The Psychology of Success: How To Rewire Your Identity | Calvin Coyles

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that they study people's IQ both in and out of financial stress. There's a drop of 13 to 14 points in someone's IQ depending on if they're in a state of stress financially or not and effectively shuts down and turns off the creative receptors of your brain which means that you're probably good enough to run the business but not enough to grow it. >> How do we take control of our nervous system? >> I'm glad that you asked. My work for the last 15 years has been working with

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nearly half a million people in 150 countries and just doing anything that you possibly can to help somebody create that breakthrough in their life. You've got to be willing to lose where it hurts, to win where it counts. Think about it. In your business, like in any moment in time, there could be five or six fires. And if you try to put all of those fires out, you [ __ ] yourself. The science tells us that there's about 20 million bits of information. 80% of that is visual. Comes through your eyes. The

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rest is smell, touch, taste, internal dialogue. And so the brain filters that and we typically do three things. We delete, distort, or generalize. If you have tremendously high challenge in your life and you're low capabilities, how does it feel? >> Terrible. On the flip side though, if you're tremendous capable and you're not getting any challenge, what's the alternative? So, what we're looking for is not equilibrium. This is an important distinction. We're looking for the

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challenges to just be just slightly above. Now, let's unpack that. This episode is brought to you by Wick Studio. Here at the agency podcast, we're building a community and we would love for you guys to be part of it. So, we would love to hear from you. What are you enjoying the most? What would you like to see more of and what do you think might be missing? Drop a comment. Make sure you subscribe. And now on with the show. What exactly is NLP? Quick backstory for the context. Uh created by

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two guys in the 70s. NLP stands for neural linguistic programming. So neuro meaning the brain, linguistic meaning language, programming like you program a computer. Um and so what they looked at was basically the the best of the best in the world of psychology, psychotherapy, counselors, and healers. And they said, "Well, what are they doing that's allowing people to get an outrageous result, right? How do you turn decades of therapy into hours or minutes?" And they categorized it. And

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turns out, like anything in life, you know, success leaves clues. You can model excellence. And so, back in the 70s, they put together a series of tools that were designed to create rapid interventions in people's lives. Now, if you Google NLP online, you're going to see some huge fans, myself included. Uh, but you'll also see some detractors, right? Because the the science on it is pretty thin. And the reason why I think the science on it is pretty thin is because it's like a collection or a

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basket of tools and techniques. Now, if you look at any of those individual tools and techniques, you see there's a tremendous evidence for their effectiveness. But when you put it all together, it's difficult to prove that NLP as a category of of tools and ideas works because they're so individual. So, I'll give you an example. We teach in our trainings maybe 60 different tools. One of them is called reframing. It's effectively looking at a negative emotional situation in your life and

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changing the way you perceive that. Now, when you do a brain study on somebody that goes through that, you see that the prefrontal cortex, the creative part of your brain, lights up because you're analyzing and trying to find new meaning and the amydala, this fear response dies down. And so, you can see that in a brain study when someone's reworking it, it's not just like a woowoo technique. It's like you're actually rewiring the brain for success. So, I like to think about it like this. You have an iPhone,

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that's the hardware. And so, you can imagine if someone has a motorcycle accident, they could damage the hardware of their brain, right? But then there's the software, the operating system that runs that. And naturally as we get updates that updates the software and sometimes the apps don't work and sometimes it crashes or sometimes the battery dies right burnout we'll talk about today. So my job and the work that we do in NLP and training is to help people upgrade the operating systems to

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identify the bugs and typically what are those bugs? Beliefs, emotions, values, focus. Effectively the way that you filter the world around you determines so much of what you do. So there's a ton of techniques that we teach. NLP has been around from the 70s. What we teach today is not really NLP. uh it's really the next generation of those tools. There's some positive psychology, there's neuroscience, there's a ton of different stuff and um it's sort of all maxed and mingled in together. But the

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fundamentals of what I learned originally, what we used to teach was was NLP and that's been around since the 70s. If you were to give people some context as to uh how they could harbor this in their mind as we go into the conversation today, what might be some of the things that people should be cognitive of before uh we start unpacking um the deep nuance of what you do with wild and and how you help people with these tools. >> So I think there's a few underlying principles, right? Like if we think

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about first principles, it starts with this idea of agency. We're going to talk about that today, but it really starts with taking responsibility for your own life. So if you put yourself in a position to go, hey, I'm in control of my life. I'm in control of my actions and behaviors. But then you naturally go, well, how do I change that? Part of it is the filter, right? So the science tells us that there's about 20 million bits of information coming at your nervous system every second of every

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day. 20 million bits of information per second. >> It's overwhelming. Right now 80% of that is visual comes through your eyes. The rest is sight, smell, touch, taste, internal dialogue. And so the brain filters that. And we typically do three things. We delete, distort, or generalize. deletion, right? There's so much information, it's overwhelming. So, your brain will just delete stuff. It'll just literally, it's called a sktoma. It's a mental blind spot. It'll just

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remove it because it considers it not to be important. So, that's the first thing. The second thing is a generalization. And a generalization is effectively, you know, we're sitting on chairs, but that's also a chair as well. So, the brain makes those leaps. A door is a door, right? You have to pattern recognize. And then a distortion is where we take something that happens and we reattribute meaning to it. So, for example, if uh if I walk in and I shake your hand and it's not a firm handshake,

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for example, I can start to apply meaning to that based off my beliefs and values and filters. Maybe uh Dane's not happy to see me today or he is happy to see me, right? You get the idea. So, we're going through and filtering the world around us. And then as we filter that, it's also reflected based off our beliefs and our emotions and our mood and our energy. if we slept well, if the toddler was crying last night. And so then we get what ends up getting left over is about 20 bits of information

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that you can reasonably focus on. And people categorize that typically into three to five major things. So consider it like this. If I was to ask you for brands and you're in this world, you probably could give me five to seven of them. But after seven, you're going to really have to stretch yourself to think about, right? Because there's only so much processing capability up front. And so what we want to be aware of is, hey, there is a filter that's going on in your lives. you're filtering the world

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around you. You know, we say all the time, you don't see the world as it is, you see the world as you are. And so, if you take responsibility for who you are, and then you start to act in alignment with who you want to be, then we can rewire our brain for success through that filter. And so, how do you do that? That's what we teach effectively. And there's a ton of different tools to be able to do that. Um and uh you know some of those are more alternative than others but effectively you know my work

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for the last 15 years has been working with nearly half a million people in 150 countries and just doing anything that you possibly can to help somebody create that breakthrough in their life. And so I don't really care so much about the studies. I care about the impact it means for the person. And so I'm I'm tools agnostic. I'm I'm just results focused. Like what gets the result for one person might be completely different for somebody else. >> I've seen a video online where uh Tony

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Robbins was using some of these techniques. I love Tony. Yeah. >> And this is going to sound controversial. >> Yeah. >> But there was a a guy who had a speech impediment and a stutter. >> I watched the video. Yeah. >> Yeah. And >> he was watching the the the documentary the the his mom and dad had the abusive relationship and he was watching um the the one of the cartoons and the the guy in the cartoon and he had the stutter and so he developed the stutter as a

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trauma response to what was going on at home. I remember the clip >> and and in a matter of 12 minutes he went from having a lifong challenge with stuttering to Tony Robbins through using some of these techniques. Then there's a video of him on stage speaking. People have a visceral reaction to something like that. They might say this is pseudocience. They might say this is >> this is not possible. It's rigged. How do you handle this? Because it seems like it's too good to be true facts.

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Man, look, once you've seen what I've seen, you go, it's almost impossible to explain that to somebody without you coming across as being out of your mind because I think we all are playing so far inside of our comfort zone and we're so committed to this current reality out of safety, right? So, you know, I've done Tony's stuff and I'm a huge fan of Tony's work and to be fair, if if I'm not part of this world and ecosystem and I saw that video without any context,

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I'm going, nah. Right? Like, I totally get it. totally get where that resistance and friction comes from. On the same token though, you know, don't look at an individual example. We always say this, which is once a fluke, twice a coincidence, three times as a trend. You look at Tony, you know, 50 years been doing this or 40 years or something been doing this. For us, it's 15 years. The results become self-evident after a period of time. You become a true believer, right? So, I understand where

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the skepticism comes from people. And the challenge is it's like if it's a problem, it's a problem. Some people are believers of just they're willing to give anything a try. And some people naturally have more of a a commitment to their current reality, which is also not a problem. If that's working for you, it's working for you. I I I like to think about it like this. This is a a gross generalization, but just really take all of the desire that we have for evidence and approval out of something.

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And just consider this. If it works for you, it works for you. That's really simple, right? Like nothing has meaning except the meaning that we give to it, right? Like we can choose to attribute meaning to anything. And so if you attribute meaning to something and it makes you feel better, then it works for you by the default that it works for you. And it might not work for somebody else. And so I think the challenge becomes that you look at that video from Tony. What Tonyy's not saying is if you

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have a speech impediment, this is exactly what you need to do to fix it. He's just saying that this is what worked for this guy. The challenge is that sometimes in this industry, people then go, "Well, this is going to work for everybody else." It's like, well, that's not the way that it works, though. It's so individualistic. And so if you have a problem, you argue for your limitations, you get to keep them. um you might not have a speech impediment, so it doesn't really [ __ ]

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matter to you, right? But if it does matter to you, then you'd want to try and seek out the very best ways to do that. And I'm absolutely convinced that some processes take a long time, and that's because of the process, but also sometimes it takes a long time because of the person, right? We're just talking off air about founders and brand, right? And like sometimes it takes a long time to launch a brand because people are not fully bought into the process of change. And sometimes they launch a brand very

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quickly because they're fully bought in. So, we always say there's two keys to lifelong change. Uh, commitment and conditioning. And so, you got to be committed and you got to condition it long term. And funny story actually with the gentleman that he's talking about, he actually developed the stutter again. Right? But then what happened was his wife called him out for it and said, "Hey, this is not who you are anymore." And the reason why he developed the stutter, he ended up going back to not

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having the stutter was because he had attributed the transformation to Tony. Tony changed me. I didn't change myself. >> Oh, I see. >> Yeah. And so the macro belief for him, the filter for him was I wasn't and unable to do it myself. And so then he went back to a default response and then eventually came back to not having the stutter anymore. Uh but I remember listening to Tony actually talk about this as an example in one of the seminars and he was like he actually went back and analyzed all of the

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personal training and transformation he had done and turned out that the people that had the macro belief that they were healing themselves and Tony was assisting them, they followed through on the transformation. But the people felt like Tony saved them. Um, some of those people default back to original behaviors because it was like, well, you were the savior. It wasn't me. >> I have a friend right now that's at a Tony Robbins conference for a week >> and I'm getting all these text messages

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around how their life's changing because of Tony. Yes. >> Um, so what is the risk people run when they externalize their transformation versus internalizing it? >> I think naturally the transformation sometimes needs to be external first and then internal second. It's no different to inspiration. I come into this space and I'm inspired as [ __ ] man. Like I'm like, "Wow, this is amazing. I love what you're doing with everything." Now, I'll take that external inspiration and then

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I'll process it and I'll consider things that we can do to replicate, emulate, model the excellence you've created here and then we'll put it into the real world. And through putting it into the real world, I'm internalizing it. Right? So, I've done the Tony stuff and you clap and you jump up and you say yes a thousand times and it's [ __ ] phenomenal. And then you come back and then life happens. And so part of the internalization is then when rubber hits the road. It's easy to be motivated,

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right, when you're in a seminar. It's easy to be motivated when you're watching a motivational movie or a clip or on Instagram, right? But the ability for you to then put that into the reality and to enforce that reality onto the world around you takes grit and determination and willpower and all the stuff we'll unpack today. And so that's really where it happens. It's it's in the aftermath of that, right? You know, we talk about a technique, for example, belief change. And we'll talk about the

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idea that I can help somebody change a belief in 15 minutes. Now we are rewiring the neurological pathways in that process. Is it fair to say though the belief has changed in 15 minutes? Yeah, you can say that. But also when do you how do you know the belief has changed? It's through the manifestation of that now changing that person's life. So it's really only when rubber hits the road. It's only when someone implements. It's only when they follow through that you fully realize that. So I think there

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is people that are in this industry especially that have a bit of a god complex right that have a desire to be the one that saves the person. That was certainly me for the first couple of years. Um because I was coming from my own inadequacy. I don't think Tony does that but I think that there are people certainly and I was guilty of that in the early days where I wanted to be the person to make the change. Uh but then after a while you realize actually as a coach, as an adviser, as a facilitator,

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you're there as the Yoda to their Luke Skywalker, right? You're not there to be Luke Skywalker. You're not the hero in the hero's journey. you're the guide for that person in the process. >> What's the importance of making that distinction of being a guide for someone in a position like yourself versus trying to be the hero? And what damage does that cause potentially? >> Well, I think that obviously it creates an unhealthy dynamic because it creates dependency, right? Um, and it it solves

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one problem because that person might have been dependent on somebody else in a traumatic way and it's like, well, I can be your hero baby, right? And so they make that transition. So it's a better form of dependency, but at the end of the day, it's still dependency. So you know, you you want to create a secure attachment with your kids, right? But the securest attachment with your kids is to also then allow them to be in a space to be truly independent. So it's like an evolution that you would have in

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any relationship is to go, hey, I I want to give you those tools. And what you realize, I think, with enough experience in anything is that winners are going to [ __ ] win. And some people are not. And some people trade uh one set of excuses and reasons why something's not working and then they just relabel that with you. And so I've had all of that, right? Like you work with 100 plus thousand people. Last year it was 117,000 people. You got people that love you, people that hate you, people that

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just don't [ __ ] care. Um and you go, "Hey, I'm just want to share these tools." And you you try to do that purely from a place of contribution. Take them, run with them, do whatever you want with them. I don't even care if you tell people that you learned them from us. I just want you to use them. And of course it's nice when you get the positives, but also you can't have it both ways, right? Like so I think there's there's a lesson for the the uh the coach, the trainer, the facilitator,

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the leader, but then there's also a lesson as well for the maturity of the person. But I would also say to your point at a macro level, you attract what you deserve and what you need. So in the beginning, I attracted a lot of people that perhaps also needed me to be that person. And then as I developed for myself and I didn't need as much of that validation, you attract people that don't need you to be that either. So this it's a it's a bit of a chicken and an egg, right? Like as you evolve, so

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does the work. No different to imagine the first clients you secured at uh at Rival are different to the clients you secured today because you've matured as a business and you can attract different people because of all of the body of work you have. If you want to grow your agency, you need more than just a website builder. You need Rick Studio, the all-in-one platform that's built to help you scale. Design smarter in a hyperflexible, responsive editor, cherry-picking whatever clients need

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chaos. Wix Studio gives you one centralized view of every project and makes real-time collaborations seamless. Do your agency's best work at scale. Build your next project on Wix Studio. Now I want to talk about the whole concept around beliefs. >> Yes. uh because people hold their beliefs dear and and it can be a complicated or confronting thing for some. >> Um when people say things like I'm just an anxious person or I'm just terrible at sales or I don't like reading books.

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>> Do you think those are actually personality traits, behaviors? >> Yeah. >> Or are they learned things that people have practiced over the years? >> Look, Henry Ford said it better than I ever could. He says, "Whether you think you can or can't, you're usually right." And so, um, you know, people don't have glass ceilings, they have belief ceilings, right? We look at the world around us, we go, I can't do that. We're not, you're saying to yourself that you

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can't do that. And yes, of course, there's a sense of that. That's woo positive thinking. But also, if you just don't believe something's going to happen, you're not going to swing for the fences. You're not going to shoot your shot, right? So, you know, I think there's a few things to unpack here with regards to beliefs. You know, the reality is there's no such thing as a positive or a limiting belief. It's just whether or not has a positive or a limiting outcome. We both know

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incredible entrepreneurs, probably people you've had on the podcast that have a limiting belief perhaps of I'm not good enough or I'm unworthy, but they've used that as a fuel to then take them to the top of the mountain, right? How many people do we know that get to and have everything they ever wanted and it was just never enough because they were trying to fill that gap or that void inside themselves, right? So, there's plenty of that. There's also plenty of people as well that will take

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that same belief system of I'm not good enough or I'm unworthy and use it as a justification to not do anything at all. And so there's a few things to unpack here for people, but fundamentally you get whatever you you you whatever you ask for, right? You don't argue for your limitations, you get to keep them. And so people often will make a generalization, right? They'll say, "I'm not good at that. Therefore, I'm not that person." So if you don't feel comfortable going into a social

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environment, they go, "I'm I'm an introverted person." Well, you could be an introverted person. You can still do a podcast and still speak on stage. Like that that's not a precondition, right? It's not it's not a law of physics. It's just that you've made a label and you've attached yourself to that label. So, one of the strongest forces in the human experience is the sense of identity, which is really just a macro belief. I am this thing. And so, we've got to be

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so clear and so careful on how we label that. Like, I'm I'm as I've matured and as I've done more research, and I've just actually graduated from King's College in London with a post-graduate in neuroscience and psychology. And so, I was very anti- medication in the early days because I just didn't understand the benefit of it. Um, but I can understand today there are some people that definitely need those types of things in their lives. But I'm always really acutely aware of the language

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that we use to describe our experiences. Right? So for example, people say things like I I am depressed or I have depression. Well, you have a pair of shoes, right? That doesn't mean that you are the pair of shoes, right? People don't say I have happiness, right? It's like okay, well, I have this thing. So, you know, when we then take that and we identify with it and we fully associate ourselves to it, it magnifies the experience and then that becomes a filter for our lives. So you're saying

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in the case where someone's saying I have depression versus I am depression is that a correlation to saying I have happiness or I am happy. Well I think the distinction I'm trying to make is this. There's a massive difference in the language pattern. Right? So you could say for example in this moment I'm experiencing depression or in this moment I'm feeling depressed. Right? And that's an accurate statement. But most people don't say that. What most people say is that they I am depressed. Right?

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Well you are not depression. Right? It's like I am Calvin. It's the same sort of connotation. And so in this moment I can experience that. And I'm not saying that depression doesn't exist. I'm just saying that the distinction matters. When you communicate it through the experience of I'm experiencing that in this moment, you're allowing it to be something that you are not. You are this person and that is an experience and in this moment you're experiencing it in the same way I'm experiencing happiness,

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right? Or we're experiencing or having this conversation. I'm not this conversation. So there's times where it's appropriate to create that separation. And so I'd be just very aware for people about how do you label yourself? >> How do you label yourself? There's a it's almost like a form of self-hypnosis. If you believe you're a good person, you're going to engage in the world in a way that determines that you'll be a good person. If you believe that you are uh you know not intelligent

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enough or not smart enough, then the world's going to validate that for you and you're going to effectively delete, distort, or generalize anything that would suggest otherwise. So it's not just like it's a thought. It's when you create a belief system, it becomes a conviction. And it becomes something that you live out and manifest every single day. And so what we need to do is be aware of the beliefs that we have. Now the challenge of doing that is that there are things that we know are

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limiting beliefs that we're working on and the stuff that we don't know that we don't know. I think it was Homozi actually once said we challenge every belief that we hold to be true except those that we absolutely believe cuz then it's just like well of course that today is Tuesday like of of course my name is Calvin. Like those are still beliefs. We still form them over a period of years but we just don't challenge them as being a belief. If we just think that that's fact and that's

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the dangerous part. It's like stuff that sits in the fact category is far more difficult to move for somebody psychologically because they built up such a tremendous evidence that this is the way that it is. Which is why it's much easier to coach and help younger people than older people. Because what the neuroscience tells us is that by 30 years old 95% of all of the neurological connections you'll ever make in your life have been pre-established. 95%. So what does that mean? Very simply, if

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you're a business owner and you achieve some success before 30, where you've got a lot of the predispositions to be successful in the future, but for most people, and this is worth just meditating on for everyone at home, their future is a well rehearsed past. >> Your future is a well rehearsed past. >> Your future is a well rehearsed past. If you're cooking right now, right, let him cook, right? If you're already in flow and you're winning and you're like, "Hey, I know who I am. I know what my

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buttons are. I'm working on my stuff, but I feel like I'm in a sense momentum." Great. We are creatures of habit and so you're going to continue to operate in that way. Now, of course, there'll be radical transformation in the world and we got to adapt or die. But fundamentally, winners win, right? No matter what's going on in the world around them, they'll find a way to win. Part of that is a belief system, right? Like, I'll figure it out, right? That's part of it. So, there's a lot in all of

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that. And I know we've gone in a couple of different directions, but it's important to get that piece for everybody, which is that if you argue for your limitations, you get to keep them. Whatever you believe is true is true. So, choose wisely. Not because it is true, but just simply because you believe it's true determines the reality for you. >> From your perspective, how much of your personality is actually changeable if by 30 95% of it is fixed. >> I think there's a massive distinction

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between your neurology and your personality. So neurologically speaking, there is a tremendous amount of research to say that we can train a brain, we can evolve and we can adapt, right? That that we are very malleable in that. Um, still we're working with the 5% but we still have tremendous capacity to evolve and change and train and learn new skills, right? There's no doubt about that. The the part that you're talking about though is more the psychology element of it which is all made up in

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your head. Right? Because it's all the filters and I think that the challenge is most people don't think about personality. They just think about the labels that are reinforced in childhood. Right now you've got three beautiful three beautiful kids. I saw two of them today which is amazing. Congratulations on your little one. And we've got two beautiful girls, and you know, being a dad, they're radically [ __ ] different kids, man. Like a is beautiful and articulate and dramatic

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and just so feminine. And Havana would beat somebody over the head with a club, right? Like that's the second child, right? And then the Yavada is visceral and angry and just like she's got all this fire at her as well. And I just [ __ ] love them to death, right? But the challenge is that if they were not in the house that they're in now, it'd be so easy to label Aeler as being this and Havana, you're this, >> right? So it might be that, you know, I grew up, I was the firstborn. You first

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born? >> I am the first born. >> First born. Yeah. Yeah. Say less. Uh, so I was first born. And so there is archetypes in families, right? You know this. So you've got like the golden child and you've got the black sheep of the family. My sister, black sheep. Me golden child. But Caitlyn's manifested. I mean, I love my sister. She's amazing. Um, and we've got a phenomenal relationship now, but we clashed a lot partly because of the labels that you're playing a role in this family show that

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you're in. And so these labels then get attached to people of, oh, you're not very outgoing, but it might not be that you're not very outgoing. It might be that your brother or sister is more outgoing, so by comparison, I'm comparing my two kids. You know, Havana is not as articulate as Aela is, but she's [ __ ] two and Aila is four. But people don't think about that when they're labeling kids. And unfortunately, when we label children, and we do this a lot now in schools,

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which is a major issue, which why we're choosing to homeschool our kids, we label kids of, oh, you've got a learning disability or you've got ADHD or you've got all of these different things. Kids latch on to that because we're looking to try to better understand who we are in the world. And then that gets reinforced by the world around us. And then we start telling people that it is. So, we're telling our story to people of this is who that I am. And and that becomes very difficult for people to be

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able to shift long term. And then they just go, "Well, this is who I am because everyone's always told me I'm like this." But you weren't always like that. At some point, someone told you that, right? Like one of my favorite quotes from Les Brown, one of my early teachers, and it was like a label for basically if you you couldn't read or write. And um that's how he was labeled. And he had a first mentor that said, "Don't let someone's opinion of you become your reality." And I was like,

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"Fuck, that's it." Right? Because so often the stuff that we associate with this is who that we are is a problem. Like give you a simple example. When I was a kid, a lot of intensity as you can tell, right? Now, my mom and dad separate, right? My dad was very intense. So, my mom had an aversion to that intensity from my father. So, she then says to me, "You're not going to end up like your dad." And so, as I was trying to develop to be a man, I've got this intensity. I've got this

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aggression. I've got this drive and determination. For a long time, that was labeled as wrong. No, I love my mom. She wasn't doing that on purpose, but she's she had her issue about that characteristic and trait. So it took me a long time to effectively become more masculine. I was very feminine through high school because I was in an environment surrendered only by women where the natural tendencies this is a cultural problem for us right now right because that natural tendency of that

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aggression and intensity if misappropriated becomes tremendously damaging right we've seen so much of that but it's also what makes people especially for men leaders and role models and good men and so it took me a long time to realize ah no no no it's not intensity is not a problem it's that it was a problem for my mom and that labor was applied to me and it took me a long time to unlearn that and to realize actually I can be intense. I can be proud to be intense. I've just got to be

00:26:34

able to channel it in a way that's constructive, not destructive. >> In your mind, you're getting these labels. I imagine that these things are bad, these things are good. So then there's a constitution of rules. >> Then you choose whether or not you adopt them or believe them. And you're saying that people can inherently change these Yeah. >> at will if they so long as they understand how the program works. >> Yeah. I think about this. There's three developmental cycles that we go through.

00:26:59

Again, this is a generalization, but it holds true. The first seven years, you're in the imprint phase. You've heard the reference, I'm sure, that a child's mind is like a sponge because you're just absorbing everything, right? You ever made the mistake of swearing in front of your kids? They pick it up and they just run with it forever in a day, right? So, the first phase is seven. They're just absorbing everything. We have no what's known as the critical faculty. The critical faculty is when

00:27:20

you hear something or someone gives you a compliment and you criticize it, right? You're like, "No, that's not true." Because you've got a sense of identity. But you don't have that for the first seven years. You're just absorbing everything because you're trying to pattern recognize. It's like if you're training an LM LLM, yeah, a large language model, you're giving it a ton of information so it can draw from that later. That's what we do for the

00:27:39

first seven years. Give me as much data as possible. Then from 7 to 14, we go through modeling phase. We start looking at roles and relationships and hierarchies in society and what does it mean to be a mom and a dad and all that sort of stuff. And then we go through from 14 to 21, we go through a phase called socialization where we start hanging out with friends. We leave our pack, our family, and we start realizing, oh, the world's a completely different [ __ ] place than what I grew up with, right? Like we we don't say

00:28:02

grace at dinner over here, and we do at home, like whatever that dynamic is. And so there is a process of shedding some of those things, right? Like you might be born into a religious family, but then you might not be a religious person later on or vice versa. That's also true. And so we do naturally go through a process of shedding an old identity. We we go through that all the time. But there's some stuff that endures over a long period of time that we've got to actively work through. And the easiest

00:28:26

way to do that is to look at the results you have of your life and go in the areas where I'm not winning, in the areas I'm not showing up, if if that was all me, right? If it was fully my responsibility, not my fault, but my responsibility, and I'll come back to responsibility in a second, but if it was my full responsibility, and if I was completely in control of that, what is that a reflection of me? Who who is who am I involved in that? How am I creating that paradigm and situation? And if it

00:28:52

was completely up to me to change and evolve who I am as a person to therefore change that dynamic, what work would be required of me? You have that mindset. It allows you to sort of self-edit through the world around you. >> And now if we take that if we take all of that and zoom out. >> Yeah. >> What exactly is an identity? And and why do we hold on to it so tightly throughout these different stages of our lives when we're shedding or we're moving? >> How do you tend to look at it?

00:29:18

>> Yeah. So identity if we want to think about it is really a collection of labels right so you know I'm Calvin but I'm also a husband I'm also a father I'm also a business owner right I'm also a sports enthusiast like all of the little roles that we play form an identity at a macro level though it's a collection of all of those things it's like a basket of labels and then what is the prevailing sense of that so there's a sense of all the different roles that

00:29:44

you play but then there's also the meaning that you have in all of those roles right so for example Example, I'm a firstborn child. So, I'm a leader in my family structure. I'm also a husband. I'm also a father. I'm also a business owner. So, across all of them, what are the common themes? There's leadership in that. There's communication in that. There's responsibility in that. So, that forms a sense of self, right? It's a collection of all of your past experiences and who you believe that you

00:30:06

are. And so, there's actually a lot of of of uh of healing and introspection that you can do by just exploring that as a principle in of itself. But really, you should think about your identity as being who are all of the different parts of you when they're all pulled together. Imagine if you organized a a group party or a boardroom meeting and you had all the versions of you around the table, right? And they're not all fully reci reconciled or or integrated, but if we could do that, for example, it would get

00:30:29

a sense of this is who Calvin is. Now, I'm not just that. Yeah. Like I'm not just all of those labels, but that gives us a pretty good sense of what it is. And so there's a there's a sense of the human psychology which is I want to act in alignment with who I believe that I am. Right? I want to act in alignment with who I believe that I am. And so sometimes it helps to bring it down to first principles which is am I a good person or a bad person? Am I a winner or am I a loser? Am I a champion or am I a

00:30:53

victim? Like it's not binary in that way but it can help think about it in that context which is to go well who am I? And if this is my life how is this a reflection of who that I believe I am? So, you know, we have that sense of self that can be cultivated over a period of time. Sometimes we have a traumatic experience, what we call a significant emotional event. It can break that sense of self. We have to try to rediscover who we are again. Um, but fundamentally, it's it's shaped and molded through our

00:31:19

experience of the world and also our projection and experience of the future. >> When you think about these different parts of ourselves, how important is it that we have a strong sense of alignment? Um and and how do you know if you are or are not in some sense of alignment with yourself? >> Yeah. Yeah. It's a fantastic question. So I think most people are not in alignment and it's not just because they've got fragmented identities. I mean if you think about it, you ever

00:31:44

seen the movie Split? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. It's effectively multiple personality disorder, right? So you can appreciate that for people, they do feel conflicted, right? Because part of me, one version of me wants to do this thing and the other version of me wants to do this other thing, right? That might be, you know, we we work a lot with amazing women. And if if you've just had a child and you're looking to go back to the workforce, there can be this split in personality, right? I've part of me

00:32:07

wants to be this incredible corporate executive or I want to grow and build my career, but part of me wants to be an incredible mother. How do I reconcile those two conflicting identities? They don't have to be conflicting, but so often they can be. And so most people are not in alignment. So we have a methodology I'm sure we'll unpack it uh today which is we call it the wild method which is a compelling vision for the future internal alignment and then finally developing and executing a

00:32:29

proven strategy but the alignment piece is it right if if you're a business owner a leader a manager of people it's all about alignment in your team it's about creating alignment because you've got to make sure you're all heading in the same direction but alternatively if you're looking at it just inside of yourself you've got to go allin and how do you go allin it's by understanding that actually you're fully in alignment with every fiber and every facet of your

00:32:51

being. And from a a mindset perspective, if we're looking at that, that's about making sure that we've got the beliefs, the emotions, the behaviors, the values that are in alignment. But really, what does that mean? Means that you fully are all your identities are fully integrated to a true sense of self and a sense of direction. >> Now, you contrast hustle >> against alignment. What happens when a founder finally achieves internal alignment in their business? >> Push versus pull. There's value in both,

00:33:17

right? because there's times you got to roll up your sleeves and get [ __ ] done. But I know I've experienced and I'm sure you have as well. I imagine everyone that's listening has had moments in life where the wind is in your sales. You're being pulled by life. It's easy. You are just in the pocket. Right? And there's been other times where you're pushing [ __ ] up a hill, right? You can't buy a win and you feel like everything is difficult, everything is hard. Right?

00:33:36

Now, sometimes that's just you creating a breakthrough, but so often it's about trying to create that sense of alignment. It's not just alignment internally. Sometimes it's alignment spiritually. You know sometimes you know what's you if it's meant for you or not go past you is a belief that I have right so you if you can create that sense of alignment it's going to sort of gravitate you and pull you towards the life that you want as opposed to feeling as you have to sort of push it up a

00:33:58

hill. >> Yeah. I think anytime you're launching something new I know for me my own experience has been that I've had great ideas and I've got a a mindset when I started the business I started uh just putting myself out there right in in the very beginning and I'd literally work with anybody that had a credit card in a heartbeat. I was desperate. I wasn't selective. There was no niche or brand or anything. It was just anything. Ironically, my first session seminar I ran was called Get More Clients Fast

00:34:21

because I needed more clients. Um, but what I noticed as I'm starting to work with different groups is I start to attract people that are all in network marketing. I didn't even know what network marketing was in the beginning, but I started working with those. And so, I developed a mindset of go where the energy is. And so, in every facet of your business right now, there'll be areas that has energy for you and there's areas that don't. Now, sometimes you don't have energy because it's a

00:34:43

problem. You got to confront it. But if there is an idea, if there's a strategy, more often than not, the best strategy is the best executed strategy. You know, if you have a a a a poor plan, but it's executed incredibly well, that will more often beat a great plan that's not executed at all. And so, you've got to be in it. And so, I would look at any aspect of your business right now, and when you're analyzing a decision about which way to go or not, chances are you'll have a gut check on that. It'll

00:35:08

be a [ __ ] yes or it's a no. We try to live by that principle. And so I think if you're in the pocket and you're thinking about alignment that will naturally come to you. If you look at any area of your life where you are winning, you'll probably find it's easy and effortless. You'll probably feel as though there's a sense of momentum. That's not to say it's not uh hard work, but there's a difference between working hard and it being hard work. The idea is

00:35:28

you want to show up and you want to do the stuff, but if it feels like every time you invest a little bit, you get a lot back. That's when you know you're in flow and momentum. Otherwise, you feel like there's a sort of a law of diminishing returns where you're putting more and more in and you're getting less and less back. If someone's never experienced quantitative and qualitative flow state before where they put a little bit in and get a lot back and it just feels like everything is against

00:35:49

them, uh how could they best adapt themselves to start getting some of those uh those wins in their business? >> If we look at flow state from a macro picture, incredible um leader in the space, really the godfather of flow research science, Mihi Chickshi, you're not that's his real name. Don't ask me to spell it. Um but I want everyone if they can imagine a graph, right? You've got an X and a Y axis. You've got challenge on one axis and you've got capabilities on another, right?

00:36:15

Challenge. If you have tremendously high challenge in your life and you're low capabilities, how does it feel? >> Terrible. >> Yeah. You're overwhelmed. You're stressed out your [ __ ] mind. It's like just way too much. On the flip side though, if you're tremendously [ __ ] capable and you're not getting any challenge, what's the alternative? >> You're bored. >> Exactly. So, what we're looking for is not equilibrium. This is an important

00:36:35

distinction. We're not looking for our challenges to be equal to our capabilities. We're looking for the challenges to just be just slightly above >> capabilities. So, you're encouraged to sort of reach, >> right? >> Kind of like there's a Goldilock zone. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just a little bit more. Right now, let's unpack that. If I'm working with an executive or a business owner and they're like, "Hey, or or a sales team, [ __ ] any team at

00:36:56

all, and they're not performing, it's normally that axis, right?" And so, how do we do that? We're living in a world of tremendous challenge right now. No doubt about it. AI is disrupting everybody. if you've got global supply chains uh you know in the Middle East what's happening in the Middle East just crazy times but by by the way let's go back a couple years it was co and go back a couple years before that it was the financial crisis and you you know before that was the do there's always

00:37:19

change there's always transformation there's always crisis so we can't always control the level of challenge that we have in our lives we should assume that it's going to be [ __ ] high right what we can control or what we at least can try to influence to the best of our ability is our own personal level of capabilities now I want everyone to be aware of this I've never met anybody that actually really has a good read on what they're truly capable of. I have a belief system and I remember being um in

00:37:44

year 10 in high school. It's like 15 years old and I just had this light bulb moment which is that most people believe they're capable of less than they really are and very few people believe they're capable of more than they usually are. But either way they're wrong, right? Like you have to make a decision. Are you a glass half full or a half empty type of guy? You're never going to get it just right. So you either have to believe you're capable of more or you're capable of less. The belief that I'm

00:38:06

capable of less is a terrible belief. There's no ROI on that belief. But the belief of I'm capable of more means that you're going to be wrong and people are going to label you with thinking you're too big for your boots. But actually, you hang around the barber shop long enough, you get a [ __ ] haircut, right? Like sometimes it just you have to be in you have to go for it. Like you 80% of success is [ __ ] showing up. So part of capabilities is that capability is really the bridge between your actual

00:38:31

competence in terms of your skill set and the belief around what's possible. And so if we think about what you're capable of, it's really not about do you have the skills to execute. It's that do you believe that it's possible that it's going to be effective and successful. So for me, I think it's about showing up. It's about priming yourself for success. It's about assuming there's going to be a challenge and a friction to make sure the very best of you shows up. Um I

00:38:52

worked with an incredible entrepreneur a couple years ago just just before co Simati built a multi-million dollar company. I think at one point was the 18th fastest growing company in Australia. And we were working on the pressures and the challenges and the stresses of of dealing with a huge team and Chinese distribution supply chains. It was [ __ ] mental. And we developed a sort of a quote. He actually believed it so much he got it tattooed. He's he's a just a lunatic. Love him. And he said,

00:39:16

"When the best of me shows up, we win. When the best of me shows up, we win." And I think about that from an entrepreneurial perspective. You know, how many of us in our own businesses would achieve more if we just got out of our own way? If the best DNE showed up at Rival every day for your wife and kids every day, every aspect of your life gets better, right? Like no doubt you're already killing it. But I know for me personally, if I take stock of my life right now, I know that there's

00:39:43

elements where I'm not being the best business owner. I'm not being the best husband. I'm not being the best father that I'm always chasing that potential. And so I'm obsessed with that piece because you can't control the challenge, right? Well, you can by just downregulating your expectations, but that's not the game any of us are going to play in. So don't, as Grant Cardone would say, don't lower your your targets. Increase your >> activity. >> Activity, right? And how do you do that?

00:40:06

By being the very best version of yourself. And so that comes with knowing who you are, knowing what makes you tick, allowing yourself to be in a position to be able to uh to, you know, set your soul and your spirit on fire. You know, we talk about this idea of do what stirs the heart, challenges the mind, calls the body to action. And if you don't really know what that is, I like I actually don't imagine anyone that's listening to this doesn't know that because if you are a business owner

00:40:28

today and you've managed to develop a business that makes money and changes people's lives and you have staff, you have to have figured that game out already. You couldn't be doing that by accident. There's plenty of people that are clocking in, clocking out. They don't have any [ __ ] idea completely unconscious. But anyone that's sort of doing anything in this world in business, business is a personal growth journey. It's uh it's through the process of you you're growing yourself

00:40:50

more than you're growing a business. And we talked about this just before. So you you have to have a sense of that. I would say go back to the time where you last felt like you're [ __ ] on fire. What were the key distinctions? If we could pull those levers again, what would we be pulling? >> Now, if someone wants to shop as their best self every day, >> yet they feel overwhelmed, burdened, burned out, stressed beyond their mind, >> of course, >> and they can't make ends meet. They

00:41:13

can't get enough wind in their sales. Where would you start for someone to start building themselves into the character that they wish they could be? Look, that's a great question, man. So, let me give you a few things on this. There's anecdote and then there's the science of it. So, for me, I think it all comes down to this fundamental principle and pillar, which is this. What can I do with what I've got in this moment now? >> What can I do with what I've got in this

00:41:42

moment now? >> Yeah. So often as entrepreneurs we're trying to do everything all the time without all the stuff, right? And that's inspiring, but after a while that just burns you out. >> And part of that is control, part of that is a fear of failure. Part of that is scarcity. Part of that is lack. Part of it's not faith. Right? It's like the book of Eli guided by faith and not by sight. Like for me, I know there's times in my own life where I feel burnout, where I'm [ __ ] pushing it to the

00:42:09

limit. And part of that is a need to want to prove myself, not to anybody else, but to myself. But there's also times where I'm going, [ __ ] man. You got to appreciate that you're guided by more than just you. It's not just you doing this, right? That there is an army in spirit with you here. I'm getting emotional about this. Like so often as a founder, we've done it all on our own for such a long time that we forget we have a team, right? And then there's also a team not just in this

00:42:33

physical world, but there's a team in this world as well, right? Like you can when you tap into that, you start asking for help and support, the world changes for you in a big way. So, let's say that you're you're a burnt out founder. I would say you're doing too much, number one, and you will go, "Well, I need to do all of it." No, you don't need to do all of it cuz not everything [ __ ] matters, right? Like, there's an incredible book called Masters of Command, and it's about military

00:42:56

strategies of Julius Caesar, Napoleon, and Hannibal and Alexander the Great. And there's always a line that stood out for me in that, and I think this is the journey of entrepreneurship, which is that you've got to be willing to lose where it hurts, to win where it counts. >> Oo, chills. Yeah, man. Because think about it in your business, like in any moment in time, there could be five or six fires. And if you try to put all of those fires out, you're going to [ __ ] yourself.

00:43:19

>> You instead, you got to go, okay, I know that all of that's on fire, and that hurts, but I've got to win where it counts. And right now, where it counts might be in your collection. So, might where it counts might be focused on the sales and securing that client because that's the thing that keeps everything else going and allows those fires to burn because, you know, they're not going to it's not going to be the difference that makes the difference, but it's not great. The challenge is for

00:43:38

a lot of us, we feel as though if anything's on fire. The whole, it's like the whole house has to be cleaned before you entertain people. Some people just get to a point where they go, you know what, the best people I know are going to come over to the house and they don't care. The house is messy, right? Very few people are like that, but I'm sure you and your wife have got people you go, hey, they're coming over and it doesn't matter to you. The house is what it is. There's other people like, [ __ ]

00:43:56

you've got to feel like you got to make an effort. You got to have that level of comfort to go, hey, I believe in myself that over a period of time, I'm going to [ __ ] win. And so you look at all of the wins and losses and you go, you know what, chances are if I'm going to bet on me, I'm going to win. And so that allows you just to go, calm the [ __ ] down. Not everything really matters. Stuff, some stuff matters. You should focus your attention on that. And if you take all your chips and you bet on that one thing

00:44:19

and you fix it, the rest won't matter. So there's got to be a perspective and wisdom, which is why mentorship's so important because you can't see the label when you're in the jar. You can't see the forest for the trees, right? >> You can't see the label when you're in the jar. That's a good one. >> Think about you're in the [ __ ] jar. You can't see the label. So a mentor would tell you, hey, none of this matters, man. Right? Like this is what

00:44:36

matters. Focus on this. I remember we had this you remember this uh you know um Dan Prey, he's coming on the the pod with you. Not the pod, but he's coming on the mentoring that we're doing, right? Um we used to do some private mentoring with Dan. And I remember we were in the middle of the [ __ ] We just had our first million-dollar month. >> We also had a ton of fires going on. I got on the call and I'm in a panic. He says, "Calvin, right now you feel realize that all these fires is I can't

00:45:01

even see the smoke from where I'm standing." Say, "None of this matters. This is all it's all good. This is this like a what is it? Uh it's um um it's a feature, not a bug, right? Like some stuff is just part of the gig. There's going to be stuff that breaks all the time. So if you are an entrepreneur and you are feeling burnt out, which is most people, and if you're not burnt out, you're probably in denial because your level of output is so [ __ ] high. No

00:45:23

one else is operating at that level. So, it's like if you're burnt out, you're really burnt out. There's a few things you got to keep keep in mind. Number one, control the controllables. Don't try to do everything. You can't do everything. You got to focus on what can I do with what I've got in this moment now. That's going to ground you in the reality. But we've got to find a way. We've got to find a way to regulate your nervous system because people hit a

00:45:44

nervous system ceiling before they hit a financial ceiling. Right? That's the barrier. The business could grow more, but they're not capable of operating at that level. And so, the science on this is overwhelming. Right? There was a study done with Harvard University in the United States. It was a macro study. It was across I think 49 different studies in brain uh brain studies um with more than 10,000 participants. Like outrageous. And what they found was that when you're in a place of stress, you

00:46:08

have a cortisol spike. It hijacks the part of your brain that's responsible for fight, flight or freeze and effectively shuts down and turns off the creative receptors of your brain. The part of your brain that filters and processes make strategic insight. So imagine you've got somebody running around like a chicken without a head. That's literally you in that scenario. And what they found was that they studied people's IQ both in and out of financial stress. Just finance stress,

00:46:30

not any other stress, just finance. There was a drop of 13 to 14 points in someone's IQ depending on if they're in a state of stress financially or not. Now for context for everyone at home, the average person's IQ is about 100 points. If you're an entrepreneur, you're probably higher than that. You're probably 110 to 120. But we're still talking about a 10% reduction, maybe 15% reduction in IQ, which means that you're probably good enough to run the business, but not enough to grow it.

00:46:57

And if you're going to take that next step, if you're going to go beyond what you currently know how to do into the area where you it's now the unknown, you need to have your [ __ ] figured out. You need to be able to analyze opportunities and turn crisises into opportunities. Otherwise, that that um that creative side of you, the strategic side of you, that requires you to be in a great place to make decisions. And if you can't get yourself to that place from a nervous system perspective, you're going to be

00:47:20

in trouble. Now, I can give you a ton of things that you can do to regulate your nervous system, but you've got to take control of that because otherwise you're going to live in a reactive, not a proactive way. >> How do we take control of our nervous system? >> I'm glad that you asked. Um, so there's several things. Ultimately, what I will say is the best thing for you to do is the best thing for you to do, right? So, what might work for me might not work for you, right? I'll give you an

00:47:42

example. We flew in here uh yesterday. Uh, we got a three-hour time zone difference, right? So, this morning we woke up at 6:00 am Sydney time. That's 3:00 am for me in Perth. And I know I need to be on for you, right? So, that means making sure the basics are good, right? Having a good night's sleep, ensuring that we're setting ourselves up for success, having the right supplements. But, it was important for me to get up in the morning and go for a run. I know the best of me shows up

00:48:06

when, and I have this as a rule, I get up before the girls, right? Ash and the girls. If I wake up before them and I've already won the day by doing some sort of health and fitness, some exercise, a run, going to the gym, and I come back and they're still asleep, I've already won because I'm already allowed to be now. I've had some time for me to fill my own cup and I now can be all of the things I need to be for them and for the team. But if I've made a mistake and I've missed that and the girls wake me

00:48:30

up on the morning and then I'm already reactive and then I open emails and the world's on fire and I've got my team calling me with all these problems and challenges. It's like, you know, I think a leader's job is to see the world as it is and then to make it better. But, you know, really for everyone to be aware of this, you know, leaders anticipate an act and a follower hopes and reacts. And so, your job is to anticipate there's going to be a challenge and prepare accordingly. Play on offense, not

00:48:52

defense. And so for me, that's getting up in the morning and going for a run or going to the gym, setting myself up for success in that way. It's about making sure that the day is planned the night before so that I'm not reactive in the day. I've already got a plan mapped out. I'm trying to manage not time, I'm managing energy, so I'm allocating time in my day to be able to make sure that I'm doing the right things at the right times. It's it's also sometimes what you

00:49:15

don't do versus what you do do, right? So I don't have time for [ __ ] TV. I don't have time for for gossip. I don't have time for negativity. you you've got to guard your attention. You Oprah has a sign on her door in her office. Be aware of the energy you bring into the room. And so you got to be aware of cool what are the people in your life? What are the energy that they're bringing into your life as well? So there's a lot of little things that you can do. We have

00:49:34

some incredible teachers in our community that teach breath work as a way of regulating your nervous system. Meditation, yoga, mindfulness, um just as some examples. Um there's a ton of stuff, right? You know, we uh we do this with our kids, I imagine. So do you have the calm app? >> No. >> No. Oh, you should get it with the kids. So, it's like a meditation app basically, but they've got a ton of these little pieces for the kids, right? And they're called calmlings. And so,

00:49:55

when we put the girls to sleep, we have white noise as a way of helping them regulate. The room is dark. We play those little uh clips. You get used to We went to bed last night. Ash's like, I feel like we should play one of the calming games cuz used to falling asleep to that, right? Like there are anchors that we can put in our lives to allow ourselves to regulate our nervous system, but you've got to do that proactively. You got to trigger those things around you. In the same way you've created a space here that is

00:50:18

triggering from a creative standpoint, you'd also want to make sure as a leader, you're also creating a triggering environment that allows you to center, come back to a place of self, breath, movement, exercise, water, exper exposure to to different elements, cold or hot therapy, anything that gets you into your body as opposed to into your head. Those are the things that will make a huge difference for you. >> You describe internal alignment almost like tuning an engine. >> Yeah. uh if you had to explain this

00:50:47

concept simply >> what does alignment >> truly mean and how does someone accomplish that? I think it's about tuning an engine right now. If you're not aiming to do big things, you know, think about a Formula 1 race car team, right? And all the feedback that goes into that, the design that goes into that. They they obsess over every tiny specific detail. They've got an entire team of people looking at everything from the wheels to the the, you know, the the design elements. And of course,

00:51:12

the driver is, you know, the very best in the world to do what they're trying to do. That's required to play the game that they're playing. Most people just get in the car and they're lucky if they service the car every year. And so I think part of this is determining what is the game that you're trying to play because some of it's necessary and some of it's not. Right? Most people get through their life just fine and they're riddled with insecurities and self-doubt

00:51:31

and they're all over the place. They have no sense of alignment. But it manifests in the fact that they don't have a great body. They don't have a great relationship. They're probably broke financially. Their career is not super satisfied or or or thriving. And so that's a reflection of their overall alignment. Uh but when someone's trying to achieve the very best, the only way you can reach the mountaintop is by making sure that everybody around you has a shared vision, mission, values

00:51:53

that you're all on the same page. So for me, I think the the analogy there of having a team of people to work on sort of tweaking the engine and you would change and organize how you coordinate those resources depending on the car or the track that you're on, right? Like Le Man's the 24-hour rally is completely different to doing the Formula 1 race car circuit in Abu Dhabi, right? Like it's a completely different game. The car is different, the driver is different, the conditions are different.

00:52:15

So I think this that that's the principle. It's about first identifying what game are we playing compelling vision like what's the sense of the purpose and direction because that will determine the team that you've got to build both internally and externally to make that happen. Get them bought in collaborate thrash it out. That's the creative process. And then once there's a strategy in place then fully execute it. The wild method I understand it from what you're talking about. It's having a

00:52:36

compelling vision having internal alignment having a proven strategy. If you can get these three ingredients to work together, you can have what you call wild success. Now, having started with internal alignment there, >> I'd like you to take our audience down into the nuances of all of these and how they interact together because I think these are essentially >> building blocks to to tuning your engine or building blocks to allowing oneself to change how they >> operate throughout the world.

00:53:04

>> For everyone listening, there's two ways I'd like them to interpret this. Both is at an individual level. We have our own version of all of this and then also in their team whether that be their family or their company, right? Same principle. It's a universal principle. You can apply it to any area or facet of your life, right? But let's think about it as an individual. First piece, you got to have a compelling vision. You have to have a sense of where you're headed,

00:53:24

right? If you can't hit a target, you can't see. And so that might be something as simple as creating a masogi for the year or or a big hairy audacious goal, right? As they would say in good to great. But effectively, it's having a sense of true north. Where is it that you're going? not where is it not where you're going in terms of I don't want those things I need you to know what it is that you do want. >> There is that moment where you ask the founder what's your vision and it does

00:53:44

seem to evoke a bit of fear. Why is this so scary for people to fully unpack >> and and why does it appear to be so difficult to to flesh out and >> fantastic question two reasons. The first for most people is just a logistical problem, right? You know, if you don't put the energy and time into it, it's hard, right? Like great design takes time as you guys have have demonstrated. So most people spend more time on their phones than they do thinking about their purpose and direction in life, right? Most people

00:54:11

spend more time planning their wedding than their marriage, right? So they have a great wedding, great reception, but the marriage ends up in divorce because they don't allocate the time and the energy. So I would look at your phone right now and go, "What's your screen time? You've probably been at 5 to 10 hours, right? at a minimum, right? If you allocated that time to thinking long-term about where you want to go in your life, that's time well [ __ ] spent, right? The challenge is in order

00:54:31

to spend 5 or 10 hours, you didn't just spend 5 or 10 hours scrolling social media. It was like 30 second clips over the course of the entire week, right? So, you've got to allocate chunks of time to do deep work and deep thinking and it's hard to do. So, that's the first piece is just you've got to allocate the time. But number two, and this is a big one, when you do allocate the time, this is what we talk about internal alignment, they go, they're fused. When you allocate the time, I say

00:54:53

to clients, go outside of the current environment. Don't do it in your office or at home. Go to a cafe, a restaurant, go to the beach, go to the park, [ __ ] wherever. Get out and be in an inspired environment, whatever that represents for you. But when you get there, fully understand this, you're going to sit down with your [ __ ] notepad and your pen. Don't [ __ ] bring a laptop or a computer cuz you'll get distracted and do other [ __ ] Notepad and a pen, right? You get there, you sit there and on that

00:55:14

park bench, right? You're going to have your hopes, your dreams, your goals, your desires, the vision for the future. But also on the park bench will be fears, needs, doubts, worries, insecurities, all those things. And you've got to corral this group of people together to go, "Hey, I hear all of you, but ultimately I've got to be the one to make the decision." And so it's actually much harder to articulate one thing than it is to articulate many things, right? Like picking one thing is

00:55:39

much harder than many things. And there's real power in that one thing. There's a sense of decisiveness in that one thing. It's about being able to identify exactly what it is because therefore you're identifying what it's not. Now, most people communicate what they don't want, not what they do want. I want you to think about the analogy of a compass. Compass has 360 degrees. If you tell me you don't want something, that's one degree. We still have 359 other degrees, though. So, it's like

00:56:02

it's going to take a long time for us to get lucky and find where you want to go. It's much easier just to get clear on what that is. But that brings up insecurities because if I don't have a clarity or a vision and I don't achieve it, it's cuz I didn't know. But if I do know and I do set out to do it and I don't do it, then it's like you failed. And for people that's not the problem of you failed. It's their interpretation of that which means that I'm a failure and

00:56:22

I'm unworthy. Like we fail all the time. But if you label it as being about you, that's the problem. And that's what people are dealing with in the insecurities. Now I give you just a beautiful example. I was reading this book the other day called um Big Magic. It's written from the author of E Pray Love, >> right? You read E Pray Love? >> Yes. >> Yeah. Of course. like with Jocker Willick's Extreme Ownership and Can't Hurt Me by David Gogins, right? Like the

00:56:45

OG books for modern men. Um, and so Eat Pray Love, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, writes this book called Big Magic. And it's basically about how inspiration finds you. Like inspiration is not just this thing. It's like a living entity and spirit in the universe and that it can find you and it can come to you. And she talked about this analogy. I thought it was [ __ ] dynamite. She's like, I talk about this idea. She said, "This is psychologically for herself of going on a road trip in life." And I'm in the

00:57:13

driving wheel and in the passenger seat, I've got my hopes and my dreams, my wants and desires, and fear is in the back seat. And she says, "I say to fear, you're welcome to come on this journey with us. You're part of this. You're part of me. And I'm happy for you to be here, but you get a voice. You don't get a vote." >> Oo, that's a big difference. >> Yeah. Because it's like, I'm going to hear you like your opinion matters. I want to listen to you when you say that

00:57:38

we're afraid, but you have a voice, but you don't get to make a vote. You never She's like, you don't even get to control the radio station, right? The only thing that you get to do is sit there and when I ask you for your opinion, you can speak up. Like, I'm not going to dismiss you. Like, you're part of my life. Fear is a really valuable thing, but I'm not going to let it run my life. And so, you got to be able to hold that space and that's hard to do, which is why working with a coach is

00:57:59

really easy because if if we're doing it, and we've actually been through part of this process with you and your team, right? You know, when I I remember we're in Dubai uh just recently, we're having a conversation about stuff. It's really difficult when you're in your own head to come up with some of these ideas for the reasons we've already mentioned. But having a mentor or a guide or an adviser to hold space for you and prompt and question and draw it out of you, that's

00:58:20

a collaborative process that is actually really valuable. So vision is hard. It's scary because it does evoke a sense of reality that I could fail. If I clearly identify this what I'm going to do and I don't do it, then I'm going to let people down or let myself down. but also because most people are just not comfortable sitting in that space of all of that other stuff around them. It's it's it's it takes a certain internal constitution to be able to do that work and that's not easy and it's not for

00:58:43

everybody. So vision starts that's the true north and then it's about internal alignment. Now this is a generalization. There's more going on than this but we categorize it as five things. So we got beliefs, emotions, behaviors, values and focus. They're the five areas and they're all intrinsically uh sort of linked to one another but they're also separate right? So they have uh you know the ven diagrams they sort of overlap a little bit um and they sort of play off one another. Your belief systems do I

00:59:09

believe that that vision I just said is possible. If you take a bit of time to constitute and think about your life and just pick any area of your life if you look at your business you know what are the fundamental beliefs that you have about your business. Do you believe that you're successful or not successful? Do you believe that it's easy or that it's hard? Do you believe that you're growing or not? Do you believe that you're in a growth industry or a declining industry?

00:59:27

Do you believe that AI is going to be a huge advantage for you or a huge disruptor for you? you don't [ __ ] know anything about it, right? Their beliefs. Two is your emotions. When I think about that vision, am I filled with uh excitement or anxiety? Right? Is going to work, do you filled with dread or hope? Is it a [ __ ] yes or it's a [ __ ] no? Is it a get to or a got to? Right? Number three is your focus. When I'm thinking about that vision, am I seeing evidence around me of where that's

00:59:50

possible, or am I seeing only overwhelming evidence that it's not? When you're in your office, are you focused only on fires and what people are not doing? Are you focused on what people are doing? Number four is your behaviors. Are my behaviors in alignment with the vision that I've created? Or am I finding myself effectively um self-sabotaging? Am I taking one step forward and two steps back? Are you finding that you're showing up deliberately and intentionally? Are you being busy being busy? Or are you

01:00:12

majoring in minor things? Right? Like, show me what your calendar looks like. I'll show you what your priorities are. And that probably reflects your values. What are the important things for you in your business? We've all had the experience of going, I'm going to, you know, get into shape this week, right? I'm going to start eating healthy and go to the gym. And you might do that on Monday or Tuesday, but if your behaviors are not following through on that long term, you don't have internal alignment,

01:00:32

right? The behaviors are out of alignment. And then number five is values. Values are effectively a proxy for the things that are most important to us in our lives. And so we tend to find that, you know, here's a here's a real like very quick unlock for people with regards to internal alignment for values is that things that you have as a high value for you that are in alignment for you, you require no willpower. There's no motivation needed to do those things. But things that are not in

01:00:57

alignment with you, you'll need willpower and motivation to do them. >> Do you have an example of this? >> Yeah, I do. But let me let's use you as an example if you don't mind. Right. What's stuff that you go this is a get to not a got to for me. Things that I just love to do. It's easy. I I spend time thinking about it. I could stay up all night doing it. It's just like it's it's your happy place. >> Oh, that's a good question. I think for me it's creating moments with my

01:01:20

children almost creates little to no effort. Yeah, it's easy, right? Like you're in that mode with as a dad. It's just like, [ __ ] this is just like Christmas for me. >> My kids are bored. Let's go do something to lighten their day up. >> Yeah. Beautiful. And so there's so much in that, right? So clearly family is a high value for you and the connection as well. Like family is not really a value by the way. It's a means to an end. So it could be love, connection,

01:01:38

significance, growth, you know, those things. So it's like you're getting all of that. What's something that if you look back on the say the last 3 6 12 months has consistently been an area where you sort of start and stop and start and stop and you don't fully follow through? >> Good question. And I think for me it's been on and off with the gym, right? >> So there's been periods where I went 21 days in a row and then two weeks off and then four days in a row and 3 days off

01:02:01

and then back and >> it's on and off. Uh and I've created narratives as to why that's the case. >> Of course you have, right? We do that, right? We selfjustify and so or we um and you probably also have done this as well where you reframe that in your mind of going you just need to work on that or I need to unlock that piece, right? So uh that doesn't mean to say that health and fitness is not a value for you. But what sometimes can happen for people is they go well you know life is

01:02:26

a series of values conflicts right you if you're making a decision do I stay at the office later or do I go home and see my kids if you make the decision to go home and see your kids it's because you're choosing that over work right and it's not just in the moment but it's like consistently do you always choose the kids or do you always choose the work right because you are whatever you consistently do. And so from a health and fitness perspective, if the only consistency you've had is in the

01:02:48

inconsistency, right, like you've been consistently inconsistent, which is what I was for a long time, right? >> Yeah. >> Was because I was always labeling and I was always choosing the work piece and not consciously but subconsciously I was choosing the work piece over the health and fitness. And that has a second order consequence, right? Like you work late, you can't get up earlier in the morning. It has a compound. So, one of the things that I had to do for me was to go, okay,

01:03:10

health and fitness is important, but this was the big unlock for me with regards to health and fitness. Cuz at one point when we just had a Leela, I was 117 kilos. I was huge. I'm 90 today, but 117 kilo, biggest I've ever been. And life is just a [ __ ] mess when you're that heavy, right? Like it's just you just you don't feel good. Life is not good. Not that it's 117, but for me at 117 wasn't good. And what I've first I had to make it fun. That's a big thing. Like the easiest way to make a

01:03:36

change if you're struggling to make the change is you're trying to do something that's difficult. So the gym might require willpower and effort, but there'll be some things that you could do from a health and fitness perspective you'd [ __ ] love, right? For me, it was competitive sport, right? So if I could just do anything that was a competitive sport. I'm still getting momentum, but it's not requiring any willpower. So we started doing a spin class on a morning, which was like this

01:03:57

uh Have you ever done Soul Cycle? >> No. >> No. You've heard of the brand? Yeah. So for me, I was like, "Fuck, this is not even my thing." But we went down, we tried this class. I was like, "This is [ __ ] epic, man." Like, especially at 117 kilos. Like, you can't really run. So, you I'm on this spin bike and there's [ __ ] epic instructors and it's a vibe and this music. It felt like I was doing a conference. And I was doing that. That was my happy place for

01:04:16

like 5:00 in the morning till 6:00 for almost a year. And that got me in tremendous momentum. But the unlock for me was to go, hey, if uh this is, by the way, from a scientific perspective, this is called grafting where you take something you're already strong in, you add something that you're not strong in to be able to build momentum in that area. I like that. Right. I know it's a default in terms of a high value and fitness in terms of my career, my mission, my purpose, my vision. And so for me, it

01:04:45

was realizing, hey, you are not going to have the energy, the the dynamic, the um the the passion, the drive, the motivation, the charisma if you're not in a place of being tremendously fit. And if you're not in a place where you feel physically and mentally strong, if you're feeling fatigued, the best of you is not going to show up. And so for me, it became this ritual of every day earning God's grace, of showing up and putting in the work to allow myself to be the very best version of myself. Not

01:05:10

because I wanted to be the best version for me, but because I wanted to be the best version so I could be the best in my business. And so in the very beginning, I was just grafting those things, right? Like if you don't show up and go to the gym or go for a run this morning and do something to work on that energy center, you're not going to fully manifest the vision. And so because that mattered so much to me, it allowed me to bridge the gap between something that wasn't great to something that is and

01:05:31

now I do it every day. Like now it's just part of what I do and it takes time. So on the behavioral piece, some people have heard this idea of 21 days like new habit. That's all [ __ ] It's not at all that case. So coming out of London, University College of London has said that it it takes on average 66 days to create what's known as automaticity. Automaticity is where the brain becomes automatic. It's now harder for you not to do it than it is for you to do it. But when you actually read the

01:05:55

science, it's as little as 2 days to sometimes even two years, but the average is 66 days. So, you've got to keep showing up and showing up and showing up and showing up. And the easy way to do that is to graft it onto something that you're already doing. >> I I like this concept because like you said, you like competition, you like sports, and then you >> grafted that competitive spirit of having fun over to something that you would have >> traditionally found difficult. Is it

01:06:20

important that the vision in and of itself isn't just a vision, but something that will pull you? >> Yeah, this why we call it compelling vision. >> So, how do we make sure whatever we write down is fundamentally compelling and we're not writing down something that just sounds nice. >> Well, it's a feeling. It's not it's not what looks like on the paper, right? Like, we can write down something that that sounds great on paper, but if it has no charge to you, then what's the

01:06:43

point? It's got to have a charge. It's got to feel exciting and energizing. The whole definition of it is this compelling vision. Now, here's the distinction. It's not a compelling plan, right? It's not it's not a onepage strategic document. It's it's not a to-do list. It is a compelling vision for the future. That should inspire a sense of hope and wonder and uncertainty, but there should be some energy about it. And you got to keep digging for that. I'm a big believer on

01:07:06

this, by the way, and this might be controversial to say, but I think some people are better off not setting goals than setting goals out of the sake of just setting goals. Because what I tend to find is that if you're in a place where you set a goal and you know you're not your heart's not really in it, right? Then what you do is you set yourself up to fail because inevitably you will fail because you're just not fully in it. And then what happens from that is you set yourself up to fail. You

01:07:28

didn't follow through. You then go, "Fuck, that's another example of me not following through." But you forget that when you said it, you weren't fully all in on it anyway. And so you sort of erode self-esteem and self-confidence. And so sometimes it's better not to have any goals. Like I'm not trying to chase down anything right now. I'm just in this pocket right now. Like, I've got nothing that I'm working towards. That's totally appropriate. You don't need to

01:07:47

always be climbing a mountain. Now, eventually you will want to climb the mountain again, but when you do, make sure it's a mountain you [ __ ] inspired to climb. And that's important because you've got to use that energy to get yourself out of the funk. There's a gravity, right? Think about a a um a SpaceX rocket taking off. 80% of its fuel is going to be taking off, leaving the Earth's atmosphere because gravity holds it into place. Once you've broken through that, it's happy days, right?

01:08:09

But you got to get out of that. And so the vision of that has to be inspiring enough. And there's an irony to this. The more difficult, the more challenging, the more inspired the vision, the easier it is to mobilize the resources required for it. >> Why is that the case? >> Because people, especially from a team perspective, people need to see a vision for themselves in your vision. If your vision of rival branding was, I'm just going to have my own studio. I'm going to make some logos for some people.

01:08:34

Like, you're not inspiring all of these people to come work for you. You also don't need them, right? because they've got to see themselves in that vision, right? Like you've got to create a vision that's so big that everybody else's vision can fall underneath them. Like if you help enough people get what they want, you'll get what you want. And so that vision is what inspires people to come on board in the journey. But the same is also true when we think about peak performance and that axis again,

01:08:54

capabilities versus challenge. If the challenge is an exciting challenge, it forces you to stretch yourself and go after it and you reach even further for it. But if it's not inspiring enough and it's just difficult, then it's like, [ __ ] I'm not even inspired. I'm not even going to show up. So, I want you to think about the the uh if you think about a running race, the starting pistol that that fires everybody off. That's the compelling vision, right? That gets it going. But once that spark

01:09:18

is there, it's then can you hold that vision from an alignment perspective, right? Then do you believe it's possible? Can you see evidence of it being possible? Um you are you invested into it emotionally? Are you able to orient your emotions accordingly to follow through? Are your behaviors and like all those things have to start to stack? And then when you do stack, this is important for everybody at home. When you're trying to do something crazy and big, seek progress over perfection. Seek

01:09:41

progress over perfection. Because if you can seek progress and you're feeling like you're developing and you're moving, it's all we are. Especially for entrepreneurs, we are momentum creatures. I don't think people fully appreciate how significant this is. When you feel you're in momentum, you feel like you're winning, you're going to keep on winning, right? When you feel like you're not in momentum, when you feel like you're not winning, ultimately everything starts to grind for a halt.

01:10:02

Right? Do you remember playing um this is this is uh this is a risky question but I think you it's going to work for the purpose of the story. Did you ever used to play the WWE game on the PlayStation? >> Yeah. >> So do you remember playing they brought out one of the games and there was like you could do um like a momentum swing like if your character was getting low on morale there was a one of the games where you could do a momentum swing and like if you hit a finishing move you

01:10:28

boost your momentum and like everything that you tried would end up working off. You have this experience? So sometimes we need to do that reset as an entrepreneur is to get ourselves back into momentum h which is not doing the same things but trying to do something different to spark that because if we can be in that place everything starts to flow and work for us as opposed to working against us >> makes a big difference. And then the final piece is strategy. You can have a great vision and you can be [ __ ] all

01:10:50

on board but if you're uh you know running east looking for the sunset you're in trouble right? Like you need to have the right strategy. And so there is time and place uh very appropriately to getting the right strategy. But what I would say is for this is probably true for most in everybody on the listening to this which is this. We probably already have a list of things that we could be doing that we're not doing that would make our lives better. So it's not new information that people need. It's

01:11:15

not a new idea or new strategy. Of course those things are appropriate, but more often than not it's like it's the basic stuff, right? Every one of the people listening could be making more money if you were just better at following up with your leads, right? If you were more compelling and more dynamic on the sales call, if you were more inspired and that energy was contagious for people. Like all of those little things we tend to underestimate for the big shiny new things because it's easier to focus on strategy than it

01:11:39

is on alignment. >> Now, something you talk about around this as well is rather than trying to prove to yourself that you can do something you've never done before is to seek counsel from those who have. How do these different perspectives differ from the entrepreneurs that you've worked with? Those that try to counterweight against themselves that it can't be done because they've never done it before versus those who seek counsel. >> I think there's a natural maturity as

01:12:01

entrepreneurs where we realize this game is really [ __ ] difficult and let's not make it more difficult than it needs to be, right? Like it's already hard enough anyway, even when you have the best people around you, right? So when you look at the most successful entrepreneurs, they've got the very best teams in the world, both internally and externally, both uh, you know, active and passive, and they're trying to challenge and tackle the biggest [ __ ] problems in the world. That's what they

01:12:22

do, right? Like that's what Bezos does. That's what Musk does. That's what they're all doing. When you look at people that are struggling in business, and we've got a full spectrum of clients, right? People that have not running anything and people that are very, very financially successful. The difference is that as you become more successful, you realize it's a team sport. And as you're less successful, it's more individual. And so there's a natural certain level of ego that you

01:12:43

have to have where you feel like you can do it better than everybody else to get yourself started. But you got to outgrow that. Otherwise, that'll be the bottleneck of the business because, you know, we is greater than me. Um, you know, we had to learn that the hard way. You know, my my dad when I was growing up was always making pretty good money, like 100 grand or so. Uh, but he was in finance and basically if he didn't work, we didn't eat, right? And he always made good money, but he was working all the

01:13:04

time. And so I saw that as a pattern and I was like, "Okay, well I want to make good money, but I don't want to be in a position where I can't take my kids and my family on a holiday." And so we created leverage in our model. But it was still built around me for a long time. And we made a couple of million dollars a year doing that. And that was great. And then in 2024, I decided, hey, let me see if I if it's not the magic is not me, but it's the model, it's the methodology, it's the strategy. And we

01:13:26

partnered with a series of different people. And I said, "Hey, what we're going to do is you're going to be me, but in your world, and I'm going to give you all of the infrastructure, and let's see what we can do together." And we've had unbelievable success. That took us from three million a year to last year 16 million. This year we'll do maybe 30 million. 25 to 30 million. Um, and one of our partners, Lindell, for example, made $60,000 in 2024. And from November

01:13:48

24 to November 25 did 4.2 million. And that's because she has individual expertise but with the right partnership everything is possible right so I think so many entrepreneurs have this desire to try and do it themselves and that for a lot of us is sort of a negative mindset around money in most cases right like rich dad poor dad says this he says wealthy people use money to save time and poor people use time to save money and you've probably seen this so many times in the world of branding and

01:14:17

digital right where people look to invest and if they put the money up they're going to get further faster otherwise they'll get much much slower and probably never get there at all. So, if you're committed to getting there, you just go, "Hey, I need to have all the very best people around me to make this process easier. It's not it's not simple, but it's it it makes it uh makes it far less complex because people have already been there and done it." Success leaves clues, you know? There's very

01:14:38

little that we're ever trying to attempt to solve or or achieve that hasn't already been tackled by somebody else before. Like, [ __ ] why would you try to make it up on your own? Like, just that just seems like such a waste of time. If you're serious about getting there, get there as fast as you can. and you spend the rest of your life enjoying it. If you spend any reasonable time just thinking about any aspect of your business, you'll go, "Okay, cool. I can see how all of those things manifest."

01:15:00

And the reason why we categorize them into five areas, even the compelling vision, turnline, proven strategy, is because it helps people to be able to compartmentalize. You might have an area of your life that's not going very well. Let's say your relationships not in a great place. Is it because you lack vision? Do you have a compelling vision that you're both bought into? Is it because you lack alignment? You're both on not on the same page or are your your trauma is triggering her trauma or vice versa?

01:15:25

Right? Are your emotions overriding? You're coming back from work in a stressed out state and you're then like water and oil, right? You're not you're not you're not meshing or you just not have a strategy, you know? Are you treating people the way that you wish to be treated, not the way that they wish to be treated? Like all those little things. It's like it's only one or two small millimeters talking about, you know, uh you know, fine-tuning the engine, but makes a massive difference

01:15:46

to performance. huge difference to performance. >> What exactly should someone expect to see in their life if if they can find a harmony between all of these >> fame, fortune, you know, magazines? No. I I want to make a distinction around this because I think sometimes it can feel really daunting when you feel like your life's all over the [ __ ] place. It's like I've got to have a vision. I've got to have all of this alignment. I've got to have a strategy. That's not

01:16:08

the case. So, I want everyone to think about it like this. >> Negative, neutral, positive. >> Okay? Negative, neutral, positive. >> Negative, neutral, positive. Right? vision. We don't want to have a negative vision, right? But if you've got a neutral vision or a positive vision, fantastic, right? It's like I don't want to be going in the opposite direction, but as long as I'm clear roughly or I'm really inspired, fantastic. Think about beliefs. There's negative beliefs. We

01:16:31

don't want that. But as long as I'm sort of agnostic about it or I'm positive, fantastic. Same with emotions. I don't want to feel like [ __ ] but if I feel like okay, or if I'm feeling great, even better. So, the first thing that we'd want to do for most people is that there's normally, if you think about all of them as switches, there's normally some switches that are set to negative, right? That are having more of a negative impact than a positive one. If we can just get rid of the negative

01:16:52

charge, so it's all neutral or positive. It's massive. Think about it like this. Everyone can probably identify with the idea of driving your car, and I'm sure you've done this before. I know I certainly have, where you're driving your car, and you've got the handbrake still on. It's like you're accelerating, but you've got friction, right? Um, it's the idea of taking one step forward and two steps back. And so, we say this to clients all the time, and I think this

01:17:12

is worth like just really thinking about how much further along in life would you be if you just got out of your own way. Like, we make this harder for ourselves. Yes, there's a ton of [ __ ] things happen in the world around us that make it really difficult, but we ourselves make it more difficult, right? Like, imagine what your body would be, your bank account would be, your family would be if you actually showed up and followed through. It's a radically different life when you can go from

01:17:36

being in a negative state to a positive state. There's been, I'm sure, incredible decisions that you've made that you had no idea how incredible they were when you made them, but that one decision, everything starts to orient and then life just takes off. Like you feel like you're in a [ __ ] rocket ship. And so those things happen for us every day in our lives when we put ourselves in a position to be able to do that. And that's really just about being able to do the inner work to be able to

01:17:56

make that happen. >> Yeah. So if someone finds themselves with some of those things on negative, >> how can they start to shift them to neutral and positive? >> It's a great question. So few things to unpack there. Um you can just delete the code, but the challenge is that if you don't replace it with something else, then you know we need to fill the vacuum. So typically what happens is if you do delete it'll just rewrite, right? It'll just go back to the original

01:18:20

paradigm. So um there's an incredible book called habit why we do what we do and how to change it from Charles de Hig did a lot of work with alcoholics anonymous and one of the things that they found was that in order for a person suffering from alcoholism not an alcoholic person suffering from alcoholism um that person if they were able to rewire the brain to effectively replace the the signal and the trigger that was leading them to drink with something more positive right effectively is reworking the

01:18:48

neurological pathways if they just try to stop drinking They might stop drinking, but eventually if they didn't find a creative outlet, a new better supportive outlet for that trigger or that need that was unfulfilled, they'd find themselves going back to drinking because it was comfortable and it was safe and it's what they already knew. So, we en liken it to the idea of if you have an apple tree in your front yard, you remove the apple tree and then plant an orange tree. You don't just remove

01:19:09

all the apples and then hope for oranges to grow. Like, you've got to remove the entire root system in the tree and then plant something new in its place. Otherwise, you'd have a big [ __ ] hole in your front yard, right? Like the idea is that we want to try to work to a sense of wholeness. So I I also don't that the idea of deleting stuff, it's not about deleting stuff. I think there's real value in saying I used to experience that. I just don't experience it anymore. Right? So we talk about the

01:19:31

idea of like breaking through or releasing or removing a limiting belief. What we're really doing is we're reframing it. We're reframing it for something that you used to believe to you don't believe it anymore. Like you didn't break through being seven years old. You were seven and then you were eight, right? You're like, I I didn't delete that I was seven cuz that was a limiting belief. Today it's a limiting belief. Or maybe it might be your [ __ ] happy place. Take me back. But

01:19:51

it's like we I went through that. I evolved from that. That was the old version of me, right? That was that was preupai. Now the Super Saiyan version of me is the next level, right? And so you can do that through pain or pleasure. Inspiration or desperation. Pick your poison. Both will get you there. Some people need for it to get really bad before they make a change. The biggest challenge, and if I was to take a a snapshot of where Australia is at as a as a culture overall, is that it is so

01:20:15

good here, and I don't mean to offend anybody, I know there's difficult times for people, but by context of the rest of the world, it's so good here that it doesn't require a huge amount to live a really [ __ ] good life. Like, you live in Sydney, it's expensive, yes, but you live an amazing life. I mean, I ran the Harvard Bridge today. Unbelievable. People would literally travel on a boat here and die on the way to have this opportunity, right? So you can be struggling here and winning on a global

01:20:38

scale, right? By just by the proximity of being here because it's so good by default, it's got to either get really really really good to want to make something happen or it's going to get really bad for people to make a change. And most people sit in that sort of make middle where it's not really good or not really bad and so they're not really inspired to want to make something happen. You need to have more of a charge if you're going to make it happen. So, so, so when you think about

01:20:58

people in the meek middle, there's not enough charge for it to be negative to get away from it or positive to be pulled toward it. >> Um, do do we then need to go either way and find those >> Yes. >> those >> Yeah. >> What would you call them? Fuel sources. >> Yeah. Yeah. Triggers, catalysts. Think about it like this. Uh, Grant Cardone talks about the difference between a complaint and an objection, right? >> It's one of my favorites. >> [ __ ] I love it, man. I I use this all

01:21:22

the time, right? And so, you know, we uh we bought coffee uh yesterday and it was like $13.50 for two coffees, right? Um now, I probably complain to somebody about going, "Fuck, $13.50 for coffee is like like $7 near $7 a coffee. That's [ __ ] outrageous." And guess what? I'm going to buy one tomorrow. It's a complaint, not an objection. It's bad enough for me to talk about it and waste some energy on it, but it's not so bad that I'm going to stop drinking coffee.

01:21:46

Right? We're in Dubai the other day, and uh this is before all of the the stuff happened in the Middle East. $20 still buying a coffee. Like just but you get it. It's like it's it's painful enough that you want to complain about it. It takes some of your energy, but it's not so painful that you're going to make any changes to your behavior. It's not like I'm going to buy a coffee machine cuz it's $400 a coffee, right? Like you you're not changing your life. It's just

01:22:07

painful that you sort of has a niggle, right? And so to that point, you're only as big as your biggest problem. And most people major in minor things. And so they just they leak energy on so much stuff that doesn't [ __ ] matter. Um, which what I will say for everybody is that for a lot of entrepreneurs, one of the biggest things that I think will make a massive difference and certainly this was the biggest thing for me for I didn't realize how big it was, but the the certain burnout that happens when

01:22:32

you're under financial distress and duress. If you're in fight or flight all the time as an entrepreneur and you're struggling to make payroll and you're always running on the smell of an oily rag, that has like it's like a charge that's always in the background. It's like, you know, when the power goes out and you don't realize the fridge made all that noise until the power goes in, you're like, "This is really [ __ ] quiet." Like, all of this has a buzz in

01:22:51

the background. The same thing's happening for us as entrepreneurs. We just get used to dealing with a lot of background noise that most people are not really aware of. So, most people just want to complain about it, but don't want to do anything about it. >> Right. >> Yeah. The difference between a complaint and objection. So, an objection might be, >> uh, I'm not just going to complain about it. I'm actually going to stop buying coffee entirely and get Sheena home or

01:23:10

something. >> Correct. Exactly. Right. you know, and and Cardone makes the reference of going, I know, my prices are expensive, you know, like, but you're still going to buy. So, it's like it wasn't a problem. It wasn't the barrier. The price wasn't the barrier. It just was exp there's a difference between that's expensive and I can't afford it. I can't afford it as the objection. It's expensive. It's just a complaint, right? And the same is true in every other

01:23:28

aspect of our business. And sometimes because if we have a pattern of people pleasing, right? You hear all of those complaints and you think that they're all objections, you have to fix them. You don't have to fix them. Or some people fix themselves. Some people just love to complain about [ __ ] right? They do. Some people like, you know, Les Bren says this, you put people in a in a room and you know, some people are so negative you put them in a dark room, they'll start to develop, right? So,

01:23:49

some people love doing that. It gives them a lot of satisfaction, a lot of meaning because guess what? You can build the tallest tower by building it or tearing other people's down. It's much easier to complain and criticize than it is to create. >> You made a point actually. Yeah. [ __ ] I love this post you put up a couple of months ago. Remember it went viral. >> Yeah. Don't take uh critical feedback from people who haven't constructed [ __ ] I was just trying to be a little

01:24:08

binary with it and I think people most people took it positively. >> Yeah. >> And look, if they take a negative, who gives a [ __ ] >> Who cares? >> Yeah. >> But yes, to the point that you were making around charge, you've got to get yourself to that place. Now, there's a few ways that you can do that. Um, you know, one of the things that we can talk about is this idea of future pacing, right? And this is actually really interesting. So, you know, if you can

01:24:29

see the long-term consequences of your current behavior, then it gives you more of a wakeup call, right? There was a TV show and uh I can't remember what it was called, but what they used to do, this is before AI, they used to do a scan of somebody and say, "Hey, basically this is what you're going to look like in 20 years from now if you don't change your behaviors." And you can do this with AI, by the way. So, if you took a photo of yourself and you think about health and

01:24:48

fitness, took a photo of yourself and said, "Hey, based off my current behaviors, what am I likely to look like physically in 12 months from now?" And then if I was committed, motivated, I showed up, I got the right coach and trainer, mentor, I ate well, what could I look like in 12 months? And you can have a before and after in the future, right? Because if you can clearly see, you know, James Clear says this, I I don't care of your current results. I care about your current trajectory. And

01:25:09

so, are you heading on a upward path or a downward path, right? There's things I'm doing right now that are upward path. I know there's other stuff that's heading on a downward path, right? So, you know, long-term you can see the manifestation of that that can create the trigger in the moment, right? But most people spend a little bit more than they earn. Not a problem today. You do that for a decade, you're [ __ ] right? So if but someone sat you down and said, "Hey, by the way, this is what your life

01:25:31

is going to look like in 10 years time if you don't get your [ __ ] together and you have that sort of wake up moment, that aha moment. You go, "Okay, cool. I'm going to take that trigger, that energy charge into the present moment and make different decisions today." Yeah. Um and sometimes you need to have a shock or a wakeup call. Only through shock comes change. You might have your dad gets a has a [ __ ] heart attack and you're like, "Shit, I've got to take responsibility for my health because if

01:25:54

I don't, I might end up like him." So, we we have these triggers in our lives. There's plenty of them to grab if you want to from a negative perspective. Uh otherwise, you'll be forced. It's like the universe puts a little pebble in your shoe and if not, it'll be a rock. Like you if you don't pay attention to it, you you'll fall over. So, that's number one. But the flip side of the positive, it's so easy to be inspired. Like, [ __ ] man. You come into an

01:26:15

environment like this and there's so much that you can be inspired by. Go and stay in a beautiful hotel. Go and hide the car that you'd like to drive. Go and walk through home opens on houses that you can't afford. Part of the ability for you to believe it is you have to see it, right? You it's it's it's much easier to replicate than it is to create. So get around creative people. Have mentors that are making more money than you could ever dream of. It it elevates your standard. You go, "Wow, I

01:26:37

didn't realize this was possible." Um Ash and I were in Dubai with the girls and we drove through a suburb called Emirates Hills. Unbelievable. Un like like a recreation of the [ __ ] White House. Like these houses are hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. Now, in Perth, we don't have anything that's at that price category. You guys in Sydney have a couple, but even still, they're not readily available in all in one suburb that you can just literally drive the streets and

01:27:00

look at them. These places were outrageous. And you go there and you go, "Wow, I can see what's possible." You know, you you got to hang around. There's a charge to that, right? Like one of the things I love about Dubai is this idea that it's a place that's built based off ideas. It's just literally the desert, but they've created it all out of nothing, right? So it's like if the Burj Khalifa can be built in the desert, what's the Burj Khalifa for you in your

01:27:21

own business, in your own life? And the guy that built the Burj Khalifa, he wasn't an engineer or an architect or a builder, never built anything before. He just got the best people around him with the vision that he had. Is this what we're going to build? Right? The the shake talked about this the other I saw this post. He said, um, I used to tell them that I would build castles on on the ocean and they laughed at me and now I take them to the palm. You put yourself in a world where your

01:27:43

creativity, inspiration will find you. That's the positive charge. It'll allow you to have a breakthrough in your expectations or think about your life and future pace it out and go, hey, am I on track or off track and if I'm off track, let's take decisive action right now to put myself back on track because otherwise uh as I said, your future is well rehearsed past. If nothing changes, nothing changes. >> We hear about this quote often that proximity is power. What is that? And if

01:28:07

I'm not in a position of power, how do I start that process? >> Well, you got to get in proximity with people that are in power, right? So, um, there's several things to break down here, but let's just think about it very simply. We are tribal creatures, right? We went from being solo hunter and gathers to forming tribes, right? I saw a post actually about the space of AI, which is that tribes that form together beat people that don't, right? That that's a safety survival mechanism. So,

01:28:30

I was bullied in in high school, right? It was real bad. I was trying to fit into the popular group. I just didn't I felt like I was a square peg in a round hole. It took me a long time to get over that and just to be I'm just going to be me. Like, you [ __ ] like me, you like me. If you don't, you don't. Right? like I'm going to try and be unapologetic in that. And um for a lot of people, they have a worry about their kids getting bullied and about that peer pressure. Peer pressure is real. It's never going

01:28:52

to go away. There is a pressure that we have to engage with our peers in a way that supports that group. Choose your peers wisely. If you're hanging around with the smart kids, there's going to be some pressure for you to start being smarter. If you're hanging around the kids that are doing drugs and alcohol, there's going to be pressure for you to hang around and do drugs and alcohol. And you can be like, "Oh, no, that's not who I am." Sure. But that requires a a very strong sense of self that some

01:29:14

people have and some people are still working on. And so just choose your peer group. I remember having an experience in Brisbane and most Australians will understand this reference. I'm in Brizzy. We're actually doing an event in the Sunshine Coast. We fly into Brisbane airport. I get the higher car. We're filling up the tank. And I'm standing there at the petrol station. I got the [ __ ] pump in. And I see these guys in a dual cab ute. Two two rows in the ute all in high viz. They're off to go off

01:29:38

to a mine site. This is 9:00 a.m. in the morning. The guys in the front have got meat pies and Red Bulls, right? And the guy in the back has got that and a Coke, I think, or like a like a dairized coffee or something like that, right? And I just thought to myself, "Wow, could you imagine being the guy in the back if you were trying to do a health kick, right? Like, how hard would it be? You got 5 hours before you get to site. Your mates in the front have got meat pies and Red Bulls at 9:00 a.m. in the

01:30:01

morning and you got like a sparkling mineral water and a protein bar or a salad, right? Like, even if your mates were supportive, and chances are mates are not going to be supportive. they're going to ri you out for for eating your your [ __ ] salad. Even if they were supportive, it would be tremendously difficult to be in that car when they're all drinking and eating that because that would have been your happy place. And so you got to be around people that bring the best out of you. So we always

01:30:24

say this to clients, hang around with people that normalize peak performance, not demonizing it. >> There's a group of people around you that are invested in you getting to the next level. Hang around with those people. But if you hang around with people that are only happy with you being at this level, you're going to experience a lot of friction. So you got to find yourself a positioning and being in a small fish in a big pond versus being a big fish in a small pond. And people always ask the next question to

01:30:48

that is well well if I don't have that network around me, how do I get that? I think again positive, negative, neutral, right? If you're in a negative environment, you got negative people around you, don't be afraid to be alone. It's better to be isolated and not have the negative influence than it is to be around people just for the sake of being around people. This is a challenge. You see people in relationships all the time. They leave a negative or toxic relationship and then they end up going

01:31:12

back to it. Why? Because there's a sense of safety and conformity and and I don't want to be alone. You've got to do the inner work being comfortable in that. It's like you've got to create space to say to the universe, hey, I'm serious about going to this next level and I want the right people in my life. But those people I use this as analogy for culture. You've got an incredible team by the way here. like not blowing hot air up your ass. You can just see the the enthusiasm and the greeting that you

01:31:34

get from people. You pick good [ __ ] people, right? And I'm sure they're all technically brilliant, but forget about any of that. Character-wise, you can tell. But I want you to imagine this as an analogy. Let's say you're doing a tour of the office, right? And I'm a new hire and I come in and I get to know this is all the people I go, cool, I'm vibing this. But you can imagine if you had some negative or toxic people here that are really not in a good place in their lives and don't really love being

01:31:56

here and you're like, "Fuck, I don't really want to go into that office again, right?" Like the analogy of the bus pulling up and you get on the bus and you naturally, if you've ever been on public transport, you look up and down the bus, where are the crazies? Where can I sit? Where do I feel comfortable? Right? >> There's probably people in your life that want to be in your life more that see themselves in being able to help you, but they're currently looking at

01:32:14

the people you got on your bus and go, "Man, I don't belong. I don't fit in on this bus. And I'd rather just wait for them just to have no one on the bus before I get on the bus. Right. Like Jim Collins, I think you've got it here. Yeah. Good. Great. Talks about getting the right people on the bus in the right seats. Sometimes you got to get people off the bus and drive with no [ __ ] on the bus for a bit to create space for the right people, right? You know, your your ideal partner is not coming into

01:32:35

your life while your existing partner is in there. You've got to release that energetically to create the space and the abundance for the new opportunity to happen. So, that's really important, but that can be done actively and passively, right? My early mentors when I was 18 and 19 and 20 were Tony Robbins and Brian Tracy and Zig Ziggler and um and Les Brown. It that was me on YouTube man just binge watching the [ __ ] out of that right in the years to come I've met many of those people which has been amazing

01:33:01

and obviously you know they say don't meet your heroes. I disagree. I think sometimes there's wonderful opportunity there but you you can absorb all of that information but it's it's not just words on the page. It's got to be visual. Get yourself to immersion events connect. Just put yourself in a position to get lucky. amazing things start to happen. I'm a big believer of this. It's better to be prepared for an opportunity, not have one, than to have an opportunity and be prepared. And so, what you want

01:33:23

to do is you want to be in a place where you just put yourselves in environments where you have a high chance of discovering and creating sort of that that fire, that that magic, that catalyst for it all. And then, of course, mentoring, masterminds, go work for an organization that's inspiring. All of those things are super tactical and real. And most people listening to this will be part of some sort of mentoring, coaching, training organization. Um, but um, if it feels like a stretch for you financially, it's

01:33:48

probably the right stretch, that tends to be the case because you want to push yourself to that next level, become the person you're born to be. >> When I was a sales representative at a car dealership, >> I remember finding myself in a situation in my life where the people around me weren't necessarily negative, but they weren't doing a lot and they were demonizing my Yes. >> proclivity for high performance. >> And uh, >> proclivity for high performance. I like

01:34:10

that. That's one way to frame it. Yeah. >> Yeah. Uh that's a light PC way of saying it. Uh and I I found myself frustrated or not depressed but just anxious or annoyed about it. And uh I remember driving in my car playing Tony Robbins tapes. >> Y >> and in my mind I would pretend Tony Robbins was talking to me as delusional as this sounds, I created a imaginary >> uh proximity of power when I didn't yet have one. >> Y >> yeah. And that helped me tremendously

01:34:38

just step out of the world and into my own mind and get aligned with the things I thought were important. >> You know, a cynic would say that's all in your head. It's all woo woo, right? Yes. The reality is that's [ __ ] on the money. That's real because Well, here's an example from from Harvard. Harvard did a study of people playing the piano and they strapped them up to these brain scans and they got them to play the piano. Then they got them just to visualize playing the piano. The

01:35:01

brain still lights up, right? The brain makes no differentiation between a vividly rich visualization and the reality, right? In fact, sometimes the visualization is even more powerful than the reality because you visualize doing it perfectly, not [ __ ] it up in reality. And so there's no really obviously there's difference in terms of what Tony would have said to you in the car, right? If he was there versus the imagined version, but it doesn't matter. Your brain is still firing those

01:35:24

neurological pathways imagining if you can do it vividly enough. Tony being in the passenger seat, right? Like you you most certainly read Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. >> Yes. >> Yeah. So, one of the things I'm obsessed about from that book was the idea of having a mastermind, but he like literally had a master in his mind, like a mastermind in his head where he used to visualize a board table and he would have Lincoln and Thomas Edison and Thomas Jefferson and um Dale Cariegi um

01:35:50

and I think even um uh some of the other like OGs in the world of of business, the titans of industry. and he had done so much research on them for the book that he was able to hold almost like a conference in his mind with by talking about all of these people and he ended up meeting Dell Cariegi know I forget who it was at um um he met one of them in person after having done this process and he explained to him the type of things that he would say and he said that's so interesting meaning that it

01:36:18

was like it was so similar to what he would have done in real life that the there was a bridge there energetically for those people to be able to have that so you know absorb as much as you possibly can. Um, it doesn't matter if it's visually, whether it's through audio books that you it's it's the process of repetition and being engaged fully in that process. The better, you know, the more you can do of that, the better. Certainly, it's better than listening to the news. They're talking

01:36:40

about the stock market crashing and about the unaffordability crisis because that's also self-hypnosis anyway. It's just that it's said over and over again by a different medium. You got to control what you what you what you eat, right? Like it's the same for the for the diet as what it is for the mind. >> It's uh nutrition for the minds. Yeah. >> I think they're all either taking energy away from you% >> giving it to you, right? >> When you think about

01:37:07

>> what it means to take agency of your life, what exactly does that mean to you? How do you get yourself in a position to be primed >> to show up as the best version of yourself? >> Yeah, fantastic question. And I'm so glad you brought this up because I was thinking about this concept with regards to agency. This being obviously the agency podcast and I was like I'm not sure if he he intended it to be a double tandra where it's like four agency owners and also it's about high agency

01:37:31

people but obviously you did. Of course you did cuz you're you're the goat of branding and and storytelling. And so for me I just thought there's so much power in that because really the secret ultimately is high agency. If you don't know what high agency is, it's really just taking radical personal responsibility for your life, right? Um, and so for me, I believe that responsibility is two words. It's response and ability. It's the ability to respond, right? That doesn't mean

01:37:55

fault. It doesn't mean blame. You know, I think about co, you know, we had a a live events business. We were on about to go on the road and have all of these events and seminars. We had them booked out all over the world and then the government shuts the the borders, right? I wasn't the guy that ate the bat in China, right? Or the guy that cooked it up in the lab, whatever you want to believe, right? I'm not responsible for that in terms of I'm not to blame for that, but I've got the ability to

01:38:17

respond. You know, that happens. They shut the borders. Okay, great. I'll lose $1.5 million. We're 6 weeks away from bankruptcy. Okay, that's [ __ ] Accept the reality. What's my ability to respond? Well, I can choose to complain about it and I can choose for it to be over. Or I can choose a more empowered reality. But it comes down to taking radical personal responsibility. One of my favorite books from Joo Willick is Extreme Ownership, right? It's about taking full responsibility from there.

01:38:40

Then to piggy back on a comment we've already made which is then ask yourself what can I do with what I've got in this moment now. If you ask yourself those questions it puts you in position to be able to take control of your destiny. And as a metaphor I talk about this all the time with my team with my kids. I believe and again this is binary but it's true that you can be the kite or the wind. You can be the kite or the wind. So many people are trying to be uh the the kite. They've embraced themselves as being the

01:39:09

kite. If they blow up or down or left or right, it's not their fault. It's not their responsibility. Nothing they can do about it. They're just literally the kite in the wind. I have a belief that you can be the wind, that you can choose to exert yourself. It's having an internal external locus of control. You can choose to exert yourself over the reality of the current present moment. That you can through your own industry, your own effort, your own sense of agency that you can change and

01:39:30

manipulate and mold the world around you and demand and command that it becomes everything that you want it to be. Now, let's be clear, that's [ __ ] right? Like we're not the wind. We are the kite. But the mindset of I am the kite just [ __ ] you because then what's the point? But if you believe even to the smallest degree that you can be the wind, it puts you in a position where you have only upside and no downside. There's only upside from that because you're only going to endeavor to try to

01:39:55

succeed to uh to be creative to be inspired to to do new things. There's a sense of if it's possible then I have the desire to want to try and make it possible. And by doing that you do make it possible. Otherwise, you just accept, hey, whichever way the wind blows today is where it's going to [ __ ] blow, and there's nothing I can do about it. Okay, you've given up already. So, you're off the playing field. Let's just keep moving forward. >> With the kite concept,

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some would have the argument in their mind that it's not that easy. >> Uh what happens if it fails? >> Yeah, of course. >> How do you counter the mechanics of the belief with only the upside against people's potential argument that it's not like that? There's there's a likelihood that we're going to fail. >> Of course, I make no attempt to counter that. That's absolutely one of the realities. There's also the reality that you're going to win. But I want everyone

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get this. Most people don't fail. They quit. Napoleon Bonapart, the French general, said more wars are lost from a loss of hope than a loss of blood. They run away from the [ __ ] battlefield. They don't die, right? They run away. They go, "Fuck, I'm out of here." Right? And so, think about a journey, right? If you don't believe it's possible and you go, "I'm not going to get there." And you quit. Well, you've guaranteed failure. But you might say to the person that keeps going,

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"Hey, man, don't you realize you could fail?" Yes, I know. But if I accept your reality, I already have failed. There's a chance I'm going to fail. There's a chance I'm going to win. There's a like this is not backed in science in any [ __ ] way. But in my own life, in my own experience, there there's so many times where everything happens in the final [ __ ] 1%. It's like you're on it's the 11th hour. Everything suggests that it's all going to be game over,

01:41:32

that you're going to lose, and then somehow in the magic of all of that, magic happens, right? Like, have you read Elon Musk's book by Ashley Vance? >> Yes. >> Yeah. Incredible, right? Like, he's literally Christmas Day, it's all over, right? He gets the call that night from NASA. They award him a $15 billion contract or something that keeps it all going. And then he gets a call that the Tesla stocks have started to boost again as well. But he'd already negotiated to

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sell it to Larry and Sergey bring from Google, right? Like, it was game over. And it was the final 1% that kept him going. And now look at the success of it all. But it's like he could have so easily quit. He could have so easily said, "This is game over, guys. We can't get ourselves out of that." Accepted that reality that's potential reality in the future. Brought it into the present and made it a reality. But he didn't. So there's a delusional quality that successful people have to have. You have

01:42:16

to be willing to believe that something different can happen despite overwhelming odds against it. And there's the hope and the faith. I would much rather I say this to all my team. I'd rather that we fail than we quit. because I learned nothing from quitting. But if we fail and we go, "That was [ __ ] That's a loss on the chalkboard. Let's learn from that and go again." But what we do is we allow ourselves to push it to the [ __ ] limit. And by doing that, you learn so much more. It

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stretches you. It pushes you. If you stay locked in and engaged, you come up with new ideas that you never would have come up with had you quit. So even if you do lose, there's still so much upside in the losing part, but there's no upside in the quitting part. like you you you you remove all of that possibility and potentiality for yourself and eventually if you want to keep winning you have to go through some of those losses. So I'm totally fine with losing. I just hate to quit. >> When you think about failure, how should

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we interpret what it means to us and what it could mean to us? How do we change the framework of our perspective or our belief or using some NLP around it? How can we shift how we feel about it? >> How do we reframe it? Two things. Feedback and skill acquisition. Feedback and skill acquisition. >> Feedback and skill acquisition. >> Yeah. So I think about failure as feedback. I tried it, it didn't work, right? Like I'm constantly testing and iterating. I've got >> activity outcome.

01:43:36

>> Yeah. Yeah. Correct. Now um think about it as prototyping, right? Um I learned this from Apple. They talked about bullets and bombs, right? So like Apple launches the iPhone, obviously unbelievably successful. Before the Tesla, it was the most successful product launch in the history of the [ __ ] world, right? But that's a radical transformation in tech. But that wasn't the how they tested it. They tested it with the iPod touch, right? They did that beforehand because they wanted to get a sense of could that

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technology work before they released the iPhone. It was bullets before it was bombs. We're not going to unload all of our ammunition. We're going to test start small scale fast is what we say. So I'm constantly thinking about a campaign, an a marketing series, a sales strategy, whatever it is, as feedback. If it didn't work, no problems. I'm not attached to it. I know most of the stuff's not going to work. you know, there's a the idea of if you have a few home runs that are 10x, 100x, a

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thousandx, it takes care of all the losses, right? So, and that's a bas principle, right? So, I I'm I'm not super attached to the outcome. Um, and so I I want to just try and learn as much as I possibly can. I've come to realize that you learn far more from doing a lot more than you do of trying to make everything that you do perfect, right? So, it's just like repetitions. Just give me as much feedback as I possibly can. So, that's the first thing is feedback. But the second thing is

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often when you fail, you might have had the right idea, but you just didn't have the capacity to execute on that properly. And that's really about skill acquisition. So it's like, okay, what's the bottleneck here? And do I need to learn more about the sales process, the marketing strategy, or do I need to learn more about the tech and the AI? Like what is the gap in terms of skill? Because the way I think about it is if you're going to win the game, and by winning the game, it's the infinite game

01:45:10

of continuing to play the game. Then it's about acquiring as many skills as you possibly can. And the sooner you've got them, it's like you're leveling up your character. Soon as you've got those things, you've got them forever, right? So, I let's take on board these quests and if I fail in these quests, but I learn, I get some XP points, right? Then it allows me to level up and go to the next level. And it's like, I'm going to play the game forever. So, I'm not

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waiting for this one thing to work. Like, I'm not trying to tap out. I want to keep playing this forever. I love doing this. Why would you not want to play the game? It's like um if you're playing in sport, sometimes it's easier in sport than business because there's, you know, you got that. It's like, cool, you missed a shot on target. That's a skill gap. you got some experience, it's feedback, right? And then you can work on that skill and you can do in training, you can get better at doing

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that. So hopefully next time you score the [ __ ] goal, right? Like it's it's no different. But in business, obviously, when money's at stake and it's your money, it hurts a little bit more, but it's it's just as important. Like again, you got to be willing to lose where it hurts to win where it counts. You can have all of these losses, but as long as you win overall, who cares? >> You've got to be willing to lose where it hurts to win where it counts. >> Yeah,

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>> that's my favorite part of our conversation today. >> Correct. >> Calvin, I could talk to you all day. Me too. >> Uh if there were any final parting words with rounding out this conversation we've had today uh for for those listening, what might that be? >> Well, first find incredible people like yourself and um and jam and talk together and discuss big ideas. I think that's really valuable. I don't think we do that enough. So, I'm tremendously

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grateful to be here and to have the opportunity to share that. I think that's number one. And life is really when you break it all down, it's about the relationships that you hold. But it's about the people that you've got in your life. And if you got good people in your life and you're trying to do good [ __ ] that's a good life. And if you got bad people in your life and you're not in a good place, that's a that's a bad life. So I think the relationships, I'm

01:46:55

so grateful to be here. So I want to say thank you for that and so grateful for your team for for making that happen. Um, if I can give everybody just one piece of of something to leave them with, which is that, you know, most people fail in life not because they aim high and miss, but because they aim low and hit. They don't go after what they really want. They don't [ __ ] swing for the fences. You know, you you I'd much rather be the sort of person that strikes out but was [ __ ] going for a

01:47:18

home run. Like, you get one shot at this game, right? You get one shot as far as I know. And so, I think the biggest fear for every entrepreneur that's listening is when they really think about it, it's not the fear of failure. It's the fear of potential not fully utilized. Like, I'm terrified of the idea of getting to the end of days and going, "Hey, you you know the whole concept of sitting on the chair?" Yeah. Like, that [ __ ] terrifies me. of going, "Hey, this is

01:47:40

who you could have been." That was so like we give you all of this opportunity. It came to you and you squandered it, man. You wasted it. You were distracted. You're all of these things where it's like there was so much in you. We give you so many gifts. And so, you know, I've got a belief about wanting to continue to earn God's grace and to be in God's favor. And for me, I think that's about showing up and doing the work, right? Like God hears your prayers, blesses your hands. And uh if I

01:48:04

can give anything to everybody listening is just just believe that it's going to be better than you think it will be. It's great to play the game of what if it doesn't work, but let's also play the game of what if it does work and [ __ ] back on yourself. If you're going to bet anybody, bet on bet on you because that's going to pay a dividend for you long term. That makes the biggest difference for me. >> I wish we could continue this conversation. I'm getting so much out of

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it personally. Again, thank you so much for being here. I've appreciated it and we'd certainly love to have you back again, man. >> I'd love to be back. Fantastic. Appreciate it.

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