I had a weird but cool experience this month, and I wanted to tell you about it. This post turned into a long one, so buckle up!
I started listening to a life coaching podcast. I feel like I could use some life coaching but damn, who’s got the kinda cash they want for the one-on-one stuff? I’ve been told multiple times by multiple people that I have to see spending that kind of money as “an investment,” and it just really exposes the classism inherent in our society. I could write a whole blog post about telling people who have no money to use that non-existent money to invest in themselves, but that’s not what this is particular post is about.
So, the coaching podcast.
I don’t agree with the life coach who puts out the podcast about everything. I seem to remember seeing a movie with a character who was supposed to be portrayed as kind of lost and looking for meaning or direction in a bunch of bad places, and one of the scenes was her listening to a self-help book on tape. The narrator of the book sounded fruity as fuck, and the woman was murmuring, “Yeah, good, okay,” and nodding along as she listened. It was supposed to be kind of a pathetic moment, revealing how lost and alone this character was. Now me, I’m in my car going, “I like you, Kara, but you’re talking some shit right now. Let’s try the next episode, maybe you’ve got some real shit to say in the next one.”
At any, I’ve been hearing a lot about positive thinking lately. A lot of my friends are super into it, to the point of even shushing me when I express doubts or fears, telling me, “Don’t put that into the universe!” I bought into it for a while, and starting doing that to my husband. He got pretty pissed at me, and I have to admit, now, that the whole positive thinking thing was hard, nigh unto impossible. And frankly, it never helped. I felt a lot of guilt around still thinking fearful, doubtful thoughts. Like, surely my thoughts are also going out into the damn universe, whether I say them out loud or not, right? Seems legit to me. So then I felt guilty for not maintaining the positive thoughts. And I couldn’t talk out my feelings with any of my positive thinking friends, because speaking the negative thought out loud was forbidden. But feeling a lot of guilt helps no one, amIright? And forbidding yourself to feel how you feel or think about what you’re thinking or ask for help sorting it out doesn’t fucking help, either.
Okay, we’re on the same page there, yes?
So this lady who does the podcast, Kara Lowenthiel, she has a philosophy that positive thinking doesn’t work on its own.
Okay, I noticed this myself. I’m in so far.
Her idea is that first you have to identify what your negative thought is. A lot of us think all kinds of self-damning thoughts all day and never really notice them, except that we feel bad a lot. You have to pick out why you’re scared or worried or down on something, and figure out exactly why you’re scared or down. What are the WORDS your subconscious mind is using? And recognize that your instincts often lead you to think that if you fail, you will actually die. We evolved to live in tribes in a very hostile environment. Failure often meant death, and our brains don’t know that’s all changed now. Which is why negativity can be so paralyzing — somewhere in your head, your instincts think you will fail, and if you fail, you will actually DIE. So what are you thinking? My thought was: “If I advertise my books, people who don’t like them will see them and be angry at me for showing them, and they might try to harm or even kill me.”
The next step is to notice when you are thinking those negative thoughts. Don’t do anything about it, just notice it. “Oh, there’s that negative thought about X again.” This teaches you to notice your thoughts, which is step one to changing them. You can’t change thoughts you don’t know you’re having.
Then, when you’ve gotten in a good habit of noticing your negative thought, try rebutting it with a more neutral thought. Like, “There’s that thought about being unsuccessful again. But I still have a job, so I can’t be a total failure.” Whatever. Just something that you can believe, that your brain can’t argue with. If your first thought after thinking the neutral thought is “Sheeya, right!” you need to come up with a different neutral thought. Mine was: “If people who don’t want to read my books see them in an ad, they will probably just ignore them and probably not actually try to kill me.”
From the neutral thought, move up to a slightly positive thought. It doesn’t have to be amazing, just something you can believe. Mine was: “Some people actually do like my books. I know because they’ve told me.” This is true, and my subconscious mind couldn’t argue with it. I could believe it.
Now the next step is that you should move up to the positive thought you want to think. But here’s where my cool experience happened.
Instead of consciously coming up with a new positive thought, one day I was grousing in my head about having to go to work and how I wanted to stay home and write instead. Spontaneously , I thought, “Maybe if I ran some ads, and they went well, I could make enough money to quit my job and I could stay home and write every day!”
Bingo!
My subconscious mind took the next step all by itself! And it was a hopeful, positive thought, not a scared, self-doubting thought. Look at me go!
A week later, I was repeating my mantra that my intention is to create a successful career writing and selling my books. And I thought, “well, what if I fail? What will I do if I fail?” And I realized that’s a fear, and that I should walk through that I won’t die if I fail, and that I could possibly fail. So I started walking through exactly what might happen if I fail, just to sooth myself and have a back up plan. But my subconscious mind kept thinking, “but people DO like my books! They’ve TOLD me! I won’t fail! Failure would be silly!”
And you know what? People DO like my books. I won’t fail. Failure would be silly!
I AM a successful author. I have fans, people like my books. I just need to figure out how to layer in more of those people, and my success will only grow.
I have only begun to take action on this. I have a plan written out, and I’m wrapping up step one now. It was a bit of a doozy. Step two might be worse. But I have a plan, and I’m acting on it, and I feel confident — even excited! — about it for the first time ever.
At any rate, that’s my cool thing. I do hope me telling you about it helps you to have cool stuff happen to you, too.
