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Freelancing Zen: Harnessing The Power of Suggestion

By Oliver Wetter

Posted on August 1, 2017

(Originally published 09/09/2014 )

The power of suggestion is a something we all have to deal with. Until the age of 18 years, many of us have heard many negative suggestion, from parents, siblings or peers – sometimes even with good intentions. The only way to reshape such a mental status is by being exposed to positive suggestion, either from others or from ourselves.

This is where auto-suggestion comes into play.

I know, it sounds like some esoteric zen-nonsense, but more often it appears to me that academics don´t like to hear about such a zen-nonsense – mainly because they fear that beeing the reason of their failure or succeess.

First of, when I mean affirmation, I mean to program the mind or subconsciousness, to work in a certain way.

Perfect example of extrinsic negative suggestion (Art from tangled © Disney)

Basically, what affirmation does is programing your subconsciousness to pay attention to the little things in your daily routine in order to navigate you better towards your goals.

Easy as that, but how is it established?

Below is a list with some ideas to get you started:

Everything takes practice, exercise your mind. Often. Read books about that matter. James Murphyand Bob Proctor are a good start.
Change habits in order to complain less.
For social media it is a good idea to go through your friends list and unfollow all people who share bad, unpleasant and negative stuff. We have the power to decide what we want to subscribe – so please, do yourself a favor and decide for a positive way of thinking.
This thought can easily result in the urge to throw away your television, that is totally normal and if you do that, it will lead to another level of enlightenment as well.
If you use video on demand at a moderate level you can keep your television. The importance lies in not having to consume advertising or news.
Learn to be patient. Learn the art of achieving things by forgetting them.
Unsubscribe from negative thoughts wherever possible. The world is not all fluffy-puffy, but it is also not your fault that there is war anywhere in the world, unsubscribe from information that you can not change.
Turn drawbacks into assets.
Lean towards a network with people or institutions that have problems you CAN change, be it healthcare, childcare, neighbourhood help, whatsoever – get control over things. That gives you power back over your life and it feels good to be in control.
Exercise your mind wherever possible, read books (text books) non fiction, autobiographies, ted-talks, whatsoever, there´s a huge list of things you can do to broaden your horizont.
Meet likeminded people, make a group, meet often and share thoughts about the things you care the most.
Avoid Burnout and stay motivated
Write 3 pages after you wake up. Everyday. For at least 3 weeks. Things will happen.
Unlearn or get rid of the emotions: fear, doubt and anger.

The most important part however is to learn the right way to do affirmation or autosuggestion.

For the most part, there is no single right or wrong way to do it, you have to find the perfect and working quote by yourself – and that is also the most exciting thing about it as well.
However, to entrench a working suggestion it takes time. Be patient. You can´t expect things to change in 3 weeks time. It may take years. In my case it took 9 years to find out that the suggestions were working -and now since 5 years I work effectively with them because I know they work.

I found out about this all the hard way, and at my lowest point in life, I sat there for weeks and wrote 3 pages every morning, kind of random stream of consciousness, and then after 4 weeks it sat there within the written sentences – waiting to be picked up by me.

Since around 13 years now, I apply this mental suggestion in the morning and evening, whenever I think of it. It is like a quick meditation on the go.

I was reading through my morning-pages from 14 years ago recently, and surprisingly I found that everything I´ve written down that I wanted to do or what I wanted to achieve in my life is achieved by now! (At leat career-wise) I credit the perfect sentence of affirmation for this as it helped me to skip doubt, anger and fear and allowed me to spend time with the right things and to decide for the right people.

One of my personal affirmations sounds like this: “The right people will find their way into my life”
And I blame this sentence to be blessed with “just-right-clients” who really appreciate what I do.

Imagination is important while you do such a set of brain-exercises, it only works when you can imagine what kind of people should step into your life, what attributes are important (and by that I don´t mean the color of their hair). You get the idea, what do you offer and how can you help them?

That might be a good start to find working auto-suggestions on your own.

Good luck and let me know your story in a comment!

P.S.
Actually I had planned to do an audiobook/ebook about how to succeed as a freelancer without burning out, I believe it will take some time and is postponed because my artistic work is more important right now. But if there is a core aspect of that course, the gist so to speak, the matter about self-affirmation and programming the right mindset is it.