Purging Destructive Thoughts That Hold You Back

How to Eliminate Negative Thinking that Ruins Your Art Sales

Many books about art marketing that I’ve read discuss the doubts and fears that get in the way of artists succeeding in selling their artworks.  

Most of them tackle this subject in a different way than I do.  

You see, doubts and fears are created by your mind, and they absolutely interfere with and can stop the creative process, both in the creation phase and in the marketing phase.  Perhaps even more in the marketing phase because marketing involves other people, and if you have doubts and fears, you will project your fears into them, which will doubly paralyze you.

For example, if you price your painting and deep in your mind, you think it’s “too expensive,”  you will project that thought into your reality and it will create a fear that other people also think it’s “too expensive.”  But that is a false thought, a negative thought, and one that will hold back your sales if you allow it to prevent you from moving closer to seeing reality is it actually is and pricing accordingly.  Or testing the marketing and proceeding accordingly.

How do you solve this problem?

Most writers, on this topic, talk about the importance of “mindset” and practicing having “positive thoughts” to counteract the “negative thoughts.”  

I call this the “Daily Affirmation” method, named after the old Saturday Night Live skit where a character named “Stuart Smalley” looked into a Mirror when he felt he wasn’t worthy of something and said, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!”

Click here to see the Stuart Smalley skit.

While this approach may work for some people, at least for a while, it is not The Way of the Bold Brush. 

In my view, this is the wrong approach and it is not sustainable.

Here’s what to do instead, and it’s far easier than “positive thinking.”