051: Celebrations Matter
In this episode, you will learn:
- What social psychology research can teach us about how to navigate stressful situations using celebrations.
- What the negativity bias is, and how celebrations can help us overcome that bias.
- How celebrating can help us identify the strategies that work within our creative businesses.
- Why celebrations are vital to developing habits that support you and your artistic work.
- What practical steps you can take to make celebration part of your creative process, benefiting you and your business.
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Last week’s podcast episode was all about the importance of acknowledging the hard things in your life as a creative entrepreneur, but if you stop there, you’re only seeing part of the picture. Yes, much in the life of an artist is really difficult, but so much is amazing as well. We get to create for a living! We get to share our artistic ideas with the world! What a gift that is! But if we don’t take time to intentionally acknowledge those good things, we run the risk of not even noticing that they happened. Our brains are primed to pay attention to and remember the bad, not the good. In order to make sure we recognize and appreciate the good things that happen in our creative lives, we need to celebrate them. Today, we’ll talk about why that’s so important and how you can incorporate celebration into your creative process. Celebrations matter.
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Hello, thriving artists, and welcome to the Starving Artist No More podcast! I’m so glad you’re here with me today. Taking time to celebrate is something that I am very passionate about, and I can’t wait to dig into this topic with you.
But before we get to that focus of today’s episode, I do want to remind you about the Thriving Narrators Retreat that’s taking place in August of 2024, and specifically the DEI Scholarship for the retreat. The Thriving Narrators Retreat is specifically for the audiobook narrators in the audience, and it will dig into both the craft of what it means to be an audiobook narrator, and the business side of the audiobook industry. I am so looking forward to this retreat! I’m deep in the planning work for the event right now, and every day, I’m getting more excited about it. The material we’re offering and the faculty who are coming to share their experiences and their expertise truly are incredible. I know it’s going to be a transformative event for everyone who attends.
And specifically what I want to highlight for you today is the DEI Scholarship to the retreat. Thanks to the generous donation of several anonymous benefactors who seek to cultivate an atmosphere of inclusivity and equity within the audiobook industry, we’re able to offer one full scholarship and three half scholarships to narrators from marginalized, underserved, and underrepresented communities so that they can have the opportunity to participate in the retreat.
I am thrilled about this scholarship opportunity, and so thankful for the donors who are sponsoring it. The publishing industry is one that has neglected the stories and perspectives of marginalized communities for too long, and I think any DEI initiative to help broaden access to careers within the publishing industry as a whole, and the audiobook industry in particular, is a wonderful thing. I’m so grateful that I have the opportunity to help make the Thriving Narrators Retreat a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive space.
As of when this podcast is releasing, on April 16, 2024, the scholarship application is open for less than one more week! Applications are due Sunday, April 21, 2024, so if you are a member of a historically marginalized community and would like to learn more about the scholarship, don’t wait. Visit my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, for all the details, and get your application in right way. And if you’d like to learn more about the retreat itself, all that information is also on my website.
And, if you’re listening to this podcast episode in the future, and the scholarship deadline of April 21, 2024 is long past, and perhaps even the Thriving Narrators Retreat in August 2024 is long past, I still encourage you to check out my website. The event page of my site will always be up-to-date with any upcoming events and opportunities. Again, that address is www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com.
Now that I’ve shared those exciting bits of news with you, let’s turn to the main focus of today’s conversation: celebrations. In your life as an artist and as a business owner, celebrations matter. Today, we’re going to talk about why that’s true.
To figure out why celebrations are so vitally important, we actually have to start by looking at what’s difficult in our life as creatives. I talked about the hard stuff in last week’s episode [ https://www.starvingartistnomore.com/podcasts/starving-artist-no-more/episodes/2148581561 ], and I encourage you to take a listen to that episode if you missed it. But it’s important to recognize when things aren’t going well in your business so that you can make changes. If you hide your head in the sand when bad things happen – something I jokingly call the ostrich response – then you’ll be at risk of continuing to use a strategy that isn’t working for you and isn’t serving your business. You have to notice what’s going wrong so you can fix it.
The danger lies in only noticing what’s going wrong. If you don’t notice what’s going right as well, then you miss the opportunity that comes when you are able to implement a strategy that really works! Acknowledging the hard stuff is important, but acknowledging only the hard stuff is only half the story.
Unfortunately, we as humans have something that psychologists call a negativity bias. In other words, we humans have an innate tendency to remember negative occurrences more strongly than positive ones. This trait was useful for humanity hundreds of thousands of years ago. It was important for early humans to remember that this particular place was where a pack of predators lived, and so they needed to remember not to go back there. Negativity bias gave lots of importance to negative experiences and helped keep early humans alive.
Now, however, negativity bias is less useful. But it is still a part of what it means to be human and how we experience the world. We remember the negative review and give it more weight than the positive one. The one critical line in a mentor’s otherwise positive feedback email will leave us hurt or in tears. The cutting offhand remark will be remembered more powerfully than the thoughtful, kind compliment. The awful experience of stage fright, or the horrible performance when you flubbed your lines and made every possible mistake, will linger longer in your mind than the high of a performance well delivered. Those bad creative experiences can haunt you for days or weeks or more, negatively impacting your present-day creativity and keeping you from being your creative best … unless you intentionally work against that tendency. You have to fight against the negativity bias so that those hard things don’t commandeer your thoughts. Yes, acknowledge them, but don’t stay there.
If all we notice is what isn’t working, if all we acknowledge is the hard stuff, we won’t be aware enough to notice things that are working. And we can't continue doing things that work if we don't notice that they work. If an actor doesn’t recognize that sending out brief quarterly reach-out emails to her casting contacts is a strategy that works, then she won’t be motivated to continue sending out those emails. If a fabric artist doesn’t realize that tweaking the SEO keywords on his online product listings brings in significantly more click-throughs and purchases, he won’t understand just how important that SEO work is to the continued health of his business. If a violin teacher doesn’t notice how many new students they get when they get to know the school music teachers in their area, they won’t recognize the importance of nurturing those networking relationships.
Knowing what works and what doesn’t requires that you actually notice what works. But due to negativity bias, we often notice what goes wrong and what doesn’t work, rather than what does. Celebrating the good allows us to take note of what actually is working in our systems, processes, habits, and creativity, and then intentionally continue doing more of that. Celebrations help us overcome the negativity bias so that the good things stick in our mind just as strongly as the tough stuff.
I’m not saying that you should only focus on the good things. After all, as I said last week, acknowledging the hard things is actually really powerful. Focusing only on the good keeps you from seeing real problems in your work, and prevents you from finding solutions to those problems. Rather, I’m encouraging you to find a middle path, one that acknowledges the hard stuff so you can do something about it, and celebrates the good stuff so that you can enjoy it. In his book The Happiness Advantage, [ https://amzn.to/49CSGRy ] author and speaker Shawn Achor calls this “wearing rose-tinted glasses.” Rather than focusing only on the good – “rose-colored glasses” – Achor says that we can instead allow our view of the world to be “rose-tinted.” He writes, “Looking at the world through a lens that completely filters out all negatives comes with its own problems. That’s why I like to offer … rose-tinted glasses. As the name implies, rose-tinted glasses let really major problems into our field of vision, while still keeping our focus largely on the positive.” Noticing and celebrating the good helps it to sink into the core of our being and be fully recognized by our awareness. Celebrating the good gives the good stuff just as much weight in our lives as our negativity bias gives to the tough stuff.
In addition to helping us overcome the negativity bias to notice what’s working so we can keep doing it, celebrations matter for another reason: they force us to step back and acknowledge the milestones we achieve. As artists, we are so prone to moving the milestones on ourselves! We say, "Sure, I did that thing that I was working towards for ages, but I haven't done that next thing!" We work and work to achieve a goal, and when we do achieve that goal, we immediately switch our focus to the next thing beyond it. We move the milestones on ourselves. But if we are constantly moving the milestones, we will always feel like we’ve never achieved anything and that we’re working and working without ever getting anywhere. Milestones matter, and they deserve to be celebrated.
Personally, I think this tendency to move milestones, and to ignore the milestones we do achieve, stems somewhat from our artistic training. In my conservatory years, it was always drilled into me that, no matter how amazing my performance was, it could always be better. My teachers were always pushing me to keep practicing, keep improving, keep perfecting my work. Perfection in art is an ideal that is always at the heart of the work I do. I want my creative efforts to lead to the absolute best finished product possible! And yet, perfection isn’t actually possible. I will never play a perfect orchestra concert. I will never sing a perfect aria. I will never narrate a perfect audiobook. It’s the paradox of what it means to be an artist. Perfection is my artistic pursuit, and yet it is impossible to ever achieve.
From an artistic perspective, this paradox of unattainable perfection keeps me striving. It keeps me growing and evolving as an artist. It keeps me open to new ideas and new ways of thinking about the creative work I do. I actually think that, in terms of my craft, allowing this paradox to fully exist within my work is a really good thing. But if I allow this paradox to creep outside of the confines of how I practice my artistic work, it can be really toxic. If I never recognize my achievements, then I’m working and working and working with nothing to show for it.
In addition to writing The Happiness Advantage, which I referenced just a moment ago, Shawn Achor also gave one of my very favorite TED talks [ https://www.ted.com/talks/shawn_achor_the_happy_secret_to_better_work/transcript?language=en ], one I watch again and again every time I need a reminder of the danger of moving milestones on myself. Achor warns us against always thinking of success and validation as being someplace off in the future. In that TED talk, which I’ll link in the show notes, he says, “Every time your brain has a success, you just changed the goalpost of what success looked like. You got good grades, now you have to get better grades, you got into a good school and after you get into a better one, you got a good job, now you have to get a better job, you hit your sales target, we're going to change it. And if happiness is on the opposite side of success, your brain never gets there. We've pushed happiness over the cognitive horizon.”
Don’t push happiness and joy over the cognitive horizon for yourself. Recognize when you reach important milestones in your creative work and in your business. Celebrate those milestones. Celebrating allows us to notice and remember each goal that is achieved, each strategy that is successfully implemented, each career highlight that we realize, each tactic we put into action. It allows us to be motivated by the progress we are making.
Celebrations are good for the big things – the major career milestones achieved, the big auditions that we land, the major performances that go well. But celebrations matter for the little things, too. In their books, both author James Clear, who wrote Atomic Habits [ https://amzn.to/4aWap7G ], and journalist Charles Duhigg, who wrote The Power of Habit [ https://amzn.to/3VYSHvZ ], recognize the importance of rewards in creating new habits. Clear talks about the habit cycle having four stages, while Duhigg’s habit loop has just three stages, but both of them recognize that having a reward for the action is vital to creating a habit. Without a reward, nothing will become a habit. Celebrating helps us to intentionally reward ourselves, allowing us to turn our positive one-time actions into positive long-term habits.
Supportive habits are one of the six components of a thriving creative business that I talked about back in Episode 16 of this podcast [ https://www.starvingartistnomore.com/podcasts/starving-artist-no-more/episodes/2147862468 ], and if you’d like detailed information about those components, go back and listen to that episode.
The necessity of supportive habits as a component of your business is a bit unique to the life of a creative entrepreneur. It’s different than what an entrepreneur running a traditional business would need. If you’re running a business cleaning houses, for example, you’re still going to be able to clean your clients’ houses effectively even if you’re having a slightly-harder-than-usual day mentally, or if you’re working when you’re a bit tired or feeling a bit off your A-game. I mean, sure, the house cleaning is going to go a lot more smoothly if you’re not dealing with those things, but even with those bumps in the road, you’ll still be able to do a good job that will satisfy your clients and keep them using your services.
That’s not always the case for creative entrepreneurs. When someone hires you for your creative work, they are expecting – they have a right to expect – that you will give the project your absolute, 100% best creative focus. And that is not possible if you aren’t able to focus because you’re tired or because you’re trying to work during a time of day when you aren’t able to focus, or if there’s something in your life that is keeping you from getting into flow with your creative work. As a creative entrepreneur, it is essential that you develop habits that support you as a person and as an artist and help you grow.
And remember, as both James Clear and Charles Duhigg have said, rewards are essential to making habits stick. It’s not enough just to know what actions help you to be your best artistic self and to do your very best work; you have to practice those actions often enough and regularly enough that they become habits, so that they support you in an ongoing basis. And celebrating – rewarding yourself each and every time you do the thing that you’re trying to turn into a habit – is an essential part of what will allow that action to become a habit that supports you and your work.
Celebrating matters. It allows us to overcome our negativity bias so that we remember the good alongside the bad. It helps us to consciously recognize what’s working so that we can keep doing more of it. And it allows us to develop habits that support us as artists and as human beings, allowing us to be our very best. Hopefully I’ve convinced you that celebrations are really important!
And now that you see the need to celebrate, let’s talk about how you do it. For a lot of people, the idea of celebrating means a big grand gesture. Perhaps it takes a lot of coordination, like planning a party with your friends. Or maybe it takes a lot of money, like going out to a really fancy (and thus really expensive) restaurant, or perhaps it takes a lot of time, like traveling to some remote destination for a celebration vacation.
While all of those things are absolutely examples of wonderful celebrations – and in fact, they are all methods I’ve used to celebrate really big achievements in the past – they aren’t actually the most helpful forms of celebrations. Often, the little celebrations that bring a moment of joy to an otherwise mundane work day are the celebrations that have the biggest impact.
One of my favorite ways to celebrate is to go on a penny walk. This idea came from an episode of NPR’s Life Kit podcast [ https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1191071743 ] [ https://www.npr.org/2023/07/31/1191071743/how-to-have-fun-for-cheap ] (and I’ll link both the episode and a summary article about the episode in the show notes). On a penny walk, I go outside and flip a coin at every intersection to determine which way I’m going to go. As the Life Kit episode puts it, a penny walk “lets the coin take you on an adventure”! Thanks to penny walk celebrations, I’ve explored areas of my neighborhood that I never might have seen otherwise. Walking around my neighborhood is one of my favorite activities, and going on a penny walk as an intentional celebration of a milestone achieved is a wonderful way to break up my work day and bring a bit of joy and celebration into the mix.
I know I’m not alone in finding great joy and satisfaction in small rewards. In a study that Shawn Achor references in The Happiness Advantage [ https://amzn.to/49CSGRy ] , experienced doctors were given a set of symptoms to analyze. One of the groups was “primed to feel happy” before being shown the list of symptoms, and they came to the correct diagnosis twice as fast as the control group! In this case, they were given a reward before even completing their task, and it still helped them to work significantly more effectively and more efficiently. But what I find most striking about this study is not that rewards were helpful, but that the reward doesn’t have to be big. These doctors weren’t given money or a vacation package or a promotion or anything like that. Not at all. They were given a piece of candy. One little gift of candy gave them the motivational boost they needed to be twice as effective at their work. Small celebrations, small rewards, can have an outsized impact on how you feel about the work that you do, and the joy and creativity you bring to your tasks.
Your celebrations don’t have to be big. They don’t even have to cost money. Maybe you give yourself a 20 minute dance break to dance along to a favorite tune from your favorite musician. Maybe you walk to your neighborhood park and sit under a tree reading for 30 minutes. Perhaps you go to the grocery store and pick up the ingredients for a delicious dinner and take some time cooking a delightful celebration meal. (Personally, this is another of my favorite ways to celebrate. I love cooking, and I love eating good food, so creating a delicious meal is a double reward!) Maybe you go to your local art gallery and spend some time enjoying the artwork. Whatever is celebratory and joyful for you, allow yourself time to celebrate. And how you celebrate will be just as unique as you are. Impactful celebrations will be different for every creative, because what you enjoy and find rewarding and celebratory will be different than what I find rewarding and celebratory, and will be different than what your colleagues find rewarding and celebratory. Find ways to celebrate that are powerful and meaningful to you, and use them to celebrate every single milestone you achieve. Celebrations matter.
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Thank you so much for spending time with me today. I really hope this episode challenged you to think about your artistic and business achievements in a new light, and to be motivated to celebrate those achievements with joy and delight. If you enjoyed today’s episode, I’d really appreciate you leaving a rating or review for this podcast within your podcast app, and of course, you should subscribe to this podcast so you can always listen to new episodes as they come out. Ratings, reviews, and subscribers are a huge part of the way podcasts, like this one, are found by listeners, and they make a big difference. Thank you. And if you have a friend or colleague who you think would enjoy today’s episode, please share it with them. Sharing is caring! If you have any comments or feedback for me on this podcast, or if you have any topic requests for future episodes, please let me know. I’d love to hear from you. You can reach me via my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com. And finally, a boatload of gratitude goes to my husband, Arturo Araya, who is the audio engineer for this podcast and who makes sure you can listen to me each week.
In last week’s podcast episode, I talked about why it's so important to acknowledge the hard things in our life as creative entrepreneurs. After all, before we can fix a problem, we need to be willing to recognize that it's there! But as we talked about today, the flip side of that coin is also very true: we must take time to celebrate when good things happen. Because if we don't, those good things will sail right past us, and we'll miss out on the joy and feelings of achievement that they can bring.
Moving the goalposts in your work is such an easy thing to do. "Yes, I did Thing A, but I'm not even close to achieving Thing B! There's so much still to do!" The "but" in that sentence is deadly. You achieved Thing A. Period. That is worth celebrating! Some of this tendency is due to the very nature of our work as artists. Our work will never be perfect. That is the paradox of every artistic industry: artists are constantly working to improve their skills and achieve perfection in their craft, but perfection is literally impossible to ever achieve. It's an unachievable goal.
And so, when we do reach achievable milestones, sometimes it feels wrong to celebrate them in a meaningful way. "But the work isn't perfect yet!" Newsflash: it will never be perfect. And finding joy in the journey, in the things that you do achieve and the goals that you do reach, isn't going to keep you from simultaneously always working to get better.
Find joy along the way. Celebrate every milestone you achieve, even when you see the next unachieved milestone looming ahead of you. Don't move the goalposts. Celebrate every bit of joy and excitement that you find in your creative journey. I can’t wait to see what you create!
