If you think the glass is half full, it really is… and vice-versa unfortunately

I read The Secret awhile back.

I remember being very skeptical at the time. I thought, this is BS, you can’t change your reality just by telling yourself everything is super-duper and you have everything you ever wanted when in reality, life can kinda stink sometimes and we all want things we may never have. The idea that you can get your dream job, a better marriage, even better parking spaces actually made a lot of people laugh and roll their eyes.

But months later, The Secret has stuck with me – as a constant in-your-face challenge to a mindset I’ve always considered “realism.”  Oh, don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of crap days. The Secret hasn’t changed that. But it has changed the way I look at things. When I’m having a bad day, I automatically think now…”what am I doing to attract this?” And interestingly, I can usually point to a negative mindset I’ve had about the thing that happened. Take submissions for example. If I submit my book to someone who I think will reject it, they usually do. Never mind the reasons I tell myself they will reject it-

a) lack of certainty- it’s not like anything on their list, or agentquery.com doesn’t say they like YA but I see one YA sale on their list
b) lack of confidence – they represent so-and-so, I can’t compete with that
c) false humility as padding against rejection – if I don’t expect a YES, I won’t be hurt by a NO
d) miscellaneous ways we writers shoot ourselves in the foot

-the variable reasons don’t matter. All I know for certain is this – every single time I have submitted to an agent and believed I would be rejected as I was writing the letter, tailoring the submission, or hitting send, I have received a rejection letter.  Now I’m not saying positive thinking alone will get you an agent or a contract. I think there is more to it than that (and actually, The Secret covers what the “more” is, and I’ll touch on it below). What I AM saying is: don’t shoot yourself in the foot. Do NOT submit if you think you will fail. If you think you will fail, there’s a good chance you will. Address your fear, confidence, reasons why you think this way. Work with them, through them. Address them any and every way you know how – believe in yourself, pray, feng shui your desk, go to therapy, get some law of attraction coaching. Do whatever it takes to believe in yourself. And THEN submit.

There. I just said the key word – the key piece to the secret of success isn’t just positive thinking, it’s positive BELIEVING. It’s not enough to just want whatever it is you want. When you want something, you’re drawing attention to the fact that you don’t have it. You know that old saying “want what you have“? That can be read two ways. Maybe you read it as “settling” if you believe that what you have is substandard. Or maybe, just maybe, you read it as “I have the talent and know-how to attract the perfect agent for my writing.” Boom. Talk about wanting what you’ve already got! That is believing in yourself. So in fact, The Secret isn’t a crock of sh*t at all. It’s an empowering belief system that encourages people to dig deeper and go with the flow.

There’s one more missing piece. And that’s walking the walk. We all know you can’t get signed just by believing you’ll be signed. You have to write the best book you can write. Write. Rewrite. Educate yourself. Revise. Write again. And you have to put yourself and your work out there for the perfect agent to see. You might not even know who the perfect agent is because the perfect agent needs to see your work and LOVE it before you can be sure they’re perfect. So… While you’re writing… Network. Learn to query. Practice pitching. It’s a lot of work, but the good news is that all this builds confidence.

So maybe you’re still not sold on The Secret. But for me, that difference between just wanting something and believing I can have it was essential for me to understand. Don’t get me wrong, I get bogged down in bad juju some days. We’re all human, you know. But knowing how to switch the energy surrounding bad days has created a whole new game for me.