A while back I was struggling to get business. One night I was at the shore and took a long walk. A though popped into my head to do some searches when I got back
I was laying in bed with my phone and found a book from around the 1930's along the dale carnegie lines. One of the things the author mentioned was affirmations. One of my main problems was I was constantly shooting myself in the foot.. ie load the 1911 and put three rounds in each foot, then load the 12 guage and put one round into each foot.. IOW, I was undercutting myself.
I decided to try the affirmations route. I remembered reading something a while back by the guy who did the far side cartoons about the power of them.
I did my own variation on it. I set up about 3 affirmations each for business and personal.
The way i did it was to (1) Define a specific goal (2) state one thing I would do with to achevie that and (3) picture a small reward from doing it.
For example I would state the goal as "By the end of next month I will be billing XXX dollars per week". Then I would state one way to do that ". . . by checking in with my current customers once a month" and then the reward - I would picture paying my phone bill with the extra money earned (The relief of paying a bill early)
I repeated each set 5 times while relaxing and deep breathing.
The really creepy thing about this is that it freaking works. If you do it right, you can reprogram your brain to move away from self defeating actions and toward things that will bring rewards. In the space of a couple of months, I went from struggling to get enough hours to trying to manage my time to get all the work on the table done.
I'm wondering if anyone else here has had experience with this? When I ask people face to face I either get blank looks or I find that the person has had some tremendous positive experiences.
