In 1989, my mother died unexpectedly. She and I were very close and I felt her death keenly. A few short months later, my grandmother died. Those weren’t the first deaths I’d ever experienced in my family. After all, I’m a widow.
Having been blindsided, as it were, by Death again, I learned a very important lesson, probably something I should have learned earlier. Life is fast. Sometimes, it’s so fast that you can’t see anything else but the blurring of it.
I decided that if I wanted to be a writer, as I always said I wanted to be, then I was going to have to do it now, because I didn’t know how much time I had left.
In 1990, I quit my very well paying job – cashed in my 401(k), and gave myself a year to make it as a writer. (Hah!) I sat down and began to write in earnest.
This part of the story I’ve told before, probably so often that other people could quote it back to me. But I’m about to tell you something that I’ve never told anyone else.
Around that time, I was hit with some pretty hefty stuff. I’ve alluded to it on this blog, but let’s just say it was life, intruding. Through it all, I was disappointed that I hadn’t made it as a writer.
My rational side said, “Forget writing. You tried it and you couldn’t get published. You’re not good enough, etc.”
But there was a tiny little light inside me that refused to believe that this was all there was for me. I kept writing, even though I think my agent had given up. I’d written three books and had come really close, like going to committee, only to be turned down.
Every day on the way to work, I said this mantra aloud: “I’m a New York Times bestselling author of over twenty books.” That simple phrase was a statement defining what I wanted, a way of “seeing” it.
I said it until I believed it.
I turned off my radio in the morning and all the way to work said my mantra - maybe fifty times. I bet some people thought I was singing. I wasn’t. Or talking to the radio. I wasn’t. At lunch, I went to the parking garage and I sat in my car, and I said the same mantra over and over and over again: “I’m a New York Times bestselling author of over twenty books.”
I needed to feel it so completely that it would become part of me. I needed to believe that it could happen. I needed to wrap my mind around the possibility of it happening. I hadn’t even sold one book, but I was beginning to believe.
On the way home from work, no matter how tired I was, no matter how much I wanted to listen to music, no matter how much I wanted to get out of my own head, I said that mantra again. Before I went to bed I said it. While I was taking a shower, I said it. I probably said it a good two hundred times a day. For two years, I did this. For two solid years. At the end of the two years, my agent called with a three book deal. The rest, they say, is history.
So here is the reason for this very long blog post.
Anything you can believe, you can achieve. Even if you have to find a way to believe it.
What you say is who you are. Thoughts come first, then words, then actions. If you say, “I’m a loser,” trust me, you will be. Your mind works in delightful ways to offer up proof for what you say about yourself.
Why am I so certain of this?
Because today marks the launch of my twenty-fifth book.
Really, how utterly wonderful is that?
