Your beliefs about what is possible for you and your business will be the limiting factor in how your business grows. If you don’t believe it’s possible to have all your needs met by your business, then you won’t be able to recognize the opportunities you have to make that happen. Building a fulfilling business starts by believing it’s possible to do so.

Hi there, and welcome to episode 2 of the Starving Artist No More podcast. My name is Jennifer Jill Araya, and I am an audiobook narrator and the creative entrepreneurial mind behind Starving Artist No More.

Before we get started on the topic of today’s podcast, I did want to mention that I have a free guide available to help you set yourself up for financial success in your business. Just visit my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, and fill out the contact form to receive, for free, the guide: “Say Goodbye to “Feast or Famine”: Three Financial Must-Haves for Creative Entrepreneurs.” I’m serious about helping creative entrepreneurs build the business they want, and let’s face it, finances are a huge part of that. I think this guide will help you move your business finances in the right direction. www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, and fill out the contact form.

So with that, let’s dive right in to the topic of today’s episode: believe it’s possible. A little bit ago, I shared a photo on social media of a bracelet I’ve had for about a year. It’s a silver plate with a black cord, and the plate is stamped with the words, “she believed she could, so she did.”

She believed she could, so she did.

A similar quote comes from business titan Henry Ford: “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.”

Both of these quotes are obviously oversimplifications of how the world works. There are plenty of things that can never happen regardless of how much I believe it. I can’t just “believe” and grow gills to breathe underwater. I can’t “believe” and fly to the moon without a spacecraft. And the same applies to more mundane things as well. Simply believing I can do incredible things doesn’t automatically mean I will actually achieve those things. But believing I can do incredible things does mean I shift my mental model to one in which those things are possible, which opens the door to me making those things a reality. Belief is step #1 to making your dreams happen.

Mental models are really powerful. I first heard the term when I read Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg, and it kind of blew my mind. A mental model is how you understand things to work in the real world. It encompasses your intuitive understanding of the reality of a specific situation, and how you understand that your actions and reactions will lead to specific consequences. Your mental model about a given situation incorporates everything that you believe to be possible in relation to that situation.

Let me give you a few examples. Let’s say I’m training one of my parrots – yes, I have two parrots, Pepper and Greyson, and they are lots of fun. So let’s say I’m training Pepper, and every time I call her, she flies to my shoulder, I click my training clicker, and I give her a little piece of walnut, which is her favorite treat. Pepper’s mental model in this situation is that when she does what I ask her to do, she’ll hear the click and get a treat. She has an understanding of how her actions and reactions will lead to a specific result – getting walnut. Outside of this situation, though, Pepper doesn’t expect to get walnuts. She knows where we keep them in in our kitchen, and she’ll sometimes go to the box where they’re stored and let us know that she wants one, but she also understands that walnuts outside of training are not guaranteed. Her mental model tells her when she is assured of getting a walnut, and when a walnut is only a possibility.

Here’s another example, this one pulled from my time as a music teacher. Let’s say a little boy – we’ll call him Adam (not his real name) – is learning how to play the cello. Adam’s mental model tells him that practicing is awful and boring and will never be any fun. He doesn’t like the music his school music  teacher has assigned to him. He thinks it’s too easy. And he doesn’t want to spend time playing it, even though that’s what his school music teacher wants him to do. His understanding of what practice is, his mental model about practice, is that practice is not and will never be something he enjoys. So when Adam’s parents bring him to a me for private cello lessons, I have my work cut out for me! I have to somehow change his mental model so that he’ll be enticed to practice, which will let him actually learn and benefit from the work we do in lessons.

I started by giving Adam different music to play, since one of the first things he told me was that he hated the school-assigned pieces. We picked out the music together and found some pieces he was actually excited to learn. We then talked about what to do when he practices – all the different things he can do in each practice session to keep things interesting. I gave him a listening list of videos on YouTube, recordings of professional cellists playing a variety of musical selections, and told him that if he wanted to watch a few of those YouTube videos instead of practicing one day each week, that was totally fine! He could count that YouTube watching as a practice session, as long as he was watching one of the videos on the list. I gave him a practice game that I used to use with my students, where they put various practice activity options into a bag and pulled out 2 or 3 out at the beginning of each practice session as the way they planned their practice. And finally, I ran a practice competition with my all students that semester, in which two prizes would be available: one for the student who practiced the most total time for the entire semester, and one for the student who practiced the most number of days in the semester, with the prizes awarded at the semester-ending recital, in front of all of the students and their families.

All of a sudden, Adam’s understanding of what practice is, what practice could be, flipped on its head. Practice was no longer something that was impossible to ever enjoy. It was now a time he could play music he liked, or he could watch cool YouTube videos of famous cellists. He could have fun by playing the practice game, and he even had the possibility of winning a prize for doing it! Eventually, Adam began looking for ways to make his practice even more fun and came back to lessons giving ME ideas for how his practice could be better, more enjoyable, more entertaining.

All of those ideas about how to improve practice had been within Adam’s reach the whole time. But because he thought practicing was awful and would always be awful, he hadn’t even considered the possibility that practice could be fun, and so he wasn’t looking for ways to make it fun. Had Adam’s mental model about practice not shifted, he would never have been able to learn to enjoy it.

In Smarter Faster Better, Duhigg provides two starkly opposite examples of mental models and the powerful impact they have on our actions. He compares the mental model of two groups of airline pilots: those flying Air France Flight 447 in 2009, in which the pilots stalled the plane and eventually crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, tragically killing everyone on board; and those flying Qantas Flight 32 in 2010, in which the pilots were able to make a successful emergency landing after the plane suffered an uncontrolled failure in one engine, resulting in not a single injury to passengers or crew. In the first flight, Air France 447, nothing was mechanically wrong with the plane. In investigations after the fact, investigators surmised that the plane’s pitot tubes likely developed ice crystals, resulting in inconsistencies in the measurements received by the instruments and the autopilot disengaging. But the crew reacted incorrectly and caused the plane to stall, eventually killing themselves and everyone on board. In the second flight, part of one of the plane’s engines disintegrated. Talk about a serious problem! But the pilots handled the situation beautifully and did what they needed to do to keep their passengers and themselves safe. Duhigg says, “Investigators would later deem Qantas Flight 32 the most damaged Airbus A380 ever to land safely. Multiple pilots would try to re-create [the original pilot’s] recovery in simulators and would fail every time.”

What was the difference between these two groups of pilots? According to Duhigg, their mental model. The Air France pilots were receiving conflicting information from their instruments about what was going on with the plane, and they had no basis for understanding what was actually happening. Their mental model didn’t include the possibility that the instruments could be wrong. As a result, they misread almost every stimulus they received, both from the instruments and from their own physical perception of the situation, and they reacted exactly as they shouldn’t have. A horrible tragedy was the unfortunate result.

The pilots of Qantas Flight 32, by contrast, had a practice together. They would regularly run through group mental exercises together, before every single flight they flew, in which someone would throw out an error that might occur during a flight and they would then discuss every option about how to recover from that error. For the Air France pilots, their mental model didn’t include instrument errors as a possibility, so when the error happened, they couldn’t even conceive of a way to recover. Their mental model didn’t tell them how to respond. For the Qantas Flight pilots, being aware of problems and responding to them quickly was so ingrained into their understanding of what it meant to be a pilot, into their mental model, that they successfully handled a situation that no one else could.

I can hear your reaction: “Jennifer, that’s an interesting story, but what does that have to do with me? I’m a creative entrepreneur, not a pilot. I’m not young cello student, even if maybe I used to be one, and I’m certainly not a parrot. Why are you telling me about mental models?”

I’m telling these stories because they encapsulate the incredible power your mental model has over you, to control how you react and the decisions you make. If you don’t perceive something as being possible, if your mental model rules it out, then it doesn’t matter how much evidence you receive to the contrary: you won’t ever believe what’s right in front of your eyes.

So many creative entrepreneurs I encounter have the “starving artist” as their one and only mental model for how they can exist in the world. Their mental model includes “hustling” and “struggling to make ends meet” and “scarcity” as the only options. And I get it! I’ve been there! I was there for much of my career as a creative entrepreneur. Some days, I still find myself defaulting to that mental model because it feels so comfortable and familiar, and because it is reinforced by everything our culture tells us about who artists are and their place in the world.

Our culture tells us:

Artists struggle.

Artists have to fight and scrounge for every penny.

Artists must hustle and sacrifice everything else in their life for the sake of their art.

Artists don’t have many opportunities for paying work.

Artists must viciously compete with other artists for the privilege of being paid for their work.

Artists must starve if they want to be artists.

An artist who doesn’t sacrifice everything else in their life for the sake of their art isn’t a real artist.

That’s what our society tells us. And I’m here to say all of that is WRONG. That mental model is telling you lies about who you are and what the value of your work is in this world. Creatives do not need to starve for their work. They do not need to sacrifice themselves for their work. It is possible to build a business, a creative life, that truly supports you. But in order to get there, you have to change your mental model. You have to believe that it’s possible.

If you can make that shift for yourself, if you can expand your conception of what it looks like to be a creative entrepreneur to one that includes the possibility of abundance and fulfillment from your work, you will start to all of a sudden, in a way that will almost feel magical because it will be so different from what you’re used to, you’ll start to notice opportunities and choices and pathways that can make that abundance a reality for you. And it will feel like magic, because it will seem like overnight, your luck has suddenly turned, and out of nowhere you have all these options and all these great possibilities laid out before you. But the reality is that all of those possibilities were already there; you just hadn’t noticed them before because your mental model didn’t include those possibilities as part of your reality.

In the spirit of honesty, I have to share that having a helpful mental model about my business is something I still struggle with. My struggles during my early years as a gigging musician led me to develop a mindset of scarcity, a mental model in which I believed that there weren’t enough opportunities for everyone trying to win those opportunities, and so I had to hustle hardest and practice longest and work more intensely than everyone else in order to have any hope of ever eking out a living. This mental model wasn’t true and didn’t reflect reality, but I believed it was true for many years. And I’m still struggling with the repercussions of that ingrained belief, of that intrenched mental model. I still sometimes accept too many projects, meaning I’m overbooked and overworked occasionally (and sometimes more than “occasionally”). I still find myself acting from a hustle mindset, from a scarcity mindset, even when those actions are harmful to my work-life balance and keep me from being at my best creatively. I still sometimes say yes to jobs that only fulfill me financially and do not fulfill me creatively, even though I know that’s not where I will do my best work.

I know that my past mental model was incorrect. I know that the way I now understand the world of creative industry to work is the correct way, the way that matches reality. I know that there are enough opportunities for all of the fabulous creatives who are looking for them; we creative entrepreneurs just have to work smarter, and we must find and then focus on the opportunities that are best suited to our unique creative selves. I know all of these things, and still I struggle to cast off the mental model of scarcity, the mental model telling me that, despite my current success, my true identity is that of a starving artist.

Changing your mental model is hard. I don’t want to downplay how difficult it is to do this mental work. It’s especially hard if you are still in a place in your business where it feels like scarcity is really the truth. Goodness, I have years of hard evidence – in the form of years of 6-figure income from my creative work – to show me in the most concrete of terms that the creative business world is NOT one of scarcity, and I still find myself at times struggling to really believe that mental model deep down in my core!

But I can tell you that doing the work within yourself to shift your mental model away from scarcity and toward a mental model of abundance is worth it. When you are making business and creative decisions from a place of abundance, you will find a new level of innovation and willingness to take risks and be bold in your work that you never knew was possible. You will find your creativity blossoming and taking your work to new and exciting places that you had never considered. Even if you still fight the old mental models, like I sometimes do, if you take the time to tell yourself that, “No, I am not in a place of scarcity. I am in a place of abundance. Building a thriving, fulfilling creative business is possible for me,” if you will tell yourself that, then you will be blown away by the possibilities that stand before you.

Only when you believe abundance and fulfillment is possible will you be able to find it. Believe you can build a thriving creative business in your creative field. Change your mental model to one in which a fulfilling business is an achievable outcome for you. Believe it, and you will be able to make it true.