Coach Bennett’s Pearls of Wisdom 2 – Measuring Success

In this blog series, I am going to share with you some of Coach Bennett’s pearls of wisdom and how they apply to my art practice.

For this post, we are going to talk about measuring success. In the guided runs, Coach Bennett says that we should measure success in as many ways as we can, and not limit ourselves by measuring success only by the numbers on our phone or watch. So consider, starting a run a success, getting to the middle of the run a success, finishing a run a success, smiling during the run, and so on… You get the picture.

And how can we apply this to our art practice? For me, the equivalent of numbers on my watch was sales on Spoonflower or followers on Instagram. I would get frustrated that I couldn’t grow my follower base, or my sales, and then I wouldn’t post (which leads to not gaining followers).

Shifting my mindset to looking for success on the things I can control, makes me much less stressed. What can I control?

• How often I sit down to make art
• Scheduling Instagram and Pinterest posts ahead of time
• Finding ways to automate my workflow

So success is that painting you start, that sketch you start, that pattern you start, just as much as the painting you finish and gets 10k likes on social media. In a way, it is like measuring success as many ways as you can is akin to enjoying the journey, not just the destination.

On the next post, I will talk about Consistency – which is a tricky one for me.