These little guys are the sled dogs at Denali â the only national park in the U.S. with a working dog team. Sled dogs have held an essential role in the life and culture of Alaska for thousands of years, and since the 1920s, Denaliâs team has helped protect the parkâs wildlife, scenery and wilderness.
Check out more dogs of Interior:Â https://on.doi.gov/2HWALcv
Photo by National Park Service.
For many creatives, talking about money can be uncomfortable. Yet, the more skilled you are at knowing your value and fighting for it, the more you’ll see your business grow. And while there are some who think that negotiating should never be a factor when buying art, the reality is that it’s commonplace. Buyers like to feel like they are getting a deal, and so it’s up to the individual freelancer to come prepared with a good set of negotiation skills whether you are selling individual artworks or trying to close a deal for a job with a client.
Gone are the days when good negotiators conjured up images of large egos battling over who could stiff the other. Once you’ve created a good basis for your pricing and you know your market, you can begin to think about what leeway you have to negotiate. And it doesn’t have to be combative, in reality, respect and a willingness to work with the other party will often breed better resultsâand long-term relationships.
Often, in a move to make sure you get the job, it’s easy to undersell yourself and put in a bid just to close the deal immediately. But in doing so, you risk being woefully underpaid and set a precedent, if the client returns for future work. It’s crucial to get your ideal pricing correct at the beginning and aim high knowing that you may have to come down in price during the negotiations.
Just as you should start with your ideal price, you’ll also want to knowâin advanceâwhat you’re happy settling with. Understanding what you’ll be satisfied with monetarily will let you go into the negotiations relaxed. The worst thing is to panic and blurt out a number to close the deal, only to feel as though it’s worked out unfavorably once you walk out the door.
The best negotiators have a poker face and never let you see them sweat. They come prepared with their reasoning and the logic behind the pricing they can offer and stay confident in their delivery. By panicking, you’re giving the other party power, and leave the impression that you are unsure of yourself. If you’re negotiating with someone who is skilled, they’ll capitalize on this to perhaps pull you into a deal you’re uncomfortable with.
Aside from staying calm and confident, one way to leverage the negotiations is by getting the other party to throw out the first offer. It’s not always possible, but by getting the other party to toss out the budget for the project or what they were hoping to spend, you’ll quickly be able to adapt and see if you are way over or under their line of thinking. This will give you the upper hand to counter.
Sometimes, thinking outside the box can help close the deal in your favor. Knowing your numbers is essential to making things work, but often it’s just about letting the other party feel like they got something out of the negotiations. Whether it’s free shipping on an artwork or bundling together multiple services or paintings together at a discounted price, there are many ways to make a deal happen.
We often think of negotiations as adversarial, but if you think about it as a team effort to leave both parties satisfied, you can change that dynamic. Instead of working against each other, use âweâ statements that evoke the feeling that you are a team and want the negotiations to end successfully for all involved. This will naturally make the other party more willing to meet you halfway.
Don’t assume that everyone knows exactly why the service or piece of art has a specific price placed on it. You should know better than anyone the market you’re working in and what makes your prices competitive and worth paying, so lay the cards out on the table. It’s harder for someone to argue against facts, and will also help them understand why the deal is worth the investment.
One of the biggest mistakes people make in negotiations is not listening to the other person. When you sit back and truly listen, the other party will often give away subtle clues about what they will be happy with or what might make the negotiations move forward. For instance, did you notice them eyeing a screenprint at your studio? That could be incorporated into the deal as a âgift.â Or, in past conversations, did the client mention how much they love their dog? Offer to throw in some extra shots at their wedding reception with their prized pooch, no extra charge. Listening will also give you an idea of whether or not they’ve reached their maximum or if there’s still room to get them up to your ideal price.
Body language is important in general for clear communication, but even more so in negotiations when you’ll want to keep the dynamic warm and nonadversarial. Lean in and don’t keep yourself closed off, which will keep engagement high and the other party motivated to work with you.
Remember, it’s just business, not personal. This can be a difficult concept when talking about something as personal as your artwork or your business, but it’s critical to keep your eye on the end goal and not be offended during the negotiations. By taking your ego out of it and focusing strictly on results, it’s less likely that the negotiations will escalate and get hostile. This doesn’t mean you can’t express concerns if you have them, but remember to be objective and respectful. In the long run, it will help you get things done.
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The post 10 Easy Tips to Learn How to Negotiate Like a Pro appeared first on My Modern Met.
There is nothing so reminiscent of Communist-era censorship culture as the coercive, patronizing ideological commentaries with which cultural officials of the Law and Justice party have in the last few years been responding to books, plays, and films related to the Holocaust. Among their crude moves to establish ideological control at home and flout opinion in the West is a recently passed an amended law criminalizing claims that the Poles were complicit in or jointly responsible for the Nazisâ persecutions of Polish Jews.
If youâre like most people, you probably have a few aspects of your life that youâd like to improve. When you think of all the changes you want to make, you might feel a bit overwhelmed. Maybe you want to start exercising regularly, eat healthier food, develop better relationships, and improve your financial situation. Thinking about all of these goals can be quite daunting! Each improvement on its own would be a big change and require a lot of effort, so how can you possibly improve them all at the same time? Fortunately, you donât have to. You only need one small improvement to start building the momentum required to make massive changes in your life.
When youâre solving a jigsaw puzzle, how do you solve it? Do you try getting all the pieces in place at the same time? Of course not! You start with one piece at a time, and each one makes adding the next piece a little easier until you complete the puzzle. You need to think of your own personal growth in the same way. Each small change builds on the last and makes the next change even easier. The more changes you make, the more confidence you build and soon enough, youâre a totally different person. Youâre no longer overwhelmed by your goals because youâve experienced your own ability to achieve them. You know that when you make a decision, you follow through, because thatâs what you need to do if you want to achieve your goals.
Start with the low hanging fruit. Find something small in your life that you can improve without a massive amount of time or effort, and commit to making it happen today. Maybe that means cleaning your house or going to the gym. The scale doesnât matter as much as the completion. Most people are so overwhelmed by their collective goals that they donât even start, but even the smallest changes can snowball into a new mindset that allows you to make more changes with less effort.
If youâre feeling overwhelmed by all the changes you want to make, thereâs one simple reason: You havenât trained yourself to think correctly about personal growth. You probably havenât experienced enough self driven positive change to remember that success is just a state of mind. If you spend every evening binge watching Netflix and eating unhealthy food, you might be training yourself to be lazy.
Every time you have the thought âI should start going to the gymâ but instead just keep watching Netflix, youâre actually conditioning yourself to believe that youâre powerless. You have admitted to yourself that you want something, but donât have the conviction to follow through with it. Youâre putting that attainable goal on a pedestal and turning it into a pipe dream. Conversely, every time you commit to something and follow through with it, you are training yourself to have confidence. Even the smallest commitment and follow through can be the spark that ignites your engine of growth.
Starting something new can be difficult, but most things get much easier after you push through the initial pain. Speaking from personal experience, I can tell you that in the last six months I went from barely exercising at all and totally dreading the gym to working out 4+ days a week with very little effort. In fact, it requires almost zero mental energy to get myself to the gym now, because Iâve learned to associate it with all the pleasure of exercising instead of the pain. The first two months were tough because I wasnât used to exerting that much energy and being sore, but then it completely changed. I had broken through the initial pain and I became excited to go, considering it a treat to my body and my mind.
Right now, in this moment, make a small commitment and follow through with it. Make a solid plan so you canât just reason your way out of it. Book an appointment, book a class, call a friend and arrange a time to go to the gym together. Better yet, start right now. In this moment, you can make a decision to become the type of person who lives the life they want, and that change happens instantly when you truly commit to it.
Pat Kelly is a self improvement writer and host of The Pat Kelly Podcast and Youtube Channel. Find more content like this at www.patkellypodcast.com
You’ve read 3 Easy Tips For Massive Personal Growth, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
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Paul Lendvai, a Hungarian-Austrian journalist who spent several decades reporting on Central Europe for the Financial Times, has written a highly illuminating biography of Viktor OrbĂĄn, whom he calls âthe ablest and most controversial politician in modern Hungarian history.â OrbĂĄn: Hungaryâs Strongman also serves as a useful overview of Hungarian history since the fall of communismâafter all, OrbĂĄn has been central to the countryâs development since at least the late-1990s, when he was first elected prime minister. Lendvai portrays him as ruthless, absolutely relentless in the pursuit of power, and, on many occasions, outright vengeful.
In some instances, the dogâhuman relationship can be deepâsome would argue as deep as that between two humans. But do humans and dogs think in similar ways? Until recently the question seemed unanswerable.
James Stourtonâs magnificent biography tells the story of Kenneth Clarkâs life in all its complexity and contradiction. It also reminds us that in his time Clark himself developed an innovative method for studying works of artâone that struck a balance between the then-prevailing disciplines of connoisseurship on the one hand and iconography on the other. And just as the Tate Britain exhibition showed the misses as well as the hits, the story Stourton tells makes it clear that Clarkâs apparently gilded career was marked by almost as many failures as successes. The time has come to look at the achievements of a man whose vision influenced the art-viewing habits of generations.
In the late eighteenth century, the fur trade in North America entailed a huge and costly detour. Beaver pelts, harvested in Canada and the United States and destined for China, had first to be shipped east to London. From there they traveled southwest, around Cape Horn, and then west halfway around the world to the Orient. The modern equivalent would be to fly from Chicago to New York with a connection in Honolulu. In 1789, fifteen years before Lewis and Clark’s expedition, the North West Company asked twenty-six-year-old Alexander Mackenzie to find a shortcut. The commission was to go “in a Bark Canoe in search of a Passage by Water through the N. W. Continent of America.” His goal was the Pacific Ocean.
A more famous explorer, Captain James Cook, had recently failed to find the Northwest Passage. But Mackenzie was young and ambitious. He set out with a party of seventeen from the Great Slave Lake in north-central Canada. From there he entered the newly discovered Deh Cho River, which was later renamed for him and is Canada’s longest at over 1,000 miles. The party navigated northwest for forty days. But instead of reaching the Pacific, the river emptied into the Arctic Ocean. Standing on Whale Island at the river’s northern terminus, Mackenzie saw ice stretching all the way to the horizon: an impassable wasteland that was commercially useless.
In Disappointment River: Finding and Losing the Northwest Passage, Brian Castner writes that, because of climate change, the vista has been free of ice in summer since 2007. “The way is open. Mackenzie was simply two hundred years too early.” Castner, a combat veteran and the author of two well-received memoirs of war, has written a joint chronicle of Mackenzie’s expedition and his own recreation of it in 2016. In order to experience the river for himself, Castner set out with a rotating cast of four friends who each paddled a leg of the river with him. He travelled 1,125 miles by canoe — nearly a million paddle strokes. Castner interweaves Mackenzie’s chronicle with his own travelogue, making for a brisk read and a thoughtful meditation on adventure, discovery, and ultimately failure.
Mackenzie is obscure today, although his memoirs were bestsellers in their time. He is overshadowed by more famous explorers of the Northwest Passage like John Franklin and Roald Amundsen. Mackenzie’s journals serve as Castner’s main source, but they require some fleshing out. “All Hands were for some time handing the loading and Canoe up the Hill. Men and Indians much fatigued.” So writes Mackenzie of an exhausting 820-pace portage along a narrow, wet ledge over treacherous rapids. The party lost a canoe there: a single slip caused it to fall to the rocks below. At moments like these, Castner’s own voyage helps fill out the story, with a fresh set of eyes on a landscape so vast and barren that it has not changed much over the centuries.
Its abiding feature is mosquitoes. The Mackenzie River passes through Canada’s Northwest Territories, a remote area of heavily forested taiga and tundra that is twice the size of Texas. The river hugs the eastern foothills of the Canadian Rockies; at times it is deep and miles wide, while at others the water has a draft of only a few feet. (These shallows, as well as the northern river’s frozen reaches during much of the year, limit its use as a major commercial waterway today.) The mosquitoes are everywhere. Castner and his boat-mates try everything to avoid them. In the 1840s, the gentle and gentlemanly Franklin is said to have blown them from his skin rather than swatting them. Another voyager, Amos Berg, who traveled the river for National Geographic in 1929, found that the only way to enjoy a meal without himself becoming one was to eat while running up and down the shore.
Disappointment River is a story of exploration, but not of tragedy or disaster. It is not an epic. No one died on Mackenzie’s expedition or on Castner’s, and while the landscape was expansive, it was not particularly dramatic. Mackenzie’s encounters with indigenous tribes were cordial and marked by productive trade; Castner’s were haunted by the poverty and idleness of a mistreated people. Even the romance of the wilderness is taken down a notch: “The song of the north is not a loon’s call or a wolf’s howl, as many famous outdoor writers contend, but rather the hum of the diesel engine,” Castner writes. Yet the book is not without a certain power. The journey itself is the reward: it is the ultimate adventure clichĂ©, but it happens to be true. As Ernest Shackleton famously said, “It is in our nature to explore, to reach out into the unknown. The only true failure would be not to explore at all.”
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Sig Nordal 