Mastering Mercury Retrograde
Mastering Mercury
Mercury is a planet of tremendous significance. As the cosmic messenger, Mercury knows how to get around. It governs many key components of how we work: communication, technology, commerce, sales, marketing, import and export, transactions, and a whole lot more. It shapes how we exchange information, make decisions, and navigate the complex terrain of the business world. Understanding its influence can help you be more effective with your communication, improve your negotiation skills, help initiate and land better contracts and agreements, make you a masterful networker, and boost your innovative edge.
The Retrograde Relevance
It’s a pop culture spectacle for everyone, yet a total enigma to most people. When a planet is retrograde, it looks like it’s moving backwards in the sky. But it’s just an optical illusion based on the funny orbits of the planets in our solar system. While it may be an illusion, it’s well-known to bring real-world trouble – especially when Mercury is retrograde.
Mercury goes retrograde multiple times each year. It appears to rewind over parts of the sky it had just moved through. It’s retracing its steps. These are periods of time that can commonly bring up communication issues, delays in business dealings, cancellations or mishaps in travel plans, misfortune in negotiations, pesky technology issues, subpar contractual arrangements. Information can go missing, leading us to make uninformed or rash decisions. But it’s not all negative – Mercury retrograde gets a bad reputation. We’re encouraged to review, reverse, rest up, reorganize, reconsider, rebudget… are you catching the pattern? In fact, any “re” word is applicable and recommended during a Mercury retrograde. It’s a healthy re-evaluation that helps us slow down, revise old processes so we can operate better in the future, revisit old ideas that we thought were no longer applicable, and reconnect with important people who may be pivotal in the next stage of our business’ growth.
Buffer Periods
Before Mercury goes retrograde, it starts to slow down in preparation to “moves backward.” Similarly, once it “moves forward” again, it takes some time to pick up speed and get back to where it was when the retrograde began. These periods of time before and after the retrograde are buffers.