Some days, you just want to chuck your computer under the train.
For example, when you’re on the train to Holland, and your computer crashes and just won’t come back to life.
Yes, more lemons for Martin.
But then again, why fret?
I arrived in Holland, got a good night’s rest, and first thing in the morning downloaded software to get stuff fixed.
While Mac OS was being reinstalled, I called up my client Anook to see if she was up for a coffee.
Turned out, it was exactly the right moment because I’m only here for a few days, and next week both she and I will be busy: hard to find a match in our schedules.
So I went over and we had lemonade.
Well, tea – but you get the point.
I could have stressed about my primary tool breaking down, but instead I just decided to pivot, and as it turned out, that what had seemed a disaster was actually a blessing in disguise.
So very often, that what goes wrong is a useful or even needed break from our plans and expectations.
It’s all good and well to plan things, but how much control do you really have?
Depends how you look at it:
When it’s about circumstances outside of yourself: pretty much zero control.
But your reactions, your attitudes, your emotional responses, and the decisions you make as a consequence of what happens with, around, or to you: Those are all things you can control.
Not always immediately, but you do have the ability to train self-awareness, to learn how your mechanisms work, and to gradually develop a bit of meta-perspective on that little bundle of perceptions and mechanisms called ‘I’.
That meta perspective which stems from self-reflection and self-awareness, that’s what will enable you to be more in control of the inner world goings on.
And the more you contemplate the default reactions you have, and get to understand how they work, the more you can recognise occurrences for what they are, in the right here and right now.
In retrospect, you’ll easily be able to see how whatever kind of disaster was a blessing in disguise.
But it’s when you can allow for that possibility right when things go wrong, that you get to pivot.
Mindstuff, yes indeed.
Because success is made up of more than strategies and tactics and social media and galleries.
Success starts on the inside, starts with how you think about yourself and how you think about your thinking.
Have you ‘learned yourself’ yet?
Worth your time to try.
Obviously, getting to know and understand yourself gets easier when you also learn about how things around you work.
Which is why I don’t just talk mind-stuff, but also practical things, like methods and strategies and tactics for marketing and exposure and communication and pricing.
If you want three hours of that, either live in Spain or by video, here’s where you can register for my 30hour art-marketing masterclass –> http://martinstellar.com/find-buyers-sell-art/
Cheers,
Martin
