Pursue Your Goals -- YOUR Way

If you're on this site, it's probably because you paint or take photos, with the idea of selling your artistic creativity to others. I would imagine that a potential goal in your life is to increase these sales, so that what is a pleasurable hobby can turn into a business worth investing time in.

And if you're like me, you've probably received reams of advice from well meaning friends, family members and straight up strangers. I could make a list of some of this advice, entitled something like "10 Top Pieces of Advice People Who Are Not Artists Trying to Sell Their Work Give to Artists Trying to Sell Their Work." Somewhere in that list would be, "Reach out to family members and friends with your art -- show them what you do, and they'll buy it!" As if Mom doesn't know, already, that you do art.

It doesn't take long to move past this well meaning advice. You find that you get very adept at a quick warm smile, a nod, and a "thank you." The "advice" that is more difficult to move past, the type that taps into our insecurities, is from those "business experts" out there -- think of the articles on Linked In with 100k views, entitled along the lines of, "Top Selling Strategies for Small Businesses." (I get regular emails from UPS these days, telling me how a former pro-tennis star turned her dreams into a Big Successful Business, without bothering to mention the financial assets, as well as a household name, that she had to start with. And then there's the former president turned "artist" -- more money and name recognition.)

You can drop down a rabbit hole with these "advice" articles, programs, and books, but before you do so, here's something that has worked for me:

Follow your instincts. Walk on a narrow trail that no one else is on. Give things a try, even if they seem crazy. And this is the big one: Allow yourself to think in a completely, radically different way than you normally do. If an idea seems outlandish, but it intrigues you, try the Just One Week technique: for one week, allow yourself to go there. When you want to say, "That's nuts. That can't possibly work," stop, and don't think that. You don't have to actually DO anything, invest money or change you're schedule -- all you're doing is, for one week, allowing yourself to consider the possibility, follow where it could go, let the pursuit of thought open up more options and ideas.

At the end of the week, you're free to give up the new, radical idea and go back to the old way of thinking. But I'm willing to bet that, after a week of allowing yourself freedom of wild thought, you won't go back to where you started. Somehow, in some way, you'll have taken another step along the narrow path.

And . . . in that week while you allow yourself to think a radically different thought, you probably don't want to tell anyone about what you're thinking, because the last thing you need is a piece of Advice from Someone Who Doesn't Sell Art telling you something like, "You're nuts! Try this instead: Ask your friends and family to share the Facebook posts of your art!"