As someone whose day job is in tech support, I’ve learned not to discount the power of “Mercury in retrograde”. Except it isn’t, and the frustrations I experienced last week were obstacles to be sure. In fact, to be honest, it left me wondering if I were on the right path. It seemed as if nothing I wanted to do was going right, and yet, towards the end of the week when I was knocking them down, one by one, like slow-mo bowling,
I realized that where I once would have called myself a failure, I now realized that I had stretched my skills. I’d learned new things. Thankfully had a bit of help from online forums, and the issues are, as far as I know, mostly resolved. Without even realizing it, I had changed my mindset around such things and it felt…good?
There’s a lot to remember as authors, or entrepreneurs, or authorpreneurs as many call themselves (I dislike the term and I’ll discuss why in a future post). We’re doing things that aren’t common. Not many people in the grand scheme of things (as a percentage of population) write and produce books in the hopes of selling them. Even fewer of those who do write books actually sell enough not to need a “day job” (and here in the US that becomes problematic because of our atrocious health care system).
Every day, we’re doing things that step us out of our comfort zone. How we think about those things matters a lot.
I could go into the psychology of it all, or lean on my coaching certifications and talk to you about how it works, but honestly, a lot of that stuff is just that–stuff–until we ask one important question — What if this isn’t a failure? What if it’s a learning experience instead?
As a neurodivergent person with a major depressive disorder diagnosis, I’m not lying if I say that our own brains can create barriers to making a shift in inquiry. That’s why I’m not talking about making choices or deciding to react better. Such terms put the responsibility on the individual, without acknowledging all the barriers from socioeconomic to neurochemical to past trauma, that can make it so difficult to yell “plot twist” and move on when things go to shit. I’ve been there. I understand.
Instead, I choose to take the power away from the word failure. If a light bulb fails (goes out), though that happens less often with LEDs, we don’t throw the whole lamp away and sit in the dark — we change the light bulb. We try again with a new light bulb. If it happens often enough, we may realize that a certain cheap brand of light bulbs just isn’t durable and change the brand we buy. If we go out for dinner and the food is horrible, we don’t stop eating. We remember not to go there and try different places.
Likewise, if something happens whether it’s website issues, or software issues, or us getting in way too deep on a project we have a limited knowledge about (oops!), we should treat it like a bad restaurant. Don’t quit doing whatever it is. Simply try another way.
Easier said than done, I know. So I’ll leave you with this. My virtual door is always open, and I have a faith in you. It’s a plot twist, and those, at least to this author, are rather fun to write. So what are you going to create today?
