8 Secrets Nobody Tells You About Declaring Your Independence

You’ve come a long way. You’ve made the commitment to staking your claim and declaring your independence. As an artist or creator this is already something to celebrate. But there’s a lot of things nobody tells you about being an independent artist that can save you years of pain and confusion. Here are 8 of those things.

As a Modern Creator, there are dozens of creative growth traps that artists and creators can fall into if they’re not careful. There are a handful of insights and breakthroughs that will change your thinking and your careers growth. I want to equip you with the knowledge, skills, habits, and mindsets of Modern Musicians so that you will succeed with your music business.

Let’s get into it.

1) It’s about the work.

It’s got to be about the mission and the cause. It’s going to take a lot of work. You’re going to need to love it and devote your life to it.

It will take time but it will pay off. Let your work be your contribution to the world. Everything that you have to give you can put it into your work and let that be the expression of your essence. Your work is the nourishing vital life giving force to your universe and with it you will expand and fulfill your desires. You must develop a deep connection to your work and maintain a mindset of mastery.

It’s not someone else’s job to tell you what your work is, so don’t look outward to find what that is, instead seek the answers within. Turn your work into a mission and you will be driven by a cause and a purpose that will cause you to become your higher self. When you are driven by purpose you are driven by the cooperative forces that will help you get to where you are going. There is always more work to do than time to do it so you have to prioritize well. There is an absolute connection that your work has to your soul so let that be a constant source of joy in your existence. The work is what brings you the results and achievements you desire. The work is the currency of your brand. The work is the pathway to your paradise.

2) It’s about having a plan.

And sticking to it.

Organized victory. That’s what you want. Failing to plan, is planning to fail. You won’t get there without a plan. Plans are the foundation of preproduction. With plans, visions and dreams turn into reality. The pathway to your paradise begins with a plan. Plans are the difference between success and failure most of the time. Traditional Musicians wing it, Modern Musicians start with a game plan.

Having a plan means that you sat down with clarity and focus and charted out where you were trying to go and then constructed the blueprints to get there. It doesn’t mean a 40 page business plan, though that doesn’t hurt. Having a plan is only good if you stick to it. So stick to it and start to see benefits of doing so. Think of your plan as your way of creating what you do want in life instead of creating what you don’t want in life. You need a plan for your content, your Content Strategy, you need a plan for your finances, for your marketing strategies and for your personal growth. Modern Musicians have a short term, a mid term and a long term game plan for their life.

3) It’s about Learning

Self Education is the direct path to the skills, habits, and mindsets you need to be successful. It's apart of what we call Grassroots Career Development. GCD. More progress has been made through personal insight than anyone's ever recognized. But think about it… learning is the lifeblood of intellectual development. Learning is fundamental in growth and understanding. We don’t learn just to learn, we learn to understand. Learning is fundamental in our development as humans as we reach different stages of our life, and people are often catalyzed during specific periods of advanced learning and processing. Learning is such an enjoyable experience for me on so many levels. It’s a deep love and connection to learning that helped me navigate along the many cold seasons of my content business. It’s learning that helped me advance the most in my life and has allowed me to evolve in so many ways very quickly.

When I talk about learning I’m talking about Sequential Learning, which is learning what you need to learn to do what you are learning to do. This is the most sensible strategy for education because it primes you for optimal use of your time, energy, and focus. Instead of learning ideas that don’t get implemented and soon vanish, you’re learning the thing most applicable to your immediate skills development and implementation into your life at that time. Instead of ideas that pass through your consciousness, the constant implementation of what you learned into your immediate experience will have the benefit of becoming a part of you and the causal forces to lead you to your higher self.

Learning should be consistent and ongoing. I’ve read about a book a week for the last 15 years and have built it into a mainstay practice fundamental in my evolution. Traditional musicians refuse to continually educate themselves. They turn their receptors off to new ideas, and reject the unfamiliar. It’s because of that they they suffer and needlessly repeat the same patterns that do not serve them. Modern Musicians are constant learners. They say all leaders are readers.

4) You will rise and fall with your belief in yourself

Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right. All things point back to this fundamental of greatness. Believing in ones self so much that you will do what it takes to figure out what you need to figure out to do what you need to do. Your belief in yourself can be a silent killer and even lead to self sabatoging yourself when you don’t fully believe in your own capabilities.

The best way to the life you want is to believe that you can have it and then go and create it. Their isn’t an easier and faster path to unblocking yourself in some way than to fix a faulty belief that’s tripping you up. You will find confidence through the competence you develop through the many many cycles of development that you go through. Let life be a triumphant resounding realization of the beliefs you hold of yourself.

Beliefs are like programs in the matrix, they are the frames of your world.

5) It’s about connecting to source. You’re always communicating with source in one way or another. You don’t need to go anywhere or do anything to tap into it. Source sends you vibrational signals to communicate with you. It’s very important to remember that you cannot be in a state of self doubt and be useful to anyone else. You have to allow the energy to flow. Have faith and confidence and be an allowing channel for the vortex to flow through you.

The source is your source of flow and your connection to higher intelligence and guidance on demand. Your job is to get into flow, to be working in harmony with the universe and not kill your momentum with resistance. Really, the whole goal of meditation is to relax the mind release resistance and give you perspective. Meditation is the awakener the activating process that connects you to source and the best tool there is for developing your mind and inner os

6) It’s about understanding marketing and sales.

Your content is your currency. Please don’t think the music isn’t important, it’s the most important part of marketing and sales. Once you have the music or the content, and you have the message, then the next stage is marketing and sales which should be built into an integrated suite of products and/or services selling at different price points including low ticket, mid-tier, and high ticket offers. Understanding marketing and sales means understanding your numbers and stories. It means knowing your audience avatars and developing a brand with mini-brand product suites. It means forecasting data to achieve your goals by completing the mission. It means understanding conversions, growth and scaling. Modern Musicianship means being able to sell your message and stories in your content. It means being able to present and persuade someone to buy from you.

Modern music marketing is all about the direct to fan experience and producing perpetual profit generating machines that advance, elevate and sell music on autopilot

7) It’s about being your best self.

Get obsessed with improving yourself. This is the pinnacle of achievement. Nothing else that you will accomplish will be as satisfying or fulfilling as being your best self. It’s the gift you give yourself. Being your best self is the crown jewel of your life, as everything you are doing is about being your best self. One with your higher self. It is the identity that you desire and can design. Your best self, your true self, is what you do all the work for and being that is the gift you give yourself. It’s so important that it should be stated twice.

I want to tell you about the divine nature that is you. I want to remind you of the true power that you hold. I want to get in touch with the deeper part of you that knows the path to your greatest unfoldment of truth and purpose. I want to resurrect in you the greatest ambition that you have to be and do something that thrives all night long and then lives on forever.

I want to inspire you to become a master and always stay on the path of growth. Meditation and visualization mixed with priming and learning and skills development is the path to your best self. Your higher self, your true self actualization, self transcendence, and your music business liberation.

8) Drive towards your desire and what you want. There is only going in the direction of what you want or avoiding what you don’t want. Tony Robbins painted the picture effectively when he told the story in some of his programs about how he took professional race-car driver lessons. He mentioned why when the car spins out of control, most people crash. What most people do is that they place their focus on the wall and then drive right into the crash. That’s what they were focused on. So that’s where they go. The professional race car driver instructor told Tony that he needed to focus on the road ahead, where he wanted to go, in the event of a spinout and place all his focus on going there to avoid the crash and recover from any disaster.

Feed your desires daily with continually thinking, feeling and acting in tune with them, and you will experience empowered states from which good, hungry, purpose driven action can align and allow all the forces, ideas, events, and experiences in your life to occur.

Jamie Leger, aka The Music Business Architect turns dreams into reality by designing the blueprints to the life you want. He helps artists, musicians, creators, and dj’s achieve their goals and create their paradise. Modern musicianship is the technology for artists to achieve success, it’s about the integration of artist, entrepreneur, and personal growth/mastery and enjoying the journey along their path to self actualization, self transcendence, and complete liberation. Subscribe to the podcast here to start to step your game up from traditional to modern musicianship.

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