When I was fourteen and starting my first business (designing biz cards and a brochure made me life-long friends with the local printer who had never had a teen for a customer before), I loved selling.

And my customers loved buying.

I understood that what I was offering was needed and wanted and appreciated. And that being paid made me

We love to buy, but hate being sold to.

We want to buy, but somewhere in our hearts lives a suspicion that “they” are out to sell us a tonic of watered-down beetle juice.

The manipulative salesman or charlatan palm reader takes up a lot of space in our buy/sell story.

I get it.

I drank the Love Buy/Hate Sell Kool-aid many times.

So I don’t know why it should surprise me when…

I don’t know why this idea persists that competition and the arts are odd bed sisters. But it does.

I know that for years, competition had so much sport’s testosterone slathered over it that I cringed just to hear the word.

Then one time, when I made sure I got to a local potter’s studio right when she opened (I had a hankering for this lovely, tiny bowl that was actually a small nesting bird), my friends who were meeting me there “accused” me of being highly competitive because I got the bowl and about 3 other items that simply called to me.

Well, blown me down! If you never!

If I’d been asked to list ten-thousand adjectives about myself,  competitive would have never showed up.

I didn’t play sports. Didn’t enter contests. Never felt elated when I got a better test score than someone else, or a better grade in school.

And yet, there I was clearly getting a head start so I’d have first dibs at the potter’s studio.

Of course, that time the competitive label came with a derogatory implication that somehow what I’d done was unfriendly. I remember the sting of feeling emotionally ostracized the rest of the day – but not to the point of giving up my bird bowl!

In re-imagining this distant past, I realize I also had another emotion that…

For a lot of you, Geoffrey Gorman needs no introduction. Besides co-hosting the Art Career Mentor Program with me, Geoffrey has a long history of coaching other artists (but, alas, no more as he’s now devoted to full time art making!)

Over the years, Geoffrey has learned a thing or two about art consultants and agreed to share his latest outreach here on the smARTist Career Blog.

Without further ado, hereeeeeeeeeee’s Geoffrey!