050: Acknowledge the Hard Stuff

Starving Artist No More

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:

• How acknowledging the difficulties of our creative entrepreneurship life gives us power.
• Why we instinctively want to ignore problems in our work.
• How to overcome that instinct to have a more helpful stance.
• What practical steps to take when you’re feeling stuck by a problem in your business.
• How we can pay attention to our difficult emotions and learn from them in the process.

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.