2-month program February-April
Boundaries + Consent
for artists
VIRTUAL: Tuesdays, February 24 - April 28, 10am-noon PT / 1-3pm ET. Students who sign up in advance will receive recordings of our live classes in case you can’t attend during class time. These recordings will not be available after class has passed.
This program helps self-employed artists shirk perfectionism and people pleasing in your art, advocate for yourself regarding rates, care for yourself and your creative practice for a sustainable life as an artist, and find your voice.
Who is this program for?
Struggling to navigate boundaries, offers, and rates sustainably while avoiding burnout as an artist? This program is for people who:
want to make (more) money from their art!!
struggle to finish projects or feel like they don’t follow through
want to build new habits, routines, and rituals to move through creative blocks and support flow
struggle with people-pleasing tendencies in your work
feel a codependent relationship with your art (“People need this from me so I will give and give and give”)
feel guilt or shame about making money with your art
struggle to find motivation to create
don’t know where to start or when to stop
want to make more money from your art
want to find a sacred relationship with play
want to find a more easeful relationship with your authenticity and creative self-expression
grapple with your ego as an artist and want to believe what you have is worth sharing with the world without feeling like an arrogant shithead
You’ll learn to:
set and negotiate rates
advocate for yourself when your rates change
price, present, and market your work in a way that doesn’t feel icky
trade/barter for services or work without the clear boundaries of money
what to consider when working for free
only offering what’s actually within your capacity, setting a container period, asking for and providing necessary information, and setting clear agreements
when and how to exit commitments you made
This class is a great fit for:
artists, designers, freelancers, consultants, and anyone who is or wants to be self-employed and find creativity in their work
performers, musicians, painters, ceramicists, directors, producers, and other artists
anyone who needs to set and negotiate rates or price their work
What will we be doing?
Our live classes will consist of lectures as well as practice exercises in breakout rooms.
You’ll also receive my Boundaries + Your Business recorded course (a $199 value) to do on your own time. This course will help you build a scalable business structure and incorporate consent into your business, both outwardly and inwardly. You’ll also receive my Boundaries + Consent for People Pleasers, my Unblocked, and Boundaries + Your Business workbooks included in the cost of the program.
Working for yourself is exciting! I wouldn’t have it any other way. But I’ve had to learn—largely through trial and error, and lots of lost money—how to speak up for myself when no one else will as a self-employed person. I’ll share everything I’ve learned, and the tools and skills I’ve cultivated to get paid and paid well.
Class 1: Myth - Find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life
Class 2: Perfectionism
Class 3: People pleasing in your art - You are not for everyone and that is a good thing
Class 4: Inner Critic + Imposter Syndrome
Class 5: Discipline vs. Punishment – Consent with yourself
Class 6: Finding your voice
Class 8: Self Advocacy for the Self-Employed Part II (also available as a standalone class)
Class 9: Setting rates and negotiating - you should get paid more for work you love
Class 10: Share your work and invite your friends!
What will you gain from this course?
Consent and boundary knowledge will help you find ever more nuance and subtlety in your communication. It gives more options, expands structure, and opens up space for creativity. You can expect to get:
a deep dive into your blockages
a magnifying glass held up to the ways you may keep yourself small. Perfectionism, anyone?
a thorough examination of your self-sabotaging strategies
exercises to help create the environment in which creativity can flourish
a concrete, structured approach to your creative practice centered around consent with yourself
I started Consent Wizardry at the start of the pandemic out of my childhood bedroom. I’ve learned a lot in 5 years, from setting my rates and negotiating, to clarifying my offers, to being realistic about my capacity so I can be selective about the projects I take on. I’ve learned how to identify and ask for what I want in both micro (project by project) and macro (big-picture goal-setting) instances; support myself through challenging conversations about money, time, and energy; and set boundaries to avoid resentment. I’ve also learned that clear boundaries are extra important when I’m bartering or working for free. I look forward to sharing everything I’ve learned with you and helping you avoid the mistakes I made, while empowering you to work for yourself at the highest caliber.
You can see my art at maxsilvermakesart.com.
“Mia is a patient and generous educator. The way they conceptualize consent is so rich and nuanced that, once you’ve encountered it, going back to a binary or reductive approach is inconceivable. It’s nothing short of a revelation. In [Mia’s Unblocked course for artists], I found myself connecting with others around obstacles to creativity, and in so doing, I experienced increased lightness and ease around being creative. My expectations were met and exceeded as I found discussions on people pleasing, the inner critic, and perfectionism facilitated more comfort and confidence in my own creative aspirations and projects. The exercises, journalling prompts, and discussions enriched my creative practices and sparked self-reflection. For me, there is immense value in engaging with this approach to consent—for creativity and beyond—and I enthusiastically recommend it to anyone.”
When I started teaching consent back in 2019, I felt my life rapidly changing. Learning about consent drastically altered my relationship with myself and others and deepened my relationship with my body. This all made sense to me. What did surprise me, though, was how learning consent changed my relationship with my creativity.
As I sat with friends over a potluck dinner this past week, at the home of my dog’s puppy’s human — my dog had puppies before I adopted her and I serendipitously found one of the puppies at the dog park last year — we all talked about our relationships to creativity and flow.
“For me, it’s been about consent,” I said. “Letting my current self to say no to a past self that gave me a to-do list. If I trust that the desire will come and stay open to feeling the creative impulse, then if it’s not there, I allow myself to say no.”
In order to play, explore, and create, we have to feel safe. Having a personal consent practice has given me a more compassionate relationship with my creativity that has made it easier to find flow because I don’t force it. I travel with my sense of safety, knowing that I can feel my desires and needs, ask for them—from myself, from my creative force, from a divine source—and handle whatever answer I get.
That said, I value ritual, which I define as — I may be absorbing some of this definition from Brooks Herr — routine with meaning. Ritual brings discipline, which is distinct from punishment. For example, I write in my journal every morning. This means that even on days when I don’t do any other form of writing, I’m still “a writer”’ I’m not suggesting that if someone doesn’t write every day, they’re not a writer; I’m saying that, for me, this practice has helped me maintain that particular sense of my self.
There’s also the issue of wanting-to-want to do something, or wanting to be at the end of a process but not wanting the process. For example, I want to be good at guitar but I don’t always want to practice. I want to have the ceramics that I imagine in my mind, but I don’t want to get my hands wet and cold. (I’ve written pretty extensively on that here.)
This course is for people who want to undergo this same deepening — to learn to feel their relationship with art and creativity as something safe, compassionate, and easily available, rather than something we have to chase out of fear that we might lose it, or avoid out of fear of burning out.
I have a responsibility to create the conditions in which my creativity can flow. This requires money.
I am not speaking to the very real socio-economic and structural barriers to accessing money; I am speaking to the ways that I get in my own way through unresolved money trauma that shows up as guilt and shame about having, receiving, and asking for money.
As an artist, no one is going to create the conditions in which my creativity can thrive for me. I have to do this. It's an uphill battle as it is with the structures set up so that the already-wealthy continue to get wealthier. What I can do is get out of my own way, get on my own team. I can find people who support me, encourage me, and lift me up when they're able, not put me down, guilt trip me, or are stuck in scarcity mindset such that my success threatens them or is perceived to take something away from them.
Money is a strategy, not a value. Within the system as it is currently, we have to have a certain amount of money to live in integrity with our values. In order to fight the current system, we have to live in it and have the means to rest, play, and innovate so that we can keep fighting it and build a new structures as we go.
Payment + Pricing
This 2-month program is $999. (Included in this price is my recorded $199 Boundaries + Your Business class and three $25 workbooks.)
There are 15 low-income spots available for those who have recently lost their SNAP benefits, are on unemployment, who were formerly incarcerated, or who otherwise could not access this program.
If this is still cost-prohibitive, you are always welcome to make me an offer, especially if you are in a country where the exchange rate makes this class financially inaccessible.
Please note: The deadline for refunds is 24 hours before the first class.
