Today we have an awesome guest for you: two time Crossfit Games Team Athlete, owner of multiple businesses, actor, and head coach at our gym, Natasha Kaz. We talk with her about the similarities between elite sport, business, and creativity. Going back to being a beginner when you've already been an expert/master in another field. The importance of admitting to yourself that you want to be great at something. Talking to friends and family about your creative dreams when they already have an established idea of "who you are". The lessons that Tash took from sport and business that she now applies to acting. Seeking out embarrassment and rejection to inoculate yourself against fear of judgement. And much more!

We're really excited about this episode because we've been banging on for years about the intersection between sport and creativity and Tash is a living example of it! 

You can checkout Tash's instagram here

This episode is largely a discussion of Fantasy Author Brandon Sanderson's incredibly successful ($40 million) kickstarter that finished recently. We talk about why other artists being mega successful is a good thing for us. Why we should be excited to see big names pursuing avenues usually used by indie artists. How there isn't a finite amount of money to go around each artistic industry and much more!

Don't forget you can now watch the video version of the podcast on Spotify and Youtube.

Thank you for being on this journey with us!

Why is it so hard for non-artistic types to understand what we do? And why is it so hard to commit to a consistent creative practice? These two questions seem unrelated but they actually stem from the same issue: We are unable to conceptualise of sticking at something that we aren't making money at for 5+ years. 

Let's grapple with this concept and learn how to use it to make us better artists!

Thank you so much for your support and your reviews.

A reminder that the Procrastination intensive is happening on the 2nd of April, 6 PM AEDT. You can find more about it here.

James asks Amie to coach him through a rough patch as he starts receiving rejection letters for his second novel. They talk about how much rejection can hurt, why it's so painful trying to get people to notice our art, how hard it is to ask for help, and how to support yourself or loved ones when you're feeling hopeless. 

Recording this episode helped me (James) so much. Thank you Unpublished community for giving me a place to talk through the struggles of being a creative!

If you'd like some coaching from Amie, don't forget she's running masterclasses on Social Media and Procrastination over the next few weeks. Details are on her website, or click here.

Let's talk about failure! We tell the story of a recent "failed" product launch and how they bounced back. We talk about the power of reframing, seeing mistakes as a guiding light, soothing ourselves through failure, treating adversity as a necessary step on the path.

This isn't about not feeling pain, or denying our reality, it's about giving you a tool that can help when things aren't going perfectly.

Amie is running two intensives in a few weeks' time. One on Social Media and one on Procrastination. We'd love to see your faces there.

As always, we love to read your reviews so thank you to everyone who's been saying nice stuff about us recently :)

We're talking about how to trick our brains into taking action on long term goals. Humans aren't great at working on big, abstract things with distant or ill-defined deadlines. So, we need to think of ways to make our brains think we are accomplishing something RIGHT NOW. That way, we can feel good about our work, start early, and generally have an easier time of things.

This ep a little rambly as we try to get our head around this concept. Thanks for being with us at our earliest stages of idea generation!

We're following up from last week's episode by answering your questions! How do we deal with taxes? Thing we wish we knew when starting our business. How do we handle variable cashflow? And much more. We also remind you that this is how we do things. Your business will be unique to you and you should always do what works for you!

Leave a review for the world's sweetest podcasters! 

Amie and James take you through their path to "going pro". How did Amie first make money from her creativity? What were her early failures like and what was the shift Amie had to make to turn them into "success"? How do we decide what business decisions to make? How much do we put back into the business? What are our next steps.

We strongly reccomend you checkout Gauri Yardi (@gauri.yardi) and Tanja Ernst (@corpholia_design_studio) on instagram to see great examples of creators hitting home runs in the early stages of their creative businesses.

REVIEWS FOR US CUTIES PLS!

In this episode Amie and James confront the idea of "making it". What does "making it" even mean? How is it different to success? How do we move through our self-doubt?

Amie's Journaling Compendium is now FREE when you sign up to her mailing list. You can join here.

Yes, we are super in favour of quitting things that don't serve you. But, sometimes we give up before we find flow and ease. This is especially true of a lot of the bullshit that surrounds a creative practice: websites, accounting, tech-shit, marketing. Thing is, those things all get easier over time. You're already doing the hard part, making art. If you can do that, you can handle all the peripherals! Come listen to us chat about this in the FIRST EPISODE OF SEASON 5!

Did you know, you get Amie's first book, The Journaling Compendium, for free when you sign up to her mailing list? Join here.

ALSO, do you want show Joe Rogan who's boss? Well, if everyone reading this left a review, we reckon Joe Rogan would feel totally inferior. "Who are these upstarts getting so many reviews and why aren't those reviews MINE", he will say (probably). So you should defs leave a review!