How to hack the beliefs that are holding you back

Admittedly much of his advice boils down to: "Figure out a way to make more money rather than trying to cut your expenses drastically (within reason)".

But the repetition and different ways that is expressed over time have really let the message sink in.

I thought it was just something I was struggling with. It's re-assuring (in a strange way), to know that these are fears that a lot of people have and not just myself. Fortunately my Mrs won't let me get away with not pressing that big nasty send button!

Agree. And even smaller. Reaching small goals give you a positive rush that allows you to take on a bigger challenge and not get depressed attempting it while sitting idly by and doing nothing.

Let's say you put off cleaning up your office. You've dreaded doing it for the longest time. One day you come in and you make serious progress on that. You feel great you're all pumped up (even though in a sense you haven't accomplished anything that anyone else would view as great (maybe your mother possibly but that's about it, right)). So you complete this really small "goal". And you are all jacked up and are ready to take on something else more serious that you have put off doing.

Another example might be to cure a programming block by writing some shell script that does something you want to do that automates something. It easily accomplish-able in one sitting and provides immediate benefit. You are then in the flow to go onto tackling something larger. It's like a warm up.

I like to intersperse my day (and am lucky to be able to do so) forking from one thing to another thing. Anything that I have put off doing I can generally get myself into the groove of doing by doing something that while I might not like to do I can "accomplish". (Well, most of the time.)

Chanting "I'm going to be rich" in front of a mirror is not going to make you rich, but constantly, internally repeating to yourself "I'm not going to be rich" will most likely make you poor.

Your convertible analogy doesn't accurately represent the issue here. What I think is a convertible could very well be objectively not. Others can look at it and tell you that what you're driving is not a convertible. With feelings of failure, they are most of the time not reality, but rather gross misinterpretations of what we've experienced. And these misinterpretations, like I mentioned below, are a product of a behavior that we've developed to fit a self-narrative. Self-affirmations with real, objective analysis can help you unlearn those destructive behaviors. I don't think swombat is advocating you stand in front of the mirror every morning to tell yourself how amazing, special, and talented you are, but rather to keep yourself grounded in reality while staying optimistic. So instead of saying "I'm the best and I'll fail at nothing", you'd be better off saying "Today is a new day, let's make the most out of it and weather the obstacles."

You're saying people will fool themselves into believing they're better than they really are, but that's not the point here. The point is to bring people, who have fooled themselves into believing the complete opposite, back up to a normal and healthy level of confidence, which could very well improve their chances of finding success.

Confidence as a prerequisite to success is a chimera. Though persevering in the face of doubt may matter. False confidence is highly dangerous to yourself and others (and very common, particularly in management).

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1655720,00....

ADDED: I always had the feel that Swombat is into this kind of thing, cool that he finally writes about thought-hacking and affirmations.

Kids are incredible sponges early in life. They soak up so much. In the store I see parents saying things to their kids and think, "Wow, that's an expensive therapy bill in the making."

Personally, I don't worry too much about remembering the particular interactions in my past. I treat it more as a reverse engineering problem. Given my behavior X, in what circumstances could that have been adaptive?

Anybody who can run a business can send invoices. It's not hard. So if you have trouble doing it, the question is why? If, like in the article, you have to get drunk to do it, then there's something going on inside. Sure, you can hire somebody to do it for you. But that just hides the problem. Brain tumor? Try aspirin!

I've never tried the affirmation thing, but I wouldn't knock it. Many, many good people lack confidence because they've been told over and over that they're bad, wrong, dumb, etc. It's not crazy to say that telling themselves something good and truthful might help.

Your proposed solutions would work on a reasonable person, but if we were always reasonable, the world wouldn't need psychiatrists and therapists.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/12/assorted-tip...

What you need to do is not measure your worth in how hard you feel that you are working or how rare you feel that your knowledge is. You are probably a very poor judge of that anyway. You should try to measure it in terms of how much value you create for an employer. That's also hard to measure, but it's much closer to what you can legitimately ask for.

Look at it like this: If you write a program that saves a boss an hour of work every day, and that boss makes $250k a year, that program is worth about $31,250 a year, even if it only took you three minutes to write it. If that same program saves dozens of people an hour of work every day, it's worth even more. If you write a program that does the work of three accountants, you are worth, three accountants. As a programmer, you probably produce a lot more value than you think you do.

Just keep that in mind next time you're at the bargaining table.

I think the most important thing is to realize that negotiating pay takes a totally different mindset from programming. When programming you're trying to be creative and cooperative.

When negotiating pay you should have a competitive mindset. Your employer is to some extent your opponent and you're playing poker with him. The thing is -- that's OK (or at least it should be). If a potential employer is making it feel like you're pushing against him personally when you ask for higher pay he's being the jerk, not you (this is of course situational -- things might be different if you've already committed to work for X amount of time).

Affirmations also should not create expectations in you. They change the way you perceive the world, and yourself. If someone creates expectations of feeling better after saying affirmations (and then is disappointed), then that's a problem of its own - it just means that you used it as a quick fix instead of trying to change your beliefs and assumptions.

I worked at a place where organizationally, we just failing. It's depressing working for a sinking ship, and as a crewman on the ship, you can feel like your bear some responsibility.

It isn't either/or.

Would you stay at a job where your salary would be delayed by 10-20 days every time? The answer is most likely no, then why do we settle when we are freelancers?

A starting businessman should be apprehensive of sending out invoices and questioning himself. Yes, it does feel like "begging", but it makes sure you don't lose out because of hubris. Over time (if you're doing everything well) you will have more money and business acumen, and it will become easier, since you won't be needing the money on the short term. It will also allow you to better negotiate higher prices.

And when you've mastered it, you can hire a (part-time) secretary, who sends out the invoices. That's your reward. You faced your fear, learned how to handle it, and now you can let it go, because with someone else doing the billing, you can always fall back to it being a secretarial error.

There are whole industries based on making it seem you have enough cash and confidence so you feel you have a stronger position to negotiate, skipping out on what I feel is a basic business skill.

Or you can do it the hard way, without leased luxury and practicing the voodoo feelgood technique of the day. Building a business on hard work and gathering confidence in your own skills through your customers, without blaming your parents or the world or your mirror.

Dont' be an actor playing an entrepeneur; be an entrepeneur.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19493324

I recently did something like this for the unlock password of my laptop--I type that one fairly often, but if the passphrase isn't super secure (after all, how many bits of entropy in an affirmation? ;-) ) it doesn't matter that much since it's the physical security of the laptop that's most important anyway (I've been considering removing the whole password-to-unlock part, I did not because I like the background I picked for the login screen--now I have a better reason not to).

Currently it's a mantra from a meditation exercise that I particularly liked, but that was just the first thing that came to mind when I realized "hey, I type this multiple times each day, so why not have it be something uplifting, cool, self-affirming or just nice?". But I think I'll change it to something more targeted according to the pointers given in that article as soon as I come up with something good.

Thinking back, I remember a friend in high school who was brilliant, but had no confidence. At her slightest mistake she'd say things like, "That was really stupid." If you tried to encourage her, she'd brush it off or disagree. It all made sense when I saw her with her dad, who at her slightest mistake would say, "That was really stupid."

If it works to remove confidence, I don't see why it couldn't work to create it. And indeed, my 6-year-old nephew has a lot of self-confidence when trying things new. I doubt it's unrelated that he gets a lot of encouragement for every step forward he makes.

For a lot of situational fear, a core component of the fear is ignorance of the outcome. So tricking yourself into walking into the situation, doing the thing, whatever, is a great way to change the ignorance. After you've been in the situation, you now have evidence and real outcomes to weigh against your fears. It isn't easy, and it requires some introspection, but real evidence is a great tool for combatting vague fears and what-ifs.

Take the invoice example, there are fears listed in the article and some other comments on this thread. A lot of them boil down to "will this make the customer reject my business" and "will the invoiced customer talk bad about me to other potential customers and hurt my business". These are real and valid fears. However, at the same time, everyone "knows" it's business, invoices are how money happens. So if you can trick yourself into sending some, you get some perspective to combat the fear in the future. You'll see that most people just pay, or quibble a bit, then pay. You probably will get some bad experiences, but usually this doesn't actually cause other people to stop using you. (Has anyone ever fired a business because "you billed my buddy's business per contract?".) When you have these actual experiences, ones you tricked yourself into having, you now have the evidence to combat the fears.

Note, the fears don't generally just go away, hence terms like combat, walk through, etc that are applied to them. Getting past fear-based blocks is an active participation event. But with proper tools, a large one of which is evidence, you can get through them. So I guess what it boils down to, is it is a chicken and egg game, you need to have one or the other, and a good way to break the loop is faking one to get the other, and change a negative cycle to a positive one.

I guess, I agree with the statement:

self confidence is a little deeper than tricking one's mind and that any confidence gained by techniques like this would be superficial at best

completely, I just disagree on how useful superficial confidence can be as a foothold to real confidence.

A cliche that applies here: Fake it 'til you make it.

That is really not what I'm saying. Having a burning desire, convincing yourself that you want to succeed, etc, is by no means a guarantee of success, and implying that people who didn't succeed failed because "they didn't want it hard enough" seems rude, wrong, despicable even.

My point is that negative beliefs will reduce your chances of success (perhaps even to zero), and that fixing those beliefs can give you a higher chance of success.

One of the great intellectual antecedents to such stuff is Emerson's Essays, which formulated an original modern American spirituality. Emerson is striking in how he seems to emerge out of nowhere. (Since nobody really does, I'd like to know more about his sources.) Anyone curious should read his essay "Self Reliance". It's a classic of entrepreneurial literature, though it doesn't talk about business. I hesitate to say this for fear of overselling it, but it's one of those rare pieces of writing that can change one's life (it changed mine).

As a surprising aside, Emerson was one of the biggest influences on Nietzsche.

You pay yourself when you save. If you live paycheck to paycheck, you never pay yourself.