Motivation Tips for Entrepreneurs

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Motivation can be a big factor in the success of an art or craft based business. It's important to understand the 'nuts and bolts' of running your home craft business, and it can also be helpful to learn some good business goal setting techniques and consider your values, priorities and concerns to build a successful art or craft business.

As you work and sometimes struggle to build your art business, sometimes motivation fades and you may wonder:

• Do people who achieve business success have some special "it" factor?
  
• Is there a certain type of person who is more likely to succeed in business?
  
• Am I doing anything to stand in the way of my own business success?
  
• Why don't I feel as motivated as I'd like to feel?

These are pretty important questions, and we don't always take time out of our busy day to day lives to come up with real answers to those questions.

The nature and health of your business impacts every other aspect of your life. It impacts what you do with a huge portion of your time, how much money you have to pay your bills, whether you sleep peacefully at night and how much extra money, time and energy you have left over for fun, family and friends. In spite of all that, many people have habits that do not build success.

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Get motivated!


SMART Goal Setting
Smart goal setting will help you to achieve your goals and motivate you to achieve even larger accomplishments. Use these tips on goal setting to achieve your business goals.

Business Goal Setting
Effective business goal setting can help ensure that your craft business continues to move forward in the direction you choose.

Ways to Achieve Your Goals
Once you've set your goals, the next step is to brainstorm ways to achieve your goals. Develop an action plan to map out the steps you will take to achieve your craft business goals.

Managing Your Time – Time Management Methods for Entrepreneurs
Managing your time effectively can play a big role in the success of your business. These tips will help you develop good time management methods to create the structure you need to reach your goals.

Define Success on Your Own Terms
Take some time to think through your motivation for building your art or craft business. If you're following someone else's dream and not really pursuing your own version of success, then you could be setting yourself up for self sabotage. It's hard to muster the motivation and self discipline it takes to build a successful business if your goals are not your own and, therefore, not really all that compelling to you.

Setting Business Goals that are Within Your Control
Strategies for setting business goals that are effective, motivating and help move your business forward.

Know the Difference Between Being Lucky and Creating Your Own Luck
Do you believe that you control your destiny and the direction of your business, or do you believe that external forces, like chance or the actions of others, control your destiny? Check out this article to find out how your answer to that question can have a big impact on the success of your home craft business.

Have a plan – Know exactly what it will take to achieve your goal
Having a well thought out plan of action is a key difference between wishes and goals - success and failure. If you don't know exactly what it will take to achieve your art business goals, how will you know if you’re willing and able to make the sacrifices and do the work required to achieve those goals?

Be realistic about what you are able to commit to doing
These considerations include anything that is beyond your control, like the number of things you can accomplish in 24 hours or the amount of repetitive work your hands can tolerate when you're making your crafts. It's great to have big dreams, but you also have to live in the real world where there are plenty of things beyond your control that impact your business success. If you tend to set unrealistic goals for yourself, you are setting yourself up to feel like you have failed and lose motivation.

Know and accept your strengths and weaknesses
Everyone’s brain works differently. Some people are great with math but have weak spatial perception skills. Others have great manual dexterity but struggle with language. Some people are big picture thinkers and come up with great overall ideas, but they need others who are more skilled at detail oriented work to follow through on putting their plans into place.

You probably already have some sense of what your brain likes to do and what it does not like, and no amount of motivation is going to make those tasks easy or appealing. Accept your strengths and weaknesses and don’t work against them. When you run a small business you are responsible for everything from designing and creating your product to bookkeeping to customer service to emptying the garbage. Know when a task is outside your expertise, and be willing to seek out help where you need it.

Artists' aversion to marketing strategies
How much is aesthetic sensibility and how much is self sabotage?
Now, this is a sticky point among artists, so I might not win any friends here, but I’m going to say it anyway. Plenty of artists have an aversion to anything that smacks of marketing or considering the motivations of their customers – it's pandering they say. The importance of artists staying true to their aesthetic vision and pushing up against boundaries has a lot of validity in my mind. If all musicians played only what was pleasing to the general public at the time, we wouldn't have Bach or Stravinsky.

However, this position can also be a pretty convenient excuse for people who are not comfortable going out and doing the work required to market their business. So, if you're consistently discarding marketing opportunities and techniques for this reason, you might benefit from taking some time to consider whether you’re really staying true to a creative sensibility, or are you getting in the way of your own success.

Who Does She Think She Is!? – Jealousy
I've seen more than a few instances of people railing against others who have the audacity to claim and promote their own talents and skills. Typically the conversation starts somewhere in the realm of, "Who does she think she is anyway to say she's talented, original, fabulous, etc., etc., etc...?"

No one's perfectly gracious and confident; it's natural to feel that kind of jealously at times. But try not to get pulled into wasting too much energy on it. Getting sucked into that kind of jealousy brings everyone down by somehow 'confirming' that it's scary or bad to be successful because people won’t like you if you’re too successful.

The next time you catch yourself thinking this way, give yourself a few minutes to vent. Then try to figure out what it is about that person’s business success that that you want for yourself. Consider how you can go about getting that for yourself, and whether you can learn or derive motivation from that person's success to get to where you want to go.

Who Do You Think You Are?
Do you think you are a talented artist and a skilled business person?
You are who you think you are, and you are not who you think you are not. Try to see your blind spots regarding your self image and abilities. If you believe that successful artists or successful business people have some magical quality that you don’t possess, you will probably find some way to sabotage your business success.

Negative thoughts that float around unexamined and unquestioned in your mind turn into action or inaction that limits you and causes you to lose motivation. Question those things that you have accepted as common sense and ask yourself if they are really true.

Almost any art business coach will tell you that motivation is something that comes and goes. It can be helpful to check in and try different motivational strategies from time to time to keep your excitement about and interest in your business intact.

   

 
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