This week I’m helping you balance the pressure of your growing arts business. I’m John Paul Fischbach. I’m the CEO and Chief Alchemist here at the Auspicious Arts Incubator. You know, as your business grows, the demands on you increase and it’s hard to meet so many needs. Here’s a little cartoon of how this looks, right? At the bottom is what we call them, and in the middle is what we call us, and at the top is what we call me, right? And meeting all these needs is hard because there are so many of them and as your business grows they all need something from me and…right? We want to help all of them. But helping all of them has a cost. What happens is we’re helping all of them, so the us gets diminished access, diminished energy. Your family, your partner, your team, they’re desperate for a bit of you. And there’s not much of you to go around if you’re helping all of them, right?

The next thing that happens is that me gets diminished, right? And that’sour health, it’s our sleep, it’s our nutrition, it’s our exercise. All of those shrink and shrink and shrink. You know, we can keep helping all of them at the cost of us and at the cost of me. What we need to do is to take this pyramid and flip it upside down. And look after me first. Look after your nutrition, look after your sleep, look after your health because the healthier and the stronger you are, the more of you there is to help us. And when the family and the partner and the team are strong, then there’s more of us to help more of them.

If you wanna help more of them, as your business grows, the best way is to make sure that you look after me immediately. The secret to managing this is to take care of me first. So here’s three things I want you to start doing this week: start to say no, schedule time for me, and schedule time for us. So right now, please, as soon as you stop this tape, go and go to your diary and schedule time for me and schedule time for the us. Look after yourself. Take some time this week to say, “hmm, what do I need to feel better, more fit, more alert, more alive?” Once you start taking care of you, then you have more power to radiate to the us and to the them. So right now, go schedule that time. Take care of me so you can take care of more of them.

Now, if you want to hear way more detail about this, that’s in our ASAP program. So you might cruise over to there and have a look. Join that community of other artists that are building their business and dig into this because it’s true and it works. See you next week.