Last month Creative Bay of Plenty piloted a new workshop to help creatives plan and prioritise, making it easier for them to achieve their goals. Plans & Priorities for Creatives was facilitated by Liz Cooper, an independent curator with extensive experience running her own business and working for small arts organisations in the UK and New Zealand.
The workshop followed a structured approach to finding inspiration, setting goals, and understanding prioritisation. Participants shared information with the wider group and then split into pairs to brainstorm their medium term goals and the steps that they needed to take to achieve them. Liz provided a range of practical tools to help declutter their thinking, as well as online resources so they could visualise their most important goal and understand how to break it down into small chunks that were not too overwhelming.
Feedback from workshop participants was overwhelmingly positive, with most saying they felt more self-confident and capable of making progress with their work. There was a strong feeling that narrowing down the focus meant they actually had more choices and pathways to achieving their goal. Some felt there were opportunities for them to invest in capability building and better understood the areas where they should upskill, while for others it was about developing good time management processes and understanding what tasks were important and which could wait.
If you’re interested in attending a similar workshop, email annie@creativebop.org.nz and we’ll let you know when the next one will be held.
