12 Tips for How a 90-Day Challenge Will Enhance Your Art Business

To get quick improvement in your art business, use a 90-day challenge.

— Barney Davey

A 90-day challenge is ideal for getting valuable things done sooner and faster. Your challenge will guide and motivate you to complete a set of actions designed to improve your life and boost your art career.

In this post, I challenge you to discover tips and ideas on how you can use 90-day challenges to jumpstart your business. You’ll be pleased to know they are easy for solo artrepreneurs to set up and manage. Getting help is also an excellent way to go, as is working with an accountability partner.

If you like the 90-day challenge concept, you’ll enjoy reading my How to Use 90-Day Goals to Get Things Done post. It has specific suggestions for setting 90-day goals. Please check it out; I am confident you will benefit from reading it.

The Concept Behind Your 90-day Challenge Is Simple.

It’s a plan to follow through with specific steps to accomplish a goal. You can use a 90-day challenge to realize unique dreams in your art business, and excellent side benefits, such as:

• It helps you make better decisions and to act now.
• Buys time to meet other essential and unfinished tasks.
• Reduces your stress because you know what needs to be done.
• Grows confidence in your ability to get things done.
• Gains better control over your destiny.
• Enjoy greater balance in your life.

Choose a Goal That Is Doable on a Stretch.

Your goal must be challenging; otherwise, you won’t accomplish anything noteworthy. Set a plan that is within your grasp with concerted effort. Set a stretch goal that is realistically possible, but only if everything works perfectly.

When you start a 90-day challenge, it’s easy to think about everything you need to do. However, as you begin doing them, you may feel overwhelmed. And as a result, you may feel like you don’t have enough time or energy to finish everything. If this sounds familiar, you can use these ideas to keep focused and on track with your 90-day challenge:

• Start small. Choose one thing to work on first.
• Set a date for completion.
• Make sure you have the right tools.
• Create a schedule.
• Stay organized and don’t procrastinate.
• Make it fun.

Thoughts for Choosing a 90-day Challenge:

Decide on a goal you genuinely wish to accomplish. It might be some aspect of your life or business worth growth or a sticking point challenging you. Consider a purpose that requires discipline and develops new skills.

You can settle on a goal that fits your lifestyle, involves other people, and is something you enjoy doing and makes you feel good. Regardless, it might be something rewarding that gives you a sense of accomplishment for meeting the challenge. It works best when you are passionate about your primary objective.

What Are Excellent Short-Term Goals for Visual Artists?  

You’ve got a new project or idea, and you want to start immediately. So what should you focus on first? There are many tasks you could start now. But before jumping into any big projects, take your time to determine what you want to accomplish.

Linking Goals Powers Next Level Productivity.

A unique dynamic occurs when you work on a series of linked goals. You create synergy and develop the personal growth trait of constant improvement — all by linking current goals to your next. Challenges help you to control your destiny and design your artist’s journey. I hope you let yourself see how high you can elevate your art business when connecting a strategic set of successful challenges to your journey.

90-Day Challenges Only Work When You Are Clear About What You Want.

Do you ever wish you had the courage and confidence to do something you wanted to do? Maybe you feel stuck because you don’t know where to begin. Perhaps you think it’s too late for you to make changes. Or possibly you have a dream that seems impossible to achieve.

Your feelings and observations about your art business are real because you perceive them. But you can break free from them when you realize they are only a hindrance because you allow them to be. You can achieve almost anything if you bring the right attitude and follow through consistently.

Completing a series of 90-day challenges is one of the best and most powerful things you can do that will change your life and your art business for much the better. Please consider and act on these thoughts.

12 Tips to Help You Get Ready to Make Your Dreams Come True.

1. Choose a Goal That Matters to You

Imagine you awaken every day feeling happy. How would it feel to say that you love what you do? And how does such a reality affect all other facets of your life? A significant side benefit of meeting 90-day challenges is experiencing gratitude for the blessings in your life that occur with you as the catalyst.

You have the chance to make a noticeable difference in your art business, your personal life, including your health and financial well-being, and that of your family. As you begin working on your challenge of picking goals that matter to you, make sure the outcome matters a lot. And whatever it is, be sure of its actual value before moving forward.

Stop and ask yourself if there is something better you can be doing to improve your art business. If there is, great! You should start doing that right away. If not, please don’t treat these ideas as infotainment. Get a challenge on and go for it.

2. Set Achievable Goals

The best way to know if you’re making progress towards your goal is to set small, achievable milestones. Little victories are influential in the same way little hinges swing big doors. Accumulating specific minor accomplishments is a major part of a larger strategic plan. Size matters both ways.

3. Visualize Your Achievement.

Visualization is powerful because it opens our minds and hearts to envision ideal outcomes. There is much truth to the saying that whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve. So when we can visualize the result, we better anticipate the next moves and stay motivated to complete them.

Imagine how your newly accomplished goal affects your life and art business. Turn daydream to full power and envision the result. Then keep those thoughts and feelings lit to build your confidence in achieving your outcome.

4. Turn Believing into Achieving.

Believe that you can succeed and then act accordingly. We spend more time dwelling on our failures than celebrating our successes. The problem with focusing so much attention on your past setbacks is that it prevents you from moving forward. And there will always be obstacles out there. There’s no reason to dwell on them, though. Instead, use them as learning experiences that help you improve your skills or refine your vision.

5. Stay in the Company of Positive People

It’s a human trait that surrounding yourself with optimistic people will inspire you to think and act more positively. Conversely, being surrounded by people whose thoughts and emotions are primarily negative will bring you down.

It’s more than psychological; it is physiological as well. When you spend time with positive people, your body releases endorphins (the same chemicals released in exercise). Endorphins have many benefits, including enhancing moods and reducing stress. And when you endure negative people, your body produces cortisol which increases anxiety. Cortisol harms memory, concentration, and motivation. Endorphins will dissipate quickly, while cortisol remains in the body for lingering periods.

6. Forecast Your Future.

Your thoughts and actions change when you focus on your future. You’ll start living your life and conducting your art business differently. Everything changes because your expectations influence all you do in life and business. For instance, if you expect to improve art sales, you’ll be more persistent in developing connections. Similarly, if you desire to learn a new painting style that you wish to enhance your reputation, you’ll study and work harder to master the skill.

7. Take Inspiration from Artists Who Have Reached Lofty Status.

It’s not a secret that success is best achieved by taking inspiration from those who have made their mark. Perhaps they faced similar challenges to yours and stuck with them until they broke through to new levels of accomplishment. So it’s comforting to know you’re not alone in your challenge. Instead, use the example of others for added motivation to stay the course on your 90-day challenge.

8. Plan Your Steps.

It would help if you had a plan to focus on the steps necessary to reach your goals. It’s crucial to know what you want with solid ideas on when and how you’ll turn them into reality exactly. It’s widely known that making goals public is a powerful driver that increases your odds of hitting your objectives.

You probably want to share your goals with your family and loved ones, but sharing becomes much more potent when you share them publicly. For example, I encourage my AMTP members to share their goals and 90-day challenges within our private group. It’s quasi-public enough to have the right effect. Some go further to find accountability partners to help keep their promises to themselves and others.

9. Be Honest and Realistic with Your Expectations.

We mentioned stretch goals above. This point emphasizes being realistic within that context. Your goals must have the potential for you to succeed in achieving them. Be real, fair, and honest when you set your expectations—doing so is how to substantially decrease the chances of stumbling and falling before you begin.

It’s essential to understand what you control and what you don’t. Things can and will go poorly, and you will fail more than once. And you will encounter bullies, naysayers, and borderline energy vampires along your path. You can’t control them, and it only wastes time to try. But you can control how you choose to react to circumstances out of your control. That’s courtesy of your unique human endowment of free will.

Learn to observe your responses objectively to determine if you have better ways to handle things. It’s not always easy to change established behavior, but you can when you start by understanding your typical reaction and that you have healthier alternatives.

10. Lean On Me – Give and Get Support From Your Close Circle.

Your family and friends form a circle around you and your art business. As the hub of your world, it’s up to you to reach out and support them. And the more you give, the more you will take from the experience. They will give it to you gladly because of who you are and how you are with them and others.

Supportive relationships are essential to your long-term happiness and improving your art business. As such, it’s vital to continually nurture your relationships by spending quality time and sharing your struggles with them. Sometimes, we all need somebody to talk to when we feel down, discouraged, or defeated. Your tribe will support you in good and bad times — especially because you give back to them.

11. Always Be Curious and Ask a Lot of Questions.

It’s more than okay to ask questions because it’s the only way to get answers to things we don’t understand. It’s natural, and most people are good-natured and inclined to help you and share their knowledge. Asking questions can help you uncover whether something is truly impossible or more likely that it just seems that way to you.

Good answers can help you move from feeling like your goal or plan is unattainable to being eager to give it a try. Never go with the mistaken belief that somehow asking questions is a sign of weakness. That’s because it is quite the opposite. Because it shows, you’re intent enough to want to know everything about how to implement your plans.

12. Be Proactive, Start Now, and Don’t Let Up.

You put in the work to develop a plan. You set goals, established actions, and timelines, and boosted your morale and motivation to achieve great things. That activity can wear you out, but you can’t let it. It’s vitally important to the success of your 90-day challenge for you to start with a bang and keep up the pace.

You’ve got to make decisions and follow through on them. Otherwise, you’ll never see results. Don’t ever give up quickly if you want to achieve a big dream. So keep going until you succeed or fail, then celebrate your victories, learn from your mistakes and keep moving.

By following through with a series of 90-day challenges, you can achieve great things in your life and art business. It’s helpful to understand few things work as planned every time – setbacks and failures are part of the process. But when you stick with your goals and plans to achieve them consistently, you position yourself to make your wildest dreams come true.

In Conclusion, Bring Joy and Be Happy.

If you’re striving for a certain kind of lifestyle, figure out what would allow you to live a joyful well-lived artist’s life. We all instinctively know what makes us happy. Use your knowledge and insights to set and achieve clear goals that will impact your life and art business.

I trust my ideas and suggestions will inspire you to act toward your using 90-day challenges to break achieving your dreams into groups of manageable tasks that altogether deliver you to the state of living your best life as an artist. If you found this article helpful, please share it with others. The social share buttons are just below.

You Are Invited.

The AMTP (Art Marketing Toolkit Project) is a global community of like-minded artists who seek to learn how to market their art based on their unique needs.

I believe how you market your art has everything to do with how you live your life as an artist. And that you will enjoy your best life as an artist when you know what you want is possible and have a plan to match your reality to your dreams.

If you want help with devising your strategy for living your best life as an artist and access to a world-class library of art marketing information to help you achieve it, please accept my invitation to join the AMTP. It will be a pleasure to get to know you in the group.