The biggest perk of being your own boss is that you get to prioritise yourself, your health and your well-being! You are building a business to support the life that you want to live, so you get to create a business that is unique to your wants and needs and desires.
And as I talked about in the blog post where I introduced the idea of a quarterly art+business retreat for a team of one, travel is a priority for me to fill my energy reserves.
So for my solo art+business retreat for this first quarter, I went to the queen of hill stations- Mussoorie!
Quarter 1 Art+Business Retreat for a Team of One Agenda
The intention for this retreat was to evaluate how can I improve the process that starts after the process of creation ends. Reflect and plan ways to share my art to honour my art and my creativity.
From the start of this year, I have been thinking about how I have been limiting my full and authentic expression because I’ve been uncomfortable with the vulnerability of showing up with all the undone edges of my human-ness.
My social media feed has been curated to provide a very measured access to me as an artist and a human. It was the combination of my fear of showing up as the full human expression of myself and my paranoia around privacy.
But I realise how it has limited my interactions with the people who are here to see and enjoy my art and see my journey as an artist, and how it has deprived me of forming any real deep connections with my community.
I knew I wanted to change that and so I came up with the idea of creating a social media posting schedule.
Creating a Social Media Posting Schedule
Showing up on social media does not come naturally to me, I don’t generally share many stories and posts on Instagram because I tend to find it draining for me energetically. But I also realise that showing up on social media is important for me to connect with my audience.
When I was thinking about the why behind creating and sharing my art, the thing that came up was that I want people to feel seen and understood through it. And how can my art form a connection with people if I don’t share with them what I create, why I create, my process, and how that creation came to life? If people don’t form a connection with me how can they form a connection with what is stemming from me?
So I knew it was important for me to show up for my art and my audience. And I also knew that since showing up on social media doesn’t come naturally to me, I feel have to make a conscious effort to do the same until it does start to come naturally.
If you don’t schedule, you snooze!
Or at least I do. If something is not on my calendar, it is not getting done. This is especially important for tasks that don’t come naturally to us or are not a habit but we want to do.
I have a million thoughts passing through my brain in a day and I have a questionable memory, which is a terrible combination. So I need to have reminders for things I need to and want to do.
I tend to do a mind-dump of all the to-do’s in my head onto a paper, then I see what to do and how to schedule them into my calendar.
While preparing a social media posting calendar, I first checked in with myself to see what posting frequency feels good to me energetically. Then I took a look at my quarterly business goals and the art launches I intend to have. Then I simply made entries into the calendar on Notion with prompts/ ideas for the posts. And finally, I intend to use it as a living, working guide and have given myself permission to alter it to serve my dynamic energy and changing goals.
So break down your intention into doable tasks and then enter them in your calendar so that you actually take action toward fulfilling your intention.