What Can You Do In 2018?
A year ago, as we were coming up to Christmas, I sat down with a piece of paper and several coloured pens.
I wrote an account of how my year had gone, and when I had finished I read it over several times.
The whole process took me a couple of days.
And when I finished, I drew up a plan for 2017.
.
I was going to work with more people, by doing something new.
I would create a membership site to provide the kind of entertainment / training / mentoring I was already providing one-to-one, or to large groups in real life.
As December turned to January, that’s what I started.
I threw myself into an unfamiliar world, full of its own weird jargon, and incomprehensible technology.
And I quickly became overwhelmed.
.
Setting up my membership platform, I couldn’t work out how to connect it to a payment system (and which one).
I started preparing one programme, but people signed up before I was ready – and I had to deliver it while I was on holiday.
Running a live webinar, I was told that participants couldn’t hear me properly. (My broadband wasn’t up to it.)
I fixed the broadband, the payment systems, and delivered that six-week programme to everybody’s satisfaction…
…but this process was taking months, not weeks, and I found it really hard on my own.
.
Mercifully, I continued to work in the real world, and people liked what I did.
The psychotherapist, artist and documentary maker Philippa Perry, asked me to join her in Paris, where she was making a TV show about Surrealism.
She wanted to “create art” spontaneously, on camera, in a flea market.
Just me and Philippa, with an expensive film crew.
It felt quite risky, but I love doing things like that, so I whizzed off and we did it.
Back home, I thought about giving up the online idea, but that would be to write off the months of effort I’d put into trying to set it up myself.
I was going round in circles, and getting really demoralised.
I started to think I was incompetent – an idiot.