Starving Artist No More

While I’m not neurodivergent myself, I know a lot of artists who are. In fact, quite a few of the artists who work with me to build their entrepreneurship skills are neurodivergent in one way or another. You, the fabulous artist listening to this podcast, might even be neurodivergent yourself. And this prevalence of neurodivergence among artists is more than just anecdote; a recent Psychology Today article explains that “neurodivergent individuals excel creatively,” making them uniquely suited to artistic careers. But while being neurodivergent can be a bonus in the creativity department, it can bring a whole host of unique challenges in the other aspects of our creative work. Today, let’s discuss strategies for handling the ups and downs of life as a neurodivergent creative. In this episode, you will learn: Why neurodivergence is so common in the creative and artistic world. (In other words, lots of creatives are neurodivergent, which means you're not alone!)How coming to an acceptance of your neurodivergence can help you strategize solutions for the unique problems you face.What practical solutions have worked for Marni Penning, an award-winning actress, and what processes and resources she used to find those solutions. How you can use those same processes to find solutions that work for you in your unique circumstances. In this episode, I mention the upcoming Thriving Narrators Retreat, which will take place August 22-25, 2024 in Cincinnati, OH. (Marni Penning, the guest for today's episode, will be a faculty member at this retreat.) You can learn more about this opportunity for audiobook narrators on my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com/ThrivingNarratorsRetreat. I refer to two past episodes of this podcast: 016: The Six Components of a Thriving Creative Business 022: Outsourcing for Creatives I also mention this article from Psychology Today and this 2022 study of neurodivergence among electronic musicians. This episode includes an interview with award-winning actress Marni Penning. You can learn more about Marni's work on her website and on her social media. You can also learn more about the Penning Method for the Panicked Actor here. In our conversation, Marni mentions two tools that she finds helpful in managing her neurological differences: a full-year write-on calendar, and write-on magnets. I also mention the large desk calendar that I like to use for my schedule, which you can see here. Marni also shares two additional resources that have helped her in her journey: Shanna Pearson's Expert ADHD CoachingA Radical Guide for Women with ADHD Marni and I discuss body doubling as a strategy to help with focus. You can learn more about body doubling here, and you can learn more about Focusmate, a body doubling service, here. A full transcript of this episode can be found here. Full transcripts of every episode will always be available at the Starving Artist No More Blog. Thank you for listening. Please feel free to reach out to me at www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, with any questions, comments, or feedback. I'd love to hear from you.

Questions related to branding and marketing can often feel incredibly overwhelming for artists. The vast majority of creative entrepreneurs got into their line of work because they were passionate about the “creative” part of the “creative entrepreneur” label, not so much because they felt drawn to the “entrepreneur” part. But as I’ve said before on this podcast, the flow of work into your artistic business is directly related to the flow of marketing efforts out of your business. So even if you feel lost when you think about what it would take to effectively market your creative business, doing that marketing work is still something that is part of what it takes to build your creative business into a thriving enterprise that meets your needs. And I’m here to tell you that marketing and branding don’t have to be as scary as they seem. Your branding and marketing decisions can flow naturally out of who you are as an artist. Today, let’s take a deep dive into the topic of branding and marketing for your creative work. In this episode, you will learn: In this episode, I mention the upcoming Thriving Narrators Retreat, which will take place August 22-25, 2024 in Cincinnati, OH. (Gail Shalan, the guest for today's episode, will be a faculty member at this retreat.) You can learn more about this opportunity for audiobook narrators on my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com/ThrivingNarratorsRetreat. In this episode, I refer to two past episodes of this podcast: 026: Marketing for Feast, Not Famine 027: Networking for Feast, Not Famine This episode includes an interview with multi-disciplinary artist Gail Shalan. You can learn more about Gail's work on her website and on her social media. In our conversation, Gail shares a quote from the book Personal Branding for Dummies by Susan Chritton. A full transcript of this episode can be found here. Full transcripts of every episode will always be available at the Starving Artist No More Blog. Thank you for listening. Please feel free to reach out to me at www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, with any questions, comments, or feedback. I'd love to hear from you.

When I’m working with artists, the most frequent question they ask is how they should structure their creative business. How do they know which tasks in their creative entrepreneurship life are worth their time? How should their business work if they want that business to support them and fulfill them in all the ways they need to be supported and fulfilled: personally, creatively, and financially? What does a functioning creative business look like? Today, let’s discuss. In this episode, you will learn: In this episode, I reference the Merriam-Webster Dictionary definitions of systematized, marketing, and networking. I also reference this Vanity Fair article, in which US President Barak Obama talks about what he does to reduce his decision fatigue. In addition, I reference several previous episodes of this podcast: 005: The Time & Income Connection (Episode 1 in the 4-Part "Time & Income" Series)006: Pay Yourself First (Episode 2 in the 4-Part "Time & Income" Series)007: Working in your Creative & Financial Sweet Spot (Episode 3 in the 4-Part "Time & Income" Series)008: Developing Asynchronous Income (Episode 4 in the 4-Part "Time & Income" Series)010: What You Need From Your Business A full transcript of this episode can be found here. Full transcripts of every episode will always be available at the Starving Artist No More Blog. Thank you for listening. Please feel free to reach out to me at www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, with any questions, comments, or feedback. I'd love to hear from you.

One of my coaching clients reached out to me this week regarding a task that she and I had discussed at length during a session a couple months ago, and she confessed to me that she hadn’t done it yet. What’s more, she wasn’t really sure why she hadn’t done it. There wasn’t anything stopping her or getting in her way. She told me, “I’m just not doing it, and I know I have to.” Have you been there? Have you felt paralyzed in the face of something you know you need to do in your creative business, but you just can’t get it done for some reason? Have you found yourself procrastinating on tasks that need to get done, and not really knowing why you’re procrastinating, or how to stop that procrastinating? I know I have. I know this coaching client is definitely not alone, and neither are you! Today, let’s figure out together how to say goodbye to procrastination. In this episode, you will learn: In this episode, I mention two of my coaching programs, the Thriving Artists Academy and the Thriving Narrators Retreat. You can learn more about both opportunities on my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com. The Thriving Narrators Retreat is August 22-25, 2024 in Cincinnati, OH. In this episode, I refer to two past episodes of this podcast: 015: But What If You Could?016: The Six Components of a Thriving Creative Business I also mention this TED talk by Lori Gottlieb. A full transcript of this episode can be found here. Full transcripts of every episode will always be available at the Starving Artist No More Blog. Thank you for listening. Please feel free to reach out to me at www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, with any questions, comments, or feedback. I'd love to hear from you.

Every creative has moments in their career that are moments of celebration, moments of pure excitement. And usually, when I talk to artists about those moments, they think about the big career milestones: that huge award that they won or were nominated for, the incredible review they received, the prestigious fellowship they were awarded, the amazing project they won. These are all big, wonderful career events in your life as an artist business owner that absolutely should be celebrated. But they aren’t the only moments that deserve celebration. The problem with focusing only on those big, external indicators of career success is that they are almost always things controlled by other people, which by definition means they are rare and unpredictable. Instead, I want to encourage you to focus on celebrating the small wins in your creative life. After all, doing the work is the win. Let’s discuss. In this episode, you will learn: In this episode, I mention the Thriving Narrators Retreat, which is August 22-25, 2024 in Cincinnati, OH. You can learn more about this exciting growth opportunity for audiobook narrators on my website, https://www.starvingartistnomore.com/thrivingnarratorsretreat. I refer to several past episodes of this podcast: 017: What You Can Control032: Progress, Not Perfection040: Small Steps051: Celebrations Matter I also share a quote from this X (aka Twitter) post by Billy Oppenheimer. A full transcript of this episode can be found here. Full transcripts of every episode will always be available at the Starving Artist No More Blog. Thank you for listening. Please feel free to reach out to me at www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, with any questions, comments, or feedback. I'd love to hear from you.

Last week’s podcast episode was all about the importance of acknowledging the hard things in your life as a creative entrepreneur, but if you stop there, you’re only seeing part of the picture. Yes, much in the life of an artist is really difficult, but so much is amazing as well. We get to create for a living! We get to share our artistic ideas with the world! What a gift that is! But if we don’t take time to intentionally acknowledge those good things, we run the risk of not even noticing that they happened. Our brains are primed to pay attention to and remember the bad, not the good. In order to make sure we recognize and appreciate the good things that happen in our creative lives, we need to celebrate them. Today, we’ll talk about why that’s so important and how you can incorporate celebration into your creative process. Celebrations matter. In this episode, you will learn: In this episode, I announced the Thriving Narrators Retreat DEI Scholarship. You can learn more about this scholarship on my website, https://www.starvingartistnomore.com/thrivingnarratorsretreat. I also talked about the Thriving Narrators Retreat itself, which is August 22-25, 2024 in Cincinnati, OH. Again, you can learn more about this exciting growth opportunity for audiobook narrators on my website, https://www.starvingartistnomore.com/thrivingnarratorsretreat. In this episode, I refer to two past episodes of this podcast: 016: The Six Components of a Thriving Creative Business050: Acknowledge the Hard Stuff I also mention several books that I have read and that I feel confident recommending for those who want more information: The Happiness Advantage by Shawn AchorAtomic Habits by James ClearThe Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg I share a quote from this TED talk given by Shawn Achor in 2011, and I reference this episode of the NPR Life Kit podcast, which is summarized here. A full transcript of this episode can be found here. Full transcripts of every episode will always be available at the Starving Artist No More Blog. Thank you for listening. Please feel free to reach out to me at www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, with any questions, comments, or feedback. I'd love to hear from you.

The life of a creative entrepreneur is a difficult one. From a culture that doesn’t value our artistic work, instead telling us we should starve, to the difficulty of dealing with business administration tasks that many of us were never formally educated to handle, the reality of being an artist business owner is not an easy one. You’ve picked a hard road, my friend. And one frequent reaction to this difficulty that I see in my colleagues and in my coaching clients is what I like to call the ostrich response: sticking your head in the sand and ignoring the hard things. If you ignore the things you don’t like, they’ll disappear, right? Oh if only it were that easy! Ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away. It just allows it to fester. It’s not easy, but there is value in acknowledging the hard stuff. In today’s episode, we’re going to look at those hard things together. In this episode, you will learn: In this episode, I announced the Thriving Narrators Retreat DEI Scholarship. You can learn more about this scholarship on my website, https://www.starvingartistnomore.com/thrivingnarratorsretreat. I also talked about the Thriving Narrators Retreat itself, which is August 22-25, 2024 in Cincinnati, OH. Again, you can learn more about this exciting growth opportunity for audiobook narrators on my website, https://www.starvingartistnomore.com/thrivingnarratorsretreat. In this episode, I refer to one past episode, 038: The Price of Success is Failure. I also reference this TED talk by Lori Gottlieb. A full transcript of this episode can be found here. Full transcripts of every episode will always be available at the Starving Artist No More Blog. Thank you for listening. Please feel free to reach out to me at www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, with any questions, comments, or feedback. I'd love to hear from you.

I know you’ve been there. Your task list is overflowing, and you’re overwhelmed. You’ve got more to do than you can possibly complete in the time available. Perhaps you’re in a feast period in your creative career, meaning your project calendar is jampacked full of fabulous projects that you’re excited to work on. Which is great, except that it means all of your time is spent heads-down creating, with no time left over for the necessary administrative tasks that come with running a business. Or maybe life has gone sideways on you, and you’re dealing with time-consuming complications in your personal life, resulting in a tight squeeze on the time available for your business work, whether that’s creative tasks or administrative to-dos. Regardless of the reason, you’ve found yourself in a place where decisions need to be made. You can’t do everything. So what do you choose to do, and what do you choose to leave undone? How do you prioritize? How did you decide what really matters to you, and how do you make sure your actions reflect those values? Today, we’re going to look at some of those hard questions. We’re going to talk about where your priorities lie. In this episode, you will learn: In this episode, I announced the Thriving Narrators Retreat, which is August 22-25, 2024 in Cincinnati, OH. You can learn more about this exciting growth opportunity for audiobook narrators on my website, https://www.starvingartistnomore.com/thrivingnarratorsretreat. I also mentioned the Thriving Artists Academy. You can learn more about this dynamic and supportive community on my website, www.starvingartistnomore.com/thrivingartistsacademy. In this episode, I refer to several past episodes of this podcast: 007: Working in your Creative & Financial Sweet Spot008: Developing Asynchronous Income016: The Six Components of a Thriving Creative Business044: Consistency Is Hard I also mention the Spoon Theory of chronic illness, and I share the Merriam-Webster definition of "priority." A full transcript of this episode can be found here. Full transcripts of every episode will always be available at the Starving Artist No More Blog. Thank you for listening. Please feel free to reach out to me at www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, with any questions, comments, or feedback. I'd love to hear from you.

As this episode is originally being released, it’s the day after Christmas 2023. Last year, for the podcast episode between Christmas and New Year’s Day, I narrated a Christmas story for you, and truthfully, that episode is one of my favorite podcast episodes of the entire first season! I’d like to make that holiday storytelling habit a tradition here on the Starving Artist No More podcast. So today, I have another Christmas story to share with you: The Elves and the Shoemaker by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. A full transcript of this episode can be found here. Full transcripts of every episode will always be available at the Starving Artist No More Blog. Thank you for listening. Please feel free to reach out to me at www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, with any questions, comments, or feedback. I'd love to hear from you.

It’s Tuesday of the last workweek of 2023, and it’s a time when lots of us are thinking about what we’ve done over the past twelve months and what we’re looking forward to in the coming twelve months. Those kinds of looks backward and dreams forward can be really exciting! But it can also be really difficult to think back on the year gone by. If I’m being honest, I’d have to admit that while “yearly review time” can be exciting and motivating, it’s also a time when it’s really easy to get discouraged and to judge yourself for what did or didn’t happen in the past year. When those self-critical thoughts start creeping in and taking over your inner-monologue, what can you do? My recommendation: be a detective. In this episode, you will learn: In this episode, I mention the Thriving Artists Academy. You can learn more about this dynamic and supportive community on my website, www.starvingartistnomore.com/thrivingartistsacademy. In this episode, I reference Merriam-Webster's definition for "curious," as well as to several past episodes of this podcast: 021: Your Unique Pace024: Overriding Imposter Syndrome045: Your Personal Definition of Success046: Year-End Planning I also read the first stanza of "As You Go Through Life," a brief poem by 19th century American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox. You can learn more about Wilcox here, and you can read the full poem here. A full transcript of this episode can be found here. Full transcripts of every episode will always be available at the Starving Artist No More Blog. Thank you for listening. Please feel free to reach out to me at www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, with any questions, comments, or feedback. I'd love to hear from you.

As this episode is being originally released, it’s less than two weeks before Christmas 2023. In another four days, my husband, Arturo, will be off from work in his corporate job for the rest of the year. Yay for holiday vacations! And all over the world right now, people are making plans for the holidays and thinking about their New Year’s resolutions. Because being less than two weeks from Christmas means we’re also less than three weeks from the new year. What are you going to do in your creative work next year? What New Years resolutions do you have around your artistic business? What are you going to do to make your coming year one of creative joy and excitement? Let’s discuss. In this episode, you will learn: In this episode, I mention the Thriving Artists Academy. You can learn more about this dynamic and supportive community on my website, www.starvingartistnomore.com/thrivingartistsacademy. In this episode, I also refer to several past episodes of this podcast: 006: Pay Yourself First019: SMART Creativity040: Small Steps045: Your Personal Definition of Success A full transcript of this episode can be found here. Full transcripts of every episode will always be available at the Starving Artist No More Blog. Thank you for listening. Please feel free to reach out to me at www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, with any questions, comments, or feedback. I'd love to hear from you.

When you picture someone who is a successful artist or creative, what image does that bring to your mind? Perhaps someone who has won lots of competitions or awards in your creative industry. Perhaps someone who is very prolific in their artistry, so you see their work all over the place. Perhaps it’s someone who takes on really high profile projects, performing with the best ensembles or working with well-known clients or having their work profiled in The New York Times or People Magazine. Exactly what those external success markers look like varies a bit from one creative industry to another, but they are all exactly that: external indicators of what our culture has deemed success. On the other hand, what if you envision yourself as successful? What image does that bring to mind? So many artists I work with come to me with the idea that I’ll help them achieve some of those external indicators of success, but that’s not actually where fulfillment lies for any artist. You can have all of those external success markers, and even more, and not be fulfilled by your creative work. And like I always say, I am all about helping you build a creative business that meets your needs, that fulfills you holistically. Not a business that meets someone else’s needs, or that meets the needs of a generic description of success, but your needs. Success is a very personal thing. It is not a blanket descriptor or a general state of being. Success is a state of being that is particular to each individual. In today’s podcast episode, we’re going to discuss your personal definition of success. In this episode, you will learn: In this episode, I mention the upcoming free Dream Big workshop I am hosting on December 5, 2023. You can learn more about this free goal-setting workshop for creative entrepreneurs on the events page of my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com/events. In this episode, I mention the dictionary definition of "success," courtesy of Merriam-Webster. I also quote from the book From Individual to Empire by Laura Bull, which I highly recommend (and which we're going to study in 2024 in my new Thriving Artists Academy Book Club), and I mention Shawn Achor's TED talk on happiness. I also refer to one past episode of this podcast: 010: What You Need From Your Business. A full transcript of this episode can be found here. Full transcripts of every episode will always be available at the Starving Artist No More Blog. Thank you for listening. Please feel free to reach out to me at www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, with any questions, comments, or feedback. I'd love to hear from you.

We’re getting toward the end of the year, when people employed in corporate jobs are completing their yearly self-assessments in preparation for performance reviews in early January. My husband, Arturo, who you heard from in last week’s episode, turned in his 2023 self-assessment last week, just before Thanksgiving. And yes, I am a self-employed creative entrepreneur, not an employee of a large company like he is, but I’m doing my own self-assessment right now, too: thinking about what went well over the past year, what didn’t go so well, and how I want to use that data to move forward with joy and creativity into 2024. As I’m thinking about those things and reviewing my own actions (and inactions) over the past year, I’m struck over and over again by one overarching theme: as a creative entrepreneur, consistency is necessary, but consistency is also hard. Today, we’re going to focus in on consistency in our creative work and figure out how we can be more consistent together. In this episode, you will learn: In this episode, I mention the upcoming free Dream Big workshop I am hosting on December 5, 2023. You can learn more about this free goal-setting workshop for creative entrepreneurs on the events page of my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com/events. In this episode, I refer to several past episodes of this podcast: 004: An Attitude of Gratitude006: Pay Yourself First016: The Six Components of a Thriving Creative Business039: Fix Forward041: A New Season A full transcript of this episode can be found here. Full transcripts of every episode will always be available at the Starving Artist No More Blog. Thank you for listening. Please feel free to reach out to me at www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, with any questions, comments, or feedback. I'd love to hear from you.

Last week’s podcast episode was all about how to think about change in our creative work. Change is inevitable in life, so we may as well find ways to think about it positively. After all, in many ways, when we think about it from a mindset of joy and abundance, change can be really beautiful! But what about change that has the potential to be incredibly destructive to your work and your way of life? How can you find positive ways of viewing that kind of change? Often, finding a silver lining in that kind of change feels impossible. And that predicament is exactly where a lot of creatives are finding themselves right now as we collectively, as a society, grapple with what the existence of generative artificial intelligence is going to mean for us over the short and long terms. In today’s podcast episode, we’re going to dig into AI and art. In this episode, I mention the upcoming free Dream Big workshop I am hosting on December 5, 2023. You can learn more about this free goal-setting workshop for creative entrepreneurs on the events page of my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com/events. In this episode, I mention a recent Reddit post by author John Bierce about his perspective on AI audiobook narration, and Arturo (who is my special guest for this podcast episode) refers to the book The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil. If you're interested in learning more about futurism, you can read about it on Wikipedia. In our conversation, we also mention two previous episodes of this podcast: 016: The Six Components of a Thriving Creative Business042: You're Not a Tree A full transcript of this episode can be found here. Full transcripts of every episode will always be available at the Starving Artist No More Blog. Thank you for listening. Please feel free to reach out to me at www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, with any questions, comments, or feedback. I'd love to hear from you.

I don’t know what the fall weather is like where you are, but here in Cincinnati, things have turned decidedly autumnal. Arturo and I spent a few hours about a week ago, on Saturday, raking the leaves from our driveway and the paths around our house. And when I flew back from the LoveNVegas book con about two weeks ago, seeing the fall colors from the plane was truly breathtaking. Fall is my favorite season for a lot of reasons, but one of those reasons is that the changing leaves remind me that change is beautiful. Change is often hard and stressful and scary, but it can also be beautiful. In today’s podcast episode, we’re going to discuss how to think about change in our creative businesses. Change is inevitable, and even though it’s sometimes scary, it can be a really good thing. After all, we’re artists, not trees. We don’t have to bloom where we’re planted. In this episode, you will learn: In this episode, I mention the upcoming free Dream Big workshop I am hosting on December 5, 2023. You can learn more about this free goal-setting workshop for creative entrepreneurs on the events page of my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com/events. In this episode, I discuss a recent Medium article about the importance of change. I also refer one previous episode of this podcast, 016: The Six Components of a Thriving Creative Business. A full transcript of this episode can be found here. Full transcripts of every episode will always be available at the Starving Artist No More Blog. Thank you for listening. Please feel free to reach out to me at www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, with any questions, comments, or feedback. I'd love to hear from you.

You may have noticed that this episode is marked as the first episode in Season 2 in your podcast player. That’s right – this week marks a full year of the Starving Artist No More podcast! For an entire year, I’ve been coaching creative entrepreneurs and helping them create workable strategies for businesses that actually work and that meet their needs in a real and tangible way. It’s been an amazing experience! Today’s podcast episode is going to look at the seven biggest takeaways I’ve observed from my first year working officially as a creative entrepreneurship coach. I can’t wait to share with you what I’ve learned. In this episode, you will learn: In this episode, I refer to three previous episodes of this podcast: 002: Expand What's Possible039: Fix Forward040: Small Steps A full transcript of this episode can be found here. Full transcripts of every episode will always be available at the Starving Artist No More Blog. Thank you for listening. Please feel free to reach out to me at www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, with any questions, comments, or feedback. I'd love to hear from you.

Mark Twain once said, “The secret to getting ahead is getting started.” Sometimes, taking those first few tiny little steps can be the hardest part of getting a new project off the ground. If you’re embarking on a new artistic venture, how do you decide where to begin? If you’re preparing to tackle something unfamiliar on the administrative side of your creative business, how do you figure out what’s the most important thing to do first? Often, we find ourselves waiting to even begin a new thing until we know we can jump in with 1,000% commitment and total confidence, but that feeling of complete commitment and absolute confidence might never come, leaving you stuck and paralyzed instead. What do you do then? Today, we’re going to look at how you can use small steps to move you past any feelings of stuckness or paralysis. Today, we’re going to learn how to add together lots of small steps so you can create the change you’re looking for. In this episode, you will learn: In this episode, I discuss the motivation research done by Harvard professor Teresa Amabile. You can learn more about her work here: Progress Principle ResearchDiary Study on the Harvard DataverseThe Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer"The Big Power of Small Wins" by Jude King I mention the book Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman and refer to this edition of his newsletter. I also refer one previous episode of this podcast, 004: An Attitude of Gratitude. A full transcript of this episode can be found here. Full transcripts of every episode will always be available at the Starving Artist No More Blog. Thank you for listening. Please feel free to reach out to me at www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, with any questions, comments, or feedback. I'd love to hear from you.

A few weeks ago, I woke up to an email from a creative entrepreneur that I’ve been coaching over the past few months. This wonderful artist had recently faced some pretty big obstacles in their creative business and was feeling really discouraged. They had wanted to start a new thing in their creative work, but they found themselves completely unable to take that first step and get started. As a result, they told me they were feeling “brutally defeated.” And my heart broke for this wonderful creative. I just wanted to wrap them up in a big hug! Shame and defeat have no place in our work as creative entrepreneurs. In today’s podcast episode, I want to share with you some of the advice and action steps that I gave this delightful artist. When you are struggling with your creative work, there is hope. You have no need to feel ashamed or defeated. You are not powerless, and you can take action that will make things better. You can fix forward. In this episode, you will learn: In this episode, I discuss the Pratfall Effect, a concept from marketing and psychology that can help us as artists feel more comfortable sharing our process, warts and all. Here are some additional resources about the Pratfall Effect: The Pratfall EffectWhy We Buy: Pratfall EffectThe effect of a pratfall on increasing personal attractivenessPsychonomic Science I also mention one previous episode of this podcast, 038: The Price of Success is Failure. A full transcript of this episode can be found here. Full transcripts of every episode will always be available at the Starving Artist No More Blog. Thank you for listening. Please feel free to reach out to me at www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, with any questions, comments, or feedback. I'd love to hear from you.

Over and over again, in my work as a creative entrepreneurship coach, I hear some variation of the question, “but what if it doesn’t work?” Fear is a natural part of trying anything new, and for most artists and makers and creatives, focusing on the business side of their creative enterprise is indeed a new thing. Much of what we do as creative entrepreneurs is objectively hard! But if we never try anything new, we’ll never get anything new. Taking risks and trying new things is a vital part of what it means to be a thriving artist. And when you are bold enough to take risks, failures will happen. They’re unavoidable! The price of success, quite literally, is failure. But if that’s true, how can you conquer your fear of failure and allow yourself the freedom to take risks? How can you learn from the failures you experience so you don’t get stuck in a failure loop? In this episode, you will learn: In this episode, I share a quote from Fauja Singh, the world's oldest living marathon runner. You can read more about Mr. Singh here. I also discuss passages from the books Madeleine L’Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life by Madeleine L'Engle and 26 Marathons by Meb Keflezighi, and I mention one previous episode of this podcast, 010: What You Need From Your Business. A full transcript of this episode can be found here. Full transcripts of every episode will always be available at the Starving Artist No More Blog. Thank you for listening. Please feel free to reach out to me at www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, with any questions, comments, or feedback. I'd love to hear from you.

Figuring out your strategy to make your creative business work is much easier said than done. You might think you know how things work in your creative industry, and you might be doing all the things that should be the right things, and yet nothing is working for you. Perhaps you even see things working out for one of your creative colleagues, but it’s just not happening for you. When you feel like you’re employing workable strategies and yet you’re seeing any progress in your creative business, what’s going on? The exact, detailed answer to that question is going to be different for every creative, but I think there are some universal truths that are common to all of us. And I recently was struck by those truths in the most unlikely of places: while at the beach, flying kites. I’m excited to share with you what I learned about business strategy by visiting the beach and attempting to fly a kite. In this episode, you will learn: In this episode, I discuss the "Invisible Gorilla" experiment conducted in 1999 by Dan Simons & Chris Chabris, and you can watch the original video from that experiment here. I also refer to previous episodes of this podcast: 007: Working in your Creative & Financial Sweet Spot016: The Six Components of a Thriving Creative Business025: Make Your Own Luck A full transcript of this episode can be found here. Full transcripts of every episode will always be available at the Starving Artist No More Blog. Thank you for listening. Please feel free to reach out to me at www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, with any questions, comments, or feedback. I'd love to hear from you.