What Advice Would YOU Give YOURSELF?

Long ago, I had just become a team leader, and I started to realize I still had a lot to learn about managerial skills. My bosses agreed to my taking a management course. An interesting thing happened in the weeks before the management course started: as I formulated one main problem I had run into, I imagined what advice they would give. I gave myself that advice, and it worked!

I still learned a lot during the management course. (There were also things they got wrong.)

But this mechanism stuck with me.

There are art coaches and mentors, and occasionally I consider them. I still do, and may want to hire one. But each time I consider it, I think of the onboarding process, them asking me the questions. What am I doing right now? What am I struggling with? Then I guess I know what they are going to say. It is what I want or need to hear, and it is embedded in the questions. The questions suggest the answer.

It’s often rather obvious. You want to draw more, but you’re spending too much time on social media. Is creating social media posts burning you out? Well... Guess what you have to do. The answer is often already embedded in your question, and the mentor just needs to tell you what you need to hear. Something you can say to yourself and save yourself a lot of money.

Is it what they will tell me? I don’t know for sure, but the advice I imagine they give me almost always works!

Sometimes, you do need a new pair of eyes, backed by an experienced brain, to look at your artwork and give you pointers, for sure. In those cases, you are stuck because you really actually don’t know the way forward, and a more experienced person might.

But for many things, you actually do know the answer. You’re just not doing it yet.

When you really get stuck, and you have the money, a mentor or coach is probably a good idea, but I find that this mental “gedankenexperiment” usually helps me forward.

What advice would you give yourself?

Yours sincerely,