Monday, April 7, 2008

Help

Help is an interesting word. We can either get help, have help or be a help. Each use indicates a level of need or giving by those involved in the help process.

Lately, I've gotten help, been a help and had help. I also recently quite my job as CEO of my universe. Mind you that is a hard job post to forget and it's habits rise fairly frequently in day to day activities. I need and have a lot of help in dealing with this welcome vacancy in my life.

I still firmly believe that we are all 100% responsible for our lot in life. We either choose to accept or ignore the opportunities that are tossed in our path. It's like deciding whether or not to pick up a dropped penny. The only problem with being CEO of my universe is that I took responsibility for every dropped or ignored penny rather than just accepting that sometimes somebody else drops them and that I have no control over when and where they fall. It's too big a job with to much false responsibility that gets in the way of looking after what I really can do.

Recently a buddy, who is a musician/artist, and I decided that maybe it would be a good idea if a group of us like-minded individuals got together for bi-monthly gab sessions to compare notes on what works and what doesn't in our art/business worlds. Snagging the name from a magazine I read, we call it the Brain Squad, rather than a Mastermind group. It's a matter of rebelling against semantics and some of the 'new agey' verbiage that goes with the term Mastermind, that we grabbed at brain squad, after all two heads are better than one, so what about 5 or 6.

The catch with this little group is that we have to be committed to showing up at the meetings, hold everything discussed in confidence, share information and sources, and be encouraging as well as honest. So far it has a really good feel to it and it's great to be in room with others who are trying to be proactive about their art/business too and who are not looking for the problem in every idea but ideas in every problem.

My personal opinion is that for most of us that work at art, however one wants to define work and art, is that there is always someone or two or more, who is important to us, but who just never seems to "to get it". They appear to be supportive, try to be encouraging, but if you tell them your good news, theirs is better. If you have a problem, theirs is worse. If you have a headache, they have a brain tumour.... In their attempt to be supportive they are often undermining your confidence and creating some amount of doubt in your abilities and it's not like we don't suffer with confidence and ability issues as it is.

Our hope is that the brain squad can help each of us overcome some of the doubts/fears that creep into our art-lives, and that by keeping the meetings to a bi-monthly schedule that we all stay a bit more focused, and that because of improved focus that we will more readily spot the dropped pennies and actually be in a position to pick them up and use them, and if we can't use them, we can at least pass them on and help somebody else.

Cheers!