Your Mindset And Skillset Determine The Results In Your Business

Your mindset is such an important thing to understand and implement in your creative life and business.

The Results In Your Business Come From Your Mindset And Skillset

Whatever your current business looks like, it’s directly traceable to your mindset and skills.

The perfect example is how many businesses threw up their hands in the first few months of the pandemic and all of it’s second-order effects.

Many artists and creatives were hit incredibly hard. The gig economy shut down overnight and still hasn’t recovered.

Currently many states are seeing a second lockdown, government orders to stay home and limit gatherings.

Hard to have a show with hundreds or thousands of people to come hear you perform in those conditions.

Yet, none of those things are in your control. They never were.

Whether a venue owner booked you on a show, whether people showed up, sure, you could influence those things, but you never had 100% control over them. If you did, every show would be sold out and you could play to the same crowd multiple times a week at $100 per ticket.

That’s not reality. Not now, not then.

The main difference between those that are thriving right now and those that no longer have any income from their art is their mindset.

Your Mindset Is More Important Than Your Skillset

There are plenty of other musicians, photographers, artists, filmmakers, stylists, designers, and more that have the same level of skills – or greater – than you do.

Yet some people who lack on the skillset still have managed to grow their business this year, find new ways to make an income, and are reaching more people than ever before.

With the right mindset you can use your skillset in new ways that lead to new opportunities. With a bad mindset you, instead, decide that the events around you are too large to overcome and you give up.

Two quick examples –

When the pandemic hit the U.S. my wife’s photography business stalled. Rather than lament the loss and postponing of shoots, the channeled her energy into a side-business with her sisters and started doing photo shoots and even video interviews of people who were using the product she created.

Those highlights and videos were viewed hundreds of times and led directly to sales of their planner.

Same skillset, different mindset.

Hayley Barry is a hand-lettering artist. When the pandemic hit, she wanted to bring some awareness to local shops that didn’t have the budget to advertise and saw a dramatic decline in foot traffic to their businesses.

She decided to take her hand-lettering skills and apply it in a different way to help others, like here and here.

She saw things a different way than others and has grown her audience and her income over the last 8 months because of it.

It’s not the skills you have that determine how well your business works. It’s your mindset.

Whatever you’re experiencing in your business right now, you can change or improve it with just your mindset.

The answer isn’t to work harder – it’s to see the situation in a different way and approach it with a different mindset so that you can not just survive, but thrive.

A few questions you can ask to help focus your mind:

• what outcomes do I truly care about?
• who do I want to serve?
• what do they really need right now?
• how can I use my skills to help them?
• what other assets do I have that I can use in different ways?

Take Action

None of this really matters if you don’t do something about it, right? Here are some quick wins that you can implement immediately to start affecting your mindset.

1. Start your day with gratitude – think about what you are grateful for, what you’re excited about, and the people in your life that make you happy.
2. When things occur that knock you off your game, give yourself just 1 or 2 minutes to feel the emotions, then brush it away. Reset, and get back into a state that helps you create.
3. Go into every interaction with someone in a “peak state” – a 9 or 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. Show up as your full self in everything that you do.
4. If there’s something you need to get done that you’re resisting, see if you can find a way to change the meaning – or change your mindset – to approach it a different way.