You walk into a coffee shop.
It’s one of those coffee shops.
The kind where the barista has a tattoo of a French press on their forearm and the menu board looks like it was written by a calligrapher having a panic attack.
The line is six deep. The espresso machine is screaming like a banshee being fed into a wood chipper.
There are seventeen mobile orders backed up on the counter, and somewhere in the back, a blender is doing war crimes to a bunch of ice cubes.
You get to the front. The barista.
Bless their overcaffeinated heart, is already looking past you, already mentally juggling four oat milk lattes and a whatever the hell a “cortado” is.
They’re doing their best. They are a human being in a hurricane of dairy alternatives.
And you say to them “I don’t want black coffee.”
The barista nods. Or maybe they don’t nod. Maybe they just vibrate at a frequency that suggests acknowledgment. They turn around. They do things. Steam happens. Thirty seconds later, they slide a cup across the counter.
It’s black coffee.
Of course it’s black coffee, I mean you clearly asked for it right?
And you stand there, holding this mug of liquid darkness, wondering how the hell you got here.
You specifically said you didn’t want this. You were clear. You stated your case. You communicated like a grown adult human person (or so you thought, duh)
I need you to tattoo this somewhere you’ll see it every morning, maybe on the inside of your eyelids or whatever…
You didn’t tell them what you wanted. You told them what you didn’t want. And the only actionable noun in that sentence was “black coffee.”
That barista heard two words through all of the yap yap…
BLACK. COFFEE.
The “don’t” got swallowed. The “don’t” evaporated like a drop of water on a hot skillet. The “don’t” never stood a chance.
This is all about your brain though.
Your brain is that barista.
Your brain is an overworked, under appreciated, slightly frazzled meat computer that is constantly processing a multitude of sensory input, emotional garbage, intrusive thoughts about whether you locked the front door, and the inexplicable urge to remember the lyrics to “Mambo No. 5” at three in the morning.
Your brain is busy. Your brain is juggling flaming chainsaws while riding a unicycle on a tightrope over a pit full of your childhood traumas.
And when you tell your brain “I don’t want to fail,” your brain hears: FAIL.
When you say “I don’t want to be broke,” your brain hears: BROKE.
When you say “I don’t want to screw this up,” your brain grins its terrible little brain grin and says, “Oh, we’re thinking about screwing things up? GREAT.
Let me allocate all available resources to imagining, in high definition cinematic detail, every possible way we can screw this up.”
There’s actual science behind this, by the way.
I’m not just pulling it out of my ass.
A psychologist named Daniel Wegner called it ironic process theory, which is the most perfectly named thing in all of psychology because it is, in fact, deeply ironic.
Wegner told people, “Don’t think of a white bear.”
Guess what every single one of those people immediately thought about? A big, fluffy, undeniable white bear, lumbering through the tundra of their consciousness, refusing to leave.
The brain cannot process a negative without first conjuring the thing it’s supposed to negate. You have to build the image before you can try to un-build it.
And by then, it’s too late. The bear is in the room. The black coffee is in your hand. The failure is playing on a loop in your skull like a terrible movie you can’t walk out of.
This isn’t just woo woo law of attraction stuff, either. I mean, it is that too, if you’re into it. The whole “the universe delivers what you focus on” thing.
Fine.
Sure.
The universe is a space barista, and it’s very busy, and it only catches the nouns. I can work with that metaphor.
But you don’t even need to believe in manifesting or crystals or vision boards made out of magazine clippings to understand why this matters.
This is just how attention works. This is mechanical. Your reticular activating system. That’s the bouncer at the door of your conscious awareness, that lets in what you’re focused on and filters out the rest.
If you’re focused on debt, you will see debt everywhere. Reminders of debt. Evidence of debt. Opportunities to acquire more debt. Your brain will be extremely helpful in confirming that yes, debt is the central theme of your existence, because that’s what you told it to look for.
You told the barista “black coffee,” and by God, you’re getting black coffee.
So what do you do instead?
You tell the barista what you actually want.
“I’d like a lavender oat milk latte with an extra shot.” Specific. Positive. Actionable. The barista now has something to make, not something to avoid. That’s a fundamentally different task.
Sports psychologists figured this out ages ago. You don’t tell a golfer, “Don’t hit it into the water.” You know what a golfer’s brain does with that sentence? It takes a beautiful, panoramic mental photograph of the water. It studies the water. It falls in love with the water. And then the golfer’s body, being the obedient servant of the brain’s attention, sends the ball right into that water with the accuracy of a guided missile.
Instead, you say, “Aim for the center of the fairway.” Now the brain has a target, not a fear. The mental image is the fairway, green and wide and inviting. The body follows the picture. The ball goes where the mind was already looking.
This applies to and I cannot stress this enough, basically everything.
Don’t write your goals as a list of things you want to avoid. “I don’t want to be unhealthy” is garbage. Your brain just heard “unhealthy” and is now Googling symptoms of diseases you don’t have.
Try for the most part…
“I want to feel strong and energised.” That’s a destination. Your brain can work with a destination.
Don’t frame your creative work around what you’re afraid of. “I don’t want to write something boring” cause you just put the word BORING in forty foot neon letters across your imagination.
Try…
“I want to write something that makes people feel like they’ve been punched in the heart in the best possible way.” Now there’s a creative brief your muse can sink her teeth into.
Most of us spend an astonishing amount of our mental energy describing, in exquisite detail, exactly what we don’t want. We are poets of avoidance. We can articulate our fears with the precision of a surgeon and the passion of a revival preacher.
Ask someone what they don’t want, and they’ll give you a forty five minute TED Talk with slides.
Ask them what they do want, and they’ll stare at you like you just asked them to solve a differential equation in Klingon.
The real work is building the positive image. Getting specific about what you want. Giving your brain your overworked, overwhelmed, beautiful disaster of a barista brain, a clear order.
Walk up to the counter of your own mind. Look it dead in the eye. And say with your whole chest:
“Here’s what I’m having.”
Then watch it get made.
Specificity is key.
Stephen Walker.