Tag Archive for: Planning
Tips: Developing and managing a creative career with Andrew Macklin
1. Avoid comparing yourself to people in the height of their careers.
We all tend to find comparisons in order to judge ourselves. We tend not to look for
people at our level of skill/ability, instead we look at people in the height of their
careers. If you find yourself wanting to compare your career to others, keep
comparisons to people who are at your current level of skill/ability or just above it.
2. Look at the things that are working well and build on them.
Our careers as creatives move in spirals as opposed to a singular, linear trajectory. It’s
natural in our careers to not know what’s next. We don’t have conventional careers;
there’s no fully predictable trajectory.
If we don’t know where we are in our careers, we can tend to feel a bit lost. It’s
difficult to track a creative career, i.e., you’re always an artist rather than progressing
from role to role, up a ladder, like people do in other sectors. We’ll go through
periods of not knowing and knowing.
What have you done so far in your career? Map out where you started in your career
to where you are now on your career journey. Consider the steps you took from the
start of your career to where you are now. Focus on the approaches & strategies that
worked for you and build upon them.
3. Think creatively about your vision of career success.
When considering our career development, we can often put the cart before the
horse; focusing on our professional development at the expense of our personal
development. Be creative when thinking of your vision of your career's future. Create
a clear picture of what you’re moving towards and consider the following themes:
● lifestyle
● impact
● finance
● emotion
Lifestyle
What do you want your lifestyle to look like on a day-to-day basis? When do you
want to work? How much free time do you want? Getting clarity on that will help
you as you continue to construct your career. It can inform your decision-making re.
jobs you're offered and the kind of career you’re moving towards.
Social Impact
Think about the impact you want your career to have. How do you want your partner
to feel living with an artist? How do you want your family to feel? You can spend 20
years being a highly-paid writer but could find yourself doing so in a way that’s
negatively impacting upon you and the people around you. Be more intentional
about what you'd like your impact to be from the outset.
Finance
Constantly working in a way that makes us feel as if we’re not being appreciated
financially can lead to burnout.
What financial figure are you happy and excited to work for? What experience do
you already have and what will you be delivering to make you feel confident asking
for that figure? It might feel out of reach but thinking about this gives you
something to aim for.
Emotional
Consider what emotional experience you’d like to have on a day-to-day basis as a
successful creative. This is the theme that can make artists leave the profession. It’s
important that we feel engaged and excited in our careers. Are fun and playfulness
important to you in your work? If you’ve decided, “yes”, then use this knowledge to
filter out work you know will be lacking fun and playfulness. Again, considering this
will help to guide your career and the jobs you accept or don’t accept.
4. Work backwards from a career goal to get a step-by-step trajectory.
For example, maybe your goal is winning an Oscar for your documentary. What’s the
preceding step to that goal? Perhaps it’s getting into an international festival. What
step precedes that? Perhaps, getting your work into a local film festival. What step
goes before that? Finishing the film! Now you have a step-by-step career outline.
– Finish a feature documentary
– Get it into a local film festival
– Get it into an international film festival
– Win an Oscar
These are stepping stones creatively drawn from your personal ideal. By using an
approach like this, you can begin to self-direct your career. Alternatively, you can
work forward from where you are now by considering which stepping stone is likely
to lead you one step in the right direction. What is the next step that’ll make you feel
like you’re making progress? Take the next step in that career you’ve mapped out
and break it down into practical steps. Break down one stepping stone into lots of
smaller steps.
Thinking backwards from your ideal career goal helps you to side-step the error of
basing your future potential on your current knowledge and ability. We learn and
acquire skills over time. What might be out of your reach today may not be in the
near future. Don’t forget this when mapping out your career.
5. Make better use of chance encounters and situations.
Let’s be honest, the average creative career hasn’t been cleverly plotted out. So
much randomness comes into our careers. In fact, some studies put 60% of career
success down to chance, with 40% down to strategy. If 60% of your career is random,
how can you feel satisfied and fulfilled? The answer is to make better use of chance.
Or happenstance as it is known.
Staying open minded and flexible will enable you to be open to unplanned
opportunities and to make the most of them. Don’t become blinkered by rigidly
holding onto unwavering career plans and goals. Make peace with knowing that
unplanned events will happen. Don’t fall into an avoidance approach. In every work
situation/meeting, consider, “How can I use this?”
6. When you meet new people, don’t talk about your past work, talk about
now.
If anyone asks, “What do you do for a living?”, respond with what you’re passionate
about or what project you’re currently working on and why it’s important to you.
When people know where we’re going, it’s easier for them to connect with us.
Talking about the past gives people context, but it’s not going to give the other
person much of an idea of the type of work you see yourself doing next.
Help new acquaintances make a connection with you. Talk about the current
stepping stones you’re working on. Your new acquaintance might know someone
who could help you.
Never wait for finely tuned plans to develop before putting the wheels in motion.
Careers are social and built on relationships. The wider you can spread your network,
the better.
7. Try a solution-focused approach.
When we’re faced with a problem, our minds typically try to fix the problem. A
solution-focused approach focuses on where we want to end up instead.
Google Maps is a great example of a solution-focused application. It won’t try to fix
the traffic or the dodgy one-way systems. It focuses on getting you to your
destination, providing you with multiple options for doing so. Maybe you can get to
your destination without having to fix the problem you're faced with.
A solution-based approach is also a creative approach. It involves throwing new
ideas around and generating as many possible options as your brain will allow.
Focusing on the problem often lowers your mood. A solution-based approach is
fundamentally about what’s wanted and what’s working. It’s focused towards
progress and breeds hope.
Know that while you can’t change everything, in most situations you have some level
of influence. Find it and use it.
In an unpredictable creative career with an unpredictable future, solution-based
focused approaches can be really helpful.
Tips: Goal Setting, Productivity & Effectiveness for Creative Minds
Brian O’ Regan – Arts Leaders Associates
1. Define and articulate your goals
Goals can be short, medium or long-term, but they are not the same as tasks. Short-term goals should be rooted in your daily/weekly habits, while long-term goals should take you a little bit out of your comfort zone. They should make you feel excited, motivated and the best ones can often feel a bit scary at the beginning. Remember, true confidence comes from competence.
2. Use the principles of strategic planning to help with goal setting
In strategic planning, we try to answer these 3 questions: “Where are we now?”, “Where do we want to be?”, “How are we going to get there?”. We can apply these questions to our goal setting, and activities such as doing a personal SWOT Analysis or a personal Resource Audit can be very effective in building a more detailed picture of where we’re starting out from.
3. Prioritise your goals and tasks – focus on the “vital few”
You can do anything, but you can’t do everything! Prioritising goals and focusing on the “vital few” will enable you to use your time and energy more effectively. Concepts like the Pareto Principle (or the 80/20 rule) and tools such as the well-known Eisenhower Matrix can really help you to prioritise, and de-prioritise your goals, as well as your to-do list.
4. Stop multitasking!
Research has shown that multitasking is less productive than single-tasking. When we think we’re multitasking, we’re really only jumping from one task to another. Every time we move between different tasks, we leave an “attention residue” behind us, which makes it more difficult to focus. Multitasking kills our productivity, and it can also be the cause of constant distraction, procrastination and negative stress.
5. Bring a sense of awareness and curiosity to everything you do
Awareness is the first step in making sustainable positive change. Without a sense of awareness, it’s hard to know what’s wrong and how to fix it. If you find that something isn’t working for you, don’t get frustrated – get curious! “Why isn’t it working?”, “What else can I try?”, “Why do I feel like this?”, “What can I do to feel different?”. Asking these questions with curiosity rather than frustration will help to open doors to solutions.
6. Think of motivation as the reward, not the stimulus
We often think that we need to be motivated in order to start something, but motivation is actually more likely to show up after you’ve started – not before! Think of motivation as being something that needs to be earned, and think of self-discipline as being the way to earn it. Self-discipline is like a muscle – it gets tired when you use it, but it also gets stronger when you exercise it.
7. Manage your energy and your focus – not your time
Knowing how to manage our time effectively is important, but what’s more important is knowing how to manage our energy and our focus. Time is constant, but our energy and focus are not. Having an awareness of what affects our energy and focus allows us to plan and execute our tasks more effectively, and with better results. Remember, there’s a big difference between being efficient, and being effective!
8. Work interdependently with those around you
We can achieve far greater things when we work interdependently, rather than dependently or even independently. When working with others, make sure you are listening with the intention to understand and not just to reply. In dealing with conflict or negotiation, respect other people’s perspectives and be curious about differences in opinion. Once you fully understand, try to figure out a “win/win” solution, or even better – synergise!
9. Don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs!
There’s a well-known fable about a farmer and his family who had a goose that laid a golden egg every day. After some time, the farmer and his family thought that instead of waiting for the goose to lay a new egg each day, they could kill the goose and get all the eggs at once. Needless to say, it didn’t work! When we’re working on a project, we sometimes turn into the farmer from this story. Sometimes we’re the goose, and sometimes we’re both. How many of us are guilty of breaking ourselves open to try and get all the golden eggs at once? Are we guilty of doing it to others?
10. Redefine what work/life balance means for you
Work/life balance is a false dichotomy, and trying to achieve any kind of balance based on these two components alone can be very difficult. Think about “life admin” for example, where does that sit on the work/life spectrum? Considering the other factors which play a role on the sliding scale of “work”, “life” and everything in between can help to get a more helpful perspective. Like riding a bicycle, balance sometimes requires momentum, and a lack of momentum in our lives can sometimes cause us to lose our balance. Developing a better awareness of where you spend your energy and how you replenish your energy will help you to rethink this idea, and what it means for you.
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