You got the job. Or the promotion. Or the thing. You told three people. Each time you told it, you found a way to make it smaller.
“Yeah, it’s nothing major.”
“They were a bit desperate.”
“It’s just for now.”
You weren’t lying. You actually believed the smaller version while you were saying it. That’s the part that’s worth noticing.
There’s a thing Australians do, and we joke about it as if it only happens to other people. The tall poppy. The one who stood up too tall and got cut down. We mostly think of it as something done to people - the way a high-profile Aussie gets pulled back into the pack by the rest of us. We talk about it as a cultural quirk.
What we don’t talk about as much is that most Australians have, somewhere along the way, started doing it to themselves.
The Inward Cut
Tall poppy syndrome turned inward is a particular Australian flavour of self-deflation. It activates whenever you’ve done a thing that might, by external standards, count as having stood up. The activation happens before anyone else has a chance to weigh in. You cut yourself down first, partly to beat them to it, partly because you’ve forgotten how to receive what just happened without immediately discounting it.
You watch yourself do it. You watch yourself talk about the new role and say “it’s not really a big deal.” You watch yourself receive the compliment and say “oh, the team did most of it.” You watch yourself succeed at something hard and immediately find the version of it where it didn’t really count.
After enough years of this, the cutting happens before you’ve noticed there’s anything to cut. The poppy doesn’t even get to peek above the wheat. The instinct fires earlier and earlier in the sequence.
What gets lost in that, over time, is your relationship with your own worth. Not in a self-esteem-poster way. In a quieter way: you stop knowing what you’d actually feel about your own life if you let yourself feel it without immediately running it through the editor.
What’s Doing the Cutting
About five per cent of what’s running in your head at any given moment is conscious - the version of you that, in principle, would like to feel okay about the thing you just achieved. The other ninety-five per cent is the subconscious. And the subconscious learned the cutting move early, probably so early you can’t remember when.
For a lot of Australians, that subconscious script runs something like: Don’t get above yourself. Don’t be one of those people. They’ll see you coming. Get in first.
It’s a protective move. It came from somewhere. Often it came from watching what happened to a tall poppy in your family or your school or your hometown, and noting that you didn’t want to be that. So you installed the cutter, set it to fire automatically, and lived inside it ever since.
The cutter does its job. It keeps you from getting above yourself. The cost is that nothing you do gets to land at full size, because the cutter’s there to make it smaller before it touches the ground.
The conscious mind would, if asked, prefer the cutter take a holiday. The cutter doesn’t listen to the conscious mind. The cutter operates a level below it.
What the Method Reaches
Inner Influencing operates at the layer the cutter is firing from. Not the layer where you decide to be different about your own achievements. The deeper layer where the cutting was registered, years ago, as the safe move when something noticeable was about to happen.
That registration runs the cut before the conscious mind has had time to weigh in on whether the cut is needed this time. Updating it does not require feeling different in the moment - the moment is too late by definition. It requires updating what’s been deployed underneath the moment.
That update is a specifically worded request to the subconscious, marked by a deliberately strange trigger phrase: “Purple Cow.” The strangeness flags the request as instruction rather than as ordinary mental traffic. One statement. Said once. No repetition.
Try It For Yourself
Read each statement below slowly - out loud if you can. Say it once, then stop. Let a moment of quiet follow before the next one.
“Subconscious, when I say Purple Cow, you will get rid of the automatic move I make to cut myself down before anyone else can, the reflex to discount what I’ve done before it lands, and the running editor that makes my own life smaller in my own ears, and keep me free from that from now on, and do this in a way that is natural, easy, instant and graceful. Purple Cow.”
Say it once. Then pause and notice.
“Subconscious, when I say Purple Cow, you will get rid of the belief that getting above myself is the worst thing I could do, that letting myself feel okay about something means I’m full of myself, that the people I care about would prefer the diminished version, and the conviction that cutting myself first is the safe move, and keep me free from that from now on, and do this in a way that is natural, easy, instant and graceful. Purple Cow.”
Say it once. Take a breath. Let it settle.
“Subconscious, when I say Purple Cow, you will make it easy for me to receive what I’ve done at its actual size, to feel the thing I’d feel about it if I let myself, and to talk about my own life without the editor running, and keep me free from that from now on, and do this in a way that is natural, easy, instant and graceful. Purple Cow.”
Say it once. Then simply rest for a moment.
What Just Settled
You may have felt something small. A breath that went somewhere it hadn’t been reaching. A slight sense, even faint, of the editor stepping back. A version of something you’ve done lately arriving in your head at its actual size for half a second. Whatever happened, even if it was barely a thing, the subconscious received the signal at the layer where the cutter has been firing from.
This kind of shift doesn’t arrive with drama. It tends to arrive as less of something - less of the immediate diminishing reflex, a slight pause where the cutter used to be instant.
What you just did is the entry-level move of Inner Influencing. There are deeper layers underneath - the early instructions about not getting above yourself, the family rules about pride, the inheritance of a culture that has confused humility with self-erasure. The free Inner Influencing Discovery Kit takes you further into this work and explains why it reaches what other methods don’t.
A lot of Australians have been cutting themselves down for so long they’ve forgotten what it would be like to receive their own life without the cut.
You’re allowed to.
The subconscious doesn’t need an argument. It needs the right signal at the right level. You’ve just sent one.