After living in the remote wilderness of West Virginia all his life, an old hillbilly decided it was time to visit the big city.

In one of the stores he picks up a mirror and looks in it. Not ever having seen one before, he remarked at the image staring back at him, “How about that! Here’s a picture of my daddy.”

He bought the mirror thinking it was a picture of his daddy, but on the way home he remembered his wife didn’t like his father, so he hung it in the barn, and every morning before leaving for the fields, he would go there and look at it.

His wife began to get suspicious of these many trips to the barn.

One day after her husband left, she searched the barn and found the mirror.

As she looked into the glass, she fumed, “So that’s the ugly bitch he’s runnin’ around with.”

I laughed. So did you I’m sure. But this email from a friend was part of a discussion I’ve been having with people about how our thoughts, how our outer reality is just a reflection of what’s happening inside us. Psychologists call it “projection.” Are you calling someone annoying? What is it that makes it annoying really? Is it something that you do yourself?

Byron Katie speaks to this topic in “The work.”

And while this may all seem like it has nothing to do with triiibes or tribes, it has everything to do with triiibes. Because the stories we tell about others may really be the stories we’re telling about ourselves. I don’t believe in the absolute mirror theory, but I do believe that our THOUGHTS about things rather than the FACTS about them, impact our business, our clients, our communication.

How?

Well, in the past week three new clients have come to me with new business and I’ve turned them down – even though I could really use the work right now. Why did I turn them down? One refused to pay my rate, even though he could afford it – but his last web designer “ripped him off,” and never finished the website and charged him $2,000 and he got screwed. I told him I was sorry that happened, but that I was not that designer. I offered to break down the work in segments and get paid only after he was satisfied at each stage. His solution was to pay me $300 for a $2,000 website. I declined. He was angry at his last designer and I knew I would end up taking the brunt of his anger and that didn’t work for me. He didn’t respect me or even want to give me a chance at proving that not all designers were rip-offs.

Another would-be client wanted a brochure. Simple enough. But his competition made fun of his last design, so he wanted me to figure out a way to create a design THEY would respect. Huh? Think of the Microsoft/Apple pissing contests. Same thing. I don’t want to be designing for a company that would NEVER admit the design was cool even if they thought so. We had “the talk” about being his own man and setting the standard, not following someone else. He wanted to pay for ONE FINAL design, but not all it would take to get there. I turned him down too.

A fairly well-known copy-writer came to me and asked me to write an ebook for them and then “split the profit.” I’d do 80% of the work – they’d handle all the money, create the landing page, and then eventually sell the site and take 2/3’s of the sale. For an “up-and-coming” writer like me – they said, “It’s a great deal.” No it wasn’t. We’re not talking thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars here. He was talking hundreds….as in, less than $1,000. I didn’t laugh in his face, but wish I had. In the past he’s offered me $5 per hour to rewrite his articles. No respect there for me.

My initial thoughts were: What is wrong with ME that I attract these people? Then I wondered if the “mirror” was about me not respecting myself enough and attracting people who didn’t respect me, and on and on and on!! The friend who sent me the hill-billy story said, “You’re not the problem – it’s the STORY you’re telling yourself about what YOU see in the mirror that’s the problem.”

So – the moral of the story – stop trying to figure out what the mirror is “saying” and start looking at the story YOU’RE telling about what you see IN the mirror. It’s the STORY you tell about what you see that matters most….THAT will determine your feelings, and from your feelings will come your actions. Look closely. What do you see?