14. How you look at things matters — 30 Days Of Medium
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You can catch up on the first 13 days of my 30 Days Of Medium challenge below if you missed them:
0. 30 Days Of Medium
1. What do you need to build your own website? — 30 Days Of Medium
2. How to find a business you love — 30 Days Of Medium
3. How to build your own website — 30 Days Of Medium
4. How to measure your website’s performance — 30 Days Of Medium
5. How to get more customers by answering their questions -30 Days Of Medium
6. The successful business website cheat sheet — 30 Days Of Medium
7. How to measure success — 30 Days Of Medium
8. Understanding the Online Sales Funnel — 30 Days Of Medium
9. What is traffic and why is it important? — 30 Days Of Medium
10. What is Google URL Builder and why should you use it? — 30 Days Of Medium
11. Double your traffic by automating your social media schedule — 30 Days Of Medium
12. How to tell what sells — 30 Days Of Medium
13. How I grew my Medium following 6,500% — 30 Days Of Medium
14. How you look at things matters — 30 Days Of Medium
15. How to SELL services to small businesses — 30 Days Of Medium
16. How to win more deals with effective proposals — 30 Days Of Medium
17. How to setup an online store in 10 minutes — 30 Days Of Medium
18. How to work from anywhere — 30 Days Of Medium
19. Why your website is sabotaging your sales — 30 Days Of Medium
20. Where does your traffic come from? — 30 Days Of Medium
21. How to actually recognise burnout — 30 Days Of Medium
22. How to hack your schedule and get twice as much done — 30 Days Of Medium
23. Don’t copy your competitors — 30 Days Of Medium
24. How to SEO optimise a blog post — 30 Days Of Medium
25. Be unique or be forgotten — 30 Days Of Medium
26. Going with your gut — 30 Days Of Medium
27. People don’t pay for average — 30 Days Of Medium
28. How to do keyword research — 30 Days Of Medium
29. Why The Pareto Principle is the world’s biggest hack — 30 Days Of Medium
30. Your content is more profitable than your telephone — 30 Days Of Medium
A quick recap
On the last piece I wrote about How I grew my Medium following 6,500%.
That article seemed to be a success and it actually turned out to be my best performing article so far.
This kind of proves my point about the power of the headline and how headlines drive views.
It was quite a catchy title and ever so slightly click baity, but, you need to strike that balance to drive views.
I made sure to include a lot of under the hood info about my 30 Days Of Medium challenge so far and the feedback was positive, thank you for anyone who viewed and liked the article!
Getting back on track
Today I want to talk about a different topic…
How you look at things matters.
Perception is everything
I rarely if ever refer to myself as an ‘entrepreneur’.
It just sounds a little self aggrandizing to be honest, but that’s just my opinion. If it makes you feel good, go for it.
The way I see it, I’m just a guy pursuing my dream of being financially independent, being my own boss and building a business I love.
After doing this for 7 years, I’ve learnt a lot, but still have a lot to learn.
One thing I’ve become more aware of over the past year is how I look at things matters.
Specifically, how my perception of what’s going on around me can impact how I feel.
The power of positive thinking
When you’re running a business, there’s a lot of stress and uncertainty.
I’ve found two things help me deal with this above all others.
- Exercise
- Positive thinking
I actually wrote an article about how important exercise is productivity, which you can check out here if you want — This 1 Simple Hack Will 10x Your Productivity
Positive thinking is just as powerful.
You can’t work out 24/7 and there will be times in your life where you need to handle stress and make high pressure decisions without the comfort of being able to go run for an hour.
You might be going through a tough time with your personal life or dealing with a loss. You might not be sure how you’re going to cover costs next month.
Sometimes exercise might not just cut it.
This is where positive thinking can save you.
Is your glass half full, or half empty?
I’ve always been fairly optimistic and full of energy, but it’s hard to be optimistic sometimes when times are tough.
I’ve had a fairly tough couple of years recently and what I’ve found is that changing my thinking has helped me through them, and helped me become more productive and well rounded as a person.
Have you ever heard the expression - is your glass half full, or half empty?
This basically is asking, are you an optimist, or are you a pessimist?
The optimist see’s the glass as half full.
The pessimist see’s the glass as half empty.
Both of them are looking at exactly the same glass, with the same amount of water in.
Translated into real life, the pessimist focuses on the negative, the optimist focuses on the positive.
Try reframing the situation
There’s nothing different about the optimist and the pessimist, they just view the world differently.
Instead of focusing on the negatives from any given situation, try to think of the positives outside of the situation.
I’ve found that the trick is not to focus on the source of the stress.
Focus on the positives, outside of the stress.
What is going good amidst all of the stress?
Think about that holiday you have coming up, or the fun stuff you’re going to do at the weekend. Think about the big deal that has just closed, or the work that is going well.
You’ve just got to get through the stress, to get to the good stuff.
Make the negative seem small and surmountable, not huge and impossible to overcome.
What’s the worst that could happen?
This is another favourite strategy of mine.
Run the ‘what’s the worst that could happen’ scenario.
One of the big things with stress and anxiety is fear of the unknown and blowing things out of proportion.
If something is really stressing you out at work, think about what’s the worst that could happen.
“O.k so this guy drops me, then what?”.
“O.k so they get unhappy and leave a bad review, then what?”.
“O.k so we don’t close those deals we need this month, then what?”.
Work each scenario through in your head and come up with solutions and positives.
“If he drops us, we get another client”.
“If they leave a bad review, we try our best to rectify it, but you can’t keep 100% of people happy it’s just not possible. We’ll learn from it on the next one.”
“If we don’t get the deals, so what. We’ll try harder next month, figure out why the deals didn’t and close and make sure we don’t make the same mistake twice.”
There’s always a positive lurking there somewhere.
I’m not saying act as if you don’t care, I’m saying try your best to always do the right thing but don’t live or die on other peoples actions or what if’s.
A lot of the anxiety we get from stress comes from over worrying about what could happen. Well a lot of the time thoroughly thinking through all these scenarios will help put the stress and anxiety to bed, because 9 times out 10 you realise it’s not actually that bad and you have a lot of positive going on as well.
Every bit of stress and hardship you go through makes you stronger, don’t ever forget that.
Why do you think billionaires are able to sleep at night and not throw themselves out of a window whilst juggling billions of dollars, lawsuits, thousands of employees and their personal lives?
Their brain and tolerance for stress has been exercised to the point that they live their lives in positive mode on autopilot.
Positive thinking takes practice
This isn’t going to be something you’re going to master over night.
The next time you feel overwhelmed or in a particularly foul mood, try reframing the situation and thinking of the positives.
If that fails, force yourself to do some exercise no matter how bad you feel.
Keep practising and it will come with time. As with anything worth having, it doesn’t come easy or overnight.
Any questions on this topic? Let me know in the comments.
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