Your morning routine might just be preparing you for a productive day reacting to things. As an artist, it’s important to start the day proactive and in control of our thoughts and our emotions. This is a technique to create a morning ritual that is better than your current routine.
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John: Welcome to this weekly podcast of “Hot Tip Tuesday,” presented by the Auspicious Arts Incubator, building sustainable arts businesses.
Woman: As an artist, it’s important to start the day proactive and in control of our thoughts and emotions. So this week on the podcast, JP has a look at your morning routine and offers a technique to create a morning ritual that might be better.
John: I’m John Paul Fischbach. I’m the CEO and Chief Alchemist here at the Auspicious Arts Incubator. And this Tuesday, I wanna introduce you to something called “The Morning Practice.” So it’s a simple morning action that has made the biggest difference across the board for every artist that we’ve shared it with.
So in Hot Tips, I’ve talked a lot about habits and routines. And now you have to develop better habits and change your routines. And I’ve also talked about intention and mindset and how important they are to be a successful artist in business. Well, it all comes together in this really simple way to start your day that I call the Morning Practice. Now, as artists in business, we tend to work very hard in the business, right? But we rarely take time to work on the business. So, I encourage artists to start each day doing something where you work on the business before you get dragged into working in the business.
So, I want you to right now think about your morning routine. What is it? Is it alarm, wake up, snooze, wake up, clean up, dress up, head out the door? Probably it’s something like that. Well, I bet you, your morning routine is efficient, but not very effective for creating the life that you want as an independent artist. Well, the fantastic art that you produce comes from inside you, right? So I encourage you to practice a little self-care and give yourself the best start to the day by creating a half-hour morning practice. So here’s why spending 30 minutes at the start of the day is a good thing.
Well, first of all, you start your day proactive, not reactive. And secondly, you start your day by managing your emotions. So, your day starts with what you choose, okay? Most of us spend our day being reactive, right? We react to the alarm clock. We react to our emails. We react to the next thing we have to do. We react to requests from others. So, start tomorrow, proactive, with 30 minutes where every thought and every feeling is something that you choose. You can choose good thoughts and generate good feelings in the first 30 minutes of your day. So for this to work, you need two things, a threshold and a ritual, okay?
A threshold just means you have to cross from the sleep zone, your bedroom, whatever that is, into a working on the business zone. So there’ll be a doorway you’d go through. There’ll be a door that you’ll pass through, some threshold where you stop before you go and you say, “I’m gonna go do my morning ritual now,” and you step across that into that space set aside for the morning ritual. But if you don’t acknowledge the threshold, you don’t send a signal to your subconscious that you’re changing your focus. So you have to have a threshold. Secondly, you have a ritual. And a ritual is just space and time, and then some sort of talisman. So for the morning ritual, I would recommend that you have a particular mug that you use for that coffee or that tea, or there’s a particular thing that you hold, or there’s a particular blanket that you use, okay?
Now, all that you need, then, once you’ve got the threshold experience and you’ve set aside the space and the time and you’ve got a talisman, there’s just three parts to the 30 minutes. A bit of mindfulness, being present, focusing on the present. A bit of reflection, what went well, what do I love about what I do, what’s the big picture. And then some intention, stating the intention. So here’s some ideas, right? You might decide that what you wanna do is feel the sunlight. You might wanna have thoughts of gratitude. You might wanna think of three achievements from yesterday. You might wanna recite your goals, the goals for this month, the goals for the year. Or you might wanna revisit and think about, “What’s the one important thing,” okay? So that morning practice is gonna set you up for the day.
Now, there’s an extended version of this, if you’d like to hear more about it, and I’ll go into greater detail about how it works if you join the membership site. So head over to our website, have a look at the membership program, and then you can get this extended version. But we’re here to help you, to give you real practical advice for your art practice. So always check us out at www.auspiciousartsincubator.org.
Thanks for listening to this week’s “Hot Tip Tuesday” Podcast. All of these podcasts in the Hot Tip Tuesday series are curated by myself, John Paul Fischbach, the CEO and Chief Alchemist here at the Auspicious Arts Incubator and are produced by Alia Vryens. Check us out if you wanna see this podcast because sometimes there are visuals that don’t translate in a podcast. And you can see those videos if you check out our website, www.auspiciousartsincubator.org. And there’s a drop-down menu for quick help for artists, where you can see the video version of this podcast.
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