Productivity

Overcome Your Limiting Beliefs, Fail Forward & Multiply Your Productivity by Hitting the Reset Button on Your Attitude

I want to help you get more out of the training courses you buy, the products you create, and the things you do every day...

And I would say the #1 ongoing problem that I have (I keep it under control but I'm very mindful of this problem), and that other marketers I come across with have, is the thing called...

LIMITING BELIEFS!

It's because of "limiting beliefs" that you stop your car at a red light: you believe that if you run that light, you might get killed, kill someone, or at least get an expensive ticket from a traffic camera. You don't commit murder, you don't steal or hurt others for thousands of reasons.

BUT having limiting beliefs in the wrong place means you don't always achieve your peak potential, you hold yourself back, and you don't get what you want or deserve.

Anchoring, Conflict, Sabotage

It's a way more serious issue than you've been led to believe. Here's how it happens:

Step #1: Your "bad behavior" (procrastinating, not finishing what you start, not making progress) gets anchored. How?

When you hang around the wrong people, their own destructive behavior rubs off on you. Haven't you ever dealt with a friend, or maybe a family member, who always seemed to be miserable? Who seemed to complain about everything? Complaining about the world made that person feel smart and relevant, and bringing others down to their level made them feel significant.

I don't want to get too personal, but during my teenage years and early twenties I have dealt with people who (unknowingly) punished me for success and rewarded me for failure. This is exactly why that saying "your income is the average income of your 5 closest friends" exists.

Step #2: Now, you start to experience "inner conflict" -- the nerdy term for this is cognitive dissonance. This is where you hold multiple beliefs that contradict each other. The easy one for most of us to point out is…

"I want to make lots of money, but I also feel like making lots of money is a bad thing"

Step #3: And the result of that is "self sabotage" -- some people label this as driving with one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake.

You create a product, setup a website, send emails, pay for traffic, begin a launch sequence… but when it comes time to make some sales… you drop it and you've moved onto the next thing.

You launch a brand new live class, and at the last second when it's time to open the doors, you chicken out and price it at $17 dollars instead of $997 or higher… worrying about being yelled at, people refunding, or not delivering on your claims… when in fact, none of that has happened yet!

If I wanted to, I could tell you stories about refunds I received on my birthday, on the day I quit my job, on Christmas morning BUT I choose not to worry about 1% of returned DIGITAL sales -- it's just as silly as not getting a cat because it will die in 20 years, not getting married because you might get divorced, not having a kid because it might grow up to hate you, not going to school because you might flunk out, not taking a job because you might get fired from it, not buying a house because someone might break into it, not buying a new car because someone might steal it!

Let's break down the three types of limiting beliefs: hopelessness (global beliefs), helplessness (personal beliefs), and worthlessness (future beliefs)…

Limiting Belief #1:
"Hopelessness"

This is where authority figures tell you something is impossible. Growing up it might have been a parent or mentor, nowadays it might be the news or a friend.

I like to keep in touch with my subscribers and every now and then I hear the excuse that "no one is making money during this economic downtime" (which I read from my iPhone, sitting in my Ford Mustang, in line at a Del Taco drive thru, surrounded by brand new cars). I hear that "internet marketing doesn't work" and yet everyone is buying more books, movies, plane tickets, and music online than ever before.

It makes it very tempting, easy and REWARDING to not take any action! There's no point in me learning, doing, or perfecting my internet business because it's all a big lie, right?

Limiting Belief #2:
"Helplessness"

This is where you might see that something is possible, but it's just not something you can do. During my early years in college, I had a middle-aged mentor from England who kept telling me about his $1,000 and $2,000 days… almost every day.

He kept giving me these numbers, and I was happy for him, but it made me think why I wasn't making that kind of money at the time. Then I'd try to justify it in any way possible!

Once again, a less than 1% refund rate but I've had refunds for the same product because it was "too complicated" for one person, and "too simple" for another. One person refunded "WordPress Drip" because they didn't realize it a WordPress plugin, "Newbie Crusher" because they didn't know it was for newbies, and "PHP Start Pack" because they didn't know it was for PHP. These are very rare events, but I find them very funny!

In reality, if you're looking for a "cop out" reason to not take action… you'll find it.

Here's the thing. If you take anyone's course and have the "wrong" attitude going in, you're never going to get the results you want. I remember in an earlier stage in my life, if I'd read an article or a book, and if I didn't already know or agree with what was said, I thought it was a waste of time! How silly. Likewise, in a different stage of my life, if I wasn't blown away by tons and tons of new material, I'd think the product was a waste of time.

One Piece of Information...

But now, if I attend an offline event, join a membership, or even attend a webinar or teleseminar… and even if it's a bad one… if I can get one takeaway piece of information, it's worthwhile.

People with the "helpless" limiting belief tend to take some action, but there's no follow through. I can't tell you how many students we've had who came to us with the "same" story of spending 40 thousand, 60 thousand, 100 thousand dollars on other peoples' courses. And in a couple weeks we got them  to setup their business and many times make their first sale. And then, they're gone… dropped off the face of the earth and I never hear from these people again because their limiting beliefs kept them from actually making some money online.

Limiting Belief #3:
"Worthlessness"

You might not believe you deserve to make a million dollars, or $10,000 a month, or to pay off your house, whether you admit it or not OR whether you even realize it or not.

They might have launched a product or two, and earned $1000 or $5000, but kept quiet about the results, didn't repeat the process, and didn't improve. These are the people who tell themselves they're "happy" making $500 a month online while still working at their day job that they hate, because it's easier.

They won't re-market an old product to their existing list of subscribers because some of them already own it. They worry about which blog theme to install this week, what's the best time of day to email, and what to price their product… when none of these things matter! Taking action and following through does.

Maybe I'm talking about you and you don't even realize it! I don't know. But I do know that if someone came to you and asked what your plan is to make $10k this month, or $100k this month (or whatever your next milestone is) and you're instantly angry, frustrated, and self-defeating… you've got a serious problem and you can either let it own you, or you can get it out of the way and move past it.

Now, how do you overcome your limiting beliefs and achieve your peak potential?

Solution #1:
"Ask Better Empowering Questions"

The first thing I want you to do is be very aware of the words you use over and over to describe yourself as a person, where you are in life, others around you, and how you deal with adversity.

Here's what I mean. If you're the kind of person who constantly asks themselves, "Why does this always happen to me?" Or, "Why am I such a screw up?" Or, "Why is everyone out to get me?" Then you're setting yourself up for failure.

On the other hand, if you ask yourself…

• What are at least three things that will make me feel better today?
• What am I excited about today?
• How can I learn from this problem?
• What isn't perfect yet and how can I move at least one step in that direction?
• How can I enjoy the things I'm going to do today?
• What parts of my life do I enjoy the most and how do those things make me a better person?
• What will I lose (or miss out on) if I don't take action right now?
• What is the next step I need to take today?
• What's one thing I was going to do later, but will instead do right now?

Tony Robbins made this "empowering question" technique famous although I was using this before I'd heard of Robbins. I actually learned this from a course about "how to write a bestselling book" a decade ago which told me to phrase book chapter titles as questions. The truth is, when a question is asked, your subconscious has to answer it, whether you realize it or not… so why not apply it to real life instead of just writing?

Garbage in, garbage out! Ask negative questions and you get negative answers. Ask BETTER questions and you'll get better answers.

Solution #2:
"Model Successful People"

Now that you've asked yourself better questions, or even if you're having trouble thinking of better questions, use your imagination to have someone ask it for you.

• What would Will Smith think about your current problem and how to fix it?
• If Michelle Obama launched a membership site and it didn't make a bunch of sales right away, what her next step be?
• How about George Clooney, Betty White, Michael J. Fox, Sandra Bullock? Would they think twice about mailing their list, contacting a joint venture partner, or setting up a new landing page?

Armand Morin calls this "Success Leaves Traces", Christians call this, "What Would Jesus Do" and NLP calls this "Modeling." It means, find a mentor who is where you want to be, look at what they do, find out what they did to get there, and follow their system. Tom Cruise wouldn't be afraid of running a 1-hour webinar, so why are you?

Solution #3:
"Just Do It"

This sounds like the cheesiest statement ever, but as soon as you stop "trying" to market your product and just market your product, you'll actually make sales.

Stop thinking about it so much and just "fail forward." Steve Jobs never intended to make movies, but after being kicked out of Apple, losing half his life savings on NeXT, and losing even more money on Pixar, he finally stumbled on creating movies -- $7 billion from 12 movies.

There's no way I would have begun putting out copywriting products, selling web templates, webinar classes, or even WordPress plugins if I hadn't "failed" through a bunch of mediocre launches for PHP products.

Solution #4:
"Have a Goal and Put a Value on Your Outcome"

Every month where I've set a clear goal about how many sales of a specific product I want to make, or how much money I want to make that month, I've made more money. Funny how that works.

Can I tell you something else? Within a 1 year period, I went from being single, with a day job, "stuck" at the 10K per month  range, to attending my first few internet marketing seminars, buying my dream car in cash at age 22, buying my first home at age 23, getting a long-term girlfriend (who I'm now living with 5 years later), and having several months with over $30,000 in income. I quit my day job permanently a few months after that.

Why did all this happen? I wrote down all the things I wanted to have. (This is what books like "Think and Grow Rich" are all about.) Next, I figured out what it would take to make those things happen… making more deals, launching more products, marketing more aggressively to my list, getting more traffic, building a bigger list, charging more money, writing better sales copy, the usual stuff!

Now that I knew what my goal was, and what actions I needed to take to achieve those goals, I could compare the pleasure versus the pain. Pain being time, effort, possibility of failure, moving out of my comfort zone, social awkwardness, putting myself out there. And pleasure being money, happiness, a relationship, comfort, security, peace of mind… all that good stuff.

And now I was aligned just right… moving AWAY from the pain and TOWARDS the pleasure, instead of self-sabotage.

Solution #5:
"Objection-Based Thinking"

Think in terms of small roadblocks (and little objections) instead of impassive barriers. The reason you don't have what you want, and the reason why you're not taking the actions you should, a real reason or just an excuse?

If there was just one thing holding you back from choosing your niche, what would it be? What about what's holding you back from creating a membership site? Is it something as simple as not knowing what software? Let's say you could only choose one thing.

I know I just threw a lot at you, but I think it's going to help. Tell me below, what's your current limiting belief and how is it holding you back? Or, what's a limiting belief you used to have and how did you overcome it? Please tell me below right now.

How to Pull Confidence Out of Thin Air, Starting Today (Easy 4-Step Process with PROOF!)

I was talking to someone the other night who was afraid to run a webinar. A lot of people are. Many of you have "enough" technical skills to do it, enough knowledge about your topic to present, but "something" is holding you back.

Let's change that in this blog post, for you, right now!

Go ahead and look at this page carefully, because it's going to help you make a sale (if you are a marketer), help people (if you are a teacher), conquer public presentations (if you are a speaker), and so on.

First, I am NOT a self-help expert of any kind. But I have run 359 live webinars (697 hours) so I know a couple of things about webinar confidence and public speaking.

You and I both have our own unique set of problems. Let's solve those problems for you, not in one huge step but in a couple of SMALL pieces at a time...

News Flash:
You Have Only Have 8 Emotions (Seriously!)

As a nerdy computer programmer, I like to take apart what makes us work. And according to psychologists (I'm not one and haven't read ANY books about psychology) you have 8 basic emotions:

• joy
• trust
• anticipation
• surprise
• fear
• anger
• sadness
• disgust

That's it! Anything else you feel is either one of these in greater or lesser intensity (i.e. rage, jealousy, distraction, annoyance, interest) or is a combination of these (i.e. love or guilt).

"But dammit Jim, I'm a computer programmer, not a psychologist." That "psychology" explanation looks like a bunch of ideas thrown at me. I like to deconstruct and simplify things.

This information isn't available in any book, only right here. At least not assembled in the way I've done it here. Let's get it into a step by step formula you can apply today.

Eight things are a lot to keep track of... are four key concepts easier? Of course they are. So let's keep in mind that each of these 8 emotions has an OPPOSITE... for example, the opposite of being "happy" is "sad", right?

Four Positives and Four Negatives

That means you really only have four negative and four positive states:

• ANTICIPATION (positive) <--> SURPRISE (positive)
• JOY (positive) <--> sadness (negative)
• TRUST (positive) <--> disgust (negative)
• fear (negative) <--> anger (negative)

(I've put positive emotions in ALL CAPS and negative ones in lower caps to make this more readable.)

The "green" and "orange" colors don't mean good or bad, it's just so you can tell which are the opposites of one another. For example, "joy" and "sadness" are opposites because they have different colors. (This is important for later.)

Here's something else you should notice from these (2 + 2 + 2 + 2) eight states:

• With 2 of the "positive" emotions, the opposite is a positive
• With 2 of the "positive" emotions, the opposite is a negative
• With 2 of the "negative" emotions, the opposite is a positive
• With 2 of the "negative" emotions, the opposite is a negative

You can have all the knowledge and all the skill in the world, but if your emotions (especially fear) hold you back, if you can't "get over yourself" so to speak... then you can't do anything!

This is why so many people have trouble putting up an optin page, can't YET run a live webinar, and so on. Too many negatives holding you back and not enough positives pushing you forward.

How to Change Your Behavior
(The Way That Really Works)

And I think the reason so many people can't get past it is they either let it take them over, try to ignore it, fight it or even go against it.

You have to REDIRECT it and USE it to your advantage. When I was young, I was in (music) band, played sports and gave school presentations probably just like you.

Anytime I "fought" what I was feeling, it distracted me from hitting the baseball. BUT... if I was nervous about playing saxophone in concert, I would use that alertness to do an even better job than I would otherwise.

(Maybe that explains why I was always stuck in leftfield/shortstop/3rd base in baseball, but was 1st/2nd chair in band class?)

To improve any skill, you need to go from:

1. unconscious incompetence (unaware you're doing it wrong), to...
2. conscious incompetence (find out WHAT you're doing wrong), then to...
3. conscious competence (doing it somewhat right even if you have to work at it), and finally...
4. unconscious competence (doing it automatically as easily as breathing or driving a car).

The seven stages of grief (shock, denial, anger, bargaining, guilt, depression, acceptance) take you up to "conscious competence."

Twelve step recovery programs (problem, awareness, decision, inventory, admission, readiness, openness, details, repair, inventory, meditation, repetition) stop before you get to "unconscious competence."

Unconscious Incompetence to Unconscious Competence

There are a lot of things I don't know. But I DO know about overcoming your fear of public speaking to run webinars because I've done it. And the secret isn't figuring it all out at once, it's focusing on ONE issue you have (i.e. running one in the first place, slurring your words, stopping for questions, silence or dead air... slowly fixing things, until one day you realize you don't have to try at all...

• 0% of the way there: ground zero
  (not online, not doing webinars)
• 20% of the way there: unconscious incompetence
  (running your first webinar, just doing "something")
• 40% of the way there: conscious incompetence
  (aware of little things you're doing wrong on a webinar)
• 60% of the way there: conscious competence
  (fixing little issues i.e. breathing on a webinar)
• 80% of the way there: unconscious competence
  (running a great webinar automatically)

If you've heard of the 80/20 rule, you know that 20% of the effort will bring you 80% of the results.

Life's 80/20 rule applies here in that the last 80% is the hardest... you can put in just 20% of the effort to achieve an 80% skill level (the beginnings of "unconscious competence") ... but now you're running webinars and doing them correctly: making sales, being a good presenter, recording it, all that good stuff.

Let's connect your "skill" (good or bad) your "emotion" (good or bad)... we want your negative state to be in the past, and your positive state to be in the future, right?

Anger, disgust, fear, and sadness should somehow fit into past -- the "unconscious incompetence" and "conscious incompetence" areas.

Anticipation, joy, trust, and surprise are in your future -- "conscious competence" and "unconscious competence."

When you're incompetent, you're in a negative state. When you're competent, you're positive. But how do you GET there?

Why Don't You Go "Confuse" Yourself!

The key is confusing yourself and let me explain. Think about when somebody won you over by making you laugh, overloading you with information or just confusing you with conflicting information until you gave up. You change your state through confusion.

The lack of confusion is also how you stay in a state, and why you're stuck in the state you're in now. Let's see what happens if we pair the "unconscious" states (beginning and end) with emotions that are NOT opposites, and "conscious" states (middle stages where we're improving) with emotions that ARE opposites -- to add the "confusion" factor where we make a change?

The Exact Roadmap to Do It Today

We get this roadmap of going from "guilt" to "love."

• unconscious incompetence = sadness + disgust = guilt
• conscious incompetence = anger + fear (opposites)
• conscious competence = ANTICIPATION + SURPRISE (opposites)
• unconscious competence = JOY + TRUST = love

(Remember, both "green" or both "orange" next to each other, means they're the same, "green and orange" means they're opposites.)

What you'll do is use fear and anger to rise above the guilt, take some action out of impulse, experience anticipation and surprise once you realize what you're doing, experience the joy of completion and the trust that it's possible to repeat.

Here are the steps you need to go through in order, for example, to get confident with webinars:

Stage 1: Unconscious Incompetence: (sadness + disgust) Do you feel bad because you're not making enough money? Feel guilty because you're not doing enough? It's okay to blame your "past" self for not doing enough... cry it out so you can move past it. Your present and future self WILL run one webinar this week, it's going to happen.

Stage 2: Conscious Incompetence: (anger + fear) Remember when someone said you weren't good enough to do something? That same person would probably say the same about you and webinars.Prove them wrong. Are you jealous of someone else, who has more than you do? It's not fair, you deserve it more than they do! Get mad enough to make a difference.

Maybe you could do a webinar better than "they" would... now you have something they don't.

In any case, your marketing message isn't getting out now -- you need to run at least ONE webinar. Try it. What you've been doing so far isn't working it... attack this head-on.

Stage 3: Conscious Competence: (ANTICIPATION + SURPRISE) You're allowed to be a "little" bit nervous trying something, like webinars, that you haven't done before.But one of the cool things about doing a webinar is that you don't know what's going to happen. Doing a webinar means you have to move outside your comfort zone a little bit, but what have you got to lose?

The absolute worst thing that happens is that no one shows up, or no one likes your webinar, and guess what... you're at the same place you are now! In other words, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Once you do this you'll know where your limits are.

Stage 4: Unconscious Competence: (JOY + TRUST) You completed the hard part... that first 2 minutes of the webinar when you were nervous, and you powered through it to the fun part.You finished your first webinar, and you're already excited about doing another one. Even if just one person said you were great, that made it all worthwhile, didn't it? You can't believe it took you this long to run a live webinar like this. You want to do it again and again. Your next webinar will be even better.

If you're not ready to run webinars, replace "run a webinar" with "make an optin page" ... "setup a payment button" ... or even "exercising" or "quitting your job" or "dating" ...

I'm not saying I know everything about everything, but you can apply what I know about webinar confidence to your own life, so that you can tackle that problem of having a SKILL but not yet having the CONFIDENCE to put yourself out there.

What do you think?

How to Complete a Week’s Worth of Work in One Day

1. You're overwhelmed by all the new offers you see.
2. You're switching between too many tasks every day.
3. You're doing too much of the work yourself.
4. Your to-do list keeps getting bigger (not shorter) and you can't prioritize.
5. You procrastinate and can't seem to finish what you start.
6. You're a perfectionist.
7. You're unhappy.

1. Choose one "computer free" day of the week, and one "email free" day (even when you're at the computer).
2. Only focus on ONE project this week, such as launching a new product, finishing that sales letter, or creating that membership site content.  Everything else can wait.
3. Outsource just one thing.  I recommend you dictate ten articles (2.5 minutes each) and send them out to get transcribed, that saves you one day of work.
4. Throw away your whiteboard and only write down four daily tasks instead of having a long to-do list.
5. Reward yourself with 30 minutes of TV, a bowl of ice cream, or the rest of the day off for finishing your project early.
6. Be "perfectly complete" instead of "perfectly perfect."  In other words, try to win the high score.  If your goal was to write 10 articles and you wrote all 10 before your deadline, you scored a "perfect" 10 regardless of the quality of those articles.
7. Use the extra money from internet marketing to go on a vacation, pay off your mortgage faster, spend time with your family, or send your kid to college.  In other words, use the money to do something you enjoy.