Microblading - The first key to success: personal responsibility

Throughout more than 10 years, we have seen a lot of students that come to pigmentation or microblading courses, and obviously, their background ranges from girls that are totally unfamiliar with providing any sort of beauty services to professionals that are already good at microblading before the class.

However, the level on which the person is able to do micro blading before the course is definitely not the criteria that determine success. Working with literally thousands of students has thought us one thing: there is something that determines quite well whether a person becomes successful as a microblading artist or not. To be more precise, there are three criteria the person should possess, the combination of which practically always grants success: the ability to take personal responsibility, massive action, and progress.

All three sound pretty simplistic and obvious. Practically all of aspiring artists accept those criteria on the fly and nod to that. However, pure acknowledgment is barely enough. It becomes clear if a person has intrinsically accepted those values only by looking at his/her actions. Now, let us explore all of those three criteria in more detail. First, let us talk about the ability to take personal responsibility today.

PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY

Personal responsibility. Before talking about it, let us just clarify that the following is not any sort of attempt to free us from our personal responsibility. As you will most probably realize, in the end, this very article is published as a part of expressing that. When it comes to personal responsibility, there is tons of information about it; however, at the same time it very little of that actually reaches us. Why? Because it would hit us where it hurts the most - our identity. Quite often, a human being is ready to admit whatever else but that she is actually the sole creator of her success or the culprit of her failures. Let us now look into that in more detail (and this is a supremely simplistic experiment you can do with yourself). When you think about the last failure in your life and list ten reasons why it went down as it went, something magical happens. Try it yourself, stop reading, think of your last failure, and mark down ten reasons you think caused that.

... Hope you did it :) When it comes to artists that succeed, about 8 reasons out of those ten are related directly to what they themselves did or did not do. For example, they have written (in case the failure was related to making microblading): I did not take the time to listen to the client, I did not prepare enough, I did not communicate myself clearly enough, I had not practiced the pattern I was using enough on fake skin, I had booked too many clients for that day, I had risen clients expectation through the roof with my marketing, I did not explain the contract the client signed in enough detail, I did not take care of my tools, I planned too little because I was running out of pigment and so on and so forth. As you can see, those reasons for the failure start with “I.” This is what taking personal responsibility actually looks like. Now, let us look at the other alternative approach and the reasons related to that. 

When it comes to such cases, the person notes that the reasons for failure were true to a very large extent related to something outside her control entirely, related to other people, events, and circumstances. For example, such people have said that the causes for failure were the following: The client did not express herself enough, The client did not read through the contract, The client did not know what she wanted, The pigments were bad, The tool was bad, The blade was crooked, The anesthetic did not work, my husband (boyfriend, friend, etc) had made name anxious before the procedure, The trainer did not train me well, The weather was working against me (this is not a joke, a person has actually said that), The lighting was bad, The chair was old, etc. As you can see, this list is endless. 

Although it has been said that one should not be absolute, based on actually hundreds of artists that have succeeded, we can say that the ones that do not take personal responsibility will never become excellent artists. Maybe, in some cases, they will become good, maybe in some cases even very good; however, never excellent and most often not even good. They probably find something else to do besides microblading, continue blaming anything and everything on something outside their direct sphere of influence, and - what is the worst - they do not even realize that. 

Does this mean that there are no outside factors, that the tools, the training, and the client are always perfect? No, of course not! Not under any circumstances! However, at the moment, we are talking about the light in which you see all that. Let us imagine a very concrete identical situation with two artists: one belonging to the first category, the other belonging to the second - the screws of the golden ratio measuring tool get loose (no pun intended). One student concentrates, gives her best, and still manages to measure her brows. After the procedure, she immediately finds a new or better golden ratio tool, meanwhile trying to tighten the screws of the old one, contacts the provider of those and kindly asks for replacement or just googles for the best one and has it shipped to her immediately. 

Aspiring artist belonging to the second category and not taking any personal responsibility un-consciously even feels relieved when she realizes that the screws of the tool are loose. Now, she has it - the reason for her failure and, whilst not consciously admitting that, sticks to this as Gollum to the ring of the LOTR trilogy, never forgetting about it and whispering “my precious…”. She fails to measure the brows correctly and, after the procedure, obviously blames the result on the screws of the tool, on the tool, the producer of the tool, or the person that sold or gave her the tool; sometimes, she even blames the whole misfortune with client's brows on the person that suggested her to order this tool from somewhere to go to training where this tool was given to her.  What is also remarkable - she does not want to give that reason up. What does she do after the procedure - literally nothing! She continues blaming and sometimes even quits trying to find new customers because of the broken tool (sic!). 

What is the moral of this example? It is not any sort of justification for the fact that even our tools have broken or become loose :) It is the very fact that s..t happen. Always. One can count on that. Clients are sometimes on their periods (whilst denying it) and act crazy for no reason whatsoever, the class is sometimes too intense or too slow for you, the tools may break, sometimes you get double booked, and you know that the other client that has traveled 300 miles to get brows from you is sitting nervously behind the door, etc. There is always something you attribute your bad brows to. Always. Because this is life, and life happens. And at any given moment, there are approximately 3000 things going on that sound plausible for a reason your microblading career is not moving or, worst yet, is in a downward spiral. 

The important thing to realize is absurdly simple: it is not all that is going on around you that matters; it is simply your reaction to it. If you want to get better, and we know hundreds of artists that have, then the principle “if there is a will, there is a way” applies. You take responsibility, and you take action. If someone would put a gun to your head and say that he or she will shoot your if you do not come up with a golden ratio tool in three hours (yes, you read it correctly, hours, not days or weeks), we bet most of us would come up with one even faster.

That is the reason SharpBrows greatly supports and acknowledges artists that are able to take personal responsibility. If a person is honest and asks for help or promotion, it becomes obvious that she has also done something from her side - put time and effort into learning, asked tons of questions and studied on her own, practiced like crazy, etc we will help. And that is not some wicked hidden agenda we would run to prefer one student to another. We do not hide it - we say it loud and clear: if you have helped yourself, if you have taken full responsibility for your career and development, then the world will give you a hand. If one wants to rain on everyone's parade, then one should not expect to get a sudden boost from the outside world. That is just the balance of life.

And now, back to one of the initial points: doesn't take so much personal responsibility really mean that SharpBrows, as a microblading academy, should also be responsible for everything related to training, including the student’s ability to take responsibility for their actions? It should. Through applying different approaches, we have understood that we can take full responsibility for giving the student the best tools to learn microblading. We are convinced that the solution we have designed that includes an internet-based learning system and intense two-day training. Although the percentage of students from SharpBrows classes is much higher than in other academies. It is totally possible that there is still 15-20 percent of students that do not start doing microblading after the class. For that reason, SharpBrows has internationally started the "leave no one behind" concept that allows those students that feel insecure after class to get extra online help, free training days, etc. We take very much responsibility for providing the best opportunities however, we just simply can not take responsibility for students’ attitudes. This is up to you. However, we can assure you we do everything that is humanly possible to design the system so that you would develop a positive attitude towards learning and would want to take responsibility.

The most important idea of this story: stop whining and see what is under your immediate control; ask, and you shall receive, take action, and good things will happen to you.

DISCLAIMER: If you are not in for taking personal responsibility for your microblading career, if you feel that this article was entirely false, PLEASE DO NOT JOIN BROW ANALYTICS, DO NOT BUY SHARPBROWS LEARNING TOOLS AND DO NOT COME TO OUR TRAINING. You probably should not go to any microblading training then; however, if you want to, please choose another training.