I have been listening to Blair Singer’s audio training for Little Voice Mastery. It basically gives you the tips and techniques of dealing with the negative inner voice that we all have. The little voice that says, you aren’t good enough, you will fail or you don’t deserve to close that deal.

As a person who struggles with depression, I see similar techniques in my own life to the ones he offers. One of his tips is to focus on things you do well after a failure. So you didn’t close that deal? It was because I wasn’t good enough. Now when you start thinking this way you need to focus on things you DO succeed at. Blair gives the examples of: I got out of bed this morning, I can tie my shoe laces, I can brush my teeth, I can spell my own name. The last one I found quite funny when it is talking about focusing on your successes in what was a business sales setting.

The technique of focusing on what you succeed at is something I have practised for years and didn’t even know it. I used to refer to it as the ‘Celebration of small victories’ or just ‘small victories’ it was at a time in high school where a lot of bad stuff had been going on in my city. (This was the period where my city not only had the highest death rate in teens from OD but also the highest death count just in teens which was multiple times the national average. How does this happen? It was a time when heroin was cheaper than weed. I am sure you can do the math on that one, and was one of the contributing causes for the decriminalisation of marijuana possession in the city).

Small Victories.
You didn’t die in your sleep. Small victory.
You ate breakfast. Small victory.
You made it to school. Small victory.
You made it on time. Another small victory.

Basically you could look at every day as a series of small victories, big victories were anything from finding $5 on the ground, getting the job you wanted, or finally finishing the research project on ‘colour blindness and it’s effect on visual communication’ (okay that one is something I was working on for my Masters Degree, which I am yet to finish)

My outlook was life was a series of victories. Each day it was small victories punctuated with big victories. It wasn’t intentionally meant to be a positive outlook reinforcement, but when you deal with friends and people you know overdosing, committing suicide or passing away in tragic car accidents you do need to have a coping mechanism that switches out negativity for a more positive outlook. Otherwise you are likely to go crazy.