Coronavirus Cancelled Our Trip to South By Southwest; Now What?

5 Benefits of Undertaking a Blog Challenge --Blooming Prejippie Zine

This post loosely accompanies Gab & Jam Episode 118

(video: http://bit.ly/Ep118Coronavirusvid and podcast: http://bit.ly/Ep118Coronaviruspod ).

As you may already know, our major trip for this year is to Austin, Texas, for the South By Southwest 2020 conference. Needless to say, we were taken aback, since just a week ago, South By Southwest had said that they wouldn’t cancel. Here we were, in the middle of packing and there was no conference to go to. The Coronavirus caused the city of Austin to declare a state of emergency and the conference could not go on.

As you might imagine, we have plenty to consider, as we are decide what to do next. We decided upon the following strategies that helped us change our perspective when major plans change suddenly. #changeinplans #diyrockstar #sxsw #prejippie #bloomingprejippie

South By Southwest playlist: http://bit.ly/sxswplaylist2019

4 Tips for Dealing with a Major Change in Plans:

1. Don’t over-exaggerate its meaning

God wants what’s best for you and your creative empire. There WILL be other opportunities to showcase your ideas. For years, we've heard of people who missed their one shot at fame, getting discovered, etc. We are convinced that those who continue to actively move toward their goals will find the success they seek. Therefore, even a setback—like this one—will eventually only be a memory and will not define what we do and where we go from here. Putting this cancellation in perspective allows us to not over-exaggerate that there is any greater meaning, save a schedule change, so that we can move on to this next tip.

(Curious about our music? Check out our SoundCloud page at http://soundcloud.com/prejippie )

Tips for Better Band Photos --Blooming Prejippie Zine

2. Find quality alternatives

In our case, we thought about going to other synch and/or music conferences, but we’re afraid that travel to it and/or the conferences themselves would be similarly affected. However, we have decided to take a creative and productive stay-cation, where we can refresh blog posts, landing pages, and clean out and organize our creative spaces. This is the time to re-visit our vision boards, to pull out the possible promotion ideas that we put to the side to focus on projects, like South By Southwest, and to do some pitching on all fronts. This leads us to our next tip for dealing with major, unexpected changes.

Vision Board Cheat Sheet --Blooming Prejippie

3. Start planning for next year

Hell, yeah, we’re planning to attend next year! And the way it stands, there is a possibility that our tickets will be deferred for next year, if they honor their word. So, we’ll start early to get the hotel that we REALLY wanted for a better price than we were going to this year. The bottom line is that we can't go too far wrong if we use this extra time to better plan for the next trip to South By Southwest, as we are sure that it will go forth EVENTUALLY, so putting our resources to the side and have a strategy—versus our very first year (http://bit.ly/sxswobservations )—seems like a worthy way to spend this "extra" time.

4 Tips for Dealing with a Major Change in Plans --Blooming Prejippie

4. Keep moving toward your goals

We’re not going to let this be our crowning moment; the fact that we DIDN’T get to South By Southwest and reminiscing over what COULD HAVE happened. Instead, we are focused on finding other activities we can do to network, partner up, and pitch our songs. We know that this is just a blip on the screen and that there will be more, more, more meetups, conventions and opportunities, if we keep moving in the right direction. Building our creative empire is a marathon and no one piece that goes missing is going to break the momentum. As long as we use all the other advice that we've given you all in the tips above, we will be on our way to the success we seek.