Hit Your Goals by Challenging Yourself

Ask an independent artist what his or her goal is and you’ll probably get answers ranging from “a record deal” to “making a full-time living from doing music” or one of a few others that I don’t need to spend time predicting.  But, there are periods of frustration, times of laziness, or spurts when it gets challenging to see that this is all really going somewhere.

Call it accountability, call it goal-setting, call it whatever you’d like.  But, if you’re having trouble getting motivated, I have an exercise that will help.  This is good as we approach March 1st this week and New Year’s resolutions having likely been abandoned by now.

A couple weeks ago I was at Podfest Multimedia Expo in Orlando.  As you might know I was a featured speaker there.  But, under a policy that I support wholeheartedly, the speakers for that event are required to stay throughout all three days of the event.  That’s good because I sat in on a session where one speaker talked about something that she did that I feel can help us all.

She imposed a 30-day challenge upon herself during which she would get on Facebook Live.  Yes, every single day of that month she had to get online.  She admitted that she wasn’t crazy about it but that this was the only way she was going to make the leap.  Then she told us about the results that it got for her.

Let’s stop here for a moment.  You’re probably already thinking about clicking away to something else because that sounds too daunting.  But wait, there are some alternatives.

She recognized that not everyone in the room would embrace that idea and suggested that maybe a 14-day Facebook Live challenge would be more appropriate.  There’s still some uneasiness, but it suddenly sounds more manageable than just over double that length.

Me, heck, I tried hopping on Instagram and doing a live 20-minute broadcast about a week after she said that.  Guess what?  I didn’t hate it.  While you think, “That’s easy for you, Bruce, you host a 45-plus minute podcast and have done TV and radio broadcasting too,” I will admit that I had to make a tiny little cheat sheet because I wasn’t even sure what I was going to talk about!  The fact is, I put myself out there.  I took the step.  Someone once complimented me by saying that they admire that I’m not afraid to put my clients in a position of discomfort – meaning, challenging them to do something that they might not be 100 percent prepared for.  That’s what I’m encouraging you to do.

If this all still sounds like something you’re just not ready to tackle, here’s one more option.

When was the last time you looked at your Web traffic stats?  They say that podcasters check their stats multiple times each day!  With this blog I play a little game with myself – making it fun changes the element of pressure – and see how I can get more and more reads each week.  The blog at the start of January about most read blogs in 2017 and then the entry the following week about the most read guest blogs of 2017 forced me to chart how many reads every blog got last year – every week.  That gives you plenty of insight and also something to strive for.

Let me know in the Facebook Group which challenge you’re going to do or maybe something similar that you’re already doing, like getting more bookings each month compared to that same month last year.