1.1 Discover your greatest motivation
First of all, welcome to the Transform programme. It’s a new course that focuses on helping you discover a market and a message that can bring you a reliable income stream. Possibly more than one right here, but it’s a process you can repeat to get more income streams.
So we’re going to start with your values, if you’ve been through any of my programmes this is where we always start. Don’t skip over it though if you’ve done it before because it’s great to do it again and merge the results, that will give you even greater clarity.
Before I get deep into why this is important, I really need you to do the exercise. Otherwise whatever I say will colour your judgment.
So here it is.
Get your head straight .. the test is going to ask you to choose between values, make the choice as you as an artist. Not you as a parent, or even you just as you. You, the artist you.
OK, go here: https://johnallsopp.com and it’ll give you a choice of 7 values. Choose the one you feel most aligned with and click it. The page will refresh with more values. There are over 60 of these pages so settle in, get a coffee or whatever.
Do all that and it will end by listing your results. Copy and paste that list so you have it somewhere safe.
There’s then a video on that page about how to group these values together. Take your time over that, do it, sleep on it, revisit it.
(I think artists have three obvious groups of values: creativity of course, continual improvement/learning/professionalism and then this came as a surprise to me: perseverance, robustness. If it makes sense to you to have those groups, great, then your differentiating value is in the next largest group. If that’s not how yours is coming out, no worries, carry on. Only you know what you meant when you chose your values.)
OK then, take your biggest group (or perhaps your biggest group that’s not one of the every-artist-three) and choose one value from it that you resonate with best. Imagine living by that value in a big way. What would change? What difference would a fly on the wall notice? How does it feel? If you made the decision to live by that value, what would you do right after finishing this exercise? And what would life be like in the future .. a year, 5 years, 10 years? How would that be different from what you’re currently doing.
Go to Chat GPT and ask it “If an artist lived mainly for [your top value], what activities would you expect them to engage in?”
How does that feel? Are you excited? Motivated? Or do you not want to do it?
It has to feel right, so if it doesn’t, try a different value until it does. I’ve got two equal ones for now: integrity and vision.
It’s important for all sorts of reasons to find one value that leads. It’s hard to keep a lot of things in our heads, so having one key value is something you can always have with you.
It doesn’t mean the other values aren’t important, but also I think many people have become used to instant choices and always having options, so we’ve become averse to closing doors. We don’t like making decisions because it means closing down an option. But if your marketing is woolly, it’s not going to work as well as if you stand for something. Clarity and confidence is attractive.
Also, although one’s values don’t tend to change over a lifetime, if it helps you can think of your key value choice as .. just for now. And here’s a sneaky peak at next week’s task. Next week is all about getting ready what you want to sell. So if you’ve all sorts of collections on the go, one factor in your choice of value might be whether it goes well with the specific art you want to sell in this programme.
One final thing. If you are revisiting this values exercise having done it before that’s great because the values you consistently choose would seem to be the most important to you. The values exercise is different every time, it gives you the choices at random, sometimes you’ll want to pick all of them on a page, sometimes none of them, so you get different results each time. I actually recommend you do it annually .. set a reminder in your diary.
The way I’ve dealt with it is .. the second time around I just bolded the words that appeared twice. But the third time around I allocated primary colours to the years and then combination colours. My intention is to have a rolling values analysis from the last three years. I haven’t yet gone through the pain and suffering of deconstructing those colours to remove the oldest year before bringing in the new, but I know it’s possible. If you’ve a better idea feel free to yell. (Yes I could write the software .. could do a lot of things.)
OK, go do the values exercise! https://johnallsopp.com
Don’t watch the next video (if I’ve posted it) until you’ve done the values choosing and gathered them into groups.