Lesson Info
15. When to Get Help & Saying No
Lessons
Embracing Yourself as an Artist
08:13 2Actionable Goals to Achieve Your Dream
06:09 3Setting Intermediate Goals
04:15 4Creating Actionable Tasks
05:29 5Develop Your Business's Personality
02:51 6Your Messaging & Communication - Part 1
01:11 7Your Messaging & Communication - Part 2
03:41 8Successfully Promote Your Work
09:21Lesson Info
When to Get Help & Saying No
when you get strategic about work habits or even when you're not. Um but especially when you are you realize that you may need help, that there are just certain things you don't have time to do because if you're already chunking out and organizing your time and you're still not getting everything done, like the thing that I actually don't find that painful to do, but always ends up being the last thing I do is reconciling my books in quickbooks. I do, I still do my own bookkeeping. I have an accountant and she helps me with my taxes, but I still do my own bookkeeping. Um And so it's occurred to me lately, maybe I should have somebody come in and do this for me, but it has to be somebody I trust to look at my bank account and all kinds of questions. Um There's always going to be things that you realize you're not good at or that you resist doing and those are the best things to turn over to other people and hire other people to do when you can afford it. Okay, hiring help, how do you kn...
ow when it's time first question you wanna ask yourself is do I have specific teachable tasks I can hand over and this is in the case of hiring an assistant or somebody to come into your studio or home office to work with you or your shop or whatever. Um Not if you want to hire a coach to help you with time management for example, or if you want to hire a consultant to help you with your bookkeeping, this is um you obviously want to make sure that if you're hiring a consultant or an accountant that you have stuff to turn over as well. But really what I'm talking about here is um stuff that people are going to maybe come to your studio or your office to do. Do I have things that I can hand over? Am I willing to hand anything over for this person to do or do I am I do I not trust anyone else, you have to be able to trust other people to do work for you. Do I have systems set up that will make our work working together flow. In other words, is there a way my employee or my assistant can or my business partner, my business manager, can they access my workflow? Can they help me with getting all of these things done? What aspects of these things can they contribute to do? We have a system for communicating and organizing our work together. It's a big one. Can I afford to pay someone and you'd be surprised how much money that can take? Um do I have space for them to work in that's going to be comfortable if somebody's sitting in my studio all day? Is that going to feel okay to me, am I willing to give up part of my space for somebody else to work? Maybe you're the kind of person who would enjoy it? But these are important things to ask do. I have planned a time time to plan my assistance week in addition to my own eventually you can get to the place where if you have enough good systems that your assistant knows exactly what to do and is very self directed, but you're gonna need to spend a lot of time at least in the beginning making sure that you know what you want them to help you with and what's the most strategic stuff for them to help you with. Speaking of which the next thing we're going to get into, I talk in art ink about this idea of work life balance and actually, since I wrote the book, I've changed my mind about it a little bit because um I think balance is a great thing to aspire to like feeling this sense that you have both a rich working life and a rich life outside of work where you feel fulfilled in your relationships and your amount of relaxation you have and the amount of time you had to get re fueled and inspired. But when you are a creative entrepreneur, I am not entirely convinced that this balance actually exists. I do think it's good to aspire to, but I also think we are wired to work really hard, especially when we're doing something we love and that's not necessarily a bad thing. So it is still important to take care of yourself and always aspire to have some sense of balance. Um I don't want to lose your mind, so balance, does it exist as I mentioned? I'm not sure that it does exactly in this very perfect even way um like on a scale that you would have equal amount of work time to relaxation time. Um but um I think it's important to always aspire to at minimum, important to take regular breaks. I talked earlier about this system that I use for working in chunks, that forces me to take breaks and I have less back pain, I have less, what do you call it? Like hand pain from what the work I do on the computer or even with my pens or brushes. Um taking breaks is important in ways that you don't even think about get out and walk literally like physical activity being sedentary is not good for your health anyway. I'm not, I haven't been wearing it for the last two days, but I wear a Fitbit. This is not an ad for Fitbit, but what it does is it counts your steps right? And supposedly No matter how athletic you are, you should be walking at least 10,000 steps a day. And so I aspire to walk 10,000 steps a day and I get it most days now I'm much better than I was before I was a bit, but it really forces me to get up and walk and be conscious of my movement. There are days when I have so much to do that's due tomorrow that um, that I literally, I'm sitting at my dining room table or at the desk at my studio and um, You know, I pick up my phone and I sync it to my Fitbit and it says that I've walked literally 1800 steps the entire day, think about it like that is not very many and um, it's sad. Those are the days that I feel actually have the least energy and feel um, the most aches and pains. How many of you from sitting here for two days are a little shaky and tired right? Moving around gives you more energy. This is not normal, natural way to work. Okay, So, um, plan vacations where you do not work even if it's a staycation I know that's really hard. I tried that in january and I was only mildly successful and get good at saying no, which we're gonna, we're gonna launch into yes, Okay. Why on earth would you want to turn down an opportunity might feel crazy to you now that you would ever turn down an opportunity. Some of you are probably your minds are spinning with dream opportunities that you hope come to you And when I first started, I actually still, my mind still spins with opportunities that I, that I hope come to me and um, there wasn't a lot and so I couldn't have imagined a time when I would have to build the skill in figuring out what was right for me and what was wrong for me. But the truth is that even before I was busy, I was getting opportunities that I probably should have said no to, and that's part of why we developed this list of core values, right? And I'm getting you to think about what's important to you in your art making and in your art business, because those are the kinds of internal compass is that you're going to use to help you decide what opportunities to say yes to and what to say no to. So you already have too much on your plate. So obviously you gotta gauge do I have time for this thing and that you may not have time not because you have a lot of other art opportunities, but because you're working or your kids are out of school for the summer or whatever, so make sure you have time, you already feel overwhelmed, you want to drive yourself into the ground and if you're already feeling stressed out, it's probably not a good idea to take on something new, even if it sounds exciting, the opportunity doesn't resonate aesthetically or conceptually with your work. So that resonance is really important and trust your gut about, you know, ask a lot of questions of the person who's offering you the opportunity, but um make sure that um, once you've asked all those questions that you're trusting your gut about whether or not, because your gut will usually tell you if it's a good opportunity or not. So the great news is that saying no is actually saying yes. And Betsy referred to this earlier in the last segment, this whole idea that when you say no to something, you are actually saying yes to something else, and that might be less stress, that might be more time in your schedule with your kids, That might be more hours in the evening to sleep. Um, and if we begin to think of turning politely and professionally down, of course, always an opportunity, um, that it is actually a way to preserve to say yes to something that we do want instead, it makes it so much easier. This is a something I've been trying to practice in my life.
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