Master your mind's "voices" to overcome the impostor and make strides in business
Image by: @anniespratt
Some nights ago I discovered and named some of the voices in my head. I think we all know on some level that there are competing voices or thoughts knocking around inside our minds, but we aren’t always introspective about them. We tend to identify our thinking brain and then our “negative” tapes that are old and outdated messages that we learn and internalize along the way.
That night, I was thinking about my business as I drifted off . I had gone to bed early, and I heard my daughter downstairs, getting her coat to take the dog for a walk. She is 17 and while I live in a safe and small bedroom community, after she walked out into the darkness of 11pm, a thought invaded and said: what if something happens to her in the dark?
Ick. She is a new driver and this voice tends to invade my thoughts often with fears of her being in an accident. Or that something bad will happen when she is out with friends on a Saturday night. Or, that she will fall on her head doing a trick in dance and end up in the hospital. It’s normal for a parent to want to keep their child safe, but these unwelcome thoughts with their catastrophic and fearful delivery is the last thing I need, because it fans the flame of fear and anxiety. Nothing is without risk, but dwelling on and immersing in negative thoughts pulls us down like anchors and can paralyze us. I mean, she went out a few feet from our home so the dog could pee, and here I was dramatizing a really unlikely scenario that only caused me undue stress.
As I have done for a while, I stopped that voice in its tracks. NOPE! She is safe, she will be back in a few moments is what I countered with. I have to stop that voice because it’s unbearable and unproductive otherwise. But then I turned my attention to that voice, trying to pick it apart. I asked my own self what that voice was, because it sounded foreign and ugly and another voice told me that it was an impostor voice. And THAT voice had a different quality too! A voice from somewhere beyond my rational thought — my intuitive voice.
Segmenting the voices in my head
Instead of allowing myself to fall asleep, I decided to unpack the fact that the thoughts I was having all had different tones and flavours. I wanted to do this so I could understand what goes on in my head a bit more. I call the Mindset Pillar the great annihilator of the Business Pillar, so it’s a worthwhile exercise to ensure I have mastery over my mindset so that I can move forward in business and life with confidence and maintain success. Here is what I came up with:
The Pest
This is the intrusive thought/ voice. These thoughts feel intrusive because they feel like they pop into our heads without our prompting. Like the thought I had about my daughter when she took the dog for a walk. I was lying in bed, calmly reviewing my day and thinking about my business and her actions triggered this pest of a voice to slide a catastrophic idea into my head. This is the impostor voice and indeed it is a pest, because it intrudes when you least expect it, and the message is always negative. It’s a voice created from fear and it taps into our historical survival mechanisms of fight or flight, causing anxiety and panic. It could be a helpful voice if I were really in danger but nowadays it mostly serves to paralyze us without basis. I stop this voice in its tracks when it comes, with a big NOPE, to redirect myself.
The Guest
This is an intuitive voice and gives us what we might call lightbulb or lightning bolt thoughts. It feels like a guest because often the ideas that it brings can feel foreign like the pest — not our own, regular, thinking voice — but the messages are positive, creative and enlightening. I believe them to be advancement messages similar to a gps, where it’s telling you to take the next right step to get to your destination. I encourage this voice by asking my subconscious questions as I drift to sleep and when I write in my journal. I want these flashes because I want to be brimming with wonderful ideas to evolve and grow!
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The Best
The best are my creation thoughts, that cascade from the guest message. If I had a flash of an idea from my guest, the best takes that idea and runs with it, creating into a viable entity that is exciting and innovative. For example, in December I had a guest voice idea that I should write an alphabet wedding planning blog series, in order to generate a large amount of content for SEO optimization. I don’t have 26 client sessions to blog at the moment, but I certainly can find a topic for each letter of the alphabet related to wedding planning. I took that guest voice idea and the best voice process took over, mulling ideas for how this blog would look and what the topics might be. This is the process of creation and within a short time, I had written down all 26 concepts! This idea fed from a previous similar idea that my guest had delivered to me, for the alphabet marketing series that I did back in the Fall and served it up again in slightly different format for my photography business. As a result of the wedding planning series idea, I have now completed 8 blogs that not only help with my SEO, but give me shareable content in my social media.
The Rest
This is my regular, thinking voice that lives in my head and considers and executes on my best thoughts. This is the executive brain that will actually write the blog posts that my guest voice fed to me and my best voice developed into a viable concept. This is the thinking brain that is most familiar to me because it’s the one that’s turned on unless I take a break from it - by mentally closing up shop when I’m done for the day, or when I’m meditating or sleeping.
The challenge with this voice is to keep in on track developing the work based on my best thoughts, and not allow it to get derailed by the pest voice, which can halt and sabotage my progress and lead me to dwell on what’s not working or what hasn’t happened for me yet.
The Recipe for Advancement
Since about August of last year, I have done daily mindset training through guided meditation and visualization exercises, supplemented by a steady diet of education and a cutting out of toxic news and messaging. I have become a firm believer that I have governance over what happens in my mind, instead of being blown around or brought down by every thought that pops into my head. I understand that some of my beliefs have come from outdated messages I received throughout my life - parents, old bosses, media etc. I have the power to discard the beliefs that no longer serve me and adopt new beliefs that do serve me. Knowing and understanding the different thoughts in my head that compete for power allows me to manage them the way I might manage a group of children, all with different temperaments. I am the adult and responsible for ensuring the group is safe, happy, learning and on the right track!
Knowledge is power. If you're struggling with a negative mindset, try to spend some time inside your own mind, like the Disney Movie Inside Out and become familiar with its goings-on. In doing so, you can decide to accept certain thoughts and decline others, all in the spirit of moving you to a place of more confidence, more positive and transformative action. And when you get even a teeny-tiny positive result, it fans the flame of success rather than failure, and keeps you firmly on the path of success!
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