The Thriving Christian Artist
The Thriving Christian Artist
98 – The 5-Minute Mentor: Where Do I Find the Time To Pursue My Art?
In this episode, I take the time to answer a question from one of my listeners, Donna, on where to find the time needed to pursue art without abandoning the responsibilities and commitments that already exist?
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Do you ever wonder if you have enough time in the day? Like I'm talking like, do I have enough hours in the day to actually get everything done that you need to get done so that you can focus on your art? Well, I'm going to answer that question and give you some really specific advice on how to start seeing your time stretch right here next on 5-Minute Mentoring. If you ever wanted to have someone in your life who you could ask real questions about your art, your business, and even your walk with the Lord, well, that's exactly what we do every Friday here on 5-Minute Mentoring, where I answer one question from one of my awesome podcast listeners in order to help you start really thriving as the artist you know God created you to be. Well, hey there, and welcome to another episode of 5-Minute Mentoring. I'm so glad that you're here with me, and Listen, I've got a great question from actually a person in my mentoring program. I snatched it off of our group and because I do question day every day in there or every Tuesday in there rather. And this is just a great question that I saw a lot of interest around. And I said, you know, I'm going to I'm going to not only answer this for her, but I'm in the program, but I'm going to also grab it and answer it here. on 5-Minute Mentoring. And so before I do that, you know, I always love to start out with a shout out to one of my listeners. And today's really shout out is all for CeCe in Tennessee. And they say, Matt does a great job of finding quality guests that explain their passion for the arts and how they can use that to impact the kingdom of God. I'm actually an actor who feels called to media. I would love to hear from more Christian actors who have the same call and goals. Well, Cece, thanks so much. And we'll have to do that. Listen, if you've got some recommendations of people that you think might be great, you know, guests here on the podcast, send them to me. I'd love to. You can always email me at matt at matttommymentoring.com. And if you've got a recommendation of folks like that, that you'd love to hear from, definitely, you know, let me know. Well, hey, listen, I want to jump in to this question all about, you know, do I have enough time? Can I have enough time? And how do I get it all done in the week that I have? The question is from one of my mentoring program members, Donna. And she said she's kind of asking about the mentoring program and all of that, but also pursuing her call as an artist. And she says this. She says, Matt, you know, I'm new to the program, and I'm also just starting to fully embrace and pursuing my call as an artist. Just getting started, I know that I need to develop a daily studio practice, but could really use guidance in establishing an ideal target amount of time each day. I work a 40-hour week regular job, but other than that, I have no other specific time commitments. I'm serious about moving forward with everything and want to go as quickly as the Lord wants me to. Well, listen, Donna, that's exciting. And for all of us, you know, that's real exciting because I think one of the things that You know, we do when we talk about being overwhelmed and time commitments and how much time should I be getting? We forget, really, number one, how much literal time that we have and also how much time that we waste, all right? And so what I did for Donna, and I'm going to do this for you guys right now, I just broke it down. You know, all of us have 168 hours in a week, all right? And so for those of you that are working, you know, maybe a full-time job, you've not transitioned yet into doing your art full-time. Maybe you never will. Maybe that's not what God's planned for you, whatever. But, you know, if you've got 40 hours of work and then you've got, if you consider you're getting a good eight hours of sleep a night, which I hope you are, that's 56 hours a week. All right. And then 28 hours a week for what I call life stuff. All right. That's four hours a day. When, you know, you're cleaning the bathroom and you're washing clothes and maybe you're running a Home Depot for that project or you're running something to, you know, the UPS store or picking up something at the grocery store, whatever it is, you know, about 28 hours a week for life stuff. That leaves, listen, 44 hours a week. Wow. I mean, think about that. That's over seven hours or over seven days. That's over six hours. a day that you are usually, all right, unrestricted time. Now, are kids involved in that? Sure. Is fixing dinner? Yeah, that's in that life kind of stuff that's happening. But for most of us, all right, you've got anywhere on the low end, four to five hours a day. On the high end, maybe six, seven, eight hours a day sometimes that are unassigned timeframes, all right? And so, Here's what I told Donna and what I would say to you out there in podcast land. Are you willing to take an hour or two hours a day of that six hours to focus on something that you believe is God's plan for your life in the season that you're in? That is your art. Are you willing to then maybe on the weekends, instead of spending an hour, are you willing to spend a couple of hours, maybe two to three hours on self-improvement, being in the studio, doing the things that you need to be doing on a regular basis to build yourself as an artist, grow yourself in the Lord, grow yourself in the business side of things, listening to a podcast, you know, whatever it is. See, obviously all of that time can't just be studio time, can't just be business development time. There's, you know, there's a mix there. But what I want you to realize is that, oh my gosh, you may think you're overwhelmed. And listen, we all got a lot going on. But more than likely, you've got a ton of time in your life that's just allocated incorrectly. And so what I want to encourage you to do is this. For example, I use like Gmail. All right. So I use the whole Gmail suite, like the whole Google suite, Google calendar, all that. Print yourself off. All right. An hour by hour calendar. You can go anywhere, you know, online to get that. All right. Print yourself off an hour-by-hour calendar for the whole week, and I want you to sit down, and over the next week, write down everything that you're doing during those hourly segments, all right? And then I want you to look at that at the end of the week and say, wow, I wasted a lot of time watching Downton Abbey reruns this week, or I didn't plan that so well, and I ended up wasting a lot of time Or here's time, I just, I forgot to write anything down. I have no clue what I was doing. Based on that, all right, kind of your typical week, then I want you to go back and write down what would be your ideal schedule, all right? Look at it. Say, I'd like to be able to give this much time, all right, to my art growth, to business growth, to growing myself spiritually. I want to, maybe you want to go take a class, or maybe you do want to have that studio time every day, whatever it is, write those kind of those key things that you're wanting to do down and then look for planned segments of time that you can write it in. And listen, write it in your schedule, all right? You have to let other people know in your life, hey, I'd love to do that, but I've already got an appointment. What's the appointment? The appointment's you, all right? You're the appointment. So get in there and schedule yourself, uh, Time to do the things that you know are important. Listen, I say it all the time. One of the most important words you can learn to say is no. No to the wrong things and yes to the right things. Listen, if you want to know what your priorities are in life, if you want to know why you're not progressing as quickly as you want to as an artist, it's really, really simple. Look at where you're spending your money and look at where you're spending your time. If you're not investing, all right, your time, talents, and resources, all right, into the thing or the things that you feel are the most important for you right now that is a dead level giveaway to let you know why you're not progressing. If you'll begin to switch that and focus your time, your resources, your energy, not saying you don't do everything else that you gotta do in your life, but you begin to focus with the time that you have and the money that you have, the resources that you have, the talent that you have, if you begin to focus those on a daily basis, hourly basis, moment by moment, every week, over time, you'll begin to see major, major progress happen. All right? Well, Donna, thanks for your question, and thank you for listening to this part of the Thriving Christian Artist podcast. Remember, every Friday we do this, five-minute mentoring, a question from you, an answer from me. Hopefully it's a blessing in your life, and and get you further down the road to being the person and the artist that God's called you to be. All right, until next time, remember, I love you and you were created to thrive. Now, before I go, I want to encourage you, make sure, make sure you pre-register for our upcoming Thriving Christian Artists Conference. It's coming up in March 2020 here in the Asheville, North Carolina area out at Ridgecrest. Incredible, beautiful conference center that we've been doing conferences at for years. Listen, this is the only conference in the world that you will be able to get access hear from speakers on healing and wholeness, identity, being able to learn how to grow as an artist, get into creative flow with the Holy Spirit, develop your unique creative voice, how to do the practical things to grow an audience, grow your business so that you can really be the artist that God's called you to be. This is our first year we're doing this. I've been doing this online for years. My mentoring program has been uber successful over the years, helping thousands thousands of artists move from striving and struggling to really thriving in their spiritual life, their art life, and their business life. And what I've done is I'm bringing a lot of that teaching to this conference, not only for me, but also from some of the best speakers that I know in the areas of healing and wholeness, in marketing, in Instagram, in social media, all right, and how to build a brand. What do you do with your website, all right? And so, so So much more. We're going to be talking about all of that kind of thing, plus doing it in an environment where we have worship, where we get to network with each other, hang out over the weekend, get to know each other. It's going to be a really, really great time in God's presence, and I want you to be there. So listen, when you register, registration starts on November the 5th, but you can pre-register now. And when you do that, you get the opportunity to get a$100 discount on your ticket, all right? Then we open the doors for pre-registrants only on October the 29th. We give a full week ahead of time before we open it to the public to those who are pre-registered. Why? because just about every conference that we do fills up, all right? They sell out. And we want you that are serious about coming to be a part of that. So pre-register right now at the link that's in the show notes. You can see all the details about the conference and get your name on the list so you can get that$100 discount and get first in line, all right, before we open it to the public. I would love to see you hug your neck, hear your story, and meet you face-to-face at the Thriving Christian Artists Conference coming up in March 2020 at Ridgecrest. Alright, do it now. Bye.