Mark E Shellshear.

It can be difficult to steady yourself after disappointment, but you need to get your mind back on what you want to achieve rather than focus on the disappointment. This takes discipline to do, rather than react to the situation and be defeated and become bitter. You are the most important asset that you have, work on you to make you better and when you do your world becomes better. Listen to positive affirming talks. Stay around positive successful people. Know your goals and have them written out and it’s important to achieve your to do list every day. Read your affirmations out loud to yourself. Don't leave it to chance, you are worth more than that, determine to build your confidence and self worth and become the best Artist and person that you can be. .

Wouldn’t it be better to become obsessed about selling, rather than the price of your Art work? Be obsessed about the sale, be right in the moment when someone buys your work, be observant, learn all you can, ask for their email address and get permission to send them your monthly newsletter and thank them for buying your work. The big prices will come later when you are well known, right now we want sales, so be obsessed with selling your Art. You bring great value to yourself and your client when you very present in that moment when someone decides to buy your Art work.

Customer service starts with building a relationship with the stranger when they are first standing in front of you admiring your painting. This is the time to be very focused on what they are saying. Remember always different people hear things differently, different people see things differently. Listen carefully to what they are saying, not what you think they are saying, to assume the sale is on we must hear what they are truly saying. Make sure you understand what they are really seeing in your Art work and then lead them into what you were trying to accomplish with your story of the painting. Caring for your customer means that customer service starts before the point of sale and goes on for the rest of your relationship with that collector. .

In the beginning of your career it is not about building big prices it’s about building your market and a reputation and that will take selling your work to strangers and then turning those strangers into fans and then life time collectors. These collectors who were once strangers will become your best advertising, by referral and word of mouth because it is to their advantage to see you become famous and your paintings sell for big prices. Strangers will make you famous and strangers have all your money, so don’t start to panic, this takes time, so prepare for the long game and be patient. This is not what Artists want to hear, but if you are unknown, then you have to work very hard at becoming known and that will mean doing videos, writing stories about you and your Art and getting your name out there in front of the buying public. Put your energy into building your market and your reputation and get known. .

Whenever an Artist decides to break away from the crowd and do things differently they will get criticism. The critics do not want change, they want to keep the status quo, but to be successful you have to embrace change because change is inevitable, whether you like it or not things change. People always criticise successful people and those striving to be successful, they are trying to drag the successful person down to their level, not rise up and make themselves into a successful person. You will always get critics, so see them this way, you must be doing something right, so keep building your life and become a successful Artist. Criticism is often born out of the failure of others, so don’t argue with them, just understand it is saying more about their own character than about you. Success requires personal change and personal growth, so if you want your world to change, you must change. Embrace change and work hard and rise above the critics. .

If you continue to do what you have always done, then your future will be exactly the same as your past.  If we make changes now, we will change our future.   Action is the key to change, paint that painting.   Finish that commission.   Write that blog.   Make that video.   Learn those new sales skills.   Work on self improvement and become a better person.   If you keep changing for the better it changes your future for the better.

Gratitude is so important, being grateful for all you have and the abilities you have. Lets not squander our opportunities but focus on what we can do to achieve our dreams and goals and be the best we can be. Focus on ourselves and work hard at being the best person that we can be and make a positive difference in our world. Be grateful for all that you have, don’t look at others and compare yourself with them, compare yourself to yourself and always be working on your daily personal best. Gratitude is the best attitude.

A daily decision to finish all the tasks that are set before me. So lean into the hard stuff and get it done and don’t put it off, we want improvement. We want to be able to finish every day, every week and every month and know we have given it our best and we can see improvement. Improvement is measurable, did I finish my daily list, am I ticking off achieved goals, are my sales increasing, am I doing my videos? All measurable tasks and we will see if we have improved, that is why it is always best to strive for improvement, not perfection.

Artists, the most assured way of growing your business is consistently getting your Art in front of the right audience, those who care, your fans. This is far better than getting in front of the mass audience once with a viral video. Real value is created by consistently putting your work out there for your audience, those who see you, know you and value what you do for them . We create Art for our fans, we don’t want a viral video once, we want consistent videos full of great content for our valued audience to continue to grow and follow our Art journey . .

A selling Artist will complement their collector on being the kind of buyer they are looking for, you are truly special and they are so happy this collector will be owning this particular painting, the collector is doing them a favour. The selling Artist wants to tell you about the painting and why it is special and why they created it, there is always a story. They truly care about your experience purchasing the painting as it is the beginning of a long term relationship and they know if you have an amazing experience the first time you buy from them you will come back next time. Yes there is a lot of money involved and we know it is a valuable painting, but that is not enough because it has to be about you the discerning buyer, that special group of people who buy paintings like this. When you sell your paintings to your customers, do you give them more to care about than just the price? .

As I said in my morning video, if the customer has a bad experience with you they will leave and there is no chance of a sale. You must understand at the beginning of the sale you are a stranger talking to a stranger, once you recognize this fact you can then approach the sales process very differently and do what most salespeople don’t do, care. Care about this stranger standing in front of you because most don’t care and the stranger can feel that. If they see that you really do care about them and you are genuinely interested in them, within seconds the meeting will change and it will be like two friends talking. The key is caring about the person, most don’t, it’s just a financial transaction to them and it’s not, you want this person to come with you on your Art journey and become your lifelong collector. Care about that stranger standing in front of you, it makes a difference.

It is easy to get distracted by the opinions of others who are not our buying our Art. Be very slow to listen to those who do not support your business, but know what you should do, careful they most likely wrong. Understand that you judge your Art business on your Art sales, your customers and collectors, not on the opinion of those who don’t buy you work. Don’t be distracted, listen to your customers and collectors, reflect on what has sold and what more you could be doing and take care of your customers. Don’t be distracted by opinions, sales are what matters, did it sell? .

The Art business is like any business, you have a product you created and then you have to sell it. What are you going to do differently to market your Art work? How are you going to get it in front of the right people who will love it? What tools will you use, how are you going to do it, like only you can. If you do what everyone else is doing, then you will get the same results that everyone is getting. Or you can market yourself in a way that creates attention within the market by making videos and talk about your Art and get noticed. It’s unlikely anyone can stop you because you don’t need permission to make videos , but you do need to act and make them . Getting attention may get you some opposition but you will get noticed and that’s exactly what we wanted.

Learning to paint was fun and not hard, because we are passionate about it. Learning to sell is hard, because we have a built in resistance when dealing with strangers. We have been educated to fear strangers since we were little children, stranger danger, and like walking it is instinctive. We need to reeducate ourselves to like strangers because we need them, lots of them to have a successful and rewarding Art business. Remember, they to you and you to them are only strangers until you speak to them and then you become acquaintances, then friendlies and then friends. Learning to walk was hard and learning to talk to strangers may be hard, but like walking once you master it, it will become instinctive and you will just do it. .

Luck is far more appealing than effort, unfortunately you don’t get to choose luck, but effort is always available to us. We can wait for luck to come our way or we can put in the effort and work hard. The more effort we put in the greater change we will bring to our Art business and build our success. We need to put more effort into three areas of our Art business, creating great original Art, selling our great Art and working on personal development and becoming a better person . If we choose to put more effort into these three areas, we won’t need luck because we will see the fruit of our effort.

We know that repetition brings mastery, if we regularly do something enough times we will master the task. Also repetition brings evolution. Interestingly, you and the task will change the more you do it. D o the same things over and over and small improvements are made and the product slowly evolves until eventually it is totally changed. Imagine if every day in our Art practice we repetitively did the task of creating over and over, in time it would evolve into something different because we would intuitively bring small improvements and in time o u r work would totally change.

  Write a weekly blog and put your thoughts out there for others to read, this gives you a mouth piece and people will read them and you will get a following. Story tell your Art, most won’t because of fear and they believe their Art speaks for it’s self, but if you are the one to story tell your Art , you will create tension with the majority who don’t story tell their Art . You must get all the unfair advantage you can, so do more than others do and don’t worry about getting overexposed, it’s not possible, you will get attention and you will get noticed. Create tension. .

We all want people to respect us, so live your professional life in a way that gets respect, you don’t always have to be right. Professional respect is something you earn over a period of time and can be lost in an instant. You can achieve the success you want as long as you don’t care how long it takes, persistence is the key and your Art must be impressive. So focus on your Art and let success follow. Push the boundaries, follow your passions and listen to the Muse. Make great Art and aim at a balanced life of integrity, creativity, innovation, originality and be constantly working on personal development it matters and be the best person and the best Artist you can be.

Being a professional Artist we want you to innovate and break all the rules, we want you to throw out the book and do it your way with your imagination. We want new and different, we want the original you, we don’t want a repeat of yesterday, we don’t want copies and we don’t want by the book. We want you to startle us, make us look with wonder, we want to be transported to a new reality, we want different, you are the Artist take us somewhere new. Art is not by the book, it is by your imagination. .