Step

25

Don’t control your moods

For failures, their mood, or state, is determined by others or by their environment rather than by themselves. For instance, if someone says something negative about them, they feel terrible. Or if it rains, they put themselves in a bad mood. You might say they get into a right state. Without giving it any conscious thought, they bounce around from one state to the next hundreds of times a day. And in a typical day, many of those states prove to be extremely negative. I’m not talking about genuine mental illness here; that’s a different thing entirely as you’ll discover later.

Now, if you think back to a specific time when you were in a less than resourceful frame of mind, what do you notice about your performance? No doubt it suffered. On the other hand, if you think about a similar situation when you performed at your absolute best, what was the key difference? You were the same person, with the same skills and knowledge, right? The difference was that you were in a better mood.

Your mood is determined by just the two Fs:

This is worth knowing because, what if, for no good reason, you suddenly found yourself in a good mood, performing at your peak, and were desperate to get back to your usual, low-performance, grumpy self? Well, just change your Fizzy or Focus and you will instantly change your mood. Quickly sit with a physiology of acute depression, with your shoulders slumped, and ask yourself self-defeating questions in a whiny tone of voice, such as: “Why does this always happen to me?” Your brain will look for the exact answer and instantly tell you: “Because you’re a fuck-up!” By focusing on what you don’t want rather than what you do want, you are doing an excellent job of confirming to yourself why you don’t deserve something. This is guaranteed instantly to throw your state out of whack.

When you tell yourself something, you are sure to believe it, especially on a subconscious level. Well, who would you believe, if not yourself?

Of course, if you’re in a bad mood and would like to be in a good mood, I’m not suggesting that doing the exact opposite of the above would work.

Remember the original series of Star Trek with Spock and Kirk? I think it was the best. Typically an episode would begin with Captain Kirk beaming down on to some planet or other with two new crew members, in red tops, whom we’d never seen before. Now I don’t know about you but I’d be sitting at home thinking, “Well, you two are dead, never to be seen in any future episodes.” However, Kirk would leave Mr Spock in charge on the bridge of the Enterprise. Suddenly they’d be attacked by the Klingons, and we all know how painful that is, and the crew would start running around like headless chickens, all, that is, except for Spock. He would be in what you might call ‘The Spock State’. Do you remember his physiology? He’d be stood with his shoulders back and head up, totally centred, and relaxed. And it was always at this exact moment of crisis that Spock would use the ‘F’ word. Do you remember Spock’s ‘F’ word? It wasn’t Failure, it wasn’t Feedback and it wasn’t that other ‘F’ word that we are sometimes tempted to use in moments of stress when things appear to be going wrong. No Spock, whatever was going on, would calmly say “Fascinating”.

Now this is one of the best state-changing words you can use, because the quickest way to change how you feel is to change your physiology and the quickest way to change your physiology is to put a big smile on your face.¹ For example: “Hey Steve, you know that direct marketing campaign we ran, where we bought a list of 30,000 names, that cost us thousands of pounds, to send out an invitation to that big seminar you are running?” says one of my associates. “Yes,” I reply. “Well, I’ve just found out we’ve only received three bookings.” “How fascinating,” say I. This causes me to crack a big smile. Which will in turn cause me to feel better. So don’t you do it! (A further explanation of why you should avoid smiling can be found in step 34.) Not only will saying “Fascinating” impact on your physiology, it will also change your focus. You see, I think all Spock was doing was asking a much better question. I think he was saying, “Listen, can we all stop running around like headless chickens for one moment and look at this result because I think there is something fascinating to learn here. But if you stay all upset, take it personally and beat yourself up, then we could miss what there is to learn, stay feeling bad and not be able to build the learning into our next attempt.” He was of course also demonstrating childlike curiosity at the stuff life – and in his case the universe – threw his way.

Abraham Maslow, a motivational expert who for years studied why people behave the way they do, said people who had self-actualised (why he couldn’t just have said ‘happy people’ is beyond me) displayed the following characteristics: They had learned to become independent of the good opinion of other people. They had no investment in power over people. They had no interest in trying to convince anybody else or dominate anybody else with their opinions or abilities. And they didn’t mind disapproval – to them it was like water off a duck’s back. Without causing offence to anyone, they simply didn’t let what folk thought determine how they should feel. Nor did they let it get in the way of their dreams, goals and ambitions. However, dear reader, don’t you stop sucking up to and trying to please everyone in order to feel good.

“Dear reader, don’t you stop sucking up to and trying to please everyone in order to feel good.”

¹ One technique lots of salespeople use is this. Next time you are going for, say, an important meeting, and you’re not feeling great, just before you go in, put a big stupid grin on your face. You will have to ‘fake it till you make it’ but what happens is your mind and body go ‘hang on a minute, he’s got a smile on his face, he must be happy’ and then the feeling will quickly follow. However, be careful not to overdo it because as comedian George Carlin observes: “If a man smiles all the time, he’s probably selling something that doesn’t work.”