This Voice In Your Head Is Holding You Back. Here’s How To Fire It.

Courtesy of The Magic of Thinking Big

My loves, there is a book.

An excellent book.

An extremely wise book.

A holy-shit-could-you-stop-shoving-excessive-amounts-of-very-good-advice-in-every-single-page-there-is-only-so-much-I-can-process-at-one-time book.

It is called The Magic of Thinking Big by Dr. David J. Schwartz and I am currently starting it over again for the fourth time this month.

It’s that good.

What Is The Magic of Thinking Big?

The Magic of Thinking Big is life advice, achievement, success, and personal development book. Dr. Schwartz described it as a “training program for personal development.”

It’s about how to grow and succeed in life, in whatever areas you want. It lays out a roadmap for growing in life — in the words of the book, “moving to First Class Avenue, USA” (the book was written by an American in the 1950s, so the language sounds like that).

There is a hell of a lot of really good takeaways from The Magic of Thinking Big, and presenting them all would take an entire book in itself. I am not writing a second book, I’m already working on a first book, and two books at one time would be excessive. So I’m going into just one takeaway.

But it’s a good one, I promise.

The Size of Your Thinking Determines The Size of Your Success

Okay, so. The entire premise of The Magic of Thinking Big can be summarized in the header above, but I want to explain it a li’l bit.

Most people, myself included, think…a little small. We walk through life going, “well, maybe I’ll make the same amount next year…or maybe I’ll be able to live in a slightly bigger apartment one day…or wouldn’t it be nice to go on vacation in five years or so,” etc., etc., and so forth. We think in incremental improvement if we think of improvement at all.

What we don’t do is think, “you know what, I’m going to be making double what I make now in three years. I have decided. And here is How I’m Going To Make It Happen (Despite the Economy, Which Can Eat It).” Or “I am going to have a metric shitton of very excellent friends AND get a promotion AND a raise AND have an extremely happy married life.”

Why do we think incrementally instead of swinging for the fences? Because we’ve been taught that incremental is reasonable. That swinging for the fences is silly and can’t happen or if it does happen you’ll have to like, give up everything you enjoy about your life and sacrifice your sleep and your morals and probably a goat.

Dr. Schwartz calls this “thinking small,” and he says that it’s responsible for the fact that most of humanity isn’t where they want to be in terms of their career, bank account, health, family life, you name it. He also says that we think small about achievement because we think small about ourselves.

“Oh, I could never do that, I don’t have the (time, money, skill, ability, etc., etc.)” is a litany from the part of your brain that he calls Mr. Defeat. In his terminology, your mind has two foremen — Mr. Triumph and Mr. Defeat. Mr. Triumph tells you why you can do something, why you do like that person, or why today is in fact an excellent day.

Mr. Defeat, on the other hand (and 90% of us have Mr. Defeat running the show), tells us why we can’t. He tells us why this person sucks, or why today is a totally craptastic day. And because he’s in charge of the running commentary in your mind, he determines your outlook, which determines your mood, which determines your actions, and BOOM look at that, suddenly it IS a craptastic day.

#lame #why #makeitstop

Boo.

Personal Experience: My Encounter With Mr. Defeat

I’ve been reading this book pretty much nonstop for the last month, so I’m starting to recognize when Mr. Defeat is calling the shots in my life. And my dudes, did I have a Mr. Defeat experience last week.

As I have previously mentioned, I’m starting a copywriting business (yay!!!). Last week, my coach put me in touch with someone she knows who is looking for a copywriter.

That was very exciting. First client! Maybe! Omg! And after the intro/connection email, the lady who needs a copywriter reached out to me directly, expressing her pleasure in the introduction and saying she’d love to hear about my experience.

*cue massive meltdown*

My dudes, I. Literally. Cried. On my bed. At 10pm. Because Mr. Defeat took the reins and went, “you HAVE no experience! You are a massive fraud! She will be so mad at you! Everything is terrible forever!”

*tears*

And here, my loves is the part I really really want to impart to you:

Mr. Defeat fucking lies.

I haven’t worked for the last three years, due to health issues. I had to focus on survival and recovery. But you know what I did before that?

I had my own goddamn content company.

I literally ran my own business doing EXACTLY what the nice copywriting lady is asking about. I went through my files two days later and went, “oh, samples? Does she want samples? I HAVE SO MANY SAMPLES OMFG.”

My meltdown was utterly ridiculous, for two reasons.

One, I let Mr. Defeat tell me I had no experience and was going to fail. Lies, lies, and more lies.

Two, for the last several years I have let Mr. Defeat dominate the narrative about my old business. I have viewed it as a gigantic failure because I didn’t make the kind of money I was hoping to because I didn’t really know how to run a business at that point.

I can give you the client’s name, project topic, and date for every project I did in my company a client wasn’t happy with. There were two, for the record. In three years. And I focused on those two. I replayed them over and over in my head until they were all that mattered.

Never mind the significantly larger number of happy clients! Never mind that one of them still uses the web copy I wrote for them six years ago (I checked). Never mind that some of these clients were still reaching out to me after I closed down my business to see if I could help them with stuff! Nope, horrible failure, all of it.

*facepalm*

In Which Mr. Defeat Is Ignominiously Fired

My friend, Mr. Defeat wrote the script about my company so hard that I literally forgot about my wins. I straight did not remember the happy clients. I had to go back into my files and look at what I had done to be able to go “oh, wait. Holy crap. I did actually do things.”

Having been smacked in the face with the Mr. Defeat/Mr. Triumph dichotomy, I have determined there is only one thing to do:

I must fire Mr. Defeat.

Mr. Defeat, your efforts are no longer appreciated in Carrie, Inc. We are going in another direction with the company, we wish you well, and we would like you to clear out your desk by tomorrow morning. Thank you and goodbye.

In The Magic of Thinking Big, Dr. Schwartz advocates for firing Mr. Defeat. He says it’s the only thing to do because the only way to achieve big, live big, and succeed big is to think big.

Stop selling yourself short.

Stop letting Mr. Defeat run the show.

I highly recommend The Magic of Thinking Big to pretty much everyone who’s interested in leveling up their life. Dr. Schwartz is astonishingly wise.

And I’m excited to see what the next chapter brings me.