To Succeed, Think . . . Negatively

In the U.S., we hear all the time about the power of positive thinking. “Visualize what you want and you’ll get it!” We have numerous anecdotes backing this up, like Jim Carrey who wrote himself a $10 million check in 1985 for “acting services rendered” and post-dated it 10 years ahead. Lo and behold, in November 1995 he was paid $10 million for his movie Dumb and Dumber. There’s also that athlete who dreamt of winning a gold medal and then did. However, these folks might be the exception rather than the norm because it turns out, visualizing a positive outcome is one of the worst things you can do if you want to be successful.

That’s because, “Ceaseless optimism about the future only makes for a greater shock when things go wrong,” writes journalist Oliver Burkeman. “By fighting to maintain only positive beliefs about the future, the positive thinker ends up being less prepared, and more acutely distressed, when things eventually happen that he can’t persuade himself to believe are good.”

writer for therapists
It can be harder to digest the negative if you’ve only focused on the positive. Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

Burkeman’s comments aren’t just conjecture, by the way; they’re backed up by research. Social psychologists Gabriele Oettingen and Doris Mayer asked 83 German students to rate the extent to which they thought positively about graduating from school and finding a job. Two years later, the researchers found the positive-thinking students put in fewer job applications, received fewer offers, and earned lower salaries.

It’s not just students either. Oettingen and Mayer published research in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that found hip-replacement patients who imagined their recovery would be swift were less successful in recovering than patients with more moderate expectations. That’s because visualizing a positive outcome conveys the sense you’re approaching your goals, which takes the edge off the need to achieve, according to Heather Barry Kappes, a management professor at the London School of Economics.

Writer for mental health professionals
Winning one of these takes more than positive visualization. Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash

That’s not to say there’s no place for positive thinking, there is, but it’s more important to visualize the obstacles standing between you and your wish along with how you’ll go about conquering them. That process is coined “WOOP” by Oettingen and stands for “wish, outcome, obstacle, and plan.” (You can practice WOOPing on this website.)

For me as a ghostwriter for therapists and an Oakland-based content writer for small businesses, that means I can’t just imagine receiving a check for a million dollars. It means I have to assess whether my goal is possible for one, and what are the obstacles between me and that goal, for two.

As much as we’d like to believe success is easy, passive, something we can dream our way into being, in reality, success — no matter how you define it — takes effort. It means meeting obstacles head on and overcoming them. It also means doing what works for you. As an old soul in business, contacting therapists and saying, “Hi, I’m a writer for therapists. Working with me, clients have increased their web traffic by 500%,” or “My clients have been published in numerous anthologies,” doesn’t seem to fly. For whatever reason, that method (which works for others!), doesn’t work for me.

writer for therapists
What stands between me and what I want? Photo by Katrina Berban on Unsplash

Instead, my effort is one of trust, faith, and knowing all who need me will find me because I’m putting myself out there. I’m using SEO so anyone who googles “ghostwriter for therapists” will stumble across my website. I’m asking for referrals from my existing clients. I’m taking inspired action, letting myself be guided, and knowing one of the best things I can do for myself is visualize, yes, but also visualize my hurdles. Imagining the worst-case scenario means I’ll know how to handle it if it arises. And as Roy T. Bennett says, “When things do not go your way, remember that every challenge — every adversity — contains within it seeds of opportunity and growth.”

If you’d like to explore opportunities for growth, I’d love to hear from you!

 

The Importance of Patience

In my last post, I talked about how business can be like the moon in that it ebbs and flows. Related to that concept is patience because patience is required during the ebb periods, at least for me. And as much as I’d like to say patience comes easily for me, it does not. I forever want things on my timeline. And usually I want that thing yesterday. “You want me to wait? For an unknown length of time for something I really, really want?” That’s my version of hell.

However, waiting is also a fact of life. That’s what it means to live in this 3D physical world. Seeds take time to sprout. Babies take time to grow. And less tangible things like a business also have their own timeline.

freelance content writer and freelance ghostwriter

As an Oakland freelance content writer and freelance ghostwriter, I spend a lot of my day waiting. Waiting for a blog topic. Waiting for revisions. Waiting for an email or a phone call. And yet, even though it doesn’t move at the speed I prefer, everything gets done.

As Lao Tzu says, “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” That’s true in business as well. If something isn’t happening yet, maybe it’s not supposed to happen yet. I can’t tell you how many times the universe just seems to know when I’m available for a new client and when I’m not. For instance, just this week an editor reached out to me and asked if I was available for a journalism writing assignment and I was. If he’d asked last week, the answer would have been no. That may seem like nothing to other people, but for me, I view that as something magical and mysterious.

freelance content writer and freelance ghostwriter

It may seem strange for me to quote from Richard Tarnas‘ book Cosmos and Psyche here but I think it’s relevant. He posits two ways of grappling with the universe and uses the analogy of two suitors to explain them. In the first approach, the suitor treats the universe as if it has no intelligence and is something to be exploited for his own gain. In the second, the suitor seeks to know you (the universe):

“[N]ot that he might better exploit you, but rather to unite with you and thereby bring forth something new, a creative synthesis emerging from both of your depths. He desires to liberate that which has been hidden by the separation between knower and known. His ultimate goal of knowledge is not increased mastery, prediction, and control, but rather a more richly responsive and empowered participation in a co-creative unfolding of new realities. He seeks an intellectual fulfillment that is intimately linked with imaginative vision, moral transformation, empathic understanding, aesthetic delight. His act of knowledge is essentially an act of love and intelligence combined, of wonder as well as discernment, of opening to a process of mutual discovery.”

freelance content writer and freelance ghostwriter

Because I hold the second view and not the first, that means I do believe the universe has my back, is conspiring for me so that we can create something new together. It means, yeah, there is a cosmic air traffic controller of sorts that  knows when I’m busy and when I’m not. So that also means things happen — like signing a new client or getting a book published — when I’m most ready for them.

I think about something Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, said regarding the runaway success of that book. She said she’s grateful it happened on her fourth and not her first book.

“And that I was nearly 40 not 22,” she said in an interview with the Guardian. “That I had a solid relationship. I’m really happy that it happened after my nervous breakdown, not before it.”

Meaning perhaps things would have been much harder for her had she achieved name and fame at an earlier age. That she would have endured more scrutiny or developed an eating disorder or something like that. Patience means we allow things to unfold naturally with the understanding that everything we need will automatically come our way at the perfect moment, to paraphrase Indian spiritual master Shirdi Sai Baba. And that includes things in the business world.