When you face major crises and difficulties in your life, whether it’s caused by some rogue virus, or caused by crazy politicians in DC, or across the globe that are causing all kinds of trouble and difficulties in life.

Whether it’s own personal choices that you’ve made that have caused you to fail in business or other areas of your life, it doesn’t matter. We all have this common reality of facing major issues and problems in our life and when that happens, how do you overcome that? How do you grow past that, how do you achieve the success that you really want to have in life? 

Well today, I want to share with you what I call the victory cycle. The victory cycle is a way of looking at life, it’s a way of looking at reality that helps you to overcome to achieve and to do more than you ever thought you could do, regardless of what your goals and your dreams are. 

My name is Joshua Boswell and I’m the founder of Copywriter Marker. I’m the author of the number one best selling program that helps writers like you take their dreams and their hopes of writing skills and turn those into living, pricking reality. 

That’s what I focus on is helping you achieve the lifestyle that you really want to have by making money as a writer and doing all the things that you need to do, not just to have clients, but to have a great lifestyle. 

This mindset aspect of it, the way you look at the world is absolutely vital in creating that lifestyle. So, I want to walk you through these two different models. I think that you’ll see that sometimes we fall into one model that ensures our failure. Sometimes we fall into the other model. I want to show you how you can consciously choose between those two. 

Then I want to share with you three key insights that’ll help get you started, that’ll give you some traction, things you can actually do today to move this forward. 

Now, let’s lay the groundwork for this whole thing and talk about a scenario that happened in my life a number of years ago that caused a major, massive crisis for me. 

You see, I already decided that I wanted to be a copywriter, I already dove into that world, I’ve been marketing myself for about six months, and glory hallelujah, I had picked up what I considered at the time a dream client. I had a retainer contract, $5,000 a month which at the time was like, “Wow!” That was an amazing amount of money. 

I was super excited for him. I wrote my first project for this particular client. I submitted it and they hated it. They hated every word of it. They sent it back to me and said, “Hey, can you give this a try again?” We went through like four or five iterations of this and finally, they cancelled the retainer agreement and I lost the contract. 

I was devastated. I was $200,000 in debt at the time, six children to feed. I really, really, really needed that money and that contract, that project, and then it was gone. 

So, I went from the height of hope and excitement and enthusiasm, down to the utter depths of despair and frustration. In that down in the depths of frustration, that personal crisis, I had some serious decisions to make. Now pause the story for just a minute. 

Have you ever been there? If you haven’t, I suppose maybe you’re not human. I don’t know because most human beings that I talk to have those moments where like they’re super excited and then like, there’s a plot twist and fate deals them a different set of cards and they find out that all their hopes and dreams, the things that they wanted are not going to actually be possible in that moment. 

So, you face that moment of crisis, you face that – whether it’s a job loss, whether it’s a marriage unraveling, whether that’s health that you thought like, “Oh! I thought I was going to be healthier and more energetic than this.” 

I don’t know what it is, but if you’ve ever been in that moment where you’re feeling despair, you’re feeling frustration, then I want you to listen very carefully to the victory cycle because it will show you why you’re feeling that way and give you resources and ideas about how to get out of that cycle, that scenario where you’re like just not feeling that you’re on top of your game, you’ve got a lack of hope and you’ve got a lot of despair in your life. 

So back to my story, what happened is, I puttered around my house, my office and moaned to my wife until finally Margie, she sat me down – Margie is my wife. Margie sat me down and says, “Honey! I want to do a favor for me.” I said, “Okay.” She said, “I want you to research how many companies there are inside of your niche that you’re trying to focus on. In the United States right now today, how many companies are there that focus in this area and they could potentially hire you, as a writer?” I said, “Okay. I guess, I can do that.” 

So I did. I went and I did a bunch of research. I dove through this and looked through it. I found that there was like a quarter of a million, over 200,000 potential companies that could hire me. 

I looked at that number. I was like, “Wait a minute, I might be really terrible at this, but there’s no way I’m that terrible.” In other words, eventually if I just keep trying, if I just keep working at this, if I just keep writing, if I just keep marketing myself, I might blow through 150,000 potential companies, but eventually I’ll get decent enough that somebody is going to hire me. 

I realized, it’s just a numbers game, it’s just the time game. I can win at this and I gained this amazing confidence that eventually I knew for sure that I could win at this game. 

So, I dove back in and I found out that I didn’t actually have to wait. I don’t have to go through 150,000 clients to make this reality. Instead what I did is, I marketed myself for the next couple of months and then I started picking up clients. 

Corel was the next big company that I picked up and then Sony, Toshiba, Microsoft, AWAI and Agora, all these other companies followed and then it’s just been hundreds since that time and I’ve had the joy of working with some of the biggest companies in the world. 

Now, why? Because I got the reality of what was going on. Instead of being in my little bubble of despair, I figured out that I could do something more and I could have something more. 

Then it really was an opportunity, a possibility for me if I just kept going. I transitioned from this cycle – which I’ll explain in a minute, to this cycle using these insights and these thoughts that I’ll share with you right now. 

That changed my life forever. I want you to be in this category right here. So, what is this category? What does this look like? Let’s walk through it and give you some insights. 

Because, look, anytime I’m feeling locked up, despair, frustration, or having that anxiety moment, which I have all the time, like I squirrel, ruminate and rummage through my brain just like every other human being does. I think it’s common to everyone. 

So, I’ve had other times in my life but even when I do have those circumstances and situations, I come back to these thoughts, this model right here, this victory cycle because I want to win in life. Don’t you want to win in life? 

I want to win. I don’t want to be crushed by fears. I don’t want to be kicked to the curb by crazy anxiety and stress points. I don’t want to be like, you’re always a victim of the man or the woman or some government agency or some economy or something that’s going on out there. 

I want to be independent and I want to win. I know you do, too. So, let me show you what this is. Okay. 

So the first side here. Let’s talk about the dark side of the force for just a minute here. The first side of this – of our chart right here is the cycle of fear. 

This is the fear cycle. This is what happens inside of our brain when we’re feeling fear. Now, all fear is based on some kind of a half truth or a lie. You see, we see things not as they really are, but we conjure things. 

Some people have said, “Fear is just an acronym for false evidence appearing real.” Right, fear, F-E-A-R. False evidence appearing real. That’s because everything we fear, it’s because we don’t have all the information or we sense that we’re going to be out of control. That sense of being out of control is almost always based on a lie. So, at the very top of our cycle right here, let’s put the word, lie. 

Not like lie down and sleep, but like falsehoods, fake, silliness, stuff that’s not real, half truths. This always begins with this process of a lie. We hear a lie. We buy into it and it starts the process of fear. Now, lies because they are half truths and they’re not the way things really are in life. Lies always transition and create confusion, right? 

Lies always create confusion. You’re not quite sure because you can’t see things the way that they really are. You can’t… You have a lack of clarity. 

Now, every time there’s confusion inside of a human being, it creates inactivity. Always. Because think about this. So, a great example: I was doing a seminar in Denver one time, and I was talking about some of these principles and right in the middle of this idea of the story that I was telling that talks about how confusion breeds inactivity, right in the middle of that, the fire alarm goes off in the building. The fire alarm goes off in the building. 

Now, what do you think everybody did, as soon as that fire alarm went off? They jumped up and rushed to the door and tried to escape the burning building? That’s not what we did. That’s not what any of us did. 

Did we just completely ignore it and just carry on with the seminar, everyone just kept taking notes, pretending like it didn’t even happen? No, that’s not what we did either. 

Every person in the room stopped and began analyzing and trying to assess and trying to figure out what was really going on and what was happening. Smelling for smoke, looking around for social proof like everybody else running around, waiting for some authority or somebody to come by. All of us started processing the information and decided what we were going to do. Why?

Because a fire alarm in and of itself is a bit of a – we don’t know if it’s a real fire or a fake fire. There’s a bit of a confusion point there. So, we freeze and we go into inactivity mode. We’re processing, we’re analyzing, we’re figuring stuff out. So, confusion will always breed inactivity. This guy right here, okay? 

Inactivity, right? So, that’s this corner point right here. So, confusion always breeds inactivity. This is very important for you to remember, because anytime you find that you’ve stopped in life and you’re not moving forward towards your goals, your dreams, your hopes, your aspirations, you can always trace it back to some lie that created some confusion. 

“I’m not good enough. I don’t know if I can actually do this. Will this really pay off? Is this the right road for me to go down? I don’t know what I should think. Can I afford this?” All these things and these breed this confusion and inactivity. Then inactivity, of course, always creates stagnation, right? 

Stagnation creates a lack of results, right? So, we heard a lie. “I’m not good enough”, where we had some kind of data and we got confused. So we started analyzing, we went into inactivity. In the middle of that inactivity, we had stagnation. So, nothing happened. Of course, that created no results, this point right here, right? 

No results. So now, because we’re not doing anything, we’re just thinking about stuff. We’re not really taking action, then we didn’t get any results. 

The lack of results creates additional confusion. That additional confusion always breeds more lies. So, what we see is that this cycle tends to rotate down like this direction. 

I hope this is making sense to you. I hope this is clear and not bred with confusion because see, fear cycle always rotates around just like this. It causes us to stop. 

When we don’t have action, we don’t have results, the results tend to validate whatever the lie was, like, “I’m not good enough. See, I really can’t do it. Nothing’s actually happening.”

Or you try just a little bit and then nothing really happens and so you’re caught up in this vicious cycle where it just spirals you down, down, down, down, down. This is the way my brain thinks and most people that I’ve talked to is like, “Oh! This is terrible.” You don’t want to get caught in this cycle. 

So, what’s the alternative? The alternative is this guy right here. I want to explain this to you so that you have total clarity about what you can do to get out of this. Okay?

Now, this is what I call the faith pattern or cycle. Okay? This is really where your victory comes in. 

Now, faith, listen. I am a “man of the cloth” as it were in some ways and because I have a significant position in my church currently and maybe one day I won’t, but look, right now today, I do minister and I do religious things and I believe in God and all these things are so vital and important to me personally in my life. But I’m not talking about that kind of faith. 

I’m talking about faith as a principle of power. So, as an example, if you’ve ever had a job, you acted on faith because every employer that I know has you start working and then two weeks later, you get your first paycheck. That’s almost common to everybody. 

So you work for two weeks with the belief that you would get a check that you had neither seen nor had any major significant guarantee that it’s actually going to show up. You acted 100 percent on faith, that idea that you have a belief in something that’s not seen but it’s hoped for. 

Now, again, we could put this in a religious context. I can preach all kinds of sermons to you but I’m not talking about that – I’m talking about just the principle of acting without seeing something. 

When I walk into a room and I flip the lights on, I’m acting in faith. I’m acting in faith that there is some electrician somewhere that wired the house, right? I don’t know him. I didn’t see him. I didn’t talk to him. I’m acting on faith that there’s a power plant somewhere, that somebody is managing it with coal or water or nuclear power or something’s going on to generate. 

I don’t know these people. I haven’t seen them. I haven’t been to the plant. I haven’t traced down the wiring, none of that stuff. Then I come in and I flip the switch and I expect the light bulbs. 

Oh! I don’t even know about the light bulb people. Who made the lights? I don’t know. But I just have total and complete trust, faith that the lights are going to turn on and it’s going to continue to function as stated. You and I live and act constantly on this principle of faith. Well, what does this actually look like? Can we get clarity on this, so that works? 

Okay. So, here’s where it starts. It starts with truth. Truth, things as they really are, okay? Things as they really are. I know these LED lights that are burning in this studio right now. I know that they’re going to work. Why? Because, well, it’s science, it’s physics. It’s supposed to work that way, and so it’s going to work. So, I know that if I give electricity to it, it’s going to drown. That’s truth. That’s why I can have faith in it. 

But see, we have to see things like for example, when I was in my crisis, Margie helped me to see the truth of the matter, which was there were hundreds of thousands of potential clients out there for me. I just had to figure out how to communicate with them in a way that they would want to hire me. 

Well, I can do that because I can learn and grow. Another truth that I realized. Oh! Truth, there are clients out there. Truth, I can learn and grow. Truth, that I can eventually get good enough. Truth, that I can figure this out, like I figured out all this truth. Truth creates clarity. 

Clarity, my friend, always and forever in the human being will create action. It creates action, right? Action is a magical, wonderful thing. See, when we know the exact path that we needed to go on, we get going! We move! And when we have faith that that path will lead us to a desired destination, then we dig into it. 

So, we go to jobs and we get college degrees and we educate ourselves and we do it like, we just do all this kind of stuff because we believe that whereas a certainty, there’s a clarity that if we take this path, it will lead to a desired destination, so we act. Now, action is awesome because action leads to growth. 

Growth is the magic ingredient to all of our victories, because we always get who we are not what we want. You might want to write that down. That’s a good one. We always get who we are, not what we want. 

Because the reality of it is, is that when we, personally… Like I know that there’s a lot of writers out there that are better than me. Why are they better than me? Because they grew to the principles, the ideas, the philosophies, the strategies, the secrets, the techniques. They apply them, they grew into those, they use them more than I have done and so they’re better. This is just a simple fact. They grew in ways that I didn’t. 

 When I was in high school, I loved watching basketball games. I loved watching Michael Jordan’s air dunk stuff. Whoa! Right. Michael Jordan, the fact is he grew to be a better basketball player than I could ever imagine to be. So, action creates growth and then growth creates results. 

I got that wrong a little bit. That’s all right. So, growth creates results. Then results train additional clarity. Clarity helps us to see the truth, and then the cycle continues. 

So once again, what you see is, we see this migrating from truth, creates action, action produces results, results help us to more clearly identify what the truth actually is in our life. Then that just repeats and cycles up on an ever increasing spiral thing. 

So, my challenge to you right now is, if you’re feeling any kind of anxiety, any kind of fear, any kind of stress, any kind of any of that stuff, I just put all that into this bundle right here of the fear category and my challenge to you is look, is this founded on a lie or is it actually true? 

Is it true that you’re really not good enough and can’t get good enough? Is it true that you really are terrible at sales? Is it true that you really are not that great with people? Is it true that your writing really isn’t that great? Is it true that the economy is so bad, nobody’s hiring? Is it true that you fill in the blank? I want you to ask yourself, is that true? 

Really be open to listening to the actual answer that comes because the vast majority of things that are the foundation of our fears and our anxieties and our stressors are not actually true. They’re not! 

I talked to people and they’re like, “Uh! The economy is collapsing. The world’s coming apart. Everybody’s sick. Everybody’s having challenges. Everyone’s stressed out.” Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 

That’s a true reality for some people but, there’s this whole other group of people that are like, “Whoa-whoa!” This is the greatest season in the history of mankind. There’s opportunity for us to grow and to get tighter as families and to reconnect and to utilize technology and to free ourselves up from physical locations and to build online businesses, and to connect with companies that are building online businesses and we’re doing all this. I mean this is like, it’s just the difference in the way you look at what’s going on and the reality is, is that this is an amazing opportunity for us right now. 

So, let me finish this sentence – you probably already know the rest of the sentence, now that we’ve been talking about this, but here it is. I want you to remember this sentence. It’s a scripture. I love it, it’s fabulous, and it’s true. That is this: The truth will set you free. The truth will set you free. 

So, when you know what the reality is, how things really are, when I knew that there were 250,000 potential clients out there and I knew that I could grow, then I was suddenly free from my stress and anxiety. I’m like, “Oh! Now, I just have to do the work.” I wasn’t afraid of the work. I knew I could do work. So, cool. 

I got free to live the lifestyle of my dreams. You can do the exact same thing today. Ask yourself, is that true? You do the research and you find out, if the fears and the anxiety and the stresses and the hold ups and the blockades and the roadblocks and the things that you have just in your brain that say, “Oh! I don’t know if I can do this.” Just is this really true? You ask yourself and you do research to find out. You’ll find that it’s probably not true. It’s not. There’s a different reality out there for you right now, today. 

So, let’s look at three – I’m just going to call these three key truths. Three key truths that would be very, very important for you. So number one, every crisis brings equal… (I already started writing this) opportunity. It’s so true. Every crisis brings an equal or greater opportunity. T

hat’s a truth you should lock into your brain, because every crisis is usually a collapse of one kind of a system and creates a void. One way of life, one economic system, one health system, one business system, something a crisis, what we call crisis is where we’re going along and we’re doing the expected ordinary, socially approved, historically similar thing, and we’re moving along that path and suddenly there’s a disruption and a system collapses. 

When that system collapses, we call it a crisis. But in that void, something else happens. Something else happens because the system collapsed but human beings didn’t disappear, we survived, so we feel that void. In filling that void, we create opportunity. 

Now, some people have used these collapses for evil purposes. I’m not arguing that at all. But the fact is – lots of people have used it for really, really, really good things. I use the crisis of getting a couple hundred thousand dollars in debt to build an entire new world for myself and for my family. I know lots of other people that have done similar things. 

I’ve seen people who have taken economic crisis, where the stock market has crumbled and collapsed and fallen and there was a major collapse in that system and then used it to create like huge, huge empires for themselves. 

So, my point is this. Every crisis brings opportunity because a crisis is a collapse of a system, it creates a void. You and I as human beings, we are solution oriented creatures. We’re going to find a way to survive and thrive. We’re going to create new systems. In that new system creation, there’s opportunity. 

For you, too, right now, people right now are creating new online businesses, new education structures, new systems of communication, new all kinds of stuff, new systems are being developed right now every single day, even as we speak. That crisis is turning into opportunity and they need writers, they need communicators, they need persuaders. That’s you and me. Boom! Opportunity is here, knocking right now and today. Okay. 

Number two, the truth that I really want you to emblazon in your brain is this. You can choose your thoughts. Every single morning, I want you to wake up and set intentions about what you want your day to look like, how you want to think. You get to choose! 

Nobody, no economy, no government, no friends, no family members, nobody, nowhere, no how can force you into thinking a specific thought. Nobody can force you into feeling a certain way. It may feel like it sometimes. But the truth is, you get to choose your thoughts. 

You and I get to… We are independent creatures. We have this God given ability to choose our thoughts. We get to decide how we get to see the world, period. End of discussion. No commentary. That’s the truth. 

If that’s true then you can wake up today and look around and decide, will you be joyful today? Will you be kind to people today? Will you serve people today? Will you find clients today? Will you build your writing skills? Would you build…Like what will you think about? Will you have optimism, despair? Will you focus on lies? Will you focus on truths? Like, you get to decide. This is your choice. I want you to choose to the best of your ability and have kindness on yourself and learn the lessons along the way that will come as you choose things that don’t have the outcomes you wanted, so you can choose again. 

But you get to choose your thoughts. This is a powerful, really, really important reality in our world today because we want to let news and friends and social environments, sort of dictate how we think and feel about stuff and that’s just totally false. You get to choose your thoughts. 

Number three, life is a reflection of thoughts. So, if you look at my victory cycles right here, you’ll see that all of this is based on the way you think about stuff. 

So, if you choose to accept the lie and create confusion, it’s a thought process that’s going on inside your mind and creates inactivity, creates stagnation, creates a lack of results. 

Your life today, right now is a – so, you look at your house, the clothes you wear, the cars you drive, where you live in the world, all these different kinds of things, these circumstances, for the vast majority of human beings on the planet. Well, actually, for everybody. The reality of it is, is your external world is a reflection of your internal thinking. 

It’s just the way it is. So, if you change – that’s why if you take action, you read more, you study more, you contact people, you build your business, you choose to be kinder to people, you choose – whatever it is, it will create growth inside of you and that growth will produce the results. We always get in life, who we are, not what we want. 

So, you simply get to choose your thoughts. Those thoughts become a reflection of your world because in the thoughts, you get to grow and become and be somebody different. 

I am such a totally, completely different person today than I was 15 years ago, 10 years ago, two years ago, a year ago. Why? Because I choose to constantly think new thoughts and I want you to do exactly the same thing. 

So my friends, this is what I call the victory cycle. I think that it’s super, super important for you to have this model, to think about it and to put it into place right now today in your life because we live in a world where mainstream media, entertainment, entertainers and lots and lots of different people are trying to push a huge agenda of fear on us and we can choose out of that. 

We can deal with it differently and we can choose to look at the reality a different way and choose to have faith, and let those choices and those thoughts redefine our life. Opportunity is there for you right now today. I just want to challenge you with my whole heart and soul to go out and to find it. 

I think writing is one of the best vehicles to make that a reality. Which… I’m so excited that you’re here with me and watching this and diving in.

So, let’s just do this together. Let’s see these systems collapse and while we feel sorrow for the people that it’s affecting negatively, we also can feel joy in the opportunities that are being created. Not at their expense, but simply because systems collapse and have always collapsed through the history of the world and it creates a void and the void creates an opportunity. 

So, let’s take advantage of it. This is a great season, for you and I right now, today and that is the truth. That gives me clarity. I want to take action and grow and I want you to come with me. Cool? All right. I’ll talk to you soon. Bye now.