The Personal Commercial: Who You Say You Are When No One’s Listening.
-An exercise that took me from rookie to nearly $2 million in one year.
Eleven years ago, I wrote a commercial.
Not for Instagram. Not for a website. Not for anyone.
I wrote it for me.
I was a rookie salesperson—hungry and eager. I felt convinced I would crack the thing wide open, yet I was completely riddled with self-doubt and limited thinking. I never knew which side of me would take the lead each day. Some mornings, I felt unstoppable. Most mornings, I didn’t. My inner critic worked overtime to convince me I was a fraud. Imposter syndrome took hold in full force.
That first year was hard—not "challenging in a way that builds character" hard, but truly difficult. I didn’t hit the numbers or build the pipeline my company expected, and I started to wonder if I had misread my ambitions.
So I did what every hungry person eventually does: I started reading every sales book I could get my hands on. Some of them were forgettable. One of them changed my life.
It was The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz.
If you haven’t read it, put it on the list. It’s not flashy. It’s not a TikTok thread. It’s a 1959 book that’s still in print because it works. And buried in its pages is one of the simplest, most uncomfortable, most effective exercises I’ve ever done.
Sell yourself to yourself.
That’s it. Schwartz instructs you to write a commercial for yourself — the way an ad copywriter would write one for a product they were trying to sell. You write it. You read it. Every morning. In the mirror.
Yes, the mirror—I know.
I rolled my eyes the first time I read the assignment. And then I did it anyway. Because I had nothing left to lose, and the ceiling I was bumping my head against was clearly inside me, not outside.
Here’s mine. I read it out loud every morning that year.
Meet Tricia. A really important person who has an important career. I am a big thinker, so I think big. I think big about everything. I am a problem solver. I provide an extravagant lifestyle to my family. I believe in happiness, progress, and prosperity. I deserve to be wealthy, so I only think that way. I can win others over because I am charming, intelligent, knowledgeable, well-educated, sincere, and eager to help. I am a leader, and those around me look to me for advice. I am lucky and have positive energy. I am good at anything I do. I care about others and the kids in my territory. This is why I have been highly successful. I have what it takes to win. Go forward, Tricia. Sell one million dollars this year.
I read that out loud. Every morning. Looking right at my own face. Feeling, most days, like a complete fraud.
By the end of that year, I sold nearly two million dollars.
Was it the commercial?
Honestly, I believe a combination of factors contributed: luck, some manifestation, a lot of hard work, the territory I worked in, the economy that year—plenty of factors outside my control.
But the biggest factor — the one that mattered more than any of those — was that I started believing the version of me on the page.
You can’t sell anyone on a version of you that you don’t believe in yourself.
That’s the whole game. Sales, business, leadership, motherhood, relationships, and money—all of them depend on what you actually believe about yourself when no one else is in the room. The rest is just performance, and people can sense when it’s inauthentic.
The mirror exercise didn’t make me successful by accident. It worked because it forced me to repeat a story about myself until my body finally accepted it. Until the woman in the mirror and the woman in the commercial were one and the same.
Why I’m telling you this now
The first phase of the framework I coach — The BOLD Blueprint — is Believe. Before we ever get to action, before we plan a launch, before we look at numbers or strategy, we look at what you actually believe about yourself.
Because every plan we build will come up against that belief. Every launch will get filtered through it. Every uncomfortable action will run into it like a wall.
You can’t out-strategize a self-image that says you don’t deserve the life you’re trying to build.
You can rewrite the self-image. That’s the whole point.
Your turn. Here’s the assignment.
Write your commercial.
Sit down — today, this week, before this email gets buried — and write the ad. Not for a friend. Not for an audience. For you. Write it the way you’d want to be sold something you’re a little skeptical of, but secretly hoping is real.
A few rules:
• Write it in the present tense. Not "I will be." "I am."
• Include both the boring and the specific. "I provide an extravagant lifestyle to my family" was a line in mine, as was "I care about the kids in my territory." Mix the big with the small.
• End with a marching order. Sell one million dollars this year. Yours might be to sign three new clients this quarter. Or finish the manuscript. Or walk away from the job by December.
• Then — and this is the hard part — read it. Out loud. Looking at yourself. Every morning for thirty days.
You will feel ridiculous. Do it anyway. The ridiculousness is the point. It means the muscle is new.
After 30 days, write back to me and tell me what changed. What felt different? What you stopped tolerating. What you started asking for.
I am not promising you two million dollars. I am promising you that the woman in the mirror will start to look like the woman on the page — and once that happens, everything you’ve been waiting on starts to move.
Believe it. Then own it. Then build from there.
— Tricia
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