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SUMMARY
- Do you know how to master the most important skill in freelancing? Becoming a successful, full-time freelancer as quickly as possible, and staying successful, is a mental game.
- The reticular activating system (RAS) is a part of your brain that can help you succeed in your business. Even if you’ve never heard of the term, you’ve likely experienced the process many times before. Say for example you’re thinking about purchasing a car—an orange Toyota Tacoma. Suddenly, you start seeing orange Toyota Tacomas everywhere! Your RAS has kicked in; it helps you notice things that are important to you.
- You’ve likely experienced Kelly and Conner’s Emotional Cycle of Change as well. At the start of your freelancing career, you’re pumped up and feeling good. As time goes by, you sink into what is called the Valley of Despair—this is the part of your journey where you encounter challenges and start to doubt yourself. However, if you make it out of the Valley of Despair, you’ll be happier than you were before.
- While your RAS can help you, it can also sabotage you, especially if you’re not careful with how you talk to yourself. If you’re in the Valley of Despair and you’re convinced that it’s a real and long-term thing, your RAS will kick in and start looking for more examples to confirm your negative thinking.
- Get out of the Valley of Despair by setting limits in your emotional scale. Have guideposts to help you determine whether you’re just having an emotional reaction or whether the thing you are experiencing is real.
- Setting guideposts and indicators will help you throughout your freelancing career, whether things are going wrong or right. When things get rough, you can say, “OK, I’m just having a bad emotional reaction right now.” And when things are going great, you can say, “This is awesome, but I can’t rest on my laurels; I still need to work on growing my business.”
- Make your RAS work for you, not against you, by adopting Mike’s five tactics.
- Steer clear of support groups and coaches that allow a lot of ranting and complaining—they only build a confirmation bias of how bad the situation you’re ranting about is and will drag you down.
- Have a plan ready for when your emotions go up and down, so when the negative self-talk starts trickling in, you have something to fall back on and get you through the Valley of Despair.
- Garbage in, garbage out. Cutting back on overdramatic TV shows, negative Nelly news, and negative online content will have a positive impact on your freelancing business.
- Journaling allows you to be honest with yourself, as well as practice turning negative thoughts into positive ones; you get to dictate how you’re feeling. And just like any muscle that needs to be developed, gaining control over your thoughts takes practice.
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INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES
FULL TRANSCRIPT: How To Master The Most Important Skill In Freelancing
Hey my friends. Mike Shreeve here, and I want to give you guys a gift, because it’s the season of giving, right?
Anyways, it’s been an awesome holiday weekend this past weekend. The past couple of days have been Thanksgiving, and I’ve just been thinking a lot about you guys and your journey towards becoming a freelancer, towards starting your business, that maybe 2018 is going to be the year that you break out and finally achieve the things that you’ve been wanting to achieve, and all these sorts of things.
So, one of the things that I want to do right now is give you a gift. Now, this gift, and I don’t mean this from a place of arrogance, but when I received this gift, I truly felt like it was a gift. Something that I’ve been wanting, something that I’ve been needing, and something that would make my life tremendously better.
Now, to get this gift, I’ve paid multiple people thousands and thousands of dollars. This is not an exaggeration and I’m not trying to fluff up what we’re doing here.
I just want you to know that where this is coming from, what I’m about to teach you, is from multiple sources who are tremendously more experienced than I, okay?
What you’re about to see and hear comes from experience beyond even my own. I’ve applied this to my life, I’ve used it in my life and it has been tremendously helpful. But again, I try to give credit where credit’s due. I’ve had coaches and therapists and other courses and things like that, that have all conglomerated into this concept that I’m about to teach you.
What is it that we’re talking about right now? One of the things that I’ve noticed in teaching at this point, hundreds and hundreds of people to become full time freelancers, one of the things that I’ve noticed is that the key to speeding up the process to becoming full time as quickly as possible happens, whatever that process is, the key to getting there, that all happens here, in your brain.
I hate to be like those guys who are like, “It’s all about mentality and whatever, your mental” but really, speed to becoming successful quickly is all about the mental game. I want to show you something that will help you. I believe this is the key to becoming a successful freelancer as quickly as possible, and then staying successful, okay?
Reticulating Activating System
One of the things that I’ve learned about is something called the reticulating activating system. This is a process in our brain and it goes a little bit like this.
You’ve experienced this I’m sure many, many times as you are actually potentially purchasing gifts for Christmas. If you have children, you’ll notice this pattern a lot in children, right? It’s the reticulating activating system and it goes like this.
Let’s say that you want to purchase a car, and you’re thinking about it, maybe you saw an advertisement, maybe you saw a magazine article, maybe you’re talking with friends and they tell you the car you need to get, you need to get an orange Toyota Tacoma. That truck is the best, okay?
That’s the car you need, and you say, “Okay.” Then you maybe do a little bit of research and you think about it and in your mind, you’re like, “Okay, orange Toyota Tacoma.”
What will happen is the very next day you’ll drive and whatever car you’re driving right now, and you’ll start seeing orange Toyota Tacomas everywhere. We’re going to represent that idea with this little circle here.
You’re seeing like, “Oh there’s one” and then you start to think, “Man, everybody drives these cars. This must be a popular car.” Now, what change did all of a sudden overnight, everybody start driving orange Toyota Tacomas? No.
What happened is the reticulating activating system kicked in. It’s a process in our brain that helps us to notice things that are important to us, and so as we told ourselves, “I’m going to go buy this truck.”
Our brain starts looking for instances to try and identify whether or not that truck is good for us.
That’s the first level. Then what happens over time, unless we tell the reticulating activating system something else, over time we then start to expand this central idea of an orange Toyota Tacoma. What we’ll start to see is as we’re driving, we’ll start seeing different colors of Tacomas. We’ll start seeing different models, different years. We’ll even start looking at just general Toyota cars in general in order to create for ourselves, a confirmation bias.
What happens is as soon as we get that first positive reaffirmation, or that first confirmation of orange Toyota Tacomas are definitely the car, I see them all the time now, because my reticulating activating system is rocking and rolling. We start to expand, and look for more and more and more data and instances to create for us a confirmation bias.
Confirmation Bias
Now, what’s a confirmation bias?
A confirmation bias is basically a bias that we have to where we only look for the things that will help to confirm the bias that we have. So, after a week or two, you could see a bad review for a Toyota Tacoma in front of your face, but because you’ve developed a confirmation bias with all this data, you say, “Oh, that must be an anomaly. That bad review must not be real. It must just be someone trying to troll Toyota” or whatever, right?
So, this is the process that happens with the reticulating activating system. Let me give you one more example and then I’ll tie it back to freelancing. With the reticulating activating system, historically, we can say evolutionary, biologically, the RAS was built to protect us. We’re out there foraging, we eat a berry, it doesn’t kill us. Now all of a sudden we say all the berries that look like this are good. All of a sudden we see them more everywhere.
It’s a system in our brain … Excuse me. To help us to survive, to help us put importance on the things that are important so we can survive.
Say a saber-toothed tiger or whatever comes and kills one of our clan’s members, we say, “Okay, saber-toothed tigers are bad, every time I see one, my senses are going to be heightened to look for that particular threat.” And then anything that looks like a saber-toothed tiger, therefore all things that look like saber-toothed tigers are confirmation bias, are bad, therefore I will be able to survive.
Now, here’s the problem with the RAS. Although it’s a beautiful, wonderful tool to help us survive, to maybe help us actually purchase things because we can develop biases and otherwise we’d never purchase anything if we didn’t have any biases, the problem is is that when it comes to freelancing, there is a mental game that is played, and let me explain that mental game.
This is called Kelley and Conner’s Emotional Cycle, if you can’t see download here, Change. Basically, anytime we do anything new, you can go search this online, Kelley and Conner’s Emotional Cycle of Change, I highly recommend that you take a look at it.
Anytime you start something new, you’re like, “Yeah, it’s so cool, shiny object, and this is so fun, and it’s going to be wonderful” and then you start to do it, you actually start to do the work and then you come down into what is called the valley of despair.
If you can push past the valley of despair, you can be much happier than you ever were, because you’ll get the results you came to get, okay? That’s pretty typical. We know that that’s a common phenomenon in the world of psychology. However, the problem is this valley of despair here. Things are tough, you start to not believe, and then what actually happens is if you aren’t careful with your self-talk, with the things you say to yourself and others, you can actually be sabotaged by the RAS.
Here’s what happens. You’re in this valley of despair down here, things aren’t great. Like, whatever you thought was going to happen overnight isn’t happening overnight, and now you’re distraught and you’re frustrated, and oh no.
What happens is when you start saying these things to yourself, and you start looking for instances to confirm that this valley of despair that you’re in is real, that this valley of despair that you’re in is not just a momentary state but a long term state.
You then start to just like when we were talking about our Toyota Tacomas, your RAS kicks in, because it feels a threat, and it will start to look around to find more examples to pile on to the negative thinking that’s going on, so that eventually you have established a confirmation bias towards your own self.
For example, let’s say that you start your freelancing career. You’re really excited, you’re building your website, blah, blah, blah, you’re doing all the cool stuff. And nothing’s happening. You start reaching out to clients, and no clients are happening, and then you’re down here in this valley of despair and you’re saying to yourself, “I’m not good enough.” You start using words, “I’m frustrated. I’m angry. I need to rant. I need to vent. I need to.” All of these kinds of expressions are triggers for the reticulating activating system.
So that while you’re down here, if you aren’t careful, you’re literally piling on data for yourself to prevent you from getting out.
One of the things I see a lot with freelancers is that when something doesn’t go right, they get stuck here.
What I want you to do is go research more about the reticulating activating system, how it works in your life, how to use it to benefit you and all these sorts of things, because I only have a limited amount of time, but you can spend hours and hours and hours just researching Kelley and Conner’s Emotional Cycle of Change and the reticulating activating system.
But the problem is if you’re stuck here, here’s how you get out. This is something that one of my therapists taught me. Some of you may or may not know, I’ve got PTSD from some stuff that happened a while ago, and so when you have PTSD brain, you deal in extremes, right? You go up really high and you go low really, and it’s really often quite fast. One of the things that I was taught is to have limits in your emotional scale.
Now, this isn’t to constrain your ability to be emotional and your ability to love and your ability to care for other people and interact with other people. This is about having guideposts that you can use to determine whether you are having just an emotional reaction or whether the thing you are feeling and experiencing is real.
Now, again, I’m not a therapist, so careful with all of this stuff and take it with a grain of salt, and put it in your life how you want to put it.
But when I talk about positive and negative limits, I’m talking more about guideposts to guide you so that you can make decisions independently of just emotions. Because you guys, if you only make emotional decisions where you say, “How am I feeling? Therefore that’s the truth,” you will be stuck here forever.
If you are stuck here forever as a freelancer,
- you cannot get clients
- you cannot build a lifestyle
- you cannot enjoy whatever client work you do have
until you get to this level where it’s like things are going well.
I’m not saying to avoid emotion. I am saying that emotion is a trick sometimes, right? How often have you just been angry at someone like, “That person is a piece of junk and I hate them, and they’re the worse. I’m having this emotional experience” and then you actually go talk to the person.
Either there was a misunderstanding, or you didn’t know the person and you got to know them, and you received new data, and all of a sudden that emotional, visceral reaction that you had was false. It was not appropriate to the reality of what was going on.
This will happen to you, my friends. Even if you’re totally level headed and totally like the coolest person ever.
The freelancing game is an emotional game.
What we have to do is make sure that we set for ourselves guideposts and indicators so that when things get rough, we can say, “Okay, when things get rough emotionally, I’m just having a really bad, emotional reaction right now.”
If things get really positive, you can say, “Yes, okay. I’m feeling very positive, but that doesn’t mean I need to stop working. I need to keep building my business because if I just rest on my laurels after one good day, I’m not going to grow at all.”
What I have discovered, these are the tactics that I use to establish for myself guideposts, and with these guideposts I’m able to guide the reticulating activating system to work for me, so that my reticulating activating system now for the most part, finds happy, good, positive data for me, instead of the negative data that will develop negative confirmation bias about either my business or my clients or who I may be working with, or anything like that.
How do you make the RAS work for you?
These are the strategies that I’ve discovered are very, very powerful in helping you to turn that negative emotion that can derail you into a positive tool that you can benefit from.
Support Group
The first of course, is a support group. Now, I want to give you some advice on support groups and coaches. Number one and number two, support group and coach. We’ll talk about that.
A good support group is not one that dogpiles on your emotional high and low frequencies. Meaning if you’re in a support group where they allow a lot of ranting and a lot of complaining and a lot of these sorts of things, that’s actually data to support a negative RAS.
Your reticulating activating system, if you’re in a support group where there’s a lot of ranting and negativity and all these sorts of things, and let’s say you post something and you’re like, “Man, you guys, I’m having a really hard time today, everything’s frustrating, I hate this, and it sucks.”
And then everybody in the group is like, “Yeah, it totally sucks.” And like they just dogpile on, to confirm that everything sucks. What happens is your reticulating activating system says, “Bing, we hit a winner. We now know how to protect ourselves. Look at all this positive confirmation that we’re getting. Let’s build a confirmation bias that says, ‘This actually does suck.'”
If you’re in a support group that does that, get out. Even if you have friends in there, get out. It is dragging you down without you even necessarily knowing it, okay?
You need to join a support group however that is, that is specifically designed and run by somebody who understands the RAS, so that you can maintain the positive data feedback, we call it a bio feedback loop, but the positive data, so that your RAS works for you to say, let’s say you jump in a group and you have a bad day, “Guys, I’m really having a bad day.”
Then everyone’s like, “Here’s how to overcome that bad day. Here’s an idea to get you out of the bad day. Here’s this, here’s this, here’s this.”
When that happens in a support group, and look for this my friends, you have to advocate for your own self, when something like this happens in a group, the confirmation bias that’s developed in that instance, the data that’s being sent to your RAS in that instance is, “Oh, I’m just having an emotional high or low frequency. Today I’m just having a bad day, this still works, people are doing it, I can still do this” and then you develop a confirmation bias towards positivity, or towards a belief in what you’re doing, or towards action, or towards whatever. But it’s a positive confirmation bias.
Coach
Number two, same with a coach. If you have a coach who acts more like a, “Let me hear you rant, my friend” and they just let it come in, and they just, they’re like, “Yeah, you’re right, that does” and they just confirm your negative or positive emotional outside the frequency that we’re looking for, those guideposts.
Again, you guys, they are without knowing, pushing you towards your RAS kicking in and creating negative bias.
When you have negative bias, you guys, it’s so hard to get out of the valley of despair, when you believe that whatever that emotional state you had for that moment is true.
When you believe that, “You know what? I’ll never be able to get clients.” When you believe that, “Oh, this is broken. Whatever I’m doing right now is broken. Obviously I can’t do this and I’m the worst person ever, et cetera, et cetera.”
When you actually believe that and your RAS helps you to believe that, because you’re getting confirmation from outside, it is very, very difficult to succeed as a freelancer, or any business owner.
Commit To A Plan
Number three is to commit to a plan. One of the things that you can do is when your emotions go up and down, which they 100% absolutely will, I promise that as part of the freelancing experience, when they go up and down, the thing that you can do is to rely on the plan.
When the negative self-talk starts jumping in, when you say I’m too this, I’m too that, I’m not good enough, all you have to do is say, “That’s okay, because I’ve got a plan and this plan works. This plan is a plan that others have followed. This plan is coming from someone who has done it before. I can rely on this plan and not rely on the negative self-talk that is going to trigger the RAS and just keep me stuck in the valley of despair.”
Garbage In, Garbage Out
Number four, this is so important, you guys. Garbage in, garbage out. I know y’all love those TV shows that are over dramatic and soap operas, and watching the negative nelly news, and looking for reasons not to succeed and looking for negativity online, and we all love reading the troll comments. We’re so happy to see bad things happen.
That’s part of human nature, but I’m telling you right now, what you put into your brain is what your brain will spit back out to you.
One of the best things I ever did for myself was to cut back seriously, to take a diet, to have a massive diet on the garbage I consumed.
If you are going through your freelancing business and you’re like, “Man, I just feel like I can’t get going. Everything I do just feels negative and I just feel like I’ve got to” … Look at what you’re consuming. Look at who you’re hanging out with. Look at who’s giving you the information and feedback and look who’s telling you what to believe, how to think.
Are you listening to the talking heads on TV who are paid millions of dollars to sensationalize things?
Are you actively looking for bad news?
Are you actively searching for reasons why this won’t work?
Whenever I see freelancers who are like, “I’m going to be a freelancer, but first I need to go find 50 reasons why this won’t work.”
One of my favorite quotes from Jim Rohn is,
“People who look for reasons why things won’t work are so silly because they don’t even realize they only need one reason for it not to work.”
It’s like you don’t need to go find 20. You only really need one.
But if you go and look for reasons why something isn’t going to work, guess what? You’re going to find them, you’re going to tell your RAS, and it’s never going to happen. While everybody else is doing it, right? That’s how powerful the RAS is. It’s just like the example of a Toyota Tacoma, right?
Before I wanted to buy a Toyota Tacoma, I didn’t know anybody who drove them. I would never notice them on the road but the second I said I’m going to buy a Toyota Tacoma, that’s all I saw.
It’s possible if you put enough garbage into your brain that you will miss the good things that are out there, because your RAS has kicked in and it’s looking for all the bad stuff.
You’re so busy, so consumed with just noticing the bad stuff, that you won’t even see the good stuff that could potentially happen. Lastly, here’s my biggest tip on being able to cut through and destroy and eradicate negative self-talk, which is the key leader, right?
It’s like the way that the RAS gets all messed up.
The negative self-talk leads to negative confirmation bias.
Journaling
I’ll just say it, more simple way to say it. Journaling every day.
Here’s why. When you journal, you can be honest, you can be honest with yourself. But you can also control what ends up on the page.
Whereas, if you’re in a conversation with someone, right? Maybe you’re talking to your confidant or your friend, and in that conversation things can get rolling. Have you ever been in a conversation where it’s like, “Yeah, and then this,” and it gets rolling and rolling and rolling, and after 20 minutes you’re both exhausted because you were just whining and complaining and ranting, right?
When you’re journaling, you can actually control the thought that ends up on the page. You can say, “Man, I’m really frustrated and I hate this and it totally sucks and everything’s terrible,” or you can say, “Today.” That same thought that’s in your mind, you can translate it and practice twisting thoughts into positive ones.
You say, “Today I just really don’t feel very good. It’s a good thing that I have a plan that I can stick to” and you can be a little bit more logical and a little bit more not as constrained and controlled by the emotion.
You get to dictate how you’re feeling when you journal, because you can control. So, journaling, at least for me, has become a time to practice overcoming negative self-talk. To say, “No, no, no, no. Negative self-talk isn’t in control. Emotional reaction isn’t in control. I am in control.”
It’s a muscle that must be developed, and the way to develop any muscle is to practice. I think that journaling every day is probably the best practice you can get.
All right, my friends, so we’ve gone for a full 30 minutes, I’m going to recap everything that we talked about so that you understand. Do a little quick summary.
Don’t forget that this video will be up in the group as a replay, so if you missed anything, that’s okay.
As soon as I hit whatever the button is, finish, as soon as I hit finish it’ll be up and you can watch it any old time. We’ll post it up there and it’ll be good.
Reticulating activating system is the process that your brain uses to develop confirmation bias.
What your confirmation bias is really determines what your beliefs and actions are and so be careful about your RAS. It’s an automagic system. It means it happens really without you knowing. You have to make sure to set up your RAS in a way that it benefits you instead of becomes a hurdle, which it is for a lot of people.
Secondly is the Kelley and Conner’s Emotional Cycle of Change, go check that out online. It’s very, very interesting, you’ll find that as you go through this journey, you’re going to hit a valley of despair.
The way to get out of that valley of despair is to use your RAS to lift you out by creating positive confirmation biases. Most people get stuck here because they let the RAS create negative confirmation bias, and so essentially they never can pull themselves out of that negativity.
Third is make sure that you have limits or guideposts for the emotional up and downs that you are experiencing as you go through this process. To create those boundaries, to create those guideposts, you need a support group that understands RAS and how it works, you need a coach who understands how it works, you need to commit to a plan, you need to regulate the garbage in, that you put into your body, otherwise you’re only going to have garbage coming out.
And lastly, practice developing your anti-negative self-talk muscle by journaling every single day.
Well my friends, I hope that that was helpful. I hope that it serves you. I hope that you have a wonderful, wonderful time for the rest of this holiday weekend.
Be sure to stay safe out there, work on your freelancing business, work on what I just taught you and let’s have some fun. I’ll talk to you later.
