444: The One Mindset Hack That Guarantees Success With Michael Hyatt

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife, Quit or Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and dig deep into what strategies they use to grow their businesses. Today I have a very special guest on the show, Michael Hyatt. And as many of you know, Michael is a New York Times bestselling author and he actually used to run a multi-million dollar publishing company as well. So I was lucky to chat with him, especially on the eve of launching my brand new book, The Family First Entrepreneur. But don’t worry, we’re not talking about publishing books today. Instead, we’re gonna talk about something way more important and that’s how to get out of the way of your own mind.

00:29
This is a great episode, trust me. But before we begin, I want to you know that tickets for the 2023 Seller Summit are now on sale over at SellersSummit.com. In fact, the price is going up this Wednesday. It is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And you probably know me well enough to know that my event has zero fluff. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business and not high level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people and it’s a very intimate event.

01:00
Everyone eats together and everyone parties together every single night. Personally, I love smaller events and tickets always sell out far in advance. Now, if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250K or $1 million per year, we also offer a special mastermind experience where we break up into small groups, lock ourselves in a room and help each other with our businesses. The Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 23rd to May 25th. Go to sellersummit.com for more information. I also want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode.

01:28
Now if you run an ecommerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your own customer contact list. And this is why I focus a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. SMS, or text message marketing, is already a top 5-room resource for my ecommerce store, and I couldn’t have done that without Postscript, which is my text message provider. Now, why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in ecommerce stores, and ecommerce is their primary focus. Not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data,

01:56
and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button. Not only that, but it’s price well too and SMS is the perfect way to engage with your audience. So head on over to postcook.io slash Steve and try for free. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. And then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcast that I released with my partner Tony. And unlike this one, where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the Profitable Audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience.

02:24
No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the profitable audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:39
Welcome to the My Wife, Quirter Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Michael Hyatt on the show. Michael is the founder of Full Focus, formerly Michael Hyatt & Co. And what I personally love about his company is that he works with his daughter, which is actually one of my dreams. He has scaled multiple companies over the years, including a $250 million publishing company with over 700 employees. His companies have been featured in the Inc 5000 list of one of the fastest growing companies in America.

03:07
for many years in a row and he was actually named one of Inc’s best workplaces. He’s also the author of several books that have made the New York Times, Wall Street Journal bestseller list and the USA Today bestselling books, including Platform, Living Forward, Your Best Year Ever, Free to Focus and his latest book, Mind Your Mindset. Now I could go on and on about Michael, but that would probably take the entire duration of the podcast. There’s a lot we can learn, but today what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna focus on mindset.

03:36
and the key to breaking through your mental barriers. And with that, welcome to show, Michael. How you doing? Thanks, Steve. Appreciate you having me on. Yeah, I mean, it’s my honor. And I have to ask this upfront before I forget to ask, how are you so lucky to be working with your daughter in your business? Like, how did you get her to be actually interested in what you do for a living? That’s a great question. I’m not sure anybody’s ever asked me that specific question, but we’ve worked together for a long time. So.

04:04
The first time we ever worked together on an actual project. Well, I take this back. When she was eight years old and I was in the book publishing industry, she went with me to the book trade show. And so she went to all my author meetings, all my vendor meetings, a little bit of everything. And she was so poised and did such a great job. So then I’d started taking her to things. And I have five daughters. So Megan is the oldest and my youngest daughter, Marissa also works for the company. But,

04:33
I just basically included them in my work. So when she was 17, at that time I was a literary agent and I had an author, one of my clients who was out on a book tour. This was back in the days when we literally traveled to different cities. And in this case, it was a big tour bus and we would go, we went to 15 different cities and she was with me and at 17, she was responsible for all merchandise sales. So it was a big job and she did great, but you know,

05:02
We’ve just all gotten along great. all my daughters, in fact, all my daughters live within 30 minutes of me. Three of them, including Megan, but the three of them that have kids, and I have 10 grandkids, they all live within five minutes of me. So we’re pretty close-knit family. Yeah, I mean, that’s the dream right there. I’m very tight with my family, and that’s one of the reasons why I went into business in the first place, so I could spend more time with them.

05:30
I think it’s amazing that you guys work together. I’m not sure if my daughter has any interest in what I do, but I’m hoping to kind of steer her that way, because I would love to have what you have. Well, I think you got to kind of set it up. You know, you’ve got to include her in things so she can get familiar with it. Talk to her a lot about why it matters and what’s important about it. And it’s funny how so much of that is caught, not taught.

05:55
Definitely. I’ve actually tried to include her in a lot of things. We filmed a lot of videos together. It’s been a good time. That’s good. Good, good. I want to start with a quick story. I’ve been teaching an online class about e-commerce for over a decade now. And for the longest time, I thought that the most important aspect of the class was to teach the strategy because that’s kind of how I was brought up. Like, tell me what to do and I’ll suck it up and I’ll do it. But over the years, I’ve chatted one-on-one with many students in my class.

06:26
And I’ve come to realize that what’s holding them back is what is in their heads. And I’m curious, you’ve worked with many high powered CEOs and executives, and I want to make the listeners first feel like they’re at home. Can you just give me some examples of your own personal experiences where either you or one of your clients have been in their heads?

06:45
Yeah, well, I think the first time this came home to roost for me was I had an executive coach by the name of Eileen. And back during the great recession, this would have been about 2009, August of 2009, she flew in to spend the day with me and she came in once a month for a full day. And it was about 75 % psychotherapy and about 25 % business coaching. But she plopped out in the chair, opened her notepad and she said, so tell me how it lasts.

07:14
month with and this would have been July of 2009 that she was talking about. And I said, well, it didn’t go that great. She said, well, what happened? I said, well, we missed the top line. Our revenue numbers by about 10%. We missed our profit number so bad that we lost money. And she said, well, gosh, that is kind of shocking because when I sat here last month, you were so upbeat, so confident that you were not only going to hit the budget, but that you had a pretty good chance of beating the budget.

07:44
What happened? And I said, well, you know, we’re in the middle of a big recession. know, inflation is high, foot traffic at retail is down, consumer confidence is down. So the economy, like that was the first reason I gave her. And I’d been rehearsing these, what I would look back on now as excuses for my board, because I was going to have to meet with them to report on the same numbers. And so she was kind of serving as a proxy for that. I said, the second reason is the book publishing industry itself,

08:14
is an enormous turmoil because we’re in the midst of this digital conversion and nobody knows where it’s going to end up, but it’s created a lot of chaos in our industry. Third, social media has changed everything we thought we knew about marketing and we haven’t quite figured out how to use it to sell books yet, but nothing that we used to do seems to be working like it used to work. So I said, that’s why those three reasons.

08:41
And she just kind of paused for a second and she said, okay, but what was it about your leadership that caused this result? Which really took me back. I was kind of offended, definitely felt defensive. And I said to her, said, this has nothing to do with my leadership. This has everything to do with the economy, my industry, the state of marketing. She said, okay, I get that those are factors, but what is it about your leadership? Well,

09:11
She quickly saw that I wasn’t getting it. So she said, let me ask the question another way. If you could go back 30 days and you knew then what you know now, would you have done anything differently? And I said, yes. She said, like what? I said, well, I would have met with my sales team every day just to make sure that they were on track and we were pacing to at least hit the budget if not exceeded. She said, okay, great. What else? I said, I would have gone on that sales call to Walmart.

09:39
Because I think that just having my presence there as a CEO would have caused them to buy more books and would have been a better result. She said, great, what else? So I gave her, I don’t know, three to five things. And she kind of smiled and she said, so what you’re telling me is that it was about your leadership. And she was exactly right. Because I saw the problem as out there. Beyond my control, I was just a victim. All this stuff was happening to me.

10:09
What she helped me realize, Steve, is that the problem was in here between my ears. It was the way I was thinking about the problem and that I had way more agency, but I’d given it away. And so in the one sense, when I took ownership of the results, the good news was that now I got my agency back and all of a sudden I had the power. Like I could do something differently. And we went on to do something very different that next month.

10:37
The bad news was it took away my excuses. But I saw the distinction between sort of the problems out there and the problems in here in my thinking. I love that because my dad was just like your coach. Like we lost a volleyball game once and he was like, why did you lose? And I’m like, ah, I’m not tall enough. You know, I deflected it towards like just things I couldn’t change. And he was like, well, you can jump, can’t you? You can work on your jump, can’t you?

11:07
I didn’t see you practicing after school. And my dad did this with every time I did better at a test, that’s what he would say to me to the point where I just stopped making excuses after a while. So I know a lot of people out there listening have limiting beliefs. And the question is, how do you get over it? And is there a process for doing so? Because it’s not really like a switch that you can just.

11:33
Well, there is. And in this book, Mind Your Mindset, which I did write with my oldest daughter, Megan, the CEO of Full Focus, we talk about a three-step process. And so the first step of the process is basically to identify the story that you’re telling yourself. Now, the subtitle of the book is the science that shows success starts with your thinking. So we did a deep dive into the brain science.

12:04
showing how our brains work. And one of the things that we discovered early on is that our brains cannot exist without constantly pursuing meaning. In other words, there are things that happen to us, and then there’s the interpretation that our brain provides of what that means. So what happened? And then the interpretation. Those are two totally different things.

12:32
So for example, I heard a story a couple of weeks ago about two identical twins, grew up in the same family. They had alcoholic parents, both of them. And they asked the successful brother, who was very, very successful from a financial standpoint and almost every aspect of his life, said, well, what do you attribute your success to? And he thought for a second, he said, well, I grew up in a family of alcoholics.

13:01
And I didn’t want to end up like that. So I worked my butt off to avoid that. And he said that it was kind of inevitable, you know, just the background I had, the circumstances I had, it was kind of inevitable that I would succeed. So they asked the second brother who was basically broke, almost homeless, had not made anything of himself. They said, why aren’t you successful? And he said, well, what would you expect? My parents were alcoholics.

13:31
It was inevitable that I would turn out like them. So the facts were the same. They both grew up in a family of alcoholics, but the meaning that they assigned to that fact or those sets of facts were completely different. And so I think making the distinction, and this is in that first step of identify the story, is that our brains are compelled to create stories.

14:00
We have these cells in our brains. It’s almost like if you go into a container store, you know, where they sell all different size boxes to store different kinds of things. Your brain is like that. There are brain cells that store the names of people that store locations that store historical facts and all that. But as those different neurons connect through synapses and begin to fire, and this is Hebb’s law.

14:28
is the neurons that fire together, wire together, and that’s the brain knitting together a story from these facts. The problem is, is that once you get that story, it’s easy to confuse the story with the truth. Because whenever you have the trigger, something that reminds you of that story, your brain automatically sends the signal down that neural pathway, and the challenge is to create a different neural pathway.

14:56
And we certainly don’t need to do this with every story because some stories are actually very helpful. But one of the things we realized in the brain science too is that up to 20 % of our memories are false, as in they didn’t happen. Up to 70 % of our memories are distorted in some significant way. whenever we find ourselves frustrated, stuck, not getting the results we want,

15:23
We need to identify the story. We need to ask ourselves the question, wait a second, what is the story I’m telling myself right now? And in the book, we talk about this, if there’s a villain in the book, it’s somebody we call the narrator. And this is, it’s a personification of our thinking process, but it’s like we have this person who lives inside our head and is offering nonstop color commentary.

15:52
on everything that happens. Now the brain’s goal, the reason the brain does this, is the brain’s number one job is to keep us safe. And so it’s constantly taking the experiences of the past and trying to predict the future and keep us safe. But the narrator is talking nonstop, much like if you watch a football game, you there’s what’s happening on the field, those are the facts. And then there’s the commentators, usually at least two, sometimes three.

16:21
who are talking nonstop about what it all means and where it’s going. And that’s the narrator. But it’s difficult to think about our thinking. And yet, as you pointed out, like that’s the major thing that changes the results. Because our thinking and our stories are what cause us to select the strategies that we select. And those strategies are what delivers the results we get.

16:50
So if we want better results, extraordinary results, biggie sized results, the best way to do that is to change our thinking, to change the story. But first we got to identify it. I have a perfect example of this. When I first started in business, I used to be an electrical engineer. And I remember the first thing I tried to sell, I wasn’t very good at it. And what I told myself is, I’m just an engineer. I program and I write code all day.

17:19
This isn’t my thing and that’s why it failed. Is that an example of what you’re talking about? Identifying the narrative. Yeah, it’s perfect. Like here’s another example. I use this in the book. I went to an industry trade show and there was the CEO of one of the larger companies in our industry who was about to speak, about to deliver a keynote. And so our language reveals our thinking. The words that we use reveal what we’re thinking. So as a business coach, which is our primary business at Full Focus,

17:48
I’m listening very intently and very carefully to the language that my clients use when they’re talking about a problem or talking about their role or what they’re capable of or whatever. So this keynote speaker stands up and he says, hey, I’m not a very gifted speaker. And he kind of laughed. And then he spent the next hour approving it. So he rambled. There was no organization. It was terrible. I looked around the room and probably 80 % of the people had their nose in their phone. They just weren’t paying attention.

18:18
because he had it in his thought that he wasn’t a very good speaker, he wasn’t a gifted speaker. So, you know, honestly, why even try? You know, if you really believe that, kind like your engineer story, if you believe that you’re only X, then you may not even try. My youngest daughter, Marissa, who works for our company too, she will often say when somebody says like that, you know, I’m not a very gifted speaker, she would say, well, if you say so, our words shape

18:47
our thinking, and our thinking shapes our words. There’s this reciprocal relationship between our language and our thinking. So part of this identifying the story, step one in the process is to pay attention to our language and particularly pay attention to the language that the narrator inside of our head hears. We may never give voice to it and yet may just be rattling around our head, but what are the exact sentences that the narrator uses for years?

19:18
I had the narrator saying to me, you know, you’re not very good with money. Watch out. You’re not very good with money. Are you sure you want to do that? Because you’re not very good with money. That all went back to an experience where I had a business that went bankrupt back in early nineties. And I had a friend a couple of years later that said to me on an airplane, he said to me, as he kind of listened to some of my story, he said, wow, it sounds to me like you’re not very good with money.

19:48
And it didn’t occur to me to question that as, as though it were an opinion. I respected him as a mentor and I just ingested that as though it were the truth. And guess what? For the next 10 years, I set out to prove the truth of that statement. You know, I made bad financial decisions. I wasn’t very good with money and it wasn’t until I began to change that story. And frankly was meeting Dave Ramsey and

20:18
having a session with him, they began to change my story about money, which changed my actions, which led to different results. But it all begins with identifying that story.

20:30
My first book, The Family First Entrepreneur, is now available for pre-order at your favorite online retailer. Now this is a book about entrepreneurship, but not the kind that they tell you about in business school or that you often hear about online. Now if you can relate to my wife and I story, you probably don’t seek to become world famous or ridiculously rich. Now you might not say no to these things, but we probably have similar priorities. You want a good life and the freedom to enjoy it. But here’s the problem with 99 % of the business and entrepreneurship advice out there.

20:59
They all preach that you need to work 80 hours a week and hustle your butt off just to get ahead. And in fact, a popular saying is that entrepreneurs are willing to work 80 hours a week to avoid working 40 hours a week for someone else. Well, I’m calling BS on this. If you follow this advice, then you’ll end up sacrificing your time and your freedom for the promise of riches, work yourself to the bone and lose what precious time you had to spend with your loved ones. Now on this podcast, which I’ve run since 2014, I’ve interviewed over 450 successful entrepreneurs

21:26
who are absolutely killing it with their multi-million dollar businesses. But what you don’t hear about publicly is that they don’t see their family much or that they’re totally burned out or stressed out. You don’t hear about the huge sacrifices that they had to make in order to get there. So in this book, I’ll share with you an alternative to the hustle culture nonsense we so often hear about in relation to achieving financial success. You can in fact achieve financial success without being a stranger to your kids. You can make good money and have the freedom to enjoy it.

21:55
and you don’t have to work 80 hours a week and be a slave to your business just to make it all work. So if you’re tired of hearing from a bunch of single men or women or 20 something kids who drive fancy cars and brag about how hard they work or how much they make, I will give you a different perspective from a father who makes both business and family work. So join me in my book launch and get access to a bunch of freebies. Go to mywifecooderjob.com slash book and I’ll send you bonuses, invitations to book parties that I’ll be throwing all over the country and special offers.

22:24
MyWifeQuitterJob.com slash book. Now back to the show.

22:30
Just want to tell all the listeners out there, especially the ones who are in my class, the number one narrative that I get is I’m not tech savvy enough to do this. I get that too. Yeah. And I point them to like 99 % of the students who put up beautiful websites. I mean, it can be done. No one’s tech savvy from the start. would say 99 % of the people are not tech savvy, but you can learn. And that’s what it takes. Same thing with money. Same thing with nearly everything. You know, you can learn it. And that’s a much more empowering thought to have.

22:59
You know, instead of me saying I’m not very good with money or I’m not very tech savvy, I could say I’m learning to become tech savvy or I’m learning to be good with money. And that was the thing that dawned on me is like literally almost anything could be learned. And the only difference between, you know, me and some financial guru is the financial guru spend a lot of time and probably made a lot of mistakes to get where he is. But we’ve got to identify that, that story. It’s easy to think about, you know, the thoughts that other people have.

23:29
about other people. It’s easy to sometimes see what other people are thinking and see how that’s not serving them. But it’s more difficult to see our own thinking. But that’s where we have to begin. Seems like we actually have to just take a make a conscious effort to maybe write these down then. Right? Yes. Okay. Well, literally we have to and this is step two in the process that we outline in the book, Mind Your Mindset, is we have to interrogate the story.

23:57
In other words, we have to ask ourselves the question, is this true? And so we get, we go through several questions in the book about how to interrogate the story and how to just challenge that narrative because so often it’s not true or it’s not accurate. And again, I think we just have to realize that a story is a story. It’s not the truth. That’s hard for a lot of people to get. And a lot of people become defensive when you start to interrogate their story.

24:26
because that story, again, it’s designed to keep them safe. So I had a story about myself that also involves my executive coach, Eileen, but this is another incident. Sounds like a great coach, the way. Yeah, she was amazing. So we were talking about introversion and extroversion. I don’t know how we got into the conversation, but we were talking about the Myers-Briggs assessment, and I was an introvert on Myers-Briggs.

24:55
And so she said, well, what does that mean to you? And I said, well, it means that I really don’t like people. You know, I’m much more, I really much more enjoy being alone and people wear me out and I don’t like to meet new people. I’d much rather stay with the same people. And she said, okay, she said, well, you’re the CEO of a public company where you have to meet a lot of new people. So how does that construct of introversion serving you?

25:25
And first of all, it never occurred to me until that moment that that was a story I was telling myself. Now, could you objectively verify it? Possibly. But what she helped me to see is that I could change the story to get different results. Because she said to me, are there ever situations where extraversion would actually serve you better? And I thought, wow, yes, definitely.

25:54
Like when I’m public speaking, you know, if I could actually meet the audience, I go out into the crowd and shake hands and talk to people before I spoke, I would probably, they would be more sympathetic to what I had to say. And she said, well, why don’t you try it? Cause maybe most of this is just a way of thinking. She said, do you think you could think like an extrovert? And I said, well, I probably could. She said, well, what would that be like? And I said, well, I’d have to be telling myself,

26:23
that I enjoy meeting new people, that I’m curious about their lives, that I wanna learn about new people. She said, perfect, give it a try. And so what I realized is that, and I would still self identify as an introvert, but I can turn that on or off. Sometimes it serves me, sometimes it doesn’t. But again, it’s a story primarily and it’s flexible. And so we gotta interrogate the story.

26:53
and not see that as something fixed that we can’t change because we use this all the time. know, people try to lose weight. They say, well, I can’t lose weight because I’m big boned or, you know, I, I’d like to have a better marriage, but I’m married to a narcissist. You know, that the problem is always out there somewhere instead of in, in here. And there are objective facts that we can’t change, but we have a lot more control than we think, but we got to interrogate the story. That’s step two.

27:22
I recall a story in your book where you had to give a speech and you were tired and not looking forward to it. And you were like, I just have to get this over with or something like that. And then was it your coach who, who? No, that, that was, that was a great story about sort of the connection between language and how that can affect our thinking. But, yeah, I just had literally boarded the plane. sat down. We were still at the gate. My phone rings and it’s one of my best friends. And he said, Hey, what’s up?

27:51
And I said, well, I’m sitting on a plane because I have to go to San Diego to give a speech. And he kind of paused and then he kind of started laughing. said, he said, first of all, dude, you’re going to San Diego, best climate on the planet, awesome fish tacos. And he said, and you’re, you’re, you’re speaking to like a thousand people. And this has been your dream for years. And he said, you don’t have to do anything. Nobody’s holding a gun to your head. He said, you.

28:21
get to do that. And that was the difference. One little tweak between the word have to and get to is a total mind shift. And so ever since then, whenever I have to do anything, you know, I wake up in the morning and maybe there’s some things that are not particularly my favorite, but I just say I get to. And that changes kind of the way that I’m thinking. Because again, there’s this reciprocal relationship.

28:48
between our thinking and our speaking. And if we can learn to listen to our own language, we can kind of catch ourselves and self-correct in our thinking. But if you can’t do that yourself, and it’s hard at the beginning, give the people that are around you, whether it’s your family or the people that you work with, give them permission to just check your language. Tell them what you’re trying to do and just say, like, if you hear me expressing a limiting belief,

29:15
or saying something that’s not serving what I’m trying to create in the world, call me out. And that’s very helpful. It’s the same thing with me. For the longest time, I hated lifting weights. But then now I tell myself, well, you’re going to feel a lot better about yourself. And then I start looking forward to it because I think about how it makes me feel after I’m done with the workout. Yes. And so now I look forward to doing it. It’s weird. Just whatever story you’re telling yourself.

29:45
really makes a huge difference in your attitude. It so does. And that kind of leads us to step three, which is to imagine a better story. And I had an experience, it wasn’t about working out, although I’ve had that same thoughts. I don’t particularly enjoy working out. I did it this morning, but for me, it’s I get to listen to a book or a podcast. And so it’s my opportunity and I love learning. So it’s my opportunity to learn.

30:14
But I had another public speaking story where, um, I used to dread public speaking. And I thought, like most people do that if I get up on the stage, I’m going to die. You know, it’s like the number one or number two fears that, uh, most people say, you know, they’re more afraid of that than death generally. So

30:36
One of the things I noticed was that whenever I had to step up on stage and speak for something, I would dread it. I would not look forward to it. And I would be really nervous. So my hands would start sweating profusely and I hated to shake hands with somebody before I spoke because I felt like it sort of betrayed, you know, my fear. And then I would sweat like under my arms so that this not proud to admit this, but I would wear two t-shirts under a dress shirt.

31:05
hoping that I didn’t sweat through the t-shirts and give myself away. And my voice would get kind of shaky and all this stuff. But for me, imagining a better story was getting the focus off me and focusing on the audience and saying, what are their needs? What do they hope to hear today? How can I be of service? And then when I would get those nervous feelings, which I do to this very day, I would say, oh,

31:35
That’s how my body prepares itself for peak performance. Because all those effects I was experiencing were the result of adrenaline. And adrenaline is one of the most powerful drugs on the planet. It gives you superpowers. You think faster, you think sharper, you’re hyper-focused, you’re very alert, your brain does better on adrenaline. You don’t want it for long periods of time, but…

32:04
You know, if you’re running from a T-Rex or you’re getting up to speak, it’s very helpful. So imagine a bigger, better story is to kind of reframe, you know, what you’re experiencing, what your thinking is to something that’s going to better serve you. And I, and I find that when I repeat that mantra of, this is how my body prepares itself for peak performance. That that really does. It causes me to relax. I’ll still have the butterflies and all that, but I welcome them. I want that adrenaline.

32:32
Cause I know I’m gonna perform better if I’ve got it. Interesting. I mean, I had a similar fright with public speaking and now when I’m up there, I actually really enjoy it because I feel powerful up there. Yeah. But it took me a while to get to that point. I’m not sure if I changed any narratives, but I love just seeing people smile or laugh at something I said and it’s kind of addictive. Well, it is. And one of the things I noticed that I love too is when I’m up on stage,

33:01
Stories will occur to me that I didn’t think of when I was preparing. And I’m always trying to manage that against the clock. Right? I don’t want to tell so much that I go over time, but I’m also hyper-focused on the audience. And I feel like, you know, like you were talking about people smiling and all that. I almost feel like I can read their minds. I’m like really trying to look in their eyes and really try to connect with them personally and emotionally. But I feel like there’s almost a intuitive superpower. And a lot of speakers report this that they have in the moment.

33:29
they know whether stuff’s connecting or not. If you don’t, you know, that’s something to work on. But I think for most people that speak, they see that. Yeah. I know for me, when it comes to changing the narrative, it always helps to just talk to someone who’s already done what you’re trying to do. Because I know for me, at least, I have limiting thoughts where, oh, I could never do that. Right? I could never make my…

33:57
create a seven figure business without like a large staff or whatever but then I met someone who did it and then all of a sudden I was like oh okay well this guy does did it then that means I can

34:08
Yeah, that’s, that’s powerful, Steve in chapter nine of mind, your mindset. talk about the importance of community and who you hang out with matters because thinking is contagious. And this is why corporate culture is such a difficult thing to fix because once the thinking is negative, it becomes contagious. And then everybody’s thinking that way. And it’s hard to turn.

34:38
things around, who you hang with matters. Jim Rohn says, we’ve all heard this, that you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And I don’t know if that’s empirically verifiable or not, but I think the principle is absolutely true. And, you know, one of the things you can do if you want to change your story is hang out, be intentional about your friendships, about your associations, and hang out with people that think different than you.

35:08
Like if you want to make a lot of money, if you want to make more money than you’re making now, hang out. doesn’t mean you have to avoid all broke people. Some of those people you can’t afford to avoid because they’re in your family. But if you want to make more money, for example, hang out with people that are making a lot of money and just see how they think. If you want to be a better public speaker, hang out with professional speakers. How do they think? I promise you, if you take a guy like Elon Musk,

35:38
or Mark Cuban or some other billionaire, it’s not that they’re that much smarter than you, although both of them are wicked smart. It’s not that they have a better Rolodex or network of contacts than you do, although they probably have that too. But the most fundamental thing is that they think differently than you do. The way they think about money, for Elon Musk, I’m sure, and I’ve heard a lot of rich people say this, hey, it’s just another zero.

36:08
more money, just a way of keeping score. But if you could do something that generates 100,000 for your business, why couldn’t you do a million dollars or $10 million or $100 million? I mean, what’s the difference? Most of it is in our thinking, how we think about the issue. I’m actually really glad I’m talking to you, because I currently actually have this limiting belief right now. I told you earlier before we hit record that my book is coming out May 16th. And I have this mental block.

36:37
about hitting the New York Times bestseller list. And right now I’m, like I’ve been trying to rewrite this narrative, like, because I’ve talked to various book launch coaches and they’re like, ah, you know, it’s like single digit percentage or whatnot. And what people have been telling me is like, you’re just not gonna hit it. You’re just not gonna hit it. And I’ve been trying to rewrite that narrative. And I know you’ve hit it multiple times, right? What was the narrative that you told yourself?

37:04
Well, that’s an interesting question because let’s just kind of deconstruct this. First of all, there are the facts. And the facts are that there more books being published than ever before. Another fact, and I’m now speaking as a publishing professional that’s been in the book publishing industry for decades, is that the most difficult list to make is the New York Times because it’s not a simple matter of sales.

37:34
Like there’s this thing called book scan and basically they scan the number of books that are sold at retail. And that’s what USA Today uses. That’s what Publishers Weekly uses. That’s what the Wall Street Journal uses. And so the top selling nonfiction book in any given week is going to be number one. The second top selling is going to be number two and so forth. So that’s kind of internal logic that we understand and makes sense. The New York Times.

38:04
has a more complex algorithm and nobody knows what it is. And you can have a book that sells tens of thousands of copies in a week and doesn’t make the list because the people at the New York Times decide that it’s not worthy for whatever reason. Okay, so those are the facts. Now, the story that you might be tempted to delay on that is that there’s no way I can make it. You know, it’s not even worth trying.

38:35
And the story I’ve chosen to tell myself is that while it’s not guaranteed, there’s a lot that I can do to influence it. So I may not make it, you know, at the end of the day, there’s somebody else pulling the lever about that. That truly is an outside thing. But internally, I can give myself a fighting chance. But if I’m telling myself a story that says there’s no way, I won’t even try.

39:04
But the cool thing about the New York Times list is that even if you don’t make it, just the effort of trying will probably get you on every other list. So here’s a question, we talk about this in the book, but here’s a question that’s a better question to ask yourself whenever you feel like something’s impossible. What would have to be true for me to hit the New York Times list? And so you might think, for example, one of the best things I could do is get endorsements.

39:33
because that’s kind of the thing that the average reader uses as a proxy for knowing whether or not to spend their money on the book. So I spent a lot of time doing that. This particular book, I had Tony Robbins and Don Maxwell and Dave Ramsey and about 50 different people endorse it because I’m trying to get myself a fighting chance to get onto the New York Times list. Then you might say to yourself, okay, I know I’ve got to get visibility and I need to get

40:01
Entree into as many on audiences as I can so I’m gonna get on as I’m gonna book as many podcast interviews as I can and So maybe set yourself a goal you say I’m gonna do a hundred podcast interviews And I’m just gonna go crazy on that because that’s gonna introduce me to people. don’t currently have a relationship with So, know, I’m create a an amazing sales page I’m gonna create pre publication bonuses so that people are really incentivized

40:30
to come buy the book before it launches, and then maybe even have a different set of bonuses during launch week, whatever. But that kind of question, what would have to be true, that sets into motion a completely different way of thinking and a completely different way of acting that better doesn’t guarantee, but it makes it more likely that you’re going to hit the list than if you didn’t do anything. Makes sense? Absolutely. Basically, put your best foot forward.

41:00
whatever happens happens. And this is actually what my dad used to tell me to. So that’s the attitude I’m taking with it right now. I’m going to do everything in my power, whatever happens happens. And I really appreciated your endorsement of my book as well. I really appreciated that. You’re welcome. And I mean, I have your book right here. I recommend that everyone go out and pick it up. I, as I mentioned before, anyone who’s listening here, I’ve just come to realize, and maybe this is because I’m an engineer.

41:29
But I used to just think that the facts and the strategies would get you where you want to be. But really, just after just talking with so many students in my class, it’s all in their heads. Like there’s, you’re smart enough to do whatever you want to do. It’s just a matter of telling yourself the right thing. So you actually take action on it. Totally. I mean, I meet so many people that are so smart, have so much life experience, have so much to say.

41:59
But the only thing that’s keeping them from doing that is the story that’s in their head. And I think speaking of engineering, we’ve got to be engineers of our own thinking. And this is one of the things that really separates humans from every other species is we have the ability, so far as we know, we’re the only species that has the ability to think about our thinking. And that self-awareness is a big gift.

42:29
but we’ve got to cultivate it. And the more we do it, the better we get at it. So I would just recommend to people, if you’re feeling stuck, if you’re feeling frustrated, if you’re not making the progress you want, sit down with a blank piece of paper. And literally, the first thing I would do is start writing the sentences that are in my head as I think about that problem. And then you can objectify it. And sometimes when you just get it out on paper, you go, well, that’s stupid or whatever. And you just like dismiss it.

42:58
And you never think those thoughts again, because once you externalized them, it became obvious that they weren’t serving you. In some cases though, we get them on paper and we go, well, yeah, that looks true. And we have to interrogate it. And again, that’s step two in the book. But then you can also begin to re-engineer those sentences. And like if my thinking is, I’m not very good with money and that’s a sentence that’s in my head.

43:26
What if I transformed that, modified it to, know, every day I’m learning more and more about money.

43:35
And that becomes the thing that you use to reprogram your thinking. I think engineering, computer science, those are good metaphors for what we’re trying to do. Because from a brain science perspective, what we’re trying to do is to take those neural pathways that our brain created to keep us safe, and we’re trying to rewire our brain so that there are new neural pathways. So that whenever we’re confronted with that, those same set of facts,

44:03
that instead of just going down that neural pathway that’s cut in our brain, we decided to take the road less traveled until we can wear a path and that becomes our natural thinking, something that’s more empowering. It’s funny for the people who tell me that they’re not tech savvy. I just tell them that being tech savvy is really about following directions and just learning where to click the mouse. It’s all it is, right? And not giving up after the first

44:33
Try. Exactly. Keep hacking. So Michael, where can people get your book and are there any pre-launch bonus goodies that you got? There are and go to mindyourmindsetbook.com and what you’re going to find there is a couple of different goodies. First of all, if you buy the book from any retailer and we have links to them all on that page mindyourmindsetbook.com

45:02
If you go there, go to a retailer, let’s say Amazon, then come back with your receipt to claim your bonuses. You’re going to get the audio book. So don’t buy the audio book. You’ll get the audio book from us for free. You also get a self coaching tool that’s amazing. So that enables you to go through that three step process and deconstruct your thinking in a little worksheet format so that you can solve the problem.

45:32
And then there’s a third thing that I can’t remember that you get. Oh, it’s a reading guide to the book. So those are the bonuses. Okay, nice. And it’s on sale right now. Is that correct? It is. Yep. And then I’ve always just been curious since your service is over at Full Focus, what do you offer there as well? Yeah, there’s two. We have a lot of things that we offer, but we consider ourselves and describe ourselves as a goal achievement.

46:02
So we help particularly leaders, achievers, small business owners achieve their goals. That’s different than goal setting, goal achievement, goal setting, two different things. But half of our business is a business coaching program called Business Accelerator. And you can find out more about that at businessaccelerator.com. And we have about 400 plus business owners that are in that program that we coach. have about 30 coaches on staff that work with them.

46:32
And then the other half of our business, like that’s the major, that is probably 40 % of our business. Then 40 % of our business is our full focus planner, which is a physical planner designed to help you accomplish your goals. takes all the stuff that I write about in goal setting, and then it helps people apply it and also be more productive. So it’s also got links. know, the other 20 % of our business is my books and we have a lot of courses that are built.

47:02
around those books that take a deeper dive. Nice. Well, Michael, I really appreciate you coming on. Yeah, I really appreciate your time. This is an honor to have you. Thanks, Steve. Thanks for having me on.

47:17
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now it took me years to realize that being successful in business is mostly mental and I hope that the strategies in this episode help you out. more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 444. Once again, I want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash Steve.

47:46
That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to hang out with you this year in person in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. So grab a ticket to Seller Summit and let’s meet up. Go to SellerSummit.com. That’s S-E-L-L-E-R-S-S-U-M-M-I-T dot com. Now I talk about how I these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.