Fairytales In Business

Just off to Write Club and we recorded our “Fairytales” episode for WriteClubThePodcast.com. This is appropriate because following on from last week’s Vzine 076, I’ve been thinking about where this feeling of “someone’s coming to save me” comes from. Also manifesting it in business as some external event or new shiny object that is going to be the “one big thing” that makes all the difference…

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Clicks And Leads is a “tongue in cheek” digital marketing Vzine by entrepreneur, author, podcaster, speaker, Nicola Cairncross.

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Hi, it’s Nicola and I’m back for episode 77 of the Vzine. I’d better not put numbers in in case I get it wrong, because I’m bound to.

Yeah, it’s been a great week out here. It’s been thunderstorms and lightning, which means that the power goes off on a regular basis, and the internet goes off on a regular basis. I’ve bought myself a Calor gas stove, a little tiny one, so I can make a cup of tea when that happens, because there’s nothing worse than not being able to have a hot drink.

I’ve been out and about this week. I’ve been to writing club. I’ve been to reading club. I’ve been out for dinner, Dave’s Dining Club. The ex-pats certainly know how to get a bit of action going on once the summer wears off. And I’m just off to Write Club where we’re going to plan for a few episodes of WriteClubThePodcast.com over Christmas. So if you’re a writer, or if you’re a reader, do come along and check out that.

This week, I would like to talk to you about how fairytales affect us

How the stories we’re told growing up, affect how we behave as adults. And the reason this was brought to my attention was because we were talking about fairytales in our Write Club podcast, and how they grew up from the folk tales, which means that they weren’t invented by any government to indoctrinate us. They were invented by women telling stories around the bedside or the campfire. And I think it just grew up to reflect how life was like in the olden days.

But when I think about the kind of fairytales I read when I was a child, before I went on to science fiction and fantasy, which is a grown-up version of fairytales, I think about how I had this subliminal thought that someone was going to come and rescue me at some point.

And I remember when that realisation came to me that that was completely false, that nobody actually was coming to rescue me at all, not even my parents, was about when I was about 37 or 38, which is really late in life, isn’t it? It really is.

It came to me when I was married and I had children. And, somehow, I had this subliminal thought that at every stage in life, I would get more grown-up or that someone would come and rescue me and everything would suddenly be made alright.

I remember how I felt when I realised that nobody was coming to save me. There was no prince in shining armour on a mounted steed with a sword.

I’d had this feeling for so long that I’d be saved at some point, and I don’t know where it came from. The only place I can think it came from was from fairytales, and, perhaps, that was my moment of growing up when I had my kids and I realised if it’s to be, it’s up to me, and nobody is coming, not even my parents.

I think people who’ve got really good parents must have this problem because they must always have their parents to fall back on. Unless the parents do a really good job of parenting and helping their child to go beyond them and to become self-resourceful rather than falling back on them. I think that’s a very tricky job indeed.

And my family background was very difficult and different to that. We had a narcissistic mother who passed on her tendencies rather, and she always thought everything revolved around her. So, obviously, I grew up with this feeling that she would always be there to save me but, of course, when she went beyond being able to save herself, let alone anyone else, it took a while for me to catch up.

So why am I telling you all this personal stuff? I think it’s because you need to look at yourself.

And it came out of this conversation I had with my client last week, where she said, “Nothing’s happening.” And I thought, where do we get this feeling that something is going to happen, something magical, something external somewhere, something outside ourselves?

Where does that feeling come from?

I can only assume it’s in the stories we’re told as children. Does it have the same effect on boys? Well perhaps they are brought up to be the ones who have to go and rescue the fair maiden, the damsel in distress, fight the dragon. So, perhaps they have a little bit of more of a sense that when they go out in the big, wide world, it’s going to be down to them. And perhaps they grasp that earlier. I don’t know.

Perhaps, perhaps everyone, men and women, has it in the sense that so many people play the lottery. They’re all hoping for that magic win, especially when it’s Euro millions. And it is actually millions, because that would make a huge difference in someone’s life. But the chances of that happening are very remote indeed. I think it’s something like you’re seven times more likely for an aeroplane to crash on your head than you are to win a lottery.

So if all the people who are spending money on lottery or gambling, putting money on the horses, or perhaps investing in things that are highly risky, then perhaps those people are still looking for something external from themselves to save them and to make things different.

There’s no answer to this. The only answer is to look inside yourself. And when you are trying to get your business going or trying to get more clients or trying to attract more sales, try and just think to yourself, “Am I expecting someone to come and save me here, or am I taking the action that this outcome requires?”

Because I think once you take total responsibility for everything that happens to you, you become a lot happier, because you’re not constantly being disappointed by looking for someone to come and save you or looking for an external event to come and make things better. You just get up, and you get on with it.

I hope that helps. Let me know in the comments below, if you respond to any of what I’ve said today. I’d be really interested to hear.

This week on the blog and the podcast

The podcast is running again fr0m episode 75 of the Vzine, which feeds onto the podcast. So do go and subscribe on iTunes. You can also subscribe to all of my content in different playlists on YouTube. If you go to ClicksAndLeads.tv, that will take you straigh to my YouTube channel.

On the podcast on Own It! this week, episode 203, we were talking about financial security for the self-employed, how you could become more financially secure even when you don’t feel very secure and you’re not sure what money’s going to be coming in. How to, I’m very keen on helping people to run simple cash flow spreadsheets on Google Docs, basically, so you can access it from your phone. And I teach people how to do that in Clicks and Leads Academy. But go and have a listen to the podcast.

Now, you’re also going to see when you go over there that I’m doing a series of daily videos, actually, across all social media platforms. I was challenged to do that by my mentor and coach, and, so far, it’s going very well. And we’ve started to put them on the blog daily as well.

So we’ll see what impact that has on my traffic, because obviously we’re having each video, it’s only a minute long, but we’re having it transcribed, and it’s got captions on it, and so, that makes a multimedia blog post. I’ll let you know what difference that makes, if any, to my traffic.

But go and check it out in the meantime. NicolaCairncross.com/Blog. And you could enjoy the tips over there, as well as the Vzine and the Own It! podcast. Hope you enjoy all that, and do comment and let me know if you are watching, listening, reading, or doing whatever you do to consume any of my content. I’d love to hear from you. Have a great week. Bye.

Creative Direction & Video Editing
Phoebe Soremekun

Intro Music
Pool Cosby

Incidental Music
Ikson – Look Up (Vlog No Copyright Music)
[No Copyright Music] Chill LoFi Hip Hop Instrumental (Copyright Free) Music – 5 Min Call

Drone footage of The Mani
Georgios Ser-Aouas

Check out more videos on my YouTube channel