The Weekly Glow Up: July 26, 2023

Welcome back to the Weekly Glow Up, where I share tips and resources that you should know about as a creative who wants to make money from their art.

Here’s what I’ve got this week:

1. ⚙️ Setting Goals You Can Control

Setting goals is important to make sure you’re moving in the right direction with your business.

And it’s important to stretch yourself and push yourself out of your comfort zone a bit to grow further.

But when you set goals that are unfeasible, you end up setting yourself up for failure and disappointment, which kills business growth momentum.

Often I see this happen when creatives set goals based on things that they can’t control.

Things like “get 200 more Instagram followers” — there’s so much involved in Instagram that’s totally outside of your control, like algorithm changes, new features, etc.

Instead, set a goal that just focuses on YOUR actions, like “post every day for 30 days.”

Yes, ideally those actions will have the effect of bringing in more followers, but you’re not placing your success or failure in the hands of a machine being controlled by a corporation with very different goals from you.

Another example: Instead of setting goals like “I’ll make $X by December,” set goals for the things that are within your control, that you’re reasonably sure will help you get closer to that income:

I’ll spend 1 hour a week engaging with prospects
I’ll create 2 freebies this month that I can use to promote my email list
I’ll launch a new digital product by August

This gives you very tangible actions to take, while setting yourself up for success instead of relying on factors outside of your control.

2. 🧠 The Case for Failing Fast

As an entrepreneur, something you can do to set yourself up for success is getting comfortable with failure.

A lot of creatives HATE the idea of “failing,” and get sucked into perfectionism instead. You’re your own worst critic when it comes to your artwork.

But in business—failing fast is better than being perfect.

The best businesses use data to optimize. And you can’t get data unless you actually put something out there, i.e. a post, a product, new messaging, etc.

Perfectionists get stuck in a workflow of endless tinkering, never feeling like something is ready:

Entrepreneurs know the value of real feedback from their ideal customers and learn how to see it as constructive, rather than criticism.

Staying stuck in a perfectionist mindset slows your business growth down.

And ironically, it won’t be perfect anyway until you get feedback from putting it out there. 🙃

3. 🍵 Client Tea: What’s in a Name?

I’ve worked with a lot of people who want everything to be figured out and planned before they take the first step or next step in their business.

Most recently, I worked with someone who was delaying the launch of their business IG account because they weren’t 100% confident in their business name yet.

And there’s something to be said for wanting to make a good first impression.

But when it reaches a point where it prevents you from sharing your talents and your solutions with people actively needing and searching for them, you have to learn to force yourself to move forward.

This is a hard lesson I’ve had to learn in entrepreneurship:

You’ll rarely feel “ready.”

There’s always going to be something you want to change or that you wish you could update.

You’re always going to find little things wrong with your website, or with your Instagram photos, or with your artwork.

And as an entrepreneur, that’s something you need to get comfortably uncomfortable with.

I’m not necessarily advocating for half-assing everything and putting low quality work out into the world.

But there’s a happy medium between that and the level of prohibitive perfectionism creatives often put on themselves.

Going back to the idea of failing fast I mentioned above — you can only get feedback and make progress in your business if you share things instead of keeping them locked up in your head.

What’s one thing you’ve been afraid to pull the trigger on in your biz? What’s holding you back, and how can challenge yourself to move forward before it’s perfect?

4. 🍏 Food for Thought: Doing Hard Things

One of the newsletters I subscribe to recently shared this quote from writer Nat Eliason:

"The ability to do hard things is perhaps the most useful ability you can foster in yourself or your children. And proof that you are someone who can do them is one of the most useful assets you can have on your life resume.

Our self-image is composed of historical evidence of our abilities. The more hard things you push yourself to do, the more competent you will see yourself to be.

If you can run marathons or throw double your body weight over your head, the sleep deprivation from a newborn is only a mild irritant. If you can excel at organic chemistry or econometrics, onboarding for a new finance job will be a breeze.”

As entrepreneurs, we can have tunnel vision, only focused on our business goals.

But sometimes, the strongest sources of confidence and strength that help you excel in your business may actually come from completely different areas of your life.

You’re a human made up of a sum of all your experiences — your business doesn’t live in isolation. The other things happening in your life have an effect on it.

It works the other way around too — successes in your business can help you feel more confident and capable in other areas of your life.

I experienced this a while back after having some great transformative moments in my business, then getting on a plane and experiencing NONE of the anxiety I usually have around flying - read this post for more about that 😊

But I encourage you to keep in mind that feeding the other areas of your life still “counts” as working toward your business goals 💪