#034: The Spiritual Side to Freelance Success (Pt. 2) -- A Talk With Pete Savage from ExpandYours...

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level.

And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia.

Hey everyone. Thank you so much for joining me for episode 34 of the High Income Business Writing Podcast. I am your host, Ed Gandia and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to take their writing businesses to the six figure level or the part time equivalent. As a quick reminder, you can find detailed show notes of this episode by going to b2b launcher.com Episode 34 Today's episode is part two of a two part interview that I conducted with my good friend Pete Savage from expandyourself.com if you haven't yet listened to last week's episode, which is episode 33, you really need to do that first because that episode is what really sets the stage. And this last section of it, this last part of the interview is a continuation of last week's show. And the material today won't make a whole lot of sense if you start in the middle of our discussion. So you can go to that episode@b2b launcher.com Episode 33 check that out first and then come back here. If you're joining us after having listened to last week's show, I wanted to remind you of kind of where we left left off. So the premise of this discussion is that I think all of us have been in a situation at least once, usually many times in our lives and in our businesses where you try so hard to achieve a certain result, to launch your business, to land that first client, to get to that certain income level, to land that high profile client that you've been chasing for months or years. It seems like no matter how hard you try, you can't seem to get there. You followed all the formulas. You've toiled day and night. You know, you've given it all you've got and you got nothing to show for it. You don't have the result or you don't have the full result that you want. So the question is, what's going on here? You know, you've played by the rules. You really feel that you've done your very best, you've worked your tail off and yet you haven't achieved that result. So what I approached Pete about was that very question and that's exactly how I explained it to him. What's going on here? Is there a spiritual side to achieving something big? And I knew that the answer was yes. But Pete had some really amazing insights into that question, and that's what I've asked him to share with us. So again, this is part two. I really, really urge you to listen to this all the way through. Keep an open mind. You may not agree with everything, but take what you agree with, you know, run with whatever rings true to you. Anyway, enjoy the rest of this episode and I'll come back to you at the end with some announcements. All right, folks, so I'm back here with Pete Savage for part two of our discussion. And hey, Pete, how are you?

Yeah, good. I'm really glad to be back.

Yeah, man, it's great to have you back. This is too important a topic to just kind of cut it short. So I figured, hey, let's just break it up into two parts and just to kind of remind everyone what we're talking about. If you haven't heard part one of this, I urge you to just stop right now and go back to that verse. It's going to make much more sense if you do. So we covered some very important items there, but here's the premise and here's why I invited Pete in here. It's basically the idea that we all do this. We work hard towards a goal. We've all been here and for some weird reason, we're just not getting the results we wanted. We've worked as hard as we think we can and we've followed everything by the book. We've followed the strategy, the plan, the framework, the roadmap, and it's just not happening. So what is it? Is it going to require even more some kind of Herculean effort? And the answer is that there's got to be a spiritual component to all this. And at some point you have to kind of resign yourself to the fact that you've done everything you can and now you have to turn things over to a very different dimension that's within your graphs. So, Pete, I don't know, is that a good explanation of kind of what we're dealing with here, what we're talking about?

Yeah, I think it is. I think it's bang on. It's like you said, be a lot easier for people to jump in midstream if they want to go and listen to the call prior to this, but they can. That's a great setup for what we're going to do here on the call.

Perfect. And what Pete's doing, he's been addressing this is instead of with a bunch of tip number one, tip number two, what he's asking is a series of self diagnostic questions. Things that you can ask yourself to really get you thinking about some very important strategies or ideas to think about. So, Pete, I'll let you take it over from here, buddy.

Yeah, awesome. So we're going through the list of questions and here's the next one to kick off this call question that you want to ask yourself. So if you find yourself looking at a situation in your business specifically for the subject of this call that you don't like, like not having the clients you want, and then you know you're feeling the feelings of frustration and despair and anxiety over that, you know what's happening is you're letting your outer circumstances and not your vision of what you want to have happen influence your thoughts and your feelings on the subject. So the question to ask yourself is just the question version of that, which is, am I letting my outer circumstances and not my vision of what I want to see happen influence my thoughts and feelings about this situation? And the reason this is important is if you don't have a strong established vision of the outcome you want to see, then you're always going to be in reaction mode. You're always going to be reacting to what's going on. That's going to stimulate the same old feelings, responses, ways of dealing with it that you have in the past. It's going to be really hard to break through. But if you have vision of the solution you want to see, and you're getting in touch with that regularly, that is going to help guide you in terms of the thoughts and actions that you want to enact. And I'll give a couple examples in a minute. But does that make sense, Ed?

I think so. I think with the examples it might help clarify that a little further. Because that's a mind blowing thought.

Yeah. So because of that, let me rephrase the question or restate the question again and then I'll go through the example. So the question I want you to ask yourself is, am I letting my outer circumstances so my current circumstances and not my vision for the outcome that I want influence my thoughts and feelings about this scenario? So here's a couple of examples of people who didn't do that. They did it the right way, the way that affected change in their lives. This is the first one is just a, just a mind blower of an example. It's super powerful. I highly recommend this book by an author called Joseph Murphy, the power of your subconscious mind. It's called, I think it's like 1963 or 64, this book. It's amazing. I Read a ton of stuff in this field. This book is incredible and it's filled with stories, which is great. One story really stood out for me. It's a story of a prisoner who escaped from a camp in concentration camp in Poland during the war. The way the story goes is that this one prisoner was in, as you can imagine, very high security, tightly guarded prison camp. And he refused to let his current situation influence his thoughts and feelings about what was going on. He would always hold. He had this vision, this dream, I'm going to escape from this prison. Imagine having the mental fortitude to think about this circumstance. But as an aside, but his approach was, I'm going to escape from this prison and live the rest of my life in America. It was his dream to go to America and spend the rest of his days there. And he held onto this vision. And held onto this vision in the middle of what I think we can all just. I mean, we can't even imagine what that must have been like. Here's how this played out. He didn't sit and plot his escape. He just held onto the vision. And one day the prisoners were lining up for work duty. And I think they were going to be transported to some place to do some hard labor or taken outside the prison. Somehow they were assembled and going to be assigned to this work duty. And as they were assembled before this was to take place, the guard went down the row of prisoners and started counting them. They always did a head count before the day's work. Then upon return to the camp, they would do the head count, you know, to make sure obviously no one has escaped. Well, prisoner was count or the guard was counting the prisoners. And to the left of the, to the right of this prisoner, the guard pointed and said 17. And then he got caught. And then he pointed to the prisoner and said 18. And then he got called aside by another guard. So he got distracted. He went over, came back and started the count on the wrong prisoner. So he resumed the count at 18. But he, he assigned 18 now to the prisoner, to this, to this prisoner that we're talking about to his left. So to clarify a little bit, when the, when the, when the guard had finished counting because he got interrupted at 18 and came back on the wrong prisoner at 18, there were two 18s. So when, when they went for work, so the prisoner said, well, this is my, my God, this is my opportunity. When they went for work duty, he knew that if he left when he, when the, when the crew came back after work duty, they'd do a Head count. And there would be the same number. Because let's say that the. In actual fact, let's say there were 25 prisoners going to do the work duty. Well, the guard counted and recorded 24. So this was so he could escape while on work duty. And when they came back, the guard would do a count and it would still be 24. If I explained that right.

Oh, yeah. So it would give him much more time to get away.

Exactly. So, I mean, how could you ever plan something like that to happen? You couldn't. And as the story goes, if you want to read the book, that's when he took his opportunity to escape. He just. He escaped while on work duty. And he knew that he'd have an enormous window of time before they even recognized that he was gone. And as the story goes, he ended up living in America. He tells you about the series of events that led him to get there.

Wow.

As you read a book like that and have a story like that, what comes through to me is what you said on last week's call, Ed, is that he didn't sit and plot the how. You know, you're right. If he had told someone, I'm going to escape, the first question might have been, well, how are you going to do that? Right. He wasn't concerned about that. The next example, this is one probably a lot of people have heard of, but this is about Jim Carrey. And he told this on Oprah. And he said that when he was down and out actor in, In. In la, he would. He would. He would drive up to Mulholland Drive, look down on the city, and he'd visualize people in the industry who he respected. He'd visualize them coming to him and giving him compliments on his work. And he also wrote a check for $10 million. And he dated it for like three years out from that date. And he tells the story that just before that three years was up, he signed on to make the movie Dumb and Dumber. And he was going to be paid $10 million for that. And he told this story in 1997 on the Oprah Winfrey Show. I love that.

I remember that. And there was another element to that story, another part where you remember he was. He was. Well, we can say he was in love, but he was very attracted to his co star. Not the other guy, but the girl who he was chasing in the movie because he had seen her. She was a soap opera. I forget her name. Soap opera star. And he had seen her for years. Lauren, Holly, I think yeah, Lauren, Holly, that's it. She ended up being his co star and they met, they started a relationship and they eventually got married.

Yeah, I remember that. See these? I mean, again, we talked about the athlete analogy before. When you hear this story, suddenly it's like inspirational and you can kind of jive with it and you think, oh, that's a great story. But we somehow sometimes have a hard time applying that in our life. And another very, very quick example is another actor, Cary Grant, who was know many people say is the ultimate, the ultimate leading man actor in the history of movies. But if you've ever seen any Cary Grant movies, he just has this suave, larger than life Persona. And his real name is Archie Leach. He said, talking about his career and how Cary Grant came to be the character that he is. And he just said, I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be and I finally became that person, or he became me. It was just holding onto that vision.

You know, it's. Let me just take this down to everyday life to Pete, because I'm getting chills just listening to these stories. And they are inspirational, no doubt. But I don't think we realize that we're doing this every single day, whether you know it or not. Right. I just drove my little guy to his school this morning right before this interview. And what did it take for me to realize that act, for me to get him to school safely and get back home safely, I had to visualize, whether I knew it or not, I was visualizing taking him to school, his teacher, getting him from the car and carpool, me saying, I love you, buddy, and just, you know, have a good day. And then just driving home and then having, right. We do this with everyday little things, but we don't think about it, we don't attach all this emotions like, oh my gosh, I really hope this happens. And you know, what if it doesn't? You know, what if my car stalls? Just, we don't. Right? But when it comes to something big. Big, right. And big is relative. For some reason, we become, we treat it differently.

Yeah.

And fear creeps in.

Yep, that's right. Fear creeps in. And it's funny, we have no problem getting emotionally charged and all hung up on fear and anxiety. But it's really hard to step back and look at the situation and get emotionally charged with better feelings about it, feelings of a better outcome. And that's why it's so important to ask yourself these questions. And in particular, a question like, you know, are the outer circumstances influencing my thoughts? And feelings or is it my vision? And you know, if, if you haven't sat and we talked about this on the last call, if you're kind of wavering, you're not really sure, or you can't like turn on your vision of what it is you want to see happen, you need to sit down and do this on a regular daily basis so that what's going on in your mind becomes just as visceral and emotionally charged in a good way as the outer, as the sort of physical reality that's going on around you that you're living every day. True. So here's the next question I want people to consider. And this really is, I mean this is a leap. Okay, I understand this is going to be a leap. And if you haven't listened to the ladder, so the rungs, the four rungs of the ladder that we talked about on the beginning of the first, I highly recommend that you do that because this is going to require some. You're going to be need to hanging around on the fourth rung of the ladder for this story. So the question is, have you considered the fact, so ask yourself this. Have you considered the fact that something that you want not happening is just one probability in a field of potential outcomes? Let me ask that again. Have you considered the fact that this not happening is just one probability in an infinite field of potential outcomes? And to set that up to kind of bring some, that's kind of a, you know, this gets into the notion of talking about quantum physics and all that sort of stuff. But the best example to kind of help illustrate this, this way of thinking, it's another Greg Braden example. And you know, I haven't read all his stuff and you know, he's not like this hugely influential author to me personally. But I have seen some really, I've seen him speak and I've read some really cool things that he's put out there. And what I like about him is he takes kind of this approach where he kind of translates everything into, you know, the benefit benefiting humanity. And he brings his science background. He kind of melds the ancient traditions with scientific thinking. Anyways, there's this, here's the, here's the quote, crazy stuff. There's a video on YouTube you can find. It's of a medicine less hospital in China. You may have seen this ad, but if not, you can, you can search for it and they're treating, it's showing a what we would call an operation treating a tumor in real time. It's like a Three or three and a half minute video where they show like a live ultrasound on one side of the screen. And then they show a static ultrasound, a picture of a tumor in someone's. I think it's their abdomen. And in this video, the patient is in a room, hospital, and there's a doctor there and there's some other practitioners around them and they're holding their hands over the patient, the area where the tumor is, and they begin this procedure. Now this is. When you watch this, it's like, what? Like, this is crazy. I'm telling you, be prepared for this story. You see this tumor over an elapsed period of three, three and a half minutes, shrink down into nothing.

I have not seen this.

You got to check this out. You got to check this out. Now. You know, this is alarm bells, I'm sure, going off from me to mind or listeners. What. This is bunk and all this stuff. Okay, just suspend that for one second. Whether you believe this or not is not really the point of this story, but I just want to talk about it. And, and so it's, it's, it's. This is part of some of the stories and the research that Greg Braden is, is telling in this. This is a particular. I think it's a PBS special or something. But anyways, what he's saying is, how does this happen? And he uses what I think are perfect words to describe this. He says, these practitioners, for them, this is just second nature to them. This is just what they. This is how they treat. And, and for the patient, the patient is just thinking about themselves being in a healthy state. It's a very different perception in terms of disease than we have in the Western culture. And what he's saying is the people, the practitioners there who are doing this procedure, they're not looking at the tumor and saying, bad cancer, tumor, you have to go away and trying to force it out of the body. This is where it gets a big leap in consciousness, leap in understanding or awareness or willingness is that they're holding in their mind the image of the patient in a healthy body. Huge, huge difference in how you think about that. Subtle difference, but really life changing. They're not focused on the problem to try and fix the problem. They recognize that this issue of a tumor being there is just one probability in an infinite field of probabilities where there are infinite potential outcomes. And so they're focused, they're choosing a different outcome. They're all focused, including the patient, on choosing a healthy body. They're visualizing that they're holding onto that feeling and how it explains that is they're drawing the manifestation of the healthy body in from somewhere beyond. Who knows? We don't know. So they're turning on that new possibility.

Well, this goes back to the first question that you asked in last week's call, which is, are you. Have I been problem focused or solution focused? It speaks to that as well. Right. So they're not talking and they're not focused on the problem. They're focused also on a solution.

Yeah.

On a healthy outcome.

And, you know, we should address. I don't just want to just leave that there because we should address this thing about this tumor, you know, vanishing before we leave this point. Like, I know this sounds unbelievable that you could get rid of a tumor in a matter of minutes. And, you know, I actually don't think there's anything wrong about being skeptical of something like that. But personally, I think it's only of benefit to you if your skepticism leads you to further exploration until you find more things that satisfy what you're looking to reconcile or to believe. But I think that, personally, Ed, I think that 20 years from now, maybe earlier, this kind of thing, which can seem unbelievable or at least unexplainable, will be seen as commonplace. I mean, look at something like the placebo effect, you know, where you have patients in studies given a sugar pill and their symptoms go away to the same degree as people who are given a course of medicine to treat the issue. And no one questions the placebo effect anymore.

You know, you're right. And I always point to that. It's one of those things that you don't hear about a lot. But that in and of itself is huge proof that what you really believe deep down inside will become a reality. Because the percentage of the placebo effect, it's huge. It's not like 5%. And I forget what the numbers are, but they're significant. When they're told, they take this, you will be cured in the test group. Is it. Is cured. I want to say 20%.

Yeah, it's, it's. And the, the reaction when we think about is to dismiss it or to say, well, I'm not really going to take that on board in my life because I don't really know how that happened. I can't define how it happens. Well, you know, some of the greatest scientists in the world, like Einstein, for example, you know, Thomas Edison, they have said that there are, there are, and they spent their lives studying, trying to figure out things that we haven't figured out. And even they have concluded that there are things that we just don't understand, we just can't explain yet. And I think, like, isn't it funny how new understandings come into our world and when they first do, they seem unbelievable and then eventually they get except as commonplace. Like, if you've ever flown on an airplane, you're doing something that most people thought was impossible or insane not that long ago. And I think it's wise to remember that, like, popular opinion has many times been shown to be wrong. In the end, the world is flat. You can't build a heavy machine that can fly through the air. Those are. Those are things that were completely outside the realm of logic, understanding, and we're proven to be wrong.

So true. So true. So I think it's important to at least accept that, look, even if it sounds completely unbelievable, you know, you might not be in a place right now. I know I wasn't a few years ago where I could accept some of these things as is truth. Just like when they finally discovered that the world is not flat, I'm sure a lot of people said, well, I still don't believe you.

Yeah, it's flat for me. Yeah, exactly. So let's now go. That was like an extreme example. And maybe we lost some people thinking, I just don't believe that. Well, let's get into something really cool and very practical now, which is looking at your inner beliefs about things and how they can influence what's actually happening outside of you, primarily by influencing your behavior. And so this isn't one question to ask yourself. This is actually a methodology that I've used many times. I've modified it a little bit and put a little bit of a twist on it, but I think it's super powerful. So I think it's worth spending time talking about it on the call. And it's called. It's based on the option method by Bruce DeMarcico. And it's just a series of very worded questions that. That are meant to bring about your deeply held beliefs. So you can look up option Method or Bruce DeMarcico if you want to learn more about this and where this came from. But I think it's really good to go through what these questions are. So the first question you would ask yourself is, what are you unhappy about? Or you would substitute the word unhappy with whatever the feeling is that you want to address. So if you're looking about, let's say you're feeling scared about getting new business. Question number one would be what are you scared about? And then your answer. And you can do this for yourself. The answer is, well, I'm feeling scared about getting new business. If you want, you could write this down. Question two, why are you scared about this issue? And this question gets you to lay the reason for your feeling out on the table. And usually it's very. Answer this question. We have a reason for this on our hair trigger. Like, you can instantly fire it off. Because this question, why are you scared about this issue? This really asks you for the justification in your own mind about why you feel the way you feel. And so we're always justifying our feelings constantly. So it's usually really easy to get to this answer.

So let's say, Pete, that it's the, oh, my gosh, I haven't been able to get the clients that I need to support myself financially. I'm really scared about that. Well, why are you scared? Okay, well, I'm scared because I don't know if I can pay my bills and I may have to go get a job.

Perfect. Yeah, perfect. Perfect answer to that. And you can see how quickly you could come up with the reason for why you're scared, right? Because it's, you're, it's. You're living it every day.

Because I've been there, buddy.

Oh, yeah, me too, bro. We all have the next question. Number three. This is the turning point. This then, is gold to this whole process. And the question is, what are you concerned would happen if you weren't scared about that? And this is a brain twister of a question. Intentionally, this usually gets someone to go, huh, can you repeat that? I didn't get that. So I want to read.

That was my reaction.

Yeah. So let this sink in a little bit. And if you're, if you're listening, maybe you'll write this down. What are you concerned would happen if you weren't scared about that? And it's getting you to look within and find out why are you hanging on to this feeling? And, you know, the person might say, well, if I wasn't scared about this, then, you know, I guess I wouldn't care enough to go out and get new business. And this is where I put something in that. It's an extra little step in the questioning approach, which I call statement. And I think it's very important that you, you get what you just said. You get your answer to this question, and you get it down to an equals statement, and you write it down so you can look at it. So let's, let's Go back and go very slowly so we can go through this. If someone was. If I was leading someone through this, I would say, so another way of saying what you just said. Remember, let's say the person's answer was, if I wasn't scared about this, then I guess I wouldn't care enough to go out and get new business. So then I would say, okay, so another way of saying exactly that is that feeling scared will lead to you getting new business. That. That's what you said. That's just another way of saying what you said. And so what you're saying is, let's try and get this into an equal statement. So you can see this on paper. What you're saying is, feeling scared equals getting new business.

Okay?

And that's when usually a light bulb goes off. The person has that equal statement. They've translated their limiting belief that's inside them into an equal statement. And they look at that and say, I've done this to myself many, many times on. On issues that I've wanted to look at, and I've uncovered a limiting belief. Like I've been running around with the belief that feeling scared equals getting new business. Let's say, and the next question is, do you really believe that? And 90% of the time the person will say, no, that doesn't make sense. And it's kind of like this release of like, my God, I've been operating from a place of fear and being scared because I think I need that motivation of fear to go out and get new business. You follow that so far?

I think so. So it's kind of like a Pavlovian dog situation where you associate two different things that are not really. Or I guess they could be related, but only because you're associating them.

Yeah, because you believe them. And if it's still vague or if it's, you know, if the light bulb hasn't gone on for. For you as you're doing this process for yourself or for the person, then the next question is, there's two more questions that can be optional. The next question is, why do you believe that? So let's look at that equal statement. Feeling scared equals new business. And then the question number four was, do you really believe that? And, you know, the person might say. Or you might say, well, yeah, you know, yes, I believe that. And then. So the next question is, why do you believe that? And that can be the point where you get really introspective and you can say, well, why do I believe that? Well, I guess it's how I grew up. My mom or dad always talked about their worries about not having money, let's say. So I guess I learned that money is something that you have to be worried about, and then so you would create an equal statement for that. Okay, so what you're saying is being worried.