Mark McGuinness - Resilience: Facing Down Rejection (21 page)

iii. Now make a list of all the resources you have—or will have if you succeed—that were unavailable to you in the past.

For example:

• Knowledge
  
• Skills
  
• Experience
  
• Money
  
• Time
  
• Assistance
  
• Mentors and teachers
  
• A network of influential people
  
• A reputation that opens doors
  

iii. Now join the dots between the challenges and your resources. Next to each challenge, write down the resources that will help you tackle it. Again, this may be all you need to do—if you realize you already have, or will shortly have, all the resources you need to rise to the challenge.

iv. Finally check to see if you are missing any resources that are essential for overcoming an important challenge. If so, set yourself a goal of acquiring the necessary resources. For example, if you’re daunted by the thought of doing media interviews, look for some specialist training. Or if you don’t think you’ll be able to keep up with the admin, look into hiring a part-time or virtual assistant.

2. Selling out

I’ve given you my definition of selling out, but for this to be meaningful, you need to be clear about your own definition. Start by asking:

• What does selling out mean to you?
  
• What’s the line you don’t want to cross?
  
• How will you know if you’re in danger of crossing it?
  

Next, think of the people who might accuse you of selling out.

• What does selling out mean to
  them
  ?
  
• What’s the line they don’t want you to cross?
  
• Does it really matter to
  you
  if you cross it?
  

3. Fear of becoming someone else

i. Close your eyes and imagine you can see yourself in the future—the ‘successful you’ who has achieved your goals and made your dreams come true.

What do you like about the person you see?

Are there any things you
dislike
about that person, or things that make you feel uncomfortable? If so, make a list of them.

ii. Now go through the list and ask yourself:

How likely is it that I will really become like this?

If the answer is ‘not very,’ you can safely cross that item off the list.

iii. Now look at the remaining items on the list—these are the things that make you feel uncomfortable, and that you think are fairly or highly likely to come true. For each of these, ask yourself:

Am I uncomfortable because this goes against my personal values—or because of the expectations of other people?

If the former, you need to take steps to make sure this doesn’t happen. Success at the price of your integrity is not worth it.

If the latter, you’ll need to steel yourself to accept potential rejection and criticism from these people. (And maybe revisit the earlier chapters of this book…)

41. No, you don’t need confidence

When I was 24 and floundering around for a direction in life, my therapist said to me: “You know, you could do
this
if you want to.”

I was dumbstruck.

“But don’t you have to be old and wise to be a therapist?”

Apparently not.

Inspired by her enthusiasm, I started reading books about hypnotherapy, neuro-linguistic programming, psychology, meditation, yoga. I went to my local library and asked what books they had about hypnosis. The librarian looked stern and told me I’d have to make an appointment with the Head Librarian. When I was eventually ushered into his office, he asked me why I wanted to see the hypnosis books and what I was going to do with them.

“We’re very careful with these books now. Last year someone started reading one of them in the library and went into a trance, and we couldn’t get him out again. Ever since then, we keep them locked away in the stack.”

Books so dangerous they need to be kept under lock and key?
Let me at them!

I researched hypnotherapy colleges, sent out applications, and was thrilled to be accepted on my chosen course. It felt like I’d been let in by mistake. I saw trainers demonstrate jaw-dropping hypnotic feats—arm levitation, catalepsy, amnesia, analgesia, time distortion, age regression. Would I ever be able to do such things myself?

During my therapy training I spent time as a freelance copy editor. One day during coffee break at a publisher’s office, I let slip that I was studying hypnosis. One of my co-workers stared at me in astonishment. She couldn’t help blurting out:

“But don’t you have to be charismatic to do that?”

Evidently not.

In the end, I not only qualified as a therapist, I also went on to teach on the same hypnotherapy course—and demonstrate the various amazing hypnotic feats to open-mouthed students.

A few years later, I was a partner in a small business coaching consultancy, providing executive coaching and training to large corporations. Out of the blue, one of the two senior partners suggested I take over new business development, a.k.a. Sales. “I think you’d be good at it,” he said.

Once more, I was flabbergasted.

“But don’t you have to be an extrovert to do that?”

Maybe not.

That was the start of my adventures in sales, which (as we saw in
Chapter 21
) turned out to be surprisingly successful, in spite of my lack of knowledge, experience, or an extrovert personality.

Over and over, I’ve heard from clients:

“I can’t do that because I don’t have enough X.”

For ‘X’, read ‘confidence,’ ‘talent,’ ‘experience,’ ‘motivation,’ ‘self-esteem,’ or some other mysterious quality that we imagine we need to have
before
we attempt to achieve our goals.

But the thing is, you don’t need to be old, wise, confident, charismatic, outgoing, talented, experienced, or anything else before you
set out
on the road to success. All you need to do is focus on your goal, get started, and keep your eyes and ears open along the way.

As time goes on you will make plenty of mistakes and improve by learning from them. You will have little triumphs that boost your confidence. And gradually, you will probably start to
look
confident, charismatic, outgoing, talented, or whatever. And maybe people will start sticking those labels on you, as if you were lucky enough to be born with all the qualities required for success.

But you’ll know different.

Confidence is like physique—while some of us are naturally more muscular than others, we can all develop what we have if we’re prepared to put in the hard work and embrace the pain. Waiting for ‘confidence’ before pursuing success is as absurd as waiting for your muscles to grow before you pick up a dumbbell.

Your next steps:

1. If you don’t feel you have what it takes to succeed, take a sheet of paper and make a list of all the qualities you wish you had more of, but are sadly lacking—such as confidence, charisma, wisdom, or experience.

2. Now take a second sheet and list all the things you could and would do if only you had the qualities on your first list.

3. Pick one of the items on your second list and do it anyway.

No, you don’t have the magical qualities required, so that means there’s no pressure on you to actually succeed—just have a go and see what happens.

4. Keep working your way through your ‘action list,’ and see what you learn from it. (Beware: small signs of success may lead to symptoms of the onset of confidence.)

42. Building momentum

At the start of 2006 I took a leap of faith by adding a blog to my website at
www.wishfulthinking.co.uk
, and devoting lots of time to writing posts, networking with other bloggers, and learning everything I could about blogging and online marketing.

The idea was to market my coaching business, but back then, particularly in the UK, blogging was very new, and it was anything but a proven marketing strategy. So I had plenty of well-meaning friends and colleagues warning me of the dangers of giving away too much valuable advice for free. Another common response I got was this one:

“I don’t know how you find the time.”

Now superficially, this looks like a compliment, but often the implication was pretty clear: if you’ve got time to burn on blogging, you can’t be doing anything important.

The answer is that I found the time by getting up early to write the blog, and ‘forgetting’ to buy a TV when I moved to a new flat. I ploughed away at the blog month after month, while trying to ignore the nagging voice at the back of my head, asking me whether I was
sure
I really wanted to give away so much advice for free, and shouldn’t I be doing something more productive?

It took several months before I started to see tangible results, but when it happened, it was worth it: emails from creative directors and training managers, asking whether I could provide coaching or training for their teams. The kind of people who would not have taken my phone call a few months earlier. The kind of clients I dreamed of landing, and they were contacting
me
. I had gone through the wall of fear, and out the other side.

In 2006 I published 70 blog posts and attracted a total of 12,000 unique visitors to my website. By 2011 I was doing most of my blogging at
lateralaction.com
, so I published just six posts at wishfulthinking.co.uk—but the site still attracted 200,000 unique visitors, and plenty of new business, with minimal maintenance.

So how come my Wishful Thinking blog now enables me to achieve bigger results with less effort than before?

Momentum.

Over the years, the site has attracted several thousand subscribers, as well as links from other websites. The links have boosted my search engine rankings, so Google sends me plenty of visitors. I’ve published a string of free ebooks that have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, all containing links back to my homepage. And the posts I publish are not only sent out to the subscribers, but are also promoted to several thousand more people via my accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Last but not least, all of the above mean that on any given week, there are plenty of people sharing my blog posts and ebooks, forwarding emails to their contacts, and helping to spread the word about who I am and what I do.

Whatever you set out to do, you’ll probably find a similar pattern.

To begin with, it feels scary and uncertain. Maybe you don’t know anyone who has done this before. No one around you ‘gets’ what you are trying to do, and may even try to discourage you. It’s a process of trial and error for months or years on end, before you see the light at the end of the tunnel and have something concrete to show for your efforts. But eventually, your momentum builds to the point where it looks unstoppable and inevitable.

There are no guarantees, of course, and in the early days your success will feel anything but unstoppable and inevitable. But you
can
start to detect momentum early, if you know where to look…

Back in 2006, when I was still getting less than 100 monthly visitors to my website, I read an encouraging post by Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net. At the time, Darren was one of the few people offering high quality, detailed information on how to succeed as a professional blogger. He had something like 12,000 subscribers at that point, which seemed a dizzyingly large number. In this piece, Darren advised new bloggers to stop comparing their subscriber count to established bloggers, since this could easily be discouraging. Instead, he suggested we compare
this
month’s stats with those from
last
month. Do you have more subscribers than last month? If so, you’re moving in the right direction. You could even plot the figures on a chart, and extrapolate the trend a year or two into the future, and see yourself with hundreds or even thousands of readers. It seemed exciting but improbable at the time, but that’s exactly what happened in my case.

So when you’re in the early stages, try to blot out the discouraging voices (internal and external) and resist the temptation to compare yourself to people several years down the road. Instead, do your best to build and detect your momentum, by picking one or two key things to measure, and tracking them regularly. No matter how small the numbers are, focus on whether they are getting bigger or smaller every day/week/month. If so, take heart. Success is never guaranteed, but you are slowly and steadily tipping the odds in your favor.

Your next steps:

1. What stage are you at in your journey?

1. Inertia
   —just setting out, contending with fear and uncertainty.
   
2. Traction
   —starting to see small, incremental (but inconsistent) progress.
   
3. Momentum
   —clear and consistent progress toward your goals.
   
4. Unstoppable
   —nothing’s going to hold you back!
   

2. If you’re at the Inertia or Traction stage, ask yourself what metric you can use to track your progress? Here are some possibilities.

• Athletes and sports players
  —distance traveled, time taken, weight lifted, pass completion, points scored.
  
• Entrepreneurs and marketers
  —new customers, repeat customers, units sold, profits, turnover, mailing list subscribers, sales conversion rates.
  
• Writers
  —words per day/week/month, pieces completed, pieces published or sold.
  
• Artists and creatives
  —hours in the studio, works completed, works published or sold.
  
• Teachers
  —attendance figures, test scores, student satisfaction scores.
  

Then decide how often you’re going to measure—daily, weekly, monthly, or after every event you take part in. Try to make it monthly at the longest, otherwise it’s hard to feel a sense of momentum. And record your scores somewhere you can easily review them, such as a chart, spreadsheet, or software app.