From the Book: Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff by Richard Carlson
Part 4: Be Aware of the Snowball Effect of Your Thinking
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Aaaahhh Shut Up!
We all have an inner voice telling us positive and negative things. The positive things we could build on, but the negative things we need to silence immediately. Regardless of how someone’s life looks on the outside, inside they’re hearing the same voices that we all hear. It’s just that some people know how to silence the negative voices better than others.
If we’re not one of those who can silence that negative voice then we should be doing everything that we can to learn how. If we don’t learn how to shut it up, that voice will start to perform magic tricks by turning nothing into something...and that something usually will not be good.
For example, take prospecting for sellers. Let’s say you’re all hyped up to start making calls and on your first one you get someone that politely tells you “No, I’m not interested in doing business with you”. Those inner voices will immediately start talking.
One voice will say something like: “Keep going, it’s ok...it will get better. Let’s get this money!”, and the other may say something like: “This is a waste of time, this isn’t how it’s supposed to go. You should be doing something different. The Team Leader doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Don’t even bother wasting your time”.
It is at that point that we have a decision to make. We can either follow the negative voice or roll with the positive voice. Whatever we decide, we’re going to have to tell one of those voices to SHUT UP! And this is where the struggle for most of us begins.
It’s not that we have a big problem telling the voices to shut up, the big issue is making a DECISION on which voice to silence. Those of us who are more in tune with our goals usually don’t have as many problems making a decision because we know where we’re going. We also know what’s going to help us get where we want to go faster and more importantly what’s going to slow us down.
As this section of the book suggests, if we tend to have a lot of negative thinking patterns, we can begin to break those patterns by starting with One Thing, and that’s telling yourself: “Whew, there I go again!” You may have to simply work on this one thing for a week or two months before you can start focusing on more positive thoughts.
Two months may be a long time, but it’s a small price to pay versus what will happen if you do nothing to improve your mindset. Remember that when we don’t make a decision for ourselves, someone or something will make the decision for us. Keep that in mind!
Let’s make today a great day and and Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff, ya dig?
~Matthew
Food for thought