This episode is originally being released on July 3, 2023, meaning that as I’m recording this, it’s the midpoint of the calendar year. Recently, on The Half Marathoner substack (which is an awesome newsletter if you’re a runner, like me), Terrell Johnson wrote, "This time of the year … has always felt like second base to me. As if you’re on a baseball diamond, running the bases, and you’re about to touch second; you’re at the farthest point from where you started — home — but you’re also half way to getting back there again." What a powerful image. You’re halfway through the journey that’s called 2023. We’re as far as we can get from the holiday season that always marks the delineation between calendar years, but we’re also halfway to getting back there.

This time of year is when business owners and leaders the world over are reviewing their plans for 2023, determining how things have been going so far, and making any needed changes. They’re taking time to figure out how they want to run the other two “bases” that are left in 2023.

What about you? Are you going to take some time over the next week or so to look back over the past six months and make plans for the coming six months? A lot of the creative entrepreneurs I work with struggle with the planning part of being an entrepreneur. So today I’m going to give you an exercise I think will help you wrap your brain around doing that deep planning work that’s necessary to allow your business to thrive. We’re going to talk about how to use your regret and your imagination to make future-shaped decisions.

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Hello, thriving artists, and welcome to episode #30 of the Starving Artist No More podcast. I’m your host, artist and business coach to artists, Jennifer Jill Araya. Helping creatives figure out how to make goal setting and business planning work for them is something I love to do, and I’m so glad you’re here with me for today’s discussion about future-shaped decisions.

In that goal-setting vein, I do want to remind you quickly that I have a free workshop all about goals and business planning that’s coming up super quickly! On Wednesday, July 5, 2023, from 7-9pm ET, I’m going to be offering a free Zoom workshop session that helps creatives understand how to make goals and plans for their creative work. I’ve already got lots of people signed up to participate, but I would love to have you join us as well! You can find all the details on the Events page of my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com.

While we’re talking about upcoming happenings in the Starving Artist No More community, there are two other exciting events I want to mention. First is the summer cohort of my Taming the Muse Group Workshop, which is getting underway in just a few weeks, on July 19, 2023, and will meet weekly for three months, through the end of September. The main purpose of this workshop is to help artists understand how they can build a creative business that fits their unique needs and creative energies, and then to provide the framework within which they can craft a strategy – a plan – to help them make that dream business a reality. The Taming the Muse group workshop is all about business planning and goal setting! It’s about deciding where you want to go with your creative career and then figuring out how to get there. If you want more information about the group workshop, again, all that information is available on my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com.

Finally, I am so excited that, thanks to the generosity of an anonymous creative entrepreneur who wants to help other creatives grow and thrive, I’m able to offer two scholarships to creative entrepreneurs who want to participate in the summer cohort of the Taming the Muse Group Workshop but who need financial support to do so. Scholarship applications are due this coming Sunday, July 9, 2023. I’ll link the scholarship application in the show notes, or you can find it on the Events page of my website. If you know you need help with the business side of your creative business but you don’t have the financial resources right now to get the business coaching you know you need, this scholarship could be the opportunity you’ve been waiting for. I really hope you’ll apply.

And if you’re listening to this episode after all of those dates have passed, I still encourage you to check out my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com. I will always keep it up to date with the events, courses, and workshops I have coming up, and who knows, perhaps you’ll find exactly the opportunity you’ve been looking for.

Now that I’ve shared about those upcoming events, it’s time to turn to the main topic of today’s episode: making future-shaped decisions. This thought exercise around decision-making is one that I’ve found extremely helpful over the many years of my artistic career, and I’m excited to share it with you. I think it will help you, too.

Let’s begin by talking about why goal setting matters to you, a creative, an artist, who owns your own business. Goals matter to creative entrepreneurs because they allow you to shape your artistic career proactively, rather than passively reacting to the world around you. So much of what we do as artist business owners is reactive. Something happens, and we are prompted to respond and take action as a result. An opportunity comes our way, and we react to it; we decide to accept it or not, or maybe we request changes in the terms of the contract so we can take a not-so-good offer and make it one we’re excited about. It’s a reaction. Our client does something, and we respond; we react. Things happen around us, in our work and in our life, and we decide how we’re going to handle those circumstances in reaction to those circumstances. All of that reaction is good and necessary, but it’s also all triggered by something or someone outside ourselves. It’s reactive. It’s not prompted by us; it’s prompted by others.

Goal setting and business planning is the area in which we can be in the driver’s seat. There is nothing passive or reactive about goals and strategic business plans. The process of setting goals for your artistic career is inherently proactive.  By setting goals, we can establish intentions for what we want to make happen and decide upon a workable plan for making those dreams a reality. There is a lot of power and agency in goal setting. In my work coaching creative entrepreneurs, when someone has been able to grasp just how powerful goal setting and strategic business planning is, I’ve always been amazed by the results.

So many creatives have felt powerless for most of their career. Whether or not they get work feels like it’s completely out of their control. Maybe you can identify with this feeling of powerlessness. I know I can. To many creatives, it often feels like getting work depends on their agent sending them auditions, or the personnel manager giving them a call, or the gallery owner accepting their show proposal, or the search engine or social media algorithms liking their content and serving it up to potential customers. There’s a lot in our work that we have no power to influence or change, and that can be really demoralizing. In short, a lot of our careers is outside our control. (I talked about that at length in Episode 17 of this podcast, so listen back if you want to know more about what you can and can’t control in your creative business.)

In contrast, goal setting is a process that gives you back control. No more are you passively reacting; you are proactively stepping in the direction you have chosen. When you engage in strategic planning for your business, your career, you are accepting that while there are things you can’t control, there are plenty of things you can control, and you are going to be proactive and intentional about doing so. You may not be able to control everything, but you can control some things, and when you make a strategic business plan, you’re making the decision that you are going to use the power you have. Goal setting is how you can take back the reigns of your artistic life.

Assuming you’re with me and that you agree that goal setting is a powerful method of taking control of your creative business, how do you do it? How do you set goals for yourself and your career? Well, back in Episode 18 and Episode 19, I did a two-part series on goal setting for creatives. Those episodes looked at the nitty-gritty of the business planning process: figuring out your purpose in your business and using that to help you shape SMART goals that you can actually put into practice. Super helpful information, for sure! And if that sounds like something you want to learn about, I encourage you to listen back to those episodes.

But what if you need broader guidance? What if you’re faced with two or three really good options for how to move forward? How do you decide which path is the right one for you? That’s where this exercise for making future-shaped decisions comes into play.

Now, before we dive into the how-to of this exercise, I do want to acknowledge that this exercise isn’t an easy one, and it’s not for everyone. It will take a lot of deep, introspective thought, which can be really uncomfortable at times. Some creatives I work with love this exercise and really dig into it and recognize how powerful it can be for them as a tool to help them build a career they love. Other creatives I work with find this exercise way too overwhelming and just can’t go there. Either reaction is ok. Wherever you land between those two extremes, it’s ok. Neither of those reactions is right or wrong. Your reaction is just a reflection of where you are in terms of the mindset journey of your artistic career.

Like everything I talk about here in this podcast, the information in today’s episode is by necessity full of general, broad ideas. I’m not coaching you individually or working with you in one of my group workshops, and so I can’t tailor this information to you specifically. Not every episode of this podcast will speak to your individual needs as a creative who manages an artistic business as unique and special as you are. Always, with all of the episodes of this podcast, and perhaps especially with today’s episode, I hope you will take what helps you, and use what doesn’t speak to you as directly to inform your decisions, without feeling frustrated if a specific piece of advice doesn’t fit your style.

So, with that little caveat in mind, let’s go through the 3-step process for making future-shaped decisions. First, use your regrets to figure out the areas in your work and life as an artist where you’ve made not-so-good decisions in the past. Then, use your imagination to think forward to the possible long term implications of each of the various opportunities available to you right now. And finally, use regret avoidance to push yourself to take action and do the hard things that you know will serve you in the long run. In short, through regret and imagination, you can make decisions that you will be proud of and happy about when the future becomes the present.

Let’s look at each of those three steps in detail so you can see how this process works. Step 1 is to use your regrets to figure out the areas in your work and life as an artist where you’ve made not-so-good decisions in the past.

If you think back over your career as a creative entrepreneur, you probably have some regrets. I know I do! What are the decisions that you made that, at the time, seemed like the right steps to take, but looking back on them now, you can see that they didn’t really serve you well? I think everyone has regrets, whether they’re about opportunities missed or paths not taken or problematic decisions made, or something else entirely. Regrets aren’t fun, but they are a universal experience, and they can teach you and help you grow.

When I think about my artistic training and career, most of the regrets I have right now have to do with educational opportunities I didn’t take full advantage of. There is one specific instance, during my second year of conservatory training, when I had the opportunity to audition for a new program, and I decided not to. I remember that decision-making process well, and I know why I said no, but looking back on it, I now also know that while I had valid reasons to make the decision I made, the real root cause for that decision was fear. I was afraid of the massive changes that would result if I took the audition and actually got it, and so I said no. Fear of what would happen if I got it kept me from even trying. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, and that was an example of me choosing not to even take the shot. Perhaps I would have gotten it, perhaps I wouldn’t have, but I’ll never know, because I didn’t even try.

Because this was an area of regret for me in the past, I’ve used it to shape my business decisions in the present. When I am presented with an exciting new educational opportunity, I now say yes to at least submitting myself for consideration. I may get it, I may not, but at least now I’m giving myself the option of benefiting from that educational experience. My regret about that opportunity not taken so many years ago informs my present decision-making and helps me make decisions now that serve me better.

My husband, Arturo, had a similar experience. When he was working on his Artist Diploma, he wrote a paper for one of his music history courses that the professor of the course found to be very powerful and well-written. In fact, the professor offered to work with him to expand that paper so that Arturo could submit it for presentation at music history conferences, and possibly even submit it for peer review and publication. Arturo said no. Again, he had plenty of valid reasons for making that decision at the time, but today, he also recognizes that saying no to the professor’s offer of help on his paper was an inflection point in his career. Had he said yes, had he expanded and submitted the paper to conferences and publications, his career might have taken a completely different direction. And he has some regret around the fact that he didn’t even give it a try.

Arturo works as a software engineer now, and recently, he was presented with the opportunity to submit a paper for consideration at two upcoming technology conferences. Based on his past experience with that music history paper, an opportunity missed, he said yes to the present opportunity. He made the decision to seize this opportunity and not let it pass him by. He submitted to both conferences, and he’s already been accepted to present at one of them.

Again, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. That isn’t to say that taking the shot is always the right decision. Sometimes not taking the shot is the better choice. But when you choose not to follow an opportunity, when you choose not to take a shot, do so knowing you are actively choosing something else. Inaction is a decision. When you choose not to say yes, it’s important that you know why you’re choosing to say no.

Think back over your career, your life to this point as an artist and creative entrepreneur. What areas of regret do you have about decisions you made or didn’t make? Think, and fill in these blanks: If I had done _____, then I might have been able to _____.

When you think about the regrets you have, do those regrets have anything in common? What commonalities tie together the instances in the past that have caused you regret? What guidance can you glean from that? What kinds of things have caused you regret in the past, meaning you should be careful to avoid that type of regret in the future? 

Obviously, there’s probably nothing you can do about those situations now, and this exercise is not about beating yourself up for past poor decision making. This exercise is about learning from that past poor decision making. Approach this review of your regrets with curiosity, not judgment. Let go of any tendency to judge your past self and view those regrets with an open mind.

Like I mentioned as I was talking about both of the regret examples I gave you, mine and Arturo’s, I know that we each made the best decision we could at the time. Our past selves did what we could with the knowledge and experience we had. But it is also true that, had we known what we know now, we both would have made different decisions. So now that we do know what we know now, what are we going to do about it? What action steps can we take now to make sure that those specific regrets don’t pop up for us again?

Use your regrets to help you plan. Think about the types of regrets you have about your past, and learn from them. Use your regrets about the past to help you make better decisions for the future.

I do want to mention quickly that, if you’re interested in learning more about this specific topic – using your regrets to positively shape your future – I highly recommend “The Power of Regret” by Daniel Pink. Before I read “The Power of Regret” earlier this year, I was already using this 3-part framework for making future-shaped decisions, but the book did solidify my understanding of how powerful this first step truly is. It’s a really good read.

Once you’ve examined your past regrets, Step 2 of making future-shaped decisions is to use your imagination. Think forward to the possible long term implications of each of the various opportunities available to you right now.  

In Step 1, you learn from the regrets you already have. In Step 2, you imagine yourself 5, 10, or 15 years in the future and use those imaginings to make decisions now that you won’t regret in those 5, 10, or 15 years. What opportunities are around you right now that, if you don’t take advantage of them, you’ll always wonder “what if”? What present opportunities will the future you wish you had explored more deeply? What opportunities around you are you missing entirely, as if they’re the invisible gorilla I talked about a couple weeks ago, back in Episode 25?

Part of what makes you a good creative, a good artist, is your power of imagination, so use that imagination now to dream about your future. Imagine what your future might look like if you take this opportunity in front of you, if you choose Option A. Then imagine what the future might look like, maybe even all the many possible futures that might result, if you instead choose Option B. Imagine what would happen if you say yes, and what would happen if you say no, and what would happen if you choose a grey area in between. Imagine and dream. Where would these things lead you, years ahead into the future? What are the implications of these decisions you make?

Obviously, you can’t know the future. There’s no way for any of us to completely comprehend the full future implications of our decisions. Some decisions that seem tiny and innocuous at the time end up being huge, lifechanging steps. And some decisions that feel momentous and impossible at the time end up not having much impact at all. This exercise isn’t meant to predict the future, or even try to. Rather, it’s meant to help you make sure you’re looking at the opportunities in front of you from all angles, considering all possibilities and making your decisions with as much context as possible.

Also, this exercise isn’t right for every single decision you face. If you take the time to do this for every decision that you make every day, you’ll get so bogged down in decision fatigue that you won’t be able to move! Decision fatigue is a real thing, and going too deep on every decision is a real quick way to get to that point of decision fatigue. No one wants that, and that’s not what I’m advocating.

Rather, this process is appropriate for the decisions you know are going to be big ones, the more consequential decisions you’re considering. This exercise is appropriate for things like quitting a day job to focus on your creative career, or perhaps the opposite: finding a flexible day job to take some of the financial pressure off of yourself so that you can do your creative work with more freedom and ease; decisions like whether and how to pursue a passion you’ve not nurtured before, or whether to do the work required to submit yourself for a completely long-shot opportunity, like Arturo did with the paper he submitted to that conference, or maybe deciding if an education choice is the right one for you.

Imagine the future that will unfold before you years down the line if you do quit your day job, and if you don’t. If you do search for that flexible day job, and if you don’t. If you pursue unexplored passion A versus if you pursue unexplored passion B versus if you sink deeper in the passion you’re already focused on. If you put in the work required to submit yourself for that opportunity, or if you focus your efforts elsewhere. If you apply for that long-shot educational experience, or if you don’t.

What diverse futures would those decisions lead to? What do those futures look like, and which ones appeal to you? Which future do you choose? Imagine. Dream. Follow the options before you to all of their possible resulting effects.

Use this imagination process to make decisions that future you will be happy about. You can't know everything, but you can plan for the future using everything you know right now. Imagine yourself looking back on this  decision in 20 years. Imagine where this decision has led you. Will it be a decision you're happy about?

The middle of the year is the perfect time to engage in this imagination process. The end of the year is the time when most business owners are doing their strategic planning for the coming year, but the middle of the year, right now, is the time to imagine and dream so that you can decide whether the strategic plan you set before yourself six months ago is still working for you. The goals you made six months ago, at the end of December 2022 or in early January 2023, are your goals, and their purpose is to support you in your artistic work. You are not in service of your goals; your goals and your strategic business plan exist to serve you.

The purpose of your goals is to center and focus you. Are your goals for 2023 still doing that? Are they still serving you? If so, that’s great! Stick with them, and continue to use those goals as the guardrails you need to keep moving forward. But if they aren’t, then they are ripe for change. Use this exercise of imagining your future to determine what the right steps are for your business right now.

Imagining your future helps you plan for the time when your present has become your past. It helps you make decisions now that future you will know were the exact right thing for you to do.

Once you’ve determined where you have regrets about the past and have imagined a whole host of future possibilities for yourself, it’s time to use all of that information to your benefit. Regret is a powerful and universal human emotion, and while regret isn’t fun, you can use the lessons you’ve learned from past regret, coupled with your desire to avoid regret now, to move you forward in a positive direction. Use regret avoidance to get over your mindset hangups that are keeping you stuck.

Fear of the future can be really hard to overcome. Sure you can use your imagination to envision possible futures that might result if you take certain steps or make certain decisions, but you can’t know what will actually happen with any certainty. That future is out of your control, at least to some extent, and the reality of that can be a scary thing that makes it hard to step out and take advantage of these big opportunities before you. Those mindset blocks can be really difficult to move past.  

But as much as everyone has an aversion to taking big chances because they’re scary, we all also have within us a desire to avoid regret. Use that aversion to regret to kick yourself in the pants and spur you to take action in the decision areas you’re facing.

Anything that short circuits your fear response is useful! Anytime you’re working to shift your mindset to a more positive place, fear will be your biggest obstacle. But your completely understandable fear of change doesn’t have to have the last word. As humans, we might fear change, but we also fear the possibility of future regret. Use that fear of regret to help yourself get over the fear of change and take action, doing the hard thing that you know you need to do.

This last step in the future-shaped decision framework was really helpful to me at one of the biggest and most influential inflection points in my artistic career. When I started working as an audiobook narrator back in 2018, I already had a job that had been my dream for years. I was a cellist in School House Symphony, an educational chamber orchestra that performs for schoolchildren in the greater Cincinnati area. It was a nearly full-time job during the school year. I loved my work, and I loved my coworkers. Serving schoolchildren every day at work was a delight. Having a full-time cello job had been a dream of mine for most of my life, and I had it! Part of me couldn’t imagine walking away from that.

But about a year into my journey as an audiobook narrator, in early 2019, I reached an inflection point. I had reached the point that, if I wanted to continue growing my narration career, my narration work needed more time and attention from me than I could give it while I was still working for School House Symphony. At that point, I faced two distinct choices. I could continue with the status quo, doing some narration work on the side while keeping my position in the group, what I had been doing for the past year. There wasn’t anything wrong with that decision.

But when I did this exercise – when I thought about my past regrets and the opportunities I didn’t take but that I wish I did, and when I imagined my future if I stayed with the group versus my possible futures if I took the leap of giving full-time narration a try – I knew I would regret it if I didn’t at least try to make narration work fulltime. I knew I would regret it if I didn’t give it a chance, and I used my desire not to have future regret about this decision to overcome my fear of change in the present. I used my aversion of regret to overcome my fear of taking that leap.

At that point, when I made that decision, there was no guarantee that I would be able to make a go of fulltime narration. I was getting regular narration work, but it was nowhere near fulltime, either in the number of projects or in the amount of income. While I thought I would be able to expand my narration work to fulltime, there was no way I could know that with certainty, which was a super scary thing. But I also knew that the future me would absolutely regret it if I didn’t give a try, if I didn’t give myself the chance to make it work.

My fear of the future was countered by my aversion to regret, and I did it. In February of 2019, I let my colleagues in School House Symphony know that I wouldn’t be coming back to my position the following school year. In May of 2019, I finished out the season and then quit my job, taking the leap to see if I could make narration work for me.

Obviously, that decision worked out extremely well. I love my current work as an audiobook narration even more than I loved my School House Symphony job, which, at the time I made the decision to quit, I wasn’t sure was even possible. The people I work with today – the authors and casting directors and producers and engineers and fellow narrators who populate the audiobook narration world – are absolutely amazing, and I know deep in my soul that I’ve found my tribe. I’ve found my place in the artistic, creative community. It’s incredible, and I am grateful every day for how well that decision in February of 2019 worked out.

But even if it hadn’t worked out the way it did, I would still stand by my decision to try. I would have no regrets about it. I knew then, and I still know now, that giving audiobook narrator a fair chance was the right decision for me. Not trying would have been something that I absolutely would have regretted. And so I took a leap of faith. I made the decision that, regardless of whether or not it worked out, not taking the step would have been a mistake for me, and so I stepped.

And isn’t that the goal of all of this? To rest assured in our decisions knowing that, whatever happens, whether the step we take ends up leading where we hope it will lead or not, that we gave ourselves the best opportunity possible of thriving and succeeding? Sometimes taking the step is the right decision, and sometimes not taking the step is the right decision, but either way, if you are making future-shaped decisions, you know, deep in your bones, that you are taking the decision with intention, proactively making decisions that the future you will be proud of. Those kinds of decisions are ones you will never regret.

Over the coming few weeks, at this midpoint of the calendar year, I hope you will take some time to review your dreams and goals and plans for 2023, and I hope that you’ll be able to use future-shaped decisions as part of that process. As you review the past six months and make plans for the next six months, as you figure out how you’re going to continue rounding that baseball diamond, passing 2^nd base and heading toward home plate at the end of the year, use your past regrets and your imaginations about the future to make adjustments to your business goals now that will serve you long term. Use your regrets to figure out the areas in your work and life as an artist where you’ve made not-so-good decisions in the past, and allow yourself to imagine the possible long term implications of each of the various opportunities available to you right now. And use regret avoidance to push yourself to take action and do the hard things that you know will serve you in the long run. Future you will thank you.

Thank you so much for joining me for today’s discussion of how making future-shaped decisions can help you thrive in the present and look forward with excitement for the future. I hope this episode gave you some food for thought and perhaps gave you a new framework with which to think about your business goals for the year.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, I would so appreciate it if you would leave me ratings and reviews, and of course you should absolutely subscribe to this podcast using your podcast player of choice. Ratings and reviews help new listeners find me, and subscribing means that you’ll never miss an episode. As always, if you know a fellow creative who might be helped by this episode, or any episode, please share it with them. Sharing is caring!

Also as always, a huge thank you goes out to my husband, Arturo Araya, who edits and engineers every episode of this podcast so I always sound my best when you listen to me. I’m especially grateful to Arturo for today’s episode, since this 3-part process of making future-shaped decisions is something that he and I have worked on together over many years, as we both have figured out our place in life as artists and musicians. In terms of intellectual property, this framework of how to make future-shaped decisions is as much his as it is mine. Thanks, Arturo, for being a great partner in business and in life, and for helping me make decisions that I know are the right ones for me.  

When opportunities come your way, I hope you’ll make the decision to pursue them – or not – with the future in mind. Knowledge of your past regrets, coupled with your vibrant imagination about the possible futures for yourself, can help you overcome any fear of change, and can allow you to take actions now that the future you will be so glad you took. When you make decisions with the future in mind, you are intentionally taking action so that, when the future becomes the present, you will know you did everything you could to allow yourself to thrive. I can’t wait to see what you create.