What’s going on you guys? Alex Branning here, and I have to be honest with you, this podcast episode is being recorded when I am not in a great mood. I’m going to tell you why. So let’s talk about what is going on with entrepreneurs and just humans in general. Just accepting our flaws and where we’re stuck, is just a part of where we are. I do the same thing, I just talked to one of my accountability partners and my message was, “Hey you know what? I fell off the horse with my physical fitness, I’ve had a bad week with that, and it sucks, and it is what it is.” And he hit me back with a message I needed to hear, he was like “Dude, just get back on the grind, one small step at a time, don’t accept where you are now, as the end point. Don’t say this is it for me, just keep getting back on the horse.”And I want to tell you the same thing, it doesn’t matter what that thing is, you cannot accept where you are now as the end game.
I talked to a gal today and she was considering doing some Facebook marketing, and she just said, “You know what, I don’t think I’m going to get on Facebook because I’m not tech savvy, I don’t think I’m going to use technology at all because I’m not tech savvy. I’m happy with three sales a year in real estate. I’m happy with that. That’s where I’m at. I’m good with it.” And during the conversation, what came out was she said, “You know what, I actually really, really want to do one sale a month, but I just don’t think I’m capable of doing it.” I said, “It’s okay,” I’m not going to name her. “I said that’s okay, it’s good that you identified that and I want to encourage you to not accept that from yourself.” Because a lot of our failures are because we accept it, for ourselves.
We accept that’s where we’re at, like for my overweight thing, for how out of shape that I am, a lot of the issues that I have are because I just accepted that this is what is, this is how it’s going to be, and I might as well just deal with it. So I don’t make a change, and that spills over into my eating. With this lady, she said, “Well, this is just going to be the way that it is. I’m not going to make a change so I’m just going to be this way it’s not going to be any different.” That’s just not a good state of mind, because that’s going to spill over into other aspects of her business.
So what can we do about it? Well I want to share with you, some strategies that I learned in the book: The Four Disciplines for Execution.
So in this book, one of the things that they talk about is measuring what you’re trying to improve upon. For example, for me, let’s look at my weight loss, so what can I measure about what I’m doing, so that I can improve? I can measure what I eat; I can measure my activity; my steps; my pushups; my sit ups; the time that I spend working out; there’s a lot of different things that I could measure, and if I don’t measure it, I’m not tracking it, and if I’m not tracking it, it won’t improve.
Now, what can you measure about marketing?That’s a legit question. What can you measure about getting started doing something that you’re not comfortable doing? Well, you can start by measuring how much time you put into education. I had somebody do this and I thought it was brilliant, she said “I’m going to try one new thing on Facebook every single day.” It was all about revenue generating activity. “I’m going to try one new thing; I’m going to go live; I’m going to post a question; I’m going to post a promotional thing; I’m going to try to put a video up; I’m going to do just one thing, it doesn’t matter what it is, I’m going to do one thing, see how it goes, see how it feels so I can find my comfort level in this new Facebook marketing world that we’re living in now.” And you know one of the things that we have to do as entrepreneurs is that we have to constantly measure what we want to see improvement in so that we can actually make progress.
There’s a popular saying, get incrementally better every single day,and I believe that’s true and I think that that’s something that quite frankly, I’m not doing a good enough job on, if I’m just going to be honest with you. I’m not measuring things that I want to get better on, I want to get thinner, I want to feel better, I want to look sexier in the mirror, but I’m not doing enough and I live in the entrepreneurial mindset, and what I mean by that is I wake up and my decisions are dictated by business and things that I’m striving for and so I need that same mindset to spill over into fitness.
Other people have that sort of obsessive mindset around hobbies and there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just that they’ve found that thing that they’re passionate about. So, I knew a guy who was absolutely a brilliant and he made guns. He would try to figure out a new tweak or a new design so that his guns they could shoot farther, they could shoot more accurate, they would look better, he was constantly tweaking this thing, it was a very artistic obsession, and in one of the calls that we had, on one of our face to face meetings, he said, “I don’t like this business stuff.” He was specifically referring to marketing, “He said I don’t like this business stuff because it’s so tedious and boring.” And I said “Well what if you approached it in the same way you approach your guns. What if you looked at your business and you said, how can I make $100 more a day. How can I go to one more conference a month? How can I set up one more relationship a month?
And he was like “Ha, I never thought of it like that before.” Because we don’t. We have a way of looking at things in our little box with our grids and our check boxes and we say “This is how it is.”
For me, my personal fitness, it was like “I’m going to do my personal fitness when I have time for it outside of work and family and all those other things.” But guess what, because I love my family, I love my business, I don’t have extra time that I’m just throwing away. So, I need to fit it in with my business specifically, I have to put in punishments and rewards for working out so I actually do the dang thing, but I have to make it a part of the obsessive part of my brain. I’m very protective over the time that I have with my family, and I love and am obsessive about what I do for work, and so I need to find that balance.
I want to encourage you, like I said, I got on this phone call because I was ticked, I was mad at myself, I was kind of frustrated with that coaching call, where I’m like “Why are you just accepting this as the end game, like you’re just never going to get better?” And I was like “Man, I’ve got to make a podcast episode about this because this is just real. Maybe it’s too real, but it is real.” There’s a mindset that can cripple us; for me it’s fitness, for you it may be accounting, for others it’s marketing, for her it was technology. It cripples us because it says “Where I’m at now, is where it’s always going to be and I’m just going to accept it.” And when we do that, we are limiting ourselves and we’re settling for less than the best of what we could be, we could get better, I could get thinner. I absolutely could, it’s just I haven’t put enough time and effort into it yet. You could bring on a team member or a virtual assistant that will do some of the hard work that you hate doing, but you’re lazy and you don’t want to go through the process of training them.
I don’t know what that thing is that’s holding you back, but identify it and work to improve it incrementally so that you can see the change that you want to see in your life because it’s obtainable; you just need to focus on it and get after it.
So I hope this inspired you, I was just fired up, so have a great day everyone.
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