How to Stop Gaslighting Yourself – with Mark Jones

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Rachel Smith: Hello and welcome to The Content Byte, a podcast for freelancers who use their words to make money. I’m Rachel Smith, a freelance journalist, copywriter, and content producer. I’m also the founder of Rachel’s List, a jobs board and community for Australian writers and other creatives. 

Lynne Testoni: I’m Lynne Testoni! I’m a journalist and content writer as well. Rachel and I are your weekly co-hosts, and every week we bring you all kinds of tips, tricks, and some fabulous guests to help you make the most of your freelance business.

We have an interesting topic today, Rachel. Well of course we always do. But this week is even more interesting because it’s about mindset. I know in our recent survey we had a lot of our listeners wanted us to talk about mindset and I think it’s really important, especially when you work for yourself. What do you think? 

Rachel: I think that you can fall into the hole of creating narratives around who you are or what you can do and all that sort of stuff. So, I’m interested in today’s episode because we’re talking about gaslighting ourselves. Being our own worst enemy. Even after 25 years as a freelancer, I’m still guilty of that. We have a great guest on who has done a deep dive into all of this, Mark Jones. 

Lynne: Yes. Such an interesting topic and I can’t wait to introduce Mark. Shall I do that? 

Rachel: Yes, please do. 

Lynne: Okay. Mark Jones is an author, speaker, and mindset strategist. With nearly three decades experience helping leaders and organisations harness the power of storytelling, and we’re all about storytelling.

A speaker and founder of storytelling consultancy, The Story Code. He’s worked with some of the world’s most recognisable brands and interviewed global leaders. As a former journalist his first book was Beliefonomics, and it explored the value of brand’s storytelling. In his new book, The Story Code he turns the lens inward guiding readers to reframe their inner narratives, for resilience, influence, and impact. He’s also the host of the CMO Show podcast, and we love a fellow podcaster. 

Rachel: We do. 

Lynne: Welcome, Mark. 

Rachel: Welcome. 

Mark Jones: Thank you so much for having me, Lynne and Rachel. It’s a delight to be here. 

Rachel: Oh, good. Gaslighting. Talk to us about gaslighting. I mean, we all know writers who are harder on themselves than anyone else that they meet. Is that what you mean by that? When we gaslight ourselves? 

Mark: This is a really fascinating question, gaslighting. We think about it in quite negative terms quite obviously when it relates to somebody else – I’m being gaslit. I think it was a couple of years ago that was a really big buzz topic, right? You are gaslighting me. Well, the concept here is that you are turning the tactics of an external gaslight, inward. So, the research talks about it being a sign of low psychological safety within yourself, which in itself is a really challenging thing to say. You are making yourself psychologically unsafe for yourself. To wrap yourself around that, it’s a bit of a mind bender.

But if I can give you a couple of simple examples, you’re doubting your own feelings. I’m overreacting. I shouldn’t feel this way. Who are you? Why are you? So, this is the inner narrative and in the new book, I’ve put out, The Story Code. I talk about your inner critic, and we can unpack that in a minute, but a couple of other examples where you minimise your own pain. It wasn’t that bad. I mean, it was only a flesh wound, right? Rewrite your memories to favour the critic was another one I was thinking about, well, maybe I was the problem. How often have you felt that meeting went south because I didn’t do the thing that I told myself I was going to do. A couple other great ones like, other people are doing well, so I should be doing well. You invalidate your own needs and then in the last one I was thinking about how we explain away bad behaviour from somebody else. They didn’t mean to do that; I’m just being too sensitive. You’re always too sensitive, why do you always think that way? And this is really interesting from my perspective because what I’m all about is inviting people to think a little bit differently and to say, this isn’t a character flaw.

You are not broken. It’s a storytelling problem. The stories you’re telling yourself are negative, and we need to be thinking about techniques to turn that around. If it’s a story that you’re telling yourself, it means it can be rewritten.

Rachel: Isn’t it true though those stories get so embedded in our psyche almost that to unravel them can be a massive process in itself. Probably best done in therapy, I don’t know. 

Mark: To be clear, I’m not a therapist, but I am a long term if you like, or as you said, three decades or so, storyteller and my experience has always been in narratives, understanding how stories are formed, developed and shaped. And then when you do a lot of the research on the psychological side, yes, you do find things like chronic stress, trauma, childhood situations that have fed through into the reasons why and sort of how does this story get fed and where do these scripts come from? And I think that’s a thousand percent the work you need to be doing with a therapist in that regard. What happens though is that once you’ve understood the root, the origin, the fact that it keeps coming up, obviously you need to be working through that.

Then when it comes to how do I deal with this on the day to day, what are some additional techniques?  How can I think about rewriting that story? How can I start taking control of it so that I can start becoming the person I want to be, instead of allowing these old scripts to rule my life.

Lynne: So interesting. I sometimes think that it’s a bigger risk, these sort of internal narratives for creatives and in creative industries, because so much of what we do is subjective. I mean, if you are adding up figures, there has to be a right answer. But when you’re creating work, it’s harder to judge sometimes, isn’t it?

Mark: Particularly if you are working on your own or in a small group or maybe a loose collection of friends who pass work amongst one another, it’s still a relatively lonely existence. And in the creative industries in particular, we do have a big problem here, which is that, to start with, from my experience, they tend to be people who are more in tune with themselves – who they are and what they’re doing, and tend to soak up what’s happening in society far more intuitively than, than perhaps other sectors and they have higher emotional intelligence from my experience. Actually, fifteen years ago I co-founded a marketing, communications and storytelling agency with my wife. We’re still working together to this day. So, I spent a long time in that space as well as being a journalist for ten years prior to that.

What I’ve noticed is actually an increasing sense of rising stress within people. A few quick stats that illustrate what’s going on. For content creators and influencers of a survey found that around, 73% of respondents in one survey reported burnout at least occasionally. Marketing Week had a career and salary survey this year and more than 50% reported emotional exhaustion. 58% felt overwhelmed. And then there was another survey called the Mentally Healthy Survey by the Healthy Change Group. About 70% of professionals in media marketing creative sectors said they had experienced burnout in the past year. 

Rachel: Wow. 

Mark: It gets worse, by the way. So, what I’ve also found in my research for The Story Code.

Lynne: Yay! 

Mark: I know, I know, I know. Is that the media marketing creative sector? Is up there in terms of burnout, stress, trauma levels with first responders. So, people who are responding to, so in fire and ambulance and so forth. If you put it in that context, you’re like, hang on a minute, what’s going on? This is obviously not good and one of the things that I found out in my research, it’s the combination of always being on. Also not really having a clear sense of what’s going to happen next, and you are responding. 

Rachel: We know about that. Right now, especially. 

Mark: Right? What’s the next question? No. Then the other thing is you are at the whim of clients. Which in the media and creative and marketing space, those clients are many and varied. Some of them are locked down psychologically and others are wildly loose. It’s like you’re the ball in a pinball machine, you’re sort of pinging around not knowing what you’re doing. And one more thing, if I might add, Microsoft put out a report earlier this year where it had studied the metadata from the Microsoft 365 platform that many of us use, and they looked at the trends and they came up with this term called the infinite workday, meaning we’re just working all the time.

In the creative world, how do you manage yourself so that you put some bookends on the day and maybe even protect your weekends and your nights? One of the things that really struck me from that research. They said there’s about two minutes between any type of digital notification that most of us deal with on a day-to-day basis.

Rachel: Wow. 

 Mark: So, emails, phone pings from your phone and your whatever, right? So, when you think about all of that together, I mean, no wonder we’re having a hard time.

Lynne: So interesting. 

Rachel: It really is the perfect storm. If you think about, we’re carrying around these unhelpful narratives and we’re potentially burnt out and we’re dealing with all these distractions as well. So, you can never get into a state of flow. But I just want to go back a little. Just to ask you about the narratives again, what happens if we don’t get on top of those? If we let those consume us, what can that do to our freelance businesses? 

Mark: How bad do you want it to get? I think is probably.

Lynne: We want some positives here, Mark.

Mark: Well, so let’s get to the positive in a second. What can it do to us? Well, at a very simplistic level, and again, speaking from experience, it can actually hold you back from being everything that you’d love to be. 

Rachel: So pricing, you can’t, you worry about that sort of thing, putting your prices up.

Mark: Oh, well that’s a great example. If you don’t think you’re worth it in the marketplace, people might say, you’re worth this per hour, or the project should be this. You can actually hold yourself back financially because you don’t believe you’re worth what the market says you are. So, you’re not asking for what you deserve. That’s a massive thing. You may not pitch for projects, for assignments that you would love to do, but you don’t have the confidence to do so because you think, well, I don’t have enough experience for that yet. So, this is what we think of as the inner critic. And so, if you listen to your inner critic, which I think of as like annoying colleague who turns up and says, you can’t do that. You’ve just been given the shiny new thing, and it pops up and says you can’t do it. If we listen to that too much, it can really hold us back and it can damage us in all sorts of ways.

Lynne: It’s so interesting. I do think sometimes people also get particular narratives. We’ve certainly, one of the things we’ve talked about on the podcast before is about finance and money. That a lot of people say, well, I’m just bad with money, or I’m bad with finances, or I’m bad with the business side. They might be feeling strong about their creative skills, but less about that. Or sometimes they say, well, I just don’t work well with large groups or I’m not good at networking, or it is so easy to get a little idea about yourself or a limitation that really can hold you back.

Mark: Lynne, can I just say that particular thing fascinated me because I did the hard work for myself. 

Lynne: Really? 

Mark: Because I wanted to know why was I thinking those things? Particularly when I went from being an introverted journalist. Because hashtag or journalists, most of them are just, we’d rather just keep to ourselves for a bit. Write a story and send it off to this big wide world and being really kind of caught by imposter syndrome. What have I got to offer? And the examples you were just giving Lynne, are what we call limiting beliefs and limiting beliefs actually point to your identity and this is tough stuff, right? When you start looking into it. 

I’m not worth that much, is actually an identity signal. That’s why I’m so passionate about this, because we need to be thinking about the positive side, Rachel? Bit of positive, see and the opposite of the opposite of a limiting belief I call a healthy belief. So, I’m not worth that much is the limiting belief. I am worth that much is the healthy belief, but then it’s got to be backed by evidence from your own life, and I think about that through a story lens, which would be, I can’t lie to myself, or at least I can try, but it doesn’t work.

You might say, I am worth that much because I know I’ve worked in this game for twenty years, or I know that X number of clients have told me that this is just the best thing that they’ve seen in a long time, why don’t you raise your prices or whatever the story is. It’s actually got to be based in facts because you are the expert in your own life as it turns out. So that’s the pivot, Lynne, to your point about these things that we carry around, and you can see just even in that example, how transformational it can be when you start challenging these identity signals that are really holding you back in so many areas of your life.

Rachel: I love that. Does that relate to your Beliefonomics theory as well in any way? 

Mark: Yes. So, look a quick skip through history. I published Beliefonomics in 2020 and for anybody at home, if you want to publish a book in a pandemic, don’t do that. 

Rachel: No good. No book two are allowed.

Mark: I think I sold four copies. No more than that, but it was a tough time. As we all know, the heartbeat of Beliefonomics was as a storyteller. Long time in journalism and my own agency. As I was putting myself out as this expert, a chief storyteller, and it had been niggling me for a long time. So, what’s the heartbeat of storytelling? And I really have got to do myself and my client’s justice by going deep because I’m really good, intuitively and from an experiential. There was no problem with the quality of the work, but if you asked me to teach a course on it, I’d really have to sort of stop and think.

So that was really the genesis of that book. And a long story short, the heartbeat of really fantastic storytelling is where we combine the hearts and minds, and I call that a belief moment. It’s where you go from either not being aware of something or maybe having a negative view of something to really switching to thinking the opposite. Right? What’s a quick example? I don’t believe rom-coms can ever be any good. You watch this amazing rom-com, and it turns out the characters and the plot, and the structure is amazing and you find yourself actually loving a rom-com. Well, there’s two things that go on with your hearts and minds. You’ve got the intellect and these minds, and then your heart is obviously moved. The thing that really is critical in that book, and I think applies to everybody and I think the listener, is we can be really lulled into a false belief that the knowledge, the ideas, my facts, my content is what’s going to get me over the line. But all the research and psychology say that decision making is about, 30% intellectual and 70% emotional. 

If you are working in a world where, and we know this from behavioural economics, we’re irrational, inconsistent humans who one day like steak and veg and the other day want to go to Indian, or pick any food, right, as an example. You’ve really got to understand the heartbeat of your customers, and you’ve got to understand how do I create a story that emotionally engages with them and contains the facts? So, that’s the Beliefonomics story. And it was also about how do I become a better storyteller? Of course, that was, I’ve just sort of given you the nub of that book, but how can I ultimately become better at storytelling? 

The flip in my journey is that I thought, well, hang on. What about myself? How can I get better at telling myself stories? And so that’s where The Story Code came along. 

Lynne: Oh, so interesting. You’ve talked a bit about burnout as well, and that it’s basically a mismatch between experts and reality. Do you want to take us through what you mean by that? 

Mark: I have this model. I call it experience. What happens in life is that we have a set of expectations or a vision for how things will play out in the future and then occasionally we get confronted with reality that is not that. And when we think about our own lives, both professionally and personally, quite often what happens, particularly in your late thirties, forties, into your fifties where you’re like, I thought I would be this type of person with this sort of scenario, family or living in a certain place or doing a certain type of job.

If you’ve had that as a subconscious narrative that you’ve not really been consciously working towards that set of expectations. And then you wake up one day and you’re like; I don’t actually have any of that. The gulf that creates, or the tension that creates, because they’re so far apart can actually be something that leads to people’s burnout. The existential midlife crisis. These are the things that pull us apart. If you’re not aware of it, it becomes a really confronting moment in life. 

Rachel: And how did that, did that sounds like you’re talking from personal experience, I mean, a personal experience of burnout. 

Mark: In fact, I devoted the whole first chapter of the book to this. I have a story. It’s my Bunnings moment. I’ve got a Bunning story, and I’ll maybe summarise it, but I was leading our business, the CEO of our agency and we’d had two really tough years. We’d lost some big contracts. I was carrying the weight of the business. Would we be able to recover and turn this thing around? Married with four kids and two dogs, a big mortgage in Sydney. And I was carrying a lot of stress for a very long period of time and didn’t have the tools and the self-awareness to really deal with it. I think like a lot of blokes we just carry on. My job is to keep soldiering on, just keep swimming to quote a movie. And what happened was I not only burnt out, I had a massive panic attack on aisle ten in Bunnings Thornleigh in Sydney, and it was a terrible day. I’d woken up with a headache, it got worse. And by the time I got there, I thought I could just keep going, have a can of coke. More coffee, more coffee. It didn’t work. And long story short, I had this incredible, extreme panic attack, and the recovery process from that was years, certainly in the short term, away from work for a couple of weeks. And then it took me a long time to really get back into business. Diagnosed with depression and of course one of the things that anybody who’s been through that type of experience, your body is also not okay. Your cortisol levels are high. You’ve been running on adrenaline, your adrenaline gland, your adrenal glands are burnt out. I was having like three double shots and two cups of tea a day. My adrenal glands were shot and so your body is wrecked, your mind is wrecked, your heart’s wrecked, your spirit’s wrecked, and it just took me a really, really long time to recover.

So, I’m here today. I’m smiling and I’m well and I’ve learnt a lot. But I think one of my big messages is firstly be open and vulnerable about where you’re at in life when people ask how you’re doing. If they’re a close friend and you trust them, be real about it, right? You’ve got to face this stuff because, there’s a growing awareness that our body actually keeps tabs on what we’re doing and at some point, if you don’t look after yourself, it’s just going to say, and we’re done. Now we’re going to stop and sometimes that’s not pretty. 

Rachel: That body keeps the score thing is, it’s a big thing.

Mark: It’s a great book, by the way. 

Rachel: Oh, I haven’t read that. Okay. I’ll put it on my list. 

Lynne: Wow. I’d love to go back to those internal narratives because I’d love to know how we can change them and be a bit kinder to ourselves. 

Mark: Yes, yes. I teach this concept called the mirror moment. And if you can picture yourself sort of looking into the rear-view mirror of your car, where you’re just sort of catching yourself thinking, I don’t think I can go through with this meeting or whatever that narrative is. There are three stages to a mirror moment. It’s literally where you’re looking at yourself in the eye, perhaps staring at your own soul a little bit dramatically. But we do this, right? This is the moment where you’re like, I’m not sure.

So, three things. Firstly, catch yourself. What is that story you are telling yourself? Is it a limiting belief? Like, I’m not the person who can or, or is it an inner critic that’s firing up to say, you haven’t got this, right? So, catch it, then flip it. And the theory of change here is that there is always an equally true positive version of that story. Now when you flip it, you’re actually saying, what’s the exact opposite of this thing? So, I don’t have this or maybe I don’t have the ability to make this thing work, to I do have the ability to make this thing work. So that’s the flip, right? So, asking yourself, what is the flip? And then you’ve got to anchor it. And I think for the listener and as a storyteller, you’ll get this, which is, what is a story from my own life that I know is true? That I can’t lie to myself about that. That one time I sent in an article, and it was just straight to the front page, or I stood up and spoke to a crowd of people and got a standing ovation or whatever the success was that from your own experience is actually true, you need to anchor yourself in that. And so over time, this is where you start going from having an inner critic to an inner coach and your inner coach is really that retrained personal narrative that is leaning more and more on those anchor moments. And that’s what I’ve been doing for all this time. Happily, the research supports that approach as well. So how do we be kinder to ourselves? The short answer is we need to tell ourselves better stories. 

Rachel: I do think as well, if you are constantly putting yourself down in your head or whatever, I could be wrong, I’m assuming this is possibly correct, but you are creating neural pathways that make it easier for you to keep following those pathways and putting yourself down and telling yourself you can’t do it, or no one’s accept price. 

Lynne: Make you fall back. 

Rachel: So, you always have to recreate your neural pathways into a more positive groove, I guess.

Mark: There’s a lot of amazing neuroscience out on this, and I am not a neuroscientist, but I know how to read, and I know that the people who’ve done the research talk about the value of that, of these simple, practical steps. What matters to me is that you have to believe in your own story in order to create those pathways because there’s a lot of people that talk about the neuroscience and the neural pathways, and they get very excited and that’s fine. But at the end of the day, for your own story we’re talking about some pretty profound stuff. Now, I don’t know if the concept of believing yourself, it’s actually one of the old Greek words for this actually equates to trust. So, do you trust in yourself? Do you trust in your story? Do you trust yourself that you can do that thing again? Right? And I find that really kind of reassuring because what you’re doing is backing yourself. And what you find is when you back yourself into an opportunity and it’s like, I’m going to step out there and I’m going to give this a red-hot crack. There’s a lot of confidence that comes through taking those big leaps of faith and you’re not doing it in sort of reckless abandon. Although if that’s your personality and you love doing that, carry on. But if you’re somebody who really needs to psych yourself up, I think this is really important that we start saying, I’ve done this before, and I know why it worked last time. I actually took some time out to figure out what it was that got me over the line. This is really profound professional development stuff that a lot of people don’t necessarily set aside time to do it. But as you can tell, I’m pretty passionate about it because it makes an enormous difference.

Rachel: I think that’s true and I think right now that we are seeing so much fear around AI. We’re seeing so much fear about, I’ve built up my career for X amount of decades or years, or whatever it is. 

Lynne: The whole paradigm is shifting. 

Rachel: There a lot of people are just also, apart from the fear, they’re experiencing all this grief, I thought I’d be top of my game by now, and it feels like it’s been taken away and all these different ways. I mean, there’s all that pressure and negativity that we are facing if you’re making a living from your words. What would be your advice? That’s such a huge question. I’m sorry to throw that at you, but what would be your advice to people feeling that way and feeling those emotions at the moment?

Mark: This is a really, really good question. I’ll take you back to my early days as a freelancer and you need to get better at taking action when you start to see the patterns emerging. Let me explain – I was getting up to a dollar a word in my early days as a freelance journalist, and then I was given an opportunity to do some corporate writing, and they were like, I could get away with $2.20 a word. And I was like, what am I doing writing journalism? I’ve got a family to feed, right? And so, the issue was, the limiting belief or the fear was then I won’t be a journalist, who am I? Right? I’m going to the dark side. So, they’re very visceral identity markers that you’ve kind of got to wrestle with. But the thing was, the narrative was changing where corporates wanted to produce more content. They still by the way, you need to produce a lot more content and this is not an ad for corporates or anything like that. But the thing is, you’ve got to recognise where the market is shifting because the markets are always shifting and you’ve got to be prepared to listen to what the market is telling you and then act on it. There’s an interesting kind of Venn diagram of things that have come through as, where’s your expertise? What am I really passionate about doing? How can I make a difference?

Then there’s kind of a sense of being the right person at the right time and being aware of it. So, you can be the right person to write for a particular niche area, but you haven’t recognised you’re the only one who understands this and maybe if I stepped into that, I could put my prices up a bit or I could own more of it, or I could make a bigger go at it. 

So, there’s a bit of a strategic lens. There’s a lot of people who talk about the concept of narrative intelligence, which I think is very, that just sound, it makes you sound really intelligent when you say that but what I love about narrative intelligence too, to our own shared story here is that we need to consciously understand that we’ve been connecting the dots on what’s going on and now I’m going to take some action. I think as storytellers, it’s very easy to just be aware of the story and say, oh, that’s nice and then move on. But actually, clients will always tell you what they want and where things are going. They won’t be quite as specific in terms of what that means you should do but if you think you’re going to be doing the same thing today well into the future, aside from the fact that I believe we’ll all be telling stories in different ways you’ve really got rocks in your head. You’ve got to be thinking about what are the different ways of expressing my creativity? How can I reshape it in a new way? And if it feels uncomfortable, guess what? It feels uncomfortable for everyone. Like we’re all figuring this out as we go along. So, I think maybe that’s a bit of an answer to your question. 

Lynne: It’s interesting, isn’t it, because that’s what your book is all about, is about understanding the self-talk and the inner critic, making it more positive. So, when somebody reads your book, what are you hoping they’ll take away from that? 

Mark: Oh, only just that it transforms their life, that’s all. 

Lynne: And what was expectations and reality back there.

Mark: I could still be a bit of an idealist. The bottom line is that I’m know myself, I’m an encourager and I want to encourage leaders to show them that there is a way forward. If you are feeling stuck, if you follow The Story Code, this is a way to get unstuck. So, really what I want to do is create pathways for people. That’s the bottom line for this book and if I can just the code is actually an acronym, so, there’s just four steps and it’s been interesting to hear people’s reaction to this because it’s not an instant fix. I just want to be clear, when you talk about rewriting your own story, it’s even for storytellers, it takes a while because we’re talking about the heart stuff, the identity stuff as expressed externally. 

So very briefly, the first step is C, challenge. You’ve got to challenge that internal narrative, the inner critic and the limiting beliefs you’ve really got to go after. What are they? What do I say to myself? Go sit down over a coffee and really figure this stuff out. You want to be able to learn how? How am I going to flip that from a critic, a coach from limiting belief to a healthy belief. 

Then the second one – O, is about overriding, and you want to be looking at, this is another level, which maybe we can talk about another time, but what’s the narrative? What’s the story you’re living within? Are you in a rags to riches story tale, fairytale in your head? Or are you, like Flight of the Concords or the sort of rags to rags and you’ll never get anywhere? Is that the story you’re telling yourself? What are these narratives and am I the hero in the hero’s journey or am I the bit character, right? Or the mentor, or the helper, right? Who are you? What’s your archetype? And we actually all have them, and we exist in a story that we’re creating all the time, so you really need to overwrite the old destructive narrative for a new one. 

D is making a decision, okay, I’ve got an old story. I’m actually going to make a decision to write a new story. And the process of writing that new story takes a bit of time, but there’s a decision point you’ve got to go through saying, I’m done with being that person who doesn’t accept new opportunities if that’s the case. The last piece is encode, and I chose that word because it’s about our habits and the lifestyle that we inhabit. You want to encode into your life a whole set of sustainable habits that you can keep up. And this is where I talk about the four pillars. So, everybody is quite aware of the first three, which is you’ve got to eat well, you’ve got to sleep well, and you’ve got to exercise well. I got a lot of therapy, paid a lot of money to get that advice. It was very disappointing. Could have probably read in this self-help book what it is but let me tell you, from the depths of the bad place that you got to get that stuff sorted. Right? So, you got to get that stuff sorted. The fourth one is of course, self-talk. What we don’t realise that that actually dictates the strength and commitment you’ll have across all of those three areas.

So, when you can set up and encode into your lifestyle, and habits that you can sustain in a healthy way that bring you life, you’re actually going to be able to sustain this new story. I’m living it myself and that’s kind of how I kind of came to this place, that it doesn’t intuitively feel like it’s going to work because writers and creatives are a little bit cynical. Love you all, been there myself. But the thing is, we are great at writing stories. Just stop writing the bad ones. 

Rachel: It’s really interesting, isn’t it? We’ve talked a lot about freelancers and how we can have these limiting beliefs, but do you reckon it would surprise people what about the people at the top end of town, who you coach? How much they have them as well. We see these people there at the top of their game and they’re leading big companies. Are they also falling prey to that? 

Mark: You’d be blown away. And this is where I need to stay professional. No names, no packed drill. However, accountants, c-suite executives, CEOs, self-doubt, imposter syndrome. Heads of finance that don’t think they’re very good at accounting. I mean, it’s a great example that I’ve shared and honestly before, because this person I was coaching, confessed to really not feeling like they’d achieved whatever bar was necessary to call them a good accountant. I said, alright. So, in the last two years, how many promotions have you had? He said, oh, about four. I said, right now, were they lying to you? Or were you actually doing something good? Oh, no, I was doing really well. Okay. So actually, we’ve got a story problem here, not a facts problem. Like you’re telling yourself the wrong story. You are actually quite good at this. What’s your title again? And it was a big, long, fancy title. And the issue for me, and this by the way, again, is a human problem regardless of who you are, where you live, your background, the rank you have in a company. If you don’t address these limiting beliefs, this inner critic, this self-doubt early in your career it turns out it doesn’t go away.

You can’t promote yourself into a better story. And I mean, through career progression or even just doing more of the same work as a freelancer. It’s really struck me that work. It’s one thing to read the stats and we talked about that earlier, but then when you’re talking to people in quite remarkable roles, still wrestling with this stuff. Think about the amount of mental energy that’s being wasted on that narrative in your head when you could be out there doing something else. To be honest, that stuff drives me. I just want to see more people kind of taking off the handbrake. Imagine how fast they’d go. If you were, and this is my definition of success by the way, which is where you’ve got a really strong alignment between your internal story and your external one. So, your external one we’re talking about your career, your title, however you promote yourself externally and LinkedIn and so forth. It’s got to be synced up with who you are in here. The internal story, because again, this dissonance, this expectation, the vision and reality gap, if you are living that for too long, where it’s, it’s too far apart, it turns out it’s not sustainable.

Lynne: I do think that social media does tend to exaggerate those gaps. It’s so easy. It’s surprisingly easy to present, to be so in control, whether it’s on LinkedIn or Instagram or something and it actually makes you feel worse because that you’re inside you’re not living up to it. Do you think that’s true?

Mark: I do and I’ve got a quick antidote because we’ve going to need more positive things. 

Lynne: We do. 

Lynne: We need some positive and practical tools. Yes, yes. Start with that. 

Mark: So, I’m also a professional speaker in addition to being an author. I’m a member of Professional Speakers Australia, which is an amazing association, an organisation of like-minded people, and it’s really quite a remarkable organisation because you are hanging around with your competitors in inverted commas. And yet here we are cheering each other on openly sharing how we launched a book, better ways to command presence on stage or whatever the topic might be. That’s remarkable in any industry. I don’t know what industry. List them might be when you see your quote unquote competitor out there, cheer them on. Verbally write it down if it’s safe, depending on the context. But if you and your heart can cheer on somebody, what it does is it takes away the power of the comparison narrative because the comparison narrative is fear. It’s a sense that I’ll never be that way or I can’t do that way, but you actually let that go when you cheer them on. I actually want the best for you. I was describing this to somebody who came to our monthly meeting for PSA and I actually said, and this is an unofficial, according to Mark definition of what makes speakers tick. I actually think where it’s the magic pudding model, right?

I think it’s unlimited opportunity in the speaking game. And if you have a magic pudding mindset, if I could call it that. It’s the idea that that person can get a gig and then it grows back and another person can get a gig and its actually kind of true in this space that we’re speaking about too because it turns out people want more stories. So, if you flip from feeling like it’s a diminishing returns model to a never-ending series of opportunities, and again, this is the mindset piece where you can flip that script, suddenly you’re like, someone’s doing really well, carry on, right? And you just sidestep that whole thing. And so, I practice that. I’m going to tell you I’m not always perfect because sometimes I see people on a stage, I’m like, oh, I’d really like to be doing that. 

Lynne: That abundance mindset isn’t it. 

Rachel: It’s huge. That’s what we really subscribe to. I think the freelancer alone in their home office, not having a tribe around them because they’re worried, they’re going to lose their contacts or someone else will commission them instead of them. All of that just goes out the window when you’re in a good community and people are sharing freely, the abundance just, it just happens. It comes to you.

Mark: Correct. And get to know them, by the way. So, if there’s a freelancer that’s doing really well, pick up the phone, send them a note and say, hey, can we hang out? Can I buy you a coffee because you want to learn what they’re doing, obviously, and it turns out you might surprise yourself that you’ve got some experiences that could encourage them as well. And so only by getting closer to these people that fascinate you can actually turn that fear into something really amazing. 

Rachel: I would love to ask you something that came up when you were talking about, how to, when all these different kind of tactics you can use to rewrite these beliefs. Would you be a fan of journaling for doing that kind of thing? Can that be powerful? 

Mark: It is a thousand percent powerful. 

Rachel: I fail at it dismally. 

Lynne: You need to change that belief. 

Rachel: I do. And I need to do it as well.

Mark: I’m a selective journaler. But actually, the habit that I’ve got into because if you think to yourself identity wise, again, limiting belief, I’m not a journaler, find the path of least resistance. What is a way that you can jot down notes or capture ideas? The good news is we’ve got so much tech; you can do this in a thousand different ways. A couple of things that I do, I’m in the Apple ecosystem, so I use the Notes app, but I use it kind of a little bit on steroids. I’m like a digital bower bird. I’ve got a home, work, speaking, book. I’ve got all these folders and then sub folders, and I’m constantly capturing ideas and throwing them in there. Feeding them in there. Then every so often I go back and I reflect on them, and I write and I capture ideas. And I’ve got into the habit of actually plonking that into ChatGPT into then projects in ChatGPT. And start feeding in ideas inside these projects. And I’m using that as my sort of real time diary so that I’m thinking about an idea and I’m not letting it flick off into the universe. I’m on my phone if I’m travelling or my laptop and I just keep it going. Then you set aside some time, ideally once a week where you go back through it, carve out an hour and what have I been thinking about, if it’s the personal growth journey and take some time again. What’s the golden thread through all of this? So, I’m just sort of in the daily habit of doing that now. I kind of call it like a real time diary. 

Lynne: Oh, that’s nice.

Rachel: We had someone else on the podcast who used to do that, like had a very robust folder system in notes and it’s amazing. I just have a million notes, but no folders. I’ve got to get into this folder. 

Mark: Oh, folders and sub folders. Sub folders are the key. They’re going to save you every time. And the great thing is you can search everything, so from the top you can just say, oh, what’s that thing? It was somebody, somebody five weeks ago. What? And so, you type in Melbourne, CEO, ex, whatever keywords it is, and then up comes your note. But it helps you structure your thinking. And I do it in real time too. This is another thing, if you are listening to somebody or you’re taking photos, take the photos inside the notes thing so that it plonks straight into that container, so you don’t have to go back later and drag in photos and images.

So, all this kind of stuff and talk to ChatGPT, it’s not your therapist. But I’m thinking about this and what are the connection points between this? And then grab those notes and then start putting them somewhere where you can work with it. That’s kind of how I’ve hacked my way through this and I think everybody will have their own way. I got to take my hat off to anyone who’s, and actually like my wife, she’s got like books and books of diaries, from journaling over the years. We move house and there’s all the diaries, right. I take my hat off to her, right? Some people are like that. 

Rachel: It’s a commitment. 

Lynne: So, if our listeners want to future-proof their business and set themselves up in a nice way, what are the top three things they could do to start? 

Mark: Okay, we didn’t rehearse this which is okay, so I’m going to give you my best crack at this. So how are they going to set themselves up in the best way? 

Well, obviously you’ve got to rewrite your story, but I mentioned the code, so I’d encourage you to look at the story code, but with the lens that I mentioned earlier about that sync between your internal and your external. So really maybe do a bit of a diagnostic on what’s out of sync right now would probably be the thing, I would also then say what? Here’s a really good one that comes to mind. When people say, oh, I really liked that or enjoyed that great article. If that’s the context, ask them why. What did they like? I’ve been speaking quite a bit lately in relation to the book coming out or at a keynote and they’ll say, oh, that was great. Oh, excellent. What exactly did you like? Asking a few more questions. So, listen to the questions you get asked, and then just go that extra bit further. And the reason I say that is that your personal growth will skyrocket. You’ll suddenly be identifying gaps and opportunities that maybe you hadn’t thought of before. Really pay attention to those questions. And the last one – I’m going to say something a little bit counterintuitive – rest. 

Not sleep. I said that before, but rest is like restful activities. And I’m saying this in the lead up to Christmas, but I have really, personally and professionally grown so much during my daily restful activity, which is walking the dog for an hour because I’m listening to podcasts, I’m reflecting on ideas, I’m taking notes, and I’m using it as that daily reprogramming. Or reinforcing ideas and there’s a lot of science to talk about this. The ideas in the shower, you get an idea in at the gym. I think we are living at a time where we have really, I think, minimised the value of quiet and slow. Right? We’re always busy and we’re always noisy. 

If you can do the opposite of that, which is what I’ve been trying to do. It turns out your brains alive. I mean, obviously, but like with ideas. So, that restful piece is about the growth is a byproduct of you getting that alignment piece right. Growth is not – you don’t just go and grab it necessarily. It’s what happens after you’ve done that internal work. It just flows. I hope that’s encouraging. I think we got three things. Was that three things? 

Lynne: That was three things. 

Rachel: It’s very encouraging. 

Mark: I might need you to summarise them back. 

Rachel: It’s rest, ask more questions when people say, I really loved that thing you did. And the first one – retell your story. 

Mark: Rewrite your story and can I briefly summarise that? Is that everyone has an old story of who they think they are, or were and, you needed a new story, right? This is the person I want to be. That what I mean by that first point. 

Rachel: Well, I would love to finish on that, but we have a question we ask all our guests, so I’m just going to slip this one in quickly before we go. We ask everybody about their favourite tech tools and tips, and obviously you are very keen on ChatGPT for connecting the dots with different things. But is there anything else you’d be lost without? 

Mark: What would I be lost without? Look, aside from my phone, I would say another AI tool that I’m using quite a bit is Google’s NotebookLM, And the reason why is, I’ll give you an example. I got together forty or fifty academic papers in my topic area around narratives and the stories we tell ourselves and so forth and I uploaded them all to NotebookLM and I said, give me the golden thread through all these reports. And then bam, there it was. That was two, three weeks’ worth of work just done in an instant. So that’s one example. I use it for that and all sorts of other sort of thinking. Things that I do with different sources, you can produce a video out of it, you can produce a podcast, as you’re probably aware but the key thing is for those of us who want to know the sources, it also shows you in the PDF where it got that line from. 

So, look that won’t be new to a lot of people, but if you’re in the business of identifying narratives and thinking about the threads between things, I don’t know how I lived without it.

Rachel: It’s amazing. I’m only really new to using it, but it’s so great, isn’t it? To create a collection of something and then distil it into a way of looking at that information really quickly. You say, it just saves so much research time. 

Mark: And importantly you can do it there knowing that it’s not going to go out to the internet. So, there’s a container from a security point of view or governance point of view, that’s really important for those of us mindful of copyright and other related issues. 

Lynne: I think it’s really, actually you are the first person to mention the LM, the Google NotebookLM which is interesting because it is coming up a lot in various things, and that’s the first time that somebody’s mentioned it. So, I still think while people know about it, not everyone’s using it to its full capability. But thank you, Mark, that’s been such a good chat, and I think we’ve got positive somewhere in there.

Mark: Well, look I can I give you a quick positive as a way out because I am a different person to who I am five years ago, and so the encouragement I had for everybody is when you begin the process of rewriting your story, it really does change everything. You have the opportunity to step into a really, a different way of living and it’s not as hard as you think. It might take a while, but you will get there, so onwards.

Lynne: Onwards.

Rachel: Onwards. Love it. Love it. Thank you very much, mark, for coming on. You can find all the links on where to find Mark and his new book The Story Code. We’ll pop all that into the show notes and if you loved this episode, leave us a review or a rating so other writers and creatives can find the show.

Mark: Thanks so much. 

Rachel: Fantastic. Thanks everyone. Bye. 

Lynne: Bye. 

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Credits:

Connect with Mark via his website: https://www.markjones.au/ 

Find Lynne www.lynnetestoni.com 

Find Rachel www.rachelsmith.com.au 

Rachel’s List www.rachelslist.com.au 

If you have questions you’d like us to answer in our next Q&A episode, just send them here.

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Episode edited by Marker Creative Co www.markercreative.co