A spiral of doom…really!

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There are times in life where we allow ourselves to let a series of random, unrelated, and often one-off events, somehow to become all connected with each other.

We only seem to do this with negative events, bad news, and not with good positive things, which we often see in our heads as ‘lucky’ or nothing to do with the hard work and effort we have been putting into achieving something.

We are conditioned to focus on mistakes, failure and bad things. This is all part of the fear system that is all to prevalent in our culture.

We connect all these ‘bad news’ things to convince ourselves that there is this pattern of doom occurring and we have gone from everything going well, to our lives collapsing around us, all due to 3 or 4 things that happen at the same time.

Now there can be consequences of ‘bad decisions’, that if not recognised and no action taken to remedy, can of course lead to worsening of a situation.

However, the things are only related, if we choose to relate them in our heads. They are hardly ever related.

Then we need to get a sense of perspective on these events, to realise that it is highly unlikely that any of them are a matter of life or death, and on that scale of 10 being death and 1 not being that important, most of them will fall close to 1.

None of them will be anything that we can’t deal with and all of them will pass, and much sooner than we realise.

If we allow these things to become connected and allow it to zap our confidence, then they can become self-fulfilling. As we allow this to drain us, we tend then handle the situation badly and then more challenges can occur.

Remember what you have achieved to get you to where you are, remind yourself of all your success, as none of it would have been sheer fluke or luck. No one suddenly turns from success to failure overnight and we are all in possession of amazing skills and ability. In fact no one is a failure, it doesn’t exist.

It is all about remaining confident of that, no matter what events come our way and then choosing not to connect all these random things into a spiral of doom.

We only create and maintain our best with total faith in ourselves and we have every reason to keep faith. We have come all this way on our amazing life journeys, so no need to panic, no need to feel down because of a few challenges.

Every reason to believe and carry on creating of best.

One piece of art and not another

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I have been in Madrid for the weekend, and I visited the Reina Sofia, which is home to some utterly amazing art, by some very well known, and not so well known, artists.

This got me thinking, who or what decisions lead to a piece of art being displayed for millions to see? Why one piece of art makes it to the walls of a museum and not another?

I looked at some of the paintings, one which had a orange wash across the canvas with a single horizontal streak of red paint across. I thought, well that is something me or anyone could paint. We didn’t and this artist did.

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I then looked at Guernica, a huge complex piece, painted by Picasso. I thought well that’s Picasso, so therefore of course it should be here. Additionally, I thought, due to the complexity of the painting, that is something very few people could paint or even think up.

Art is of course a very subjective thing, what appears as art to one, my appear as trash to another.

To me I think it is to do with the story behind the artist, the originality of the piece and therefore the fact that it is different.

Guernica’s power is to do with the story of the Spanish Civil War behind it and to Picasso’s story too.

The piece is completely original and very different, whether you like it or not, there are no close copies of it, no one else can create such a piece, it has been done.

This is true in whatever we are creating in life, different ‘art’ and with a great story behind it, is what will get our work noticed.

Then the same applies, our work, our craft, our services are not for everyone, it is subjective.We all have our own audiences for what we create.

However, if the art is not different, original, with meaning and there is no story, then we can only expect mediocre results.

We are not here to create mass, bland, copies of what has been done before, we are here to create something with meaning, that relates to our story.