How to Plan & Set Goals for your Art Career?

Tips for Artists

25 Apr

In this article, I want to give my two-cents on how to effectively set goals that will actually lead us toward our achieve our art dream.

It would be a lie if I told you I was good at business, or with my own business… Unfortunately, this is also a story I tell myself because the “Bad -at-Business Artist story” has been the only story I know for a very looooooooong time (spoiler: time wasted).

Believing this story has led me to stay deeply convinced that whatever effort I do for my art career, I was bound to fail.

Needless to say, this is one of the biggest lies that exist in the universe.

Luckily enough, I decided that I no longer want that to be my story, which means I need to rewrite another story. And that involves getting serious about achieving my goals without fear and hesitation.

You’re not failing (yet), you’re just afraid to fail.

We’re all afraid of making mistakes to a certain degree. Failing is uncomfortable. Failing is shameful. Failing is a disgrace. Failing is weakness.

These are all the things we’ve learned about failure. Yet one crucial detail always gets lost in translation: we get more than one shot.

We can learn to use failure as a source of motivation instead of paralysis and depression.

Studies have actually shown that visualising failure is the most effective way to achieve goals!

How not to fail as an artist?

Define clear artistic goals

Not knowing which goals you’re pursuing while still vaguely pursuing something is one of the best ways to make you feel like a failure.

Sit down, close your eyes, take a deep breath and try to imagine your ideal life without censoring yourselves to help you understand what you really want to achieve with your art and your life.

Do not censor yourself.

Make sure your goals are yours

Don’t get too hyped by other artists’ paths. They may look cool, but if those paths not yours, you’ll want to make u-turn pretty quickly.

Define your emotional need and don’t project it onto your art career

We all have emotional needs that need to be fulfilled. In order to properly plan and set goals for our career, it’s important that we’re aware of our emotional needs so we can get them fulfilled in other areas of our lives that is not our career. This way, our career will not be bound to fail.

Do I really need to set goals to achieve my dream art career?

Yes, we do need to set goals to be able to strongly focus on what to do. The problem is how? How can we, bound-to-be-starved artists, know what to do to plan our career for success? Painting and improving our art everyday is hard enough… Do we really need to know how to set goals on top of that?

Unfortunately, having a vision stay in our head without a plan is a sure way to failure for most of us.

But how do I set goals for my art career then?

There are different approaches to goals setting, but the one approach that I found the most effective is the EOS Vision Traction Method.

I come across this method thanks to my partner who is a strategist (and who encouraged me to get serious with my goals by using this method).

The approach basically splits your Goals Setting into two parts: Vision and Traction. The Vision part is about clarifying and formalising your dream into crystal clear picture. The Traction part makes you define the immediate actionable steps.

The magic of this approach is that you’re not aimlessly defining goals. You are aligning everything into a Focused Vision.

You have to unbundle your Vision or your Art Dream into smaller and smaller pictures in order to know what to do.

By unbundling down your Vision, you are creating a top-down pyramid of goals.

Then by defining the actions (or tasks) thanks to this goals pyramid, you will be able to perform smaller actionable steps and climb your pyramid of goals back up to the TOP.

But I don’t know what my goals are…

This is a whole topic of its own. I’ll work on it!

I don’t know how to set goals as an artist…

Then scroll below and download a copy of your own Plan & Achieve Goals worksheet!

Plan your Art Career and Achieve your Art Goals

You have a Big Art Dream, but have no idea about what to do to achieve it? I put together a FREE worksheet that will help you unbundle your Big Art Dream into smaller, actionable, achievable daily actions.

Use this template to: