What it feels like:
I feel like I’m always working alone and everyone and everything around me is telling me I’ll never make it.
- You’re surrounded by people and messages that your art is not a Real Job.
- Your family/friends don’t seem to take your ambitions seriously.
- You don’t know how to get taken seriously in the business.
- You don’t know how to find compatible colleagues for collaboration and sharing ideas as well as support. The people you find just never seem to work out.
- You know you need a reliable support team to help you with the business end of your creative career. But you can’t seem to find them and so you end up trying to do it all yourself.
Maintaining your belief in yourself feels like an enormous burden and your inner critic is reflected all around you. Every step forward feels very hard and heavy and your progress feels like one step forward and two steps back. Each time you feel like you’re making progress something breaks or goes wrong and the voice in your head is like, “See? I’m never gonna make it!”
And the people around you (especially family) are telling you to stop fantasizing and get a real job. Or, even worse, they encourage you, but you don’t believe them. It may even look like the people around you are actively undermining and sabotaging your dreams.
Success Solution:
So, I’m going to say something that may be very hard for you to hear. You are creating this experience. It’s not that you make people undermine you. It’s that you attract the people into your life who will reflect yourself back to you. You train people how to treat you. In NLP, we call this “perception is reflection.” What you see in front of you that you hate the most is what you don’t want to look at in yourself. If the people around you don’t take you seriously, it’s because you don’t take yourself seriously. You haven’t committed – not really.
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to turn back, always ineffective.
Concerning all acts of initiation (and creation) there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans. That the moment one commits oneself, then Providence moves too.
All sorts of things occur to help that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision; raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it; Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
Begin it now.
– Goethe
The first step in shifting this experience for yourself is to commit. But commitment isn’t a one time decision. Commitment is a decision you make over and over and over again. Notice if your current commitment is conditional. Is it in “if/then” statements? “If I get this gig, then I’ll believe that I can succeed!” Or, “If I get an Agent/Manager/Recording contract, then I can really commit.” That’s not commitment.
Commitment is being willing to do whatever it takes to create what you’re committed to. When you’re committed, it’s not a matter of if you’ll succeed, but when.
Once you’ve made the decision – I’m committed – take a good long look at yourself, your circumstances and the people around you. And decide what you need in order to be successful. And since you are an individual with unique circumstances, it would be impossible for me to tell you what the right actions are for you in an article. It will look different for each individual and completely depend on your medium, genre, talent level, skill level and degree of training in business.
Working with a coach, with an objective eye, can be critical in this analysis. Because, let’s face it, when it comes to our own lives, it’s extremely difficult to be truly objective. And the people around us, our family and friends, they love us, but they also have their own stuff, their own agenda and their own investment in us being who they expect us to be. So, relying on the people around you to help you change, well, it doesn’t always work.
The first step in this process is to acknowledge, to own, that you are the creator of your own life. If you want things around you to change, you must change what you believe, how you think, and what you do. And you must commit.
Start taking yourself seriously. Look at your art with an eye for improvement – how do you make the best art you can make? Are you working on your craft on a regular basis? Are you studying with people who are where you want to be in terms of their art and their career?
Start looking at the people around you – what about you do they reflect? When you truly believe in your own success and act from that belief, one of two things will happen. The people around you will either rise to your new level with you or they’ll drop away. And while this process may be painful as you may lose people you love, and it may surprise you who stays and who goes, this is a critical piece of your own growth.
Choose to pursue your goals and your dreams and encourage the people around you to do the same – pursue their goals and their dreams. And be willing to let them go. Because it’s not up to you to decide for them if they will be successful in their lives, just as it’s not their job to make you successful in yours.
But if you do this, I think you will begin to notice something amazing happen. You will start to discover people all around you who will truly support you in pursuit of your dreams. You will discover opportunities and collaborators. People will begin to treat you differently, take you seriously, and respond to your work.
And the only thing that changed was you.
Recommended Actions
- Create a list of the people you want around you – i.e. collaborators, emotional support team, and business support team. For each person on that list, write a list of the characteristics, qualities, skills, and talents of the ideal person to fill that role. Get detailed, get specific, and get unreasonable. Once you’ve got a list of about 50 qualities, skills, and talents of that ideal person, then identify which of these things are non-negotiable. If your backup singer can’t carry a tune, that would be a deal-breaker, right? Which items on each list are the deal-breakers for you?
- Read and work the 12 Chapters of The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
- Notice when you think someone is not taking your art seriously, undermining you or not respecting your boundaries – ask yourself – “What actions or words did I take/not take that taught them to treat me in this way? What will I do about this, now?”
- Look into working with a coach or a mentor – and find one who feels really right, and whose ONLY agenda is your success.
Additional Resources:
- The Art of Leadership – Class
- Mindset of a Leader Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 – 3 Part Class
- Attract Success – Class
- Transform Your Beliefs – the Key to Success Class
- Create and Manage Your Team – Class
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4 Responses
Oh, one more thing. In most cases, I decided I didn’t need to eliminate someone totally from my surroundings, but to view them as an extended resource,someone whose association might work well occasionally, but not someone who would be part of my mastermind.
I think it’s really important to understand that not everyone is going to be in your inner circle and they shouldn’t be. Creating clear strong boundaries and knowing what you can trust a person for (and what you can’t) will keep you happy and healthy in the long term.
I am also reminded that on my last major project we decided that we were going to write and perform 4 sets of all original material and tell the audience that’s all we knew. We did it and it worked like a charm.
In my journey most of the time I had a pretty good idea of the ideal people and circumstances that I wanted to surround myself with. This usually led to the conclusion that I needed to relocate to NYC or L.A., which I eventually did. Soon, technology meant that all I needed was an internet connection or to send someone a plane ticket. But I found myself begrudgingly moving forward on many things with less than ideal circumstances, like hopping from rock to rock across a stream. This meant that I put up with deal-breaker items longer than I would have liked to, but at least moved a project forward so that it existed in material form for potential future collaborators to see. Much like when I thought I would pose a theoretical tour and find members who would agree to it. Rather, I had to actually book tours not knowing if anyone was coming with me, then hope that I could recruit adequate tour mates. Were the tour mates I found adequate to play the tour? Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but we went anyway.
I find that the people around me are all people on the internet now. That has opened up a much wider field of associates. I like to say that my band is Apple Logic X, and my venue is the internet.