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So you have a passion. So what? You have the mind of a great critic, but your eyes, ears, and hands aren’t up to the task. What is there to do?

You might have a great vision of the practitioner you could become and some influences that you look up to too. You feel that you could achieve the same level of competency as the ones you admire, or you just generally have a sense that you could be a lot better than you are.

You might feel like you genuinely have something worth sharing with the world. Something that you want to share with the world.

Yet something just isn’t right. No matter how much you practice, your material just isn’t up to snuff. You persevere through thick and thin, but you can’t even tell if you’re improving. You might have a sense that you’re just going in circles, and you don’t really like the circles that you’re going in.

You need to be realistic about where you are. You need to count your chickens. What are you capable of doing? Make a plan. The best plan you can honestly say is right. Then chip away at it.

The reason you need a plan is because you need a direction. You need to cover all of your bases and improve across the board. When you leave your improvement up to luck, you may or may not improve. When you have a plan, you will improve at what you set out to do, even if it’s not exactly what you’re aiming for. It’s something, and it’s laying the foundation for the years to come.

You’ve got to devote all of your energies to your passion. Your creative energy, your will, your intellect, your emotion, your vulnerability, and all your efforts. You’ve got to persevere and remain committed. Dedication should be automatic.

Once you start improving, you might still feel the same sense of ‘imposter syndrome’. In your head you really think you have a talent, but your improvements don’t seem to add up to your ultimate vision. This is ok. The thing is, you’ll start to enjoy the small progress that you do make. You might even partially forget about your grand vision for yourself, and just start to enjoy the little victories.

This is actually a good position to be in, because you’ve transitioned from negativity to positivity. You’re enjoying yourself because you’re making progress, and small wins are fun.

Now you’ve improved your baseline. You used to go in circles and be disappointed and now you’re moving towards betterment and you’re enjoying it. But what about your original vision of being great?

You need to remain at your baseline of continued small improvement. Give yourself fully to this process, and be patient with yourself. You might just be making small wins for months or years.

The thing is something magical can happen if you keep at it.

If you give yourself fully to your passion, your passion will give your whole self back, but this time you will be different: you will have integrated your passion with your core identity. It happens in an instant, so fast you could almost miss it.

The moment that says “I am the artist, and this is my artform.”

This is the ultimate victory for the practitioner who feels like they have imposter syndrome or feels like they just don’t measure up to their keen eye or ear.

Once this happens things change dramatically. It’s like you’ve already become the artist you set out to be, even if you don’t quite have the skills yet. This is when you maybe don’t even need a plan anymore and can just practice on intuition. This is when the small daily victories that you make actually feel like they are going in the direction of the artist that you want to become.