly achieve. And so on and so forth.
I also talk about goals all the time because I have daily check-ins with two friends who, while not visual artists, are also creative entrepreneurs who mainly work from home. Every weekday morning, we text each other a little list of what we’re hoping to get done for the day. We end our days with a quick phone call where we talk about how our day went - we get to share in good news as it happens, pump someone up when they have to write a hard email, celebrate a ‘boring but productive day’, and vent about frustrations and struggles of simply motivating ourselves to do the damn thing. This leads to a lot of interesting talks on what it means to be a creative and run a business based on that creative outlet. It’s a constant balancing act of bringing two seemingly opposite things (admin vs. creating, body vs. mind, intuition vs. organized thought) together to reach a common goal.
Two big things these talks have taught me, specifically about working towards goals:
1. As the three of us begrudgingly say with a lot of groaning every time it comes up ‘it’s the small actionable steps’. Small actionable steps are boring. They don’t feel like you’re getting anywhere. Until all of a sudden, you’re chipping away YET AGAIN for a boring hour at your boring desk with your boring coffee and your boring cat and I guess your entire boring life and you realize…..you’ve made it pretty far. You’ve actually almost reached your goal. You can tell your skills have improved. You got into a couple things you didn’t last year. And then you share how far you’ve come with your friends and all of a sudden you love your cute little desk and man, you make good coffee, and how lucky are we that we get to spend our lives with cute little animals under our feet and that you get to do ‘x’ for a good chunk of your days?!
2. There will never be a ‘perfect’ way to work or a ‘perfect’ way to make goals that you stick with your whole life (as much as my all or nothing brain wants to believe). It’s really just finding the perfect way for you to work right now. Make small tweaks rather than throwing out everything and trying to find an entirely new system. And sometimes that way of working right now may only last a week and next week you need to make another tweak or go back to how you were doing it before. Sometimes, you need one way of working for your good/high energy days and another for your not so great days. And that’s okay.
When I started the year, I had two major goals for myself - land 10 (non-family/friend) client jobs and make $x amount in art income. Pretty reasonable on both counts. But then the beginning of the year was slow, spring was spent focusing on my gallery show, and June was full of travel and some non-art related theatre work. I started feeling a little anxious that I had been away from working on my portfolio and submitting my work for so long -how on earth was I going to reach my goals when the year is already half over? I had only secured 2 clients and barely made 1/4 of my income goal. I thought about years past where I didn’t meet my goals and how frustrating it felt to be in that spot of simultaneously pumping myself back up to try again yet also trying to make myself feel okay that I didn’t meet them - often left wondering if I needed to ‘dream smaller’ next time around. Oof.
During another check-in not long ago, I brought up these feelings of anxiety and disappointment about how far ‘behind’ I was. We started asking questions - What happens when the small actionable steps still don’t result in you reaching your goal and how can we stop feeling like a failure when that happens? How can we hang tight to our big dreams while tweaking how we go forth achieving them?
We came to realize that often, the goals we make are not 100% in our control. They rely on other people or a little luck. Yet we still measure our success each year by these things that have zero guarantee of happening no matter how hard we work. And really, aren’t we just using the word ‘goal’ as a synonym for ‘dream’ in most cases? So when we don’t reach the goal (that isn’t even fully in our control), we feel we have lost our dream. We feel defeated and lost. We feel we have to dream smaller. Oof again.
The definition of dream is ‘a cherished aspiration, ideal, or ambition.’ The definition of goal is ‘the end towards which effort is directed.’ So for purposes of goal setting….maybe our goals shouldn’t be the same as our dreams. We’ve already established our dreams are often not in our control which means there can’t be a sure end point to them. And who’s to say even if they were realized, it would happen in the timeline we set or in the way we imagined? We’re taking these big beautiful dreams of ours - often the thing that makes us look forward to each day and strive to be better - and giving them a lot of responsibility they didn’t ask for along with the baggage of possible failure. We still want to hold on to them, we still want them as a guiding light, but let’s not drag them through the mud with us. They don’t need our silly bouts of overthinking, imposter syndrome, fatigue from another late night, or thoughts of why me (or why not me). They deserve better than that.
Bar Harbor, Maine
Okay, so we’re putting our dreams (or big picture, holy grail, wish, etc) on a shelf in our studio where we can see it in the morning when we wake up but it’s not on our desk. Our goals are on our desk. But what are those now that we separated dreams from them? Well, if goals are ‘the ends toward which effort is directed’, they should probably be 100% in our control so our efforts are almost guaranteed to reach that end. We should, by all means, make these goals in service to our big picture/dreams, but they’ll be ends in themselves. They will be the new measures of success, not the dreams that we don’t have full control over. With this in mind, I can easily picture myself feeling a sense of accomplishment rather than our old friends failure and disappointment. Chances are high I will have finished or at minimum, partially finished the goals by the end of the year. If I don’t finish them, it’s one of three things: I wasn’t realistic about how much time I had, other priorities became more important (like family or health), or I need to take a hard look at what I truly want.
To show this all in action, I’m going to take the goals I mentioned earlier that I made at the beginning of the year and share how I’ve reframed them. But first, remember there are levels to our big picture dreams - some are really big, like ideal life big, some are more practical ones for each category of life. A lot are small, specific ones that will help you get to those bigger dreams. The point is, throw any goal that isn’t 100% in your control in the Big Picture/Dream category.
BIG PICTURE (my dreams for the year, not in my control - I’m stating them, then they’re going on the shelf!!!)
1. Land 10 client (not friends/family) jobs.
*Not entirely in my control, I’m dependent on another person to give me a job and they may not because of a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with me
2. Make $x in Art Income.
*Not entirely in my control for the same reasons as above, along with being dependent on others to buy the things I sell, beholden to the budget of a business, where the economy is at, the list goes on.
MEASURES OF SUCCESS/GOALS (100% in my control)
1. Email 100 theatres my portfolio.
2. Have 10 - 12 poster/cover pieces in my portfolio
3. Send 10 newsletters
4. Create 10 editorial pieces for portfolio
5. Email 20 art directors my editorial portfolio
*The above are all items that serve my big picture dream of landing 10 client jobs. Finishing each one is the real measure of success, landing jobs will just be a bonus.
1. Build wholesale shop on Faire
2. Email 20 stores for wholesale
3. Offer mats & frames with art prints for holiday shows
4. Offer painted pots and wood items as higher priced items, along with limited art prints.
*These 4 help to serve my big picture dream of $x in Art Income. Finishing each one will mean I’ve succeeded and I’ve done all I can regardless of the amount of $ I end up making.
I added a couple more categories for my own purposes, so these may be helpful to you or not!
Because I’m realizing I do want a lot of things to happen for me that are not in my control (that I formally framed as goals), it makes me feel good and like I’m not ‘dreaming smaller’ to write a few specific ones down. I’m really just writing them down as a reminder to just keep an open eye for opportunities that may facilitate them:
BONUSES (not in my control, cool if they happened)
1. Land a repeating theatre client.
2. Land a repeating client (in any form of illustration)
3. Get into an illustration annual
These are little things I’d love to incorporate into my daily life to enhance it and help support my ‘Measures of success’. Skill-building and building my voice will help in my portfolio and being part of a community will help me gain peers, get feedback, boost esteem, and network.
ACTIONS (100% in my control)
1. Take a color theory class (skill - building)
2. Participate in online figure drawing (skill - building)
3. Stay active in online art community once a week (community)
4. Carve out time to experiment with no outward end (building voice)
Glidden Point Oyster Farm
So. I’ve simply tweaked the language I’ve used and what goes on that written piece of paper on my desk (I like to call these small tweaks ‘playing tricks on our stupid brains’). I’ve come to realize that my dreams and what I ultimately envision for myself can be separated from the goals I work toward each year. I’ve realized that my goals should be….wait for it….small actionable steps. Which means that I really just have to do even smaller actionable steps to reach those completely-in-my-control goals. It feels good to know there’s no question of if I’ll achieve my goals or not - as long as I’m able to put in the time, I will. I tend to be a little afraid to focus on things that feel smaller, so I’m giving myself comfort by writing those big picture dreams down to remind me they are still there and not going anywhere. I’m not going to think about them in my day to day or base my feelings of success on whether they happen or not, but they do exist to give me hope and a reason to keep moving forward.
This way of re-framing my goals has helped take away some of that anxiety I felt a couple weeks ago - I went from feeling like the rest of my year was already stacking up to be a disappointment to the feeling that I just may, for one of the first times, be able to say I achieved everything I set out to do.
♡
nicole
P.S. If you have any thoughts or if any of this resonated with you, leave a comment, I’d love to hear from you!