Getting Your Mind Right in a Down Economy

Once you've done all that you can, what's the point in panicking or getting super pessimistic? Anything we accomplish starts with a thought. If we get into a negative thought loop and we expect disaster all the time, guess what? That's what we'll get. 

Links:

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/22/chrysler-parent-stellantis-laying-off-400-salaried-us-workers.html

https://causeyconsultingllc.com/2024/03/27/unprecedented-uncertainties/

https://www.amazon.com/Cant-Afford-Luxury-Negative-Thought/dp/0931580242

Links where I can be found: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/2023/01/30/updates-housekeeping/

Need more? Email me: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/contact-causey/ 

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive the typos!

Welcome to the Causey Consulting Podcast. You can find us online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com. And now, here's your host, Sara Causey. 

Hello, Hello, and thanks for tuning in. In today's episode, I want to talk about getting your mind right, in an economic downturn. I don't agree with Dan Lok on everything. But I've heard him say 20 to 30% of business problems are tactical or strategic in nature, and the other 70 to 80% are actually mindset issues in disguise. And I have to say, I think his ratios are pretty spot on. Anything that happens in life originates with a thought, in order for a thing to actually become a thing, it has to be thought up first, an inclination has to drive you in a particular direction. And if we are poisoning that thought stream, if we're caught in a negative thought loop, it can really destroy our best efforts. My hand is in the air because I have lived it before. In my first iteration of self employment that failed, where I went splat at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and very nearly bankrupted myself, I had negative thoughts all the time, I was living off of caffeine and sugar and fumes I was working constantly, yet never really accomplishing very much. I felt like Sisyphus, rolling the boulder up the hill, I would work and work and work until I finally collapsed sleep for a few hours get up and start the whole process over again. But yet, nothing was ever really going in terms of positive momentum. And I had a few people who tried to tell me about positive outlook, positive thinking getting into the vortex. And I didn't want to hear that. I kept thinking, something's gonna pop, something's gonna break. I mean, it has to even a blind mouse finds a nugget of cheese now. And then just by the law of averages, the law of statistics, surely something will pop, something will happen, something good will happen. The thing of it was the good things happening where I actually got a paycheck, were so few and far between that the business was totally unsustainable. And unfortunately, it was very difficult for me to make the connection of thoughts becoming things, I would get into these negative thought loops. I feel cursed. I feel like somebody has a voodoo doll of my business, and they're just sticking pins in it. All of these deals blow up. Nothing ever comes together. I feel awful. I'm exhausted. But I can't stop. I can't take a few days off to just decompress, get my physical and mental health squared away and then come back to this. I have to have to have to have to have to keep going. I hate what I'm doing. This has become an albatross around my neck, I want out of it. But at the same time, I feel trapped. It was difficult for me to understand how those negative patterns and negative thought loops. were causing so much trouble. They sure as hell weren't solving any of my problems. They were just making bad problems even worse. Now, full disclaimer here. I'm not a psychiatrist, a mental health professional, a doctor. I don't give you advice. I don't tell you what to do or what not to do. I sit here and I opine for your entertainment only. And that's it. All I can give you are my thoughts and opinions. We're in some pretty shaky, uncertain times. It's an election year in the US. We don't know what's going to happen with that. And then regardless whether it's senile old man going back in whether it's the orange MAN, six and one half a dozen of the other. You already have people predicting turmoil and false flags and lock downs and martial law and all of these dystopian images. Who knows what's yet to come? We have no idea. Good, bad or indifferent. We just don't know what's about to happen. Not long ago, there was an article in CNBC about how still Lantis was laying off 400 salaried US workers due to quote, unprecedented uncertainties. I wrote a blog post about it because I thought Yeah, that's it. We do have a hell of a lot of unprecedented uncertainties right now. I don't have billions of dollars. I can't go and build a Hawaiian underground bunker with armed guards like Zuckerberg, I have to just work with the resources I've got, and hope it's good enough. The reason why I talk about being prepared and not scared is because I feel like when you get to that place where you can legitimately say, all that I can do, I've done, I'm tapped out financially, I couldn't do any more physically, I couldn't do any more emotionally and spiritually, I couldn't do any more. I'm as prepped as I'm going to be able to get whatever your individual circumstances might be. When you reach that point, I'm going to borrow a lyric from a sting song at the still point of destruction. At the center of the fury. When you reach that point, all I can do I've done I'm at the still point of destruction, come what may, I can't control it, I've got to just take care of myself and my family day by day. When you get there, there's really no reason to walk in a spirit of fear. If you legit feel that all you can do, you've done. That's it, it's a wrap. When we're dealing with an economic downturn, we're dealing with a crappy job market. prospects that don't seem very good. It is very, very easy to get into one of those negative thought loops. Why can't I find anything? Why aren't any good companies hiring? What if I get in the door? And then I'm laid off? Why are the freelance prospects terrible? Why are people treating me poorly? Why can't I get any callbacks? Why am I not getting any offers? Why are the jobs posted paying poopoo wages, and then that becomes like a vortex that we get sucked into instead of getting into a positive vortex. We get sucked into a negative vortex. And then that begets more and more negativity. I wish that I could tell you that positive thinking had no merit at all. But it actually does. It's not magical. It's not a panacea. We don't want to get into toxic positivity, toxic optimism, toxic gratitude, oh, I'm gonna thank my lucky stars that I was laid off today, it must be a wonderful thing. Thank you so much. We don't want to go there. But on the other side of the spectrum, we don't want to slide off into abject pessimism either. Because that puts us in a hole that's very difficult to get out of. It's like when you get into in my experience anyway, when you get into a hole of pessimism, it's like, the hole just begins to dig itself deeper and deeper. It's like you don't even have to put any work into digging the whole. That negative thought loop digs the hole deeper and deeper. even while you're asleep. You can be clenching and grinding your teeth and your sleep and be having terrible nightmares. It's like this, this bad perpetuating cycle. And I feel like it's important to get out of that, again, you want to do your preps, in my opinion, get prepared. So you don't have to be scared, you can reach that still point of saying, All I can do, I've done. And I'm not going to sit and be paranoid about it. And I'm not going to punish myself, I'm not going to punish myself and say I must be a bad person. Because I'm not a billionaire that can have an underground bunker. I'm not a bad person, because I don't have an underground bunker full of enough canned goods to last for 50 years. I have what I have. And that's going to have to do, I'm going to have to figure out how to make lemonade out of lemons. But what I'm not going to do is sit around and get into this negative thought loop of Everything's bad. Why is this happening to me? I don't deserve this. I can't control the economy. This sucks. The job market is terrible. The saying that we use is consuming the news without allowing the news to consume us. I talk all the time about the importance of staying alert and aware, not paranoid, but just aware. You don't want to be the type of person that gets blindsided. You don't want to be in a situation like a friend of mine. I've talked about this before many times. He was involved in print journalism, and he loved his job. He knew that he was in a dying industry. He knew that he was going to get a pink slip at some point. It was just a matter of when. But he chose to ignore that. And when he was laid off, he was on the job market at the same time as a lot of other people and it took him a long time to find another job. And he obliterated his savings account in the process. And he told me I wish that I had played that situation differently. I knew it was coming. But I chose to live in denial instead of being proactive. You don't want to be in that type of situation where you are deliberately putting your head in the sand, or you are deliberately ignoring what's happening in your industry, I mean, we can think about AI, and what's happening with jobs. This settlement with the National Association of Realtors, you've got some people saying, well, that's not gonna be a big deal. People are just being alarmist. And I'm like, Yeah, hmm. If all somebody has to do is use the internet, if the main function of a realtor at this point is to open that key box and turn the key in the door and say, All right, walk through and let me know what you think. What's the point? People can do that on their own? They don't need to have somebody standing there just long enough to open a door. And then they usually want to just lurk on the front porch and play on their cell phone. I mean, it's like, they don't even give a shit anymore. Pardon me. I didn't mean to cuss. This is my daytime broadcast. But you get what I'm saying that I don't care. A lot of them don't even care. They got spoiled on that easy money from the FOMO and the Yolo of 2020 and 2021. And a bunch of them have washed down anyway, people who thought that they were hot stuff during the bubble, huh? Where are they now, you don't want to ignore reality. You don't want to be the kind of person that's incapable of coming up with a plan B or Plan C, you just don't want to get paranoid about it. You don't want to start looking for ways to borrow trouble. When I start to get like mad about things, and I'm too much in a spasm mode. I have a friend that will always tell me the same thing. And I know when I go to him, I know what he's going to say, sufficient unto the day. Every day has its own set of problems. This is in Christian tradition. This is in the Buddhist tradition. Many world religions talk about this. If you start trying to worry too much about future problems, you're just going to take a giant poopoo on your current moment today, sufficient unto the day. And that's one of the reasons why I go to him I'm like, Oh my God, John, bla, bla, bla bla is happening. And we're like sufficient under the day. If you deal with today's problems, and you don't get too wrapped up and what's going to be happening in the next quarter in the next year in the next decade. You'll suddenly feel that anxiety come back down. Peter McWilliams has a great book from like late 80s, early 90s called you can't afford the luxury of a negative thought. And the byline is it's cheeky, but funny. A book for people with any life threatening illness, including life. So true, isn't it? There's a chapter here titled you don't have to do anything. The little quote beside it is from Louise Beale, Love thy neighbor as thyself, but choose your neighborhood. I know that's real. So under the heading, you don't have to do anything. Peter MacWilliam writes, whatever you do, do it because you choose to do it, not from any misguided sense of duty or obligation. Sometimes people need to be pushed to the brink before they realize that this life belongs to them, not to the demands and desires of others. If you have a life threatening illness, you're on that brink. If you learn that this is your life, you can more effectively take the necessary steps towards debriefing yourself. Try saying this out loud. I don't have to do anything. Say it a few times. Feel the sense of release of freedom of unburdening to this you can add and what I choose to do, I can do. Together, they make a nice and perhaps necessary affirmation. I don't have to do anything. And what I choose to do, I can do. Repeat it out loud or in your mind often in quote. I think that that is such a great affirmation. And the way that I've tweaked it around a little bit for myself is I'll say something along the lines of I don't have to do anything, what I choose to do, I can do, what I choose to do, I will do and I will succeed. Whenever I start to feel whether it's like I'm angry because I feel like freelancing opportunities have dried up. Clients are not wanting to pay anything. The market is flooded, people are desperate, and it's driving the costs down, et cetera, et cetera, et all. You know, welcome to a bus cycle. The boom cycles are great when you're riding the wave, but man, you better save your money because when the bus cycle hits, it sure does suck. So when I get frustrated by these bus cycle conditions, I'll just go back to this book, okay. I don't have to do anything. What I choose to do I can do and what I choose to do, I will do and I will succeed. I go back. And I think about that mantra. Because it's tempting whether you freelance or you are in a W two full time job, or that's what you're looking for, we can get tempted sometimes to take a raw deal. To work for less than we actually need, we start thinking a stack of wands is is better than a stack of nuns. And maybe that's true. As I always say, I don't know what your personal situation is, you may very well be in a situation where some money is better than no money. I'm thinking more like in the freelancing world, you have a client that wants to pay pennies on the dollar, they want to micromanage you, they want to harp on you every five minutes, they want you to camp out on a slack channel. So you can be at their beck and call every five seconds. They want to time your potty breaks, et cetera, et cetera. And you're like, I'm not even making Jack crap on this job. Like, it's so not even worth it to be put in this position. For me, that's one of the things that's empowering about his affirmation, I don't have to do anything. Meaning I don't have to take a crap job, where I'm going to have a client that treats me like the gum on the bottom of their shoe, I can find a good client that will treat me well that will pay the bill on time and everything will go swimmingly, it is possible to do that. That's the thing. In order for that to manifest, it has to first begin with a thought. If your thought is well, all right, I'm just going to have to take the scraps because there's just nothing out there. And so I guess I'd better settle for something that's really subpar. If that's where your thought process is, guess what, that's what you're going to wind up doing. Whereas if you can come at things from a place of strength and empowerment, I don't have to do anything. What I choose to do I can do and what I choose to do, I will do and I will succeed. That's a much healthier springboard, I think, for you to go out whether you're searching for a job, a full time job, a part time job, a side hustle a freelancing gig, etc, etc. It's better to be coming at it from that place of strength than to be like Chicken Little in panic mode. Or to be like Debbie Downer. Woe is me. Everything is crap. This sucks. Life's a biatch and then you die. I mean, just feel the difference in the language. I don't have to do anything. What I choose to do, I can do what I choose to do, I will do and I will succeed. A point to ponder, stay safe, stay sane. And I will see you in the next episode.

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