Envision Your Future

The two pillars of my consulting work are the parallel practice and growth planning. To be recognized by a field of peers through exhibitions, critical interpretation, and other forms of public attention requires establishing and maintaining a parallel practice, which is the practice of tending to your infrastructure, opportunities, and communities. I coined this phrase out of a need for a convenient way to describe what it is that I mostly work on with my clients. I also wanted to name this enormous area of activity that's required to be an artist in public but which is under-discussed in the narrative of the everyday lives of working artists. Continuous Project is grounded in a mission to empower artists. As long as the professional practices of working artists remain amorphous and under-discussed, the communities I serve remain disempowered within an opaque, hierarchical, and even exploitative field. 

Like an artmaking practice, the parallel practice is a lifelong engagement that requires the same attention, persistence, care, and discipline that the artmaking practice requires. And also like an artmaking practice, the parallel practice is big and unruly; it’s dynamic and can sometimes be just as treacherous as it can be exuberant; it’s often boring and tedious, tbh, but can also be a generative and engaging set of rituals, a portal to the future you envision, a radical act of world-building. 

Growth planning offers a flexible container for the parallel practice. By organizing the parallel practice within this container, you can reduce overwhelm, improve focus and results, make values-driven decisions, and stay aligned with what’s most meaningful in your work. For most of my clients, that means having as much time as possible to be making art. Growth planning gives us space to get granular about the parallel practice so that we can really consider all of its aspects, establish and embrace operational structures, and make thoughtful decisions for the way forward. 

The first stage of growth planning is VISIONING. Visioning is a six-step practice for envisioning growth that anchors the growth planning process in a milestone or set of milestones to plan toward.

To envision the future is not to predict it. I don’t believe it’s possible to predict the future, but I do believe it’s possible—necessary, even—to envision the future we want. When we are clear with ourselves on where we are going, we can make informed decisions about how to get there. By envisioning the future, we are better equipped to approach the present with intention, which contributes to fulfillment and sustainability in our life’s work.

In growth planning, visioning is the essential first step to get perspective on what we’re often already deeply enmeshed in. If you’re in the earlier stages of developing your project, visioning can help you define (and get real about) what might seem both exciting AND overwhelming. And if you’re in a more mature phase of your project or if you’re pivoting or evolving your project, visioning can help take you out of potentially limiting thought patterns and outdated assumptions you might be carrying around with you that are hindering your growth.

The six-step practice of visioning leads to a clear picture of the future toward which you want to build. By envisioning your future, you're better equipped to organize your parallel practice to meet that future through the next seven steps of growth planning.    

Envision your future as part of the 5th cohort of the Growth Planning Workshop. The workshop begins on September 4, and registration is now open.

Email me with questions or to register; or book a discovery call. I look forward to talking with you!