June 22, 2024 • 44 mins
Welcome to episode 13 of The Will to Win. This week, we are joined by Michael Mojo, an expert in personal development and business coaching. Michael shares his journey from corporate dissatisfaction to creating a world class business called the Mojo Human Performance institute. Michael goes into detail about how he helps individuals and business owners master their mindset, raise their standards, and continuously outperform themselves, no matter what the circumstance. In this episode, Michael dives deep into his three-pillar success map: understanding what fulfils you, setting clear direction through vision, mission, and goals, and consistently managing energy over effort. He also discusses the importance of evolving as individuals and business owners, and how to handle the inevitable challenges and emotional hurdles that come with growth. Discover how to build a fulfilling life and business, navigate through stress and pressure, and maintain consistency for long-term success. Tune in to learn actionable strategies and insights that will inspire you to unlock your potential and make what seems impossible, totally possible.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Music.
(00:07):
Welcome to The Wheel to Win, where emerging entrepreneurs come to learn the
best tips, strategies, and techniques to unlock their potential and become more successful.
Music.
I'm your host, Steve Scarni, and each week I will bring on the most incredible
guests who are going to share their own unique stories, knowledge,
wisdom, and insights about how they've been able to close the gap between failure and success,
(00:30):
and then go on to live a life of greatness.
Here at The Will To Win, we are dedicated to educating and inspiring you to
be able to maximize your potential and make what seems impossible, totally possible.
(00:52):
Michael, Mojo, welcome to The Will To Win, episode 13, where we will be talking
about out how to master your mindset, transform your performance, and win big in business.
Thank you for the opportunity to have you on the show. My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
(01:13):
Obviously, you've got a wealth of business experience and expertise over many
years, and you have a very unique name.
I bet lots of people who don't know who you are are asking the question,
what is Mojo Michael Mojo. What does Mojo stand for?
(01:34):
Yeah. So Mojo became a bit of a weird thing for me. The way it all started was
I've been in the personal development industry for a long, long time now.
I've been coaching people for 20 years, about 20 years now.
And so I was with a friend. So my original business was called Ultimate Achiever.
And it was okay. And I I was doing a lot of like corporate business work and
(01:56):
yeah, I was just, I was, I was doing some like public speaking and things like
that. And we'd run some smaller events and stuff around the place.
There's a certain type of clientele I enjoy working with. So I love working
with small business owners, especially.
I love working with driven people. My community is called the Driven Mofos because
everyone's driven for more.
(02:16):
They want more out of life, really. Driven for better health,
driven for better finances, driven for better relationships,
better communication, better businesses.
The usual things that people are driven towards, I think most people.
But I was just getting some more corporate-y type work. And I think that the
corporate environment isn't my environment.
(02:36):
I'm a coach, not a speaker. So I did some work a couple of weeks ago for a large
business organization.
And they said, you know, Michael was a speaker, like a public speaker and whatever.
And I said, I'm not. I'm a coach. I help people to solve problems and to move
forward and to progress and achieve more.
It's a different skill set than standing up on stage and giving a motivational
(02:56):
pep talk that then people feel good for 24 hours and leave.
But anyway, I was doing that in the corporate industry for a bit and I wasn't
really enjoying it because I felt like there wasn't the growth there in people.
I like seeing people grow. I like seeing people overcome their problems,
overcome their barriers and keep pushing towards growth.
I think that's the greatest gift we have in life is the ability to grow and overcome our problems.
(03:18):
And we solve one problem, we create another problem and so on.
I was doing that and I was feeling a bit, I don't know, a bit lost because it
wasn't the people I really enjoyed working with and so on, but I was doing all
right financially and whatever.
And then one day I woke up, I'd spent all night working on this new website
with a couple of other friends of mine.
Back in startup days where you just, your mates come around,
(03:38):
you sit there and you build a website.
Everyone's enthusiastic and you're all like, in your early 20s.
And then it's just like, you've got this crazy amount of stupid energy that,
normally gets misplaced.
But that had happened. So we'd pretty much pulled an all-nighter.
And then I went to a friend's house to train in the morning.
I'd had a couple of hours sleep and he said, what's been going on?
I told him we'd pulled this late night and we're building a website and he goes,
(04:02):
man, you're like this mojo dude. I was like, oh, mojo dude.
I thought about it and it sat with me for a couple of days and I was like, mojo dude.
Then I remember just something clicked and I ran into my wife's office.
She had this little office at the time and I ran into her office and I'm like, I'm the mojo master.
She's like, what do you mean? I was like, I'm the Mojo Master.
And she goes, I hope I can swear.
(04:23):
But she's like, I'm the Mojo Master. And she's like, I don't know what you mean.
Whatever you're saying is, I don't know. And I said, look, we have to rebrand as the Mojo Master.
So that was sort of our transformation from the ultimate achiever,
which was our original business, to the Mojo Master. And then that business
operated under that brand for a period of time.
(04:43):
But what I realized was there was a bit of a disconnect.
I liked the name, but I didn't really connect with it.
And then over time, the branding shifted and I created Mojo Human Performance
Institute because I wanted to have bigger impact and bring in other coaches
and have different types of events and build something to scale.
My big business mission is to build businesses that help people perform better,
(05:06):
both in life and business.
And so I knew I needed to leverage more people and I couldn't build it off my personal brand alone.
So I created Mojo Human Performance. And then I realized that if I keep calling
myself the Mojo Master, that's going to put limits on our growth.
And so I just changed it to Michael Mojo and it sort of stuck.
And now I go places and people are like, Mojo.
And so Mojo is like the thing that's stuck. And even people wouldn't call me
(05:29):
the Mojo Master, they'd just call me Mojo.
So that's why I kept the Mojo part.
But really Mojo, when I looked it up is an African folklore.
In certain tribes, they used to carry around a bag of mojo.
A bag of mojo would keep away bad spirits or bad energy and bring in good energy
and good spirits and good luck.
(05:50):
I was like, that's essentially what I do.
Sorry. Apologies. It's okay. That's quite an inspiring story.
Thank you. it's everything sort of came together naturally and it was sounds
like it was just a process that evolved over time and now here you are really
(06:10):
dominating your your industry in performance.
Helping people get the most out of their lives and achieve the highest levels yeah,
something you mentioned was like evolution i think part of the process of life
which most people mistake is we're always evolving i always say this in my events
like if someone can describe me in two years from now as being the same person
(06:30):
as I was two years ago tells you a lot about that person.
I want people to say, Michael's like this, but what they're describing is who I was, not who I am.
Because who I am is an evolution of myself, someone who's consistently growing
and learning and adapting.
I sometimes go to my parents' house for dinner and they'll say,
yeah, but you're always angry.
I was always angry, right? I'm a redhead. I got expelled from school for fighting.
(06:55):
I had my nose broken. I got stabbed in the head with a bottle.
I used to be hyper-aggressive and that's who I was back then.
But it's not who I am. Now I'm pretty calm.
So when I first started the business, I had people, old staff members who left
and they're like, Michael's a radic.
I was erratic when I first started my business because I didn't know what I
was doing. Now, I'm really calm. I'm a lot more structured.
(07:16):
I like to hear people describe me who I was because that's a past tense.
It means they're stuck in it, but I've outgrown them.
If people keep describing who I was in the past, it tells you that they haven't
grown, but I have because they don't have the ability to adapt to realize that
people around them grow as well.
Life's an evolution. Business is an evolution. Everything's always changing. It's always in flux.
(07:41):
It certainly is. And just expanding on the point of evolution,
you talk about creating a winning mindset.
And my question for you is, what are some of the processes that you help your
clients or the people that you speak to when it comes to achievement?
(08:02):
How do you help them develop that mindset of no limits of pushing yourself to
new levels and becoming a whole new you?
I mean, it's a very broad question because it depends what the problem is that
we're trying to solve, right? Yes.
You know, if someone comes in and they're a business owner and they're stressed
out, burnt out, tired, frustrated, they feel stuck, that's going to be different
(08:23):
than someone who comes to me with a relationship problem and says,
my relationship isn't working.
Now, there's some foundation principles that I can go over because I think that
strategy always has to be built on principles.
And most people make this mistake of trying to build a strategy without understanding
the principles of what winning or what working looks like already.
We know the principle of health is we probably need to move X amount of time every day.
(08:48):
We probably need to eat fairly healthy.
And then what are the principles of what does good eating look like?
And so when we research that, we find that there are principles,
so like frameworks that we can sort of sit in.
Now, the principle of eating vegan to vegetarian to paleo doesn't really matter,
providing that the framework is correct.
If we eat more calories than what we burn, we're probably going to put on weight
(09:10):
and it doesn't matter whether we're eating vegan, paleo.
So that's a principle. Then from there, we look at strategies and structures,
which then can be refined over time.
What most people do is they want the strategy without understanding the framework
or the principles that they're trying to achieve things under.
But if I look at what are the common principles that make someone do well in
(09:35):
life, their personal life?
Now, if we look at business, like I'm a business owner, if I'm not doing well
personally, my business is screwed.
Most people don't realize that. In fact, I was just on the call with one of
my clients I've been working with now for five years.
We've grown their business from doing about a million dollars a year in revenue.
And I think at the moment, they're doing about 14 million on average and their
profit margins are wild. Yeah. So their profit margins are good.
(09:58):
They're making over seven figures profit every year.
Actually, it's well over seven figures.
Anyway, my point is that when I was working with him tonight,
I kept coming back to the core fundamental principle is that your external world
is a reflection of what's going on internally.
If you're stressed in your head and you can't control your own stress,
(10:19):
the world around you becomes highly stressful.
Now, what most people do is they try to solve the external issue without solving
the internal issue, and so they keep repeating patterns.
So the business owner who's stressed thinks that if they get rid of one shitty
staff member and they hire somebody else, that somebody else is going to make
the business perform better.
And normally it doesn't. It
just creates the stress again. And then in six months, they fire somebody.
(10:41):
And then they just have these cycles that they go through.
People get into an intimate relationship, and then they end up breaking up three,
four years down the track.
And then they get back into a relationship, and three, four years down the track,
they break up again, or they go through their second divorce or whatever. Whatever.
What they're not realizing is that every time we look outside of ourself,
we're essentially looking into a mirror of ourselves.
(11:02):
If we don't learn to look within ourselves in order to solve the external problems
that are around us, then we don't actually learn to grow.
Now, as business owners, that's one of the key things is like with this guy
tonight that I was working with, part of the thing is I'm building his leadership
skills now because the business is working well, but his team aren't as effective as what he wants.
My first thing is, is let's go back to you.
(11:23):
What's going on with you? Now, he's like, well, I'm just stressed out.
I'm frustrated. There's all this chaos. I'm like, ah.
You're mentally, internally stressed. You're internally chaotic.
Now, you're projecting that out.
You think that if everything outside of you can be less stressful,
then you'll be less stressed on the inside.
He said, well, that's exactly right. I said, it doesn't work like that.
You go deal with your stress and the problems that you're perceiving on the
(11:47):
external will seem a lot easier to solve versus the other way around.
Is you keep thinking that if I'm in a rush or I can quickly fix all this stuff
on the outside, then I'll feel better.
That's a really shit way of living in the way that most people live.
Coming back to the frameworks, which was the original question,
the framework for helping someone to achieve great things in their own life
(12:08):
where they enjoy it and they're fulfilled,
I have something that I help people build, which is their success map.
Their success map is essentially three key pillars.
The first pillar is understanding what fulfills them.
Because if we want to achieve anything in life, we have to understand what type
of life do we want to build.
Now, I don't want to build a business where I wake up in the morning like most
(12:29):
people where they're like, oh man, I got to get up and I got to go to work and
I got to do... I don't want that.
I want to wake up in the morning and just be like, fuck yeah, let's do this.
And I want to wake up next to my wife where I look at her and I'm just like,
Like, hell yeah, let's go have some fun today.
That's the life that I want. It's like, I want to enjoy my clients.
I want to enjoy running a business.
I want to enjoy life. Now, does that mean that I always enjoy it? Hell no.
(12:49):
There's problems every day. Like being a business owner, I essentially wake
up, there's a bunch of problems, I solve problems, and then I go to bed,
and there are more problems.
So business owners who can't control their internal, they try to solve all the
external problems without realizing that that's our job, is we essentially wake
up and we solve problems, and that's called evolution and growth. both.
I might have a staff problem today. I fixed the staff problem.
(13:10):
Now I've got a cash flow problem.
Then I fixed the money problem by getting staff more effective.
Then all of a sudden, I got a taxation problem.
And so all the time, you're just dealing with these problems.
I love that. To me, that's like, cool.
Now I get to solve the next one. And I keep doing it. My company grows. My team have fun.
Life's good. But when I work with all these other business owners that have
been trained that the goal is to get rid of problems, and so they surround around
(13:33):
themselves with problems, they stress out, then eventually they either melt
down and burn out or they run away from them. I've got to go on a holiday. I've got to get away.
But they're always trying to escape their own life and they think that something
else outside of themselves is going to solve it.
So we want to understand what fulfills you in life. What's the thing that you
love to do that you're going to wake up and do? Not the thing you're passionate
about because passion means to suffer.
(13:53):
So I don't want to do things that I'm passionate about. I don't give a shit about passion.
What I care about is what do I love to do? And love, you've done some work with
Demartini, haven't you?
Oh, look, I've been to some of his seminars and know some of his basic principles.
So yeah, go ahead. Yeah, so he talks about love as being, and so do all the great philosophers.
(14:15):
Like some of the books back there are some of the greatest philosophers in history.
They talk about the idea of avoiding passion and finding love. Love.
Love is a symmetry of both positives and negatives. I love running a business,
but every day there are positives and there are negatives.
Every day, the shit hits the fan somewhere. There's always a problem.
Staff come to me, oh, this happened and that happened.
I'm like, that's cool. We'll fix it. Let's work through it all.
(14:37):
I train them and I develop them and I help them.
The better that they get and the more effective they get in life,
the better the business grows.
The more effective my customers are, the more money they make,
the more money I make because they keep reinvesting in our products and our services and so on.
As we evolve, if I evolve myself, then I can evolve my team.
It's the I, we, and all principle.
If I evolve, I can evolve my family and those close to me.
(14:58):
If my family and everyone are evolving and I'm evolving, then I can go out and
evolve my business and people around me and my community and so on.
But most people make the mistake of can't even change their own thoughts.
It's a stupid principle and it creates a lot of stress and a lot of problems that are unnecessary.
So pillar number one is fulfillment. What fulfills you? What would you love to do?
(15:19):
What challenges would you love to solve every day?
What stresses would you take on? What pressures would you take on?
Because pressure creates expansion.
Stress creates growth. Most of our society want to avoid stress and avoid pressure,
and therefore, they don't grow and don't expand.
It's a fundamental law of physics. Everything in the universe is expanding or
contracting. Nothing stays the same. And everything on earth either grows or
(15:41):
dies. Nothing stays the same.
So if we're not growing through stress and we're not expanding through pressure,
then we're not getting anywhere.
So we have to embrace that fundamental principle. And the question is,
what stress do I want? What pressure do I want? And let's go after it.
The pressure and stress that I love is building people.
I love building people to be more, whether that's through business or whether
(16:02):
that's through my one-on-one coaching or whether that through my events and
seminars. I just want people to be better.
And so that's what I do every day. Is it easy? No, because people are people.
People complain, people get stressed, people get frustrated.
They're people, right? Now, I'm pretty lucky because I have a good group of
community, but we still get people who slip in who are unappreciative or who
(16:25):
expect too much from us and things like that.
And it causes problems, but that's part of my job is to solve those problems.
So that's number one is the fulfillment pillar is important because if you're
fulfilled, are you more likely to stick at something for a long period of time?
You do something well for a long period of time, it creates compounding, right?
Whereas the people who want to get rich quick or do shit quick,
(16:46):
they're the people who get somewhere quick and then just drop off the face of
the planet and then they go to the next thing and they never really get anywhere.
I used to be like that. I'm not anymore.
We need to do something that we're fulfilled in so we can do it over a long
period of time so that we get compounding effect.
Also, we want to do something that we love because every day we're a day closer to death.
I want to know that today my life was worth it because today I'm one day closer to dying.
(17:10):
I don't know when it's going to be, not yet, but what I know is that I'm a day closer.
If I died tomorrow, did I enjoy today? If I didn't enjoy today,
and I'm not talking about the usual enjoyment that most idiots,
when I say idiots, I mean that in the most fundamental way, which is low-minded,
when someone's trapped in an idiotic way of thinking,
(17:30):
they think fun is getting drunk, partying, drugs, but they're essentially the
seven deadly sins in Christianity, or the Greeks had the eight evil thoughts.
What they're saying is, those things there, although they're pleasurable in
the moment, they create pain afterwards.
That's why most people live on a pendulum of pleasure and pain,
because they chase pleasure, get it, it leads them back to pain.
(17:53):
Then when they're in pain and suffering, they want more pleasure.
And so they forward between the pleasure and pain.
But that never gets you to where you want. I don't care about pleasure.
I don't care about it. What I care about is I love the growth.
I love waking up every day and going, you know what? I changed five or six people's
lives today by just moving them a little bit closer to their goal.
I got to inspire my team and we move forward a little bit. And you know what?
(18:15):
I got rewarded because I'm good at that financially, which then means I can
go back and reinvest in myself through learning and growth and development,
doing things that I love to do, traveling and so on.
And then I get to go and invest in my team more. And we keep doing that.
And now you're expanding as a business. You're expanding as a family.
You're expanding as a community.
So we've got to find out what we're fulfilled in doing, or if not,
(18:37):
we chase pleasure and pain all the time, which always leads in circles.
Hence the seven deadly sins or the eight evil thoughts from the Greeks.
Also, a lot of people in the personal development field quote people like Marcus Aurelius.
In Marcus Aurelius' book, he clearly states that we need to avoid the passions.
Yeah, almost everyone in the personal development space talks about finding
your passion, doing things that you're passionate about, whereas the greatest
(18:59):
philosophers in history spoke about avoiding the passions because passions are pleasure.
Anyway, that's fulfillment. The second pillar is you need to know your direction
because without direction, you won't have drive.
So we want to be driven towards something that's meaningful for us,
which comes from a long-term mission, documenting our visions.
Now, we all have unique visions that pop into our mind and things that we believe
(19:22):
we can achieve in our lifetime.
I personally have never thought about going to space. I don't think about it. I don't really care.
I think about building a massive business where I'm running events and seminars
with tens of thousands of people and working with the best people on the planet
in all different fields, which I've been able to already do,
from Olympic athletes to rich listers and so on, they've been my private clients.
(19:44):
So that is a vision that's etched in my mind that I keep working towards and I keep building.
You have your own unique visions and so does everybody else.
They need to be documented because that documentation gives you clarity on your mission.
The mission is the path to get there and then you set goals.
Now, goals, most people mess up goals as well because normally they get excited.
And if you get excited about goals, you think that you're more skilled than what you are.
(20:08):
When you do that, you set big goals with a small skill set and then you fail
at them and then you beat the shit out of yourself because you feel like you
didn't get what you wanted and you feel guilty and ashamed.
That's that negative cycle, the negative loop that most people get into.
Something that's really important is your goals. I talk to business owners all
(20:29):
the time about this, but also this relates to the general public.
When you set goals, any goal or anything thing that we're doing into the future
is essentially we're looking into a crystal ball.
Now, if I said to you, you should invest in a certain, let's say I'm going to
tell you that I think you should invest all your money into,
let's say, abalone farming.
(20:53):
Do you know what abalone is? That's interesting.
So abalone, for those who don't know, is like a seashell. Is it a mollusk or whatever?
But essentially, they're an ocean fish that is quite expensive, right?
It's not even a fish, but anyway, it's like a shellfish.
There's probably a marine biologist on here who's going to flip out,
but anyway. That's good promo.
(21:16):
Yeah, if I told you to do that, you'd probably sit there and go,
this guy had a mirror ball.
If you went to your friends and family and said, this guy had a mirror ball,
and he said he looked into the future and he saw that abalone farming was going
to go really well, what would your friends and family think?
They'd think that you're a weirdo. Yeah, what's wrong with this guy?
Yeah, who has this magic ball, right?
(21:38):
Because we all know the magic person who can see into people's future and we
all know that it's bullshit.
Now, when people set goals, we're essentially looking in our own mindset into
the future, trying to create predictable patterns.
And if we look at our past behaviors and our past way that we utilize our own
(21:58):
skill sets and the people around us and our own resources and other people's
resources, it should give you some sort predictable pattern.
Now, that predictable pattern should lead us towards the goal.
But again, it creates a probability.
When people set goals, they're like, I'm going to go carve this thing into stone.
I'm going to over-exaggerate my skill set.
People come to me and they're like, I want to be a millionaire in 12 months.
(22:21):
And I'm like, cool, you can do that.
Just a quick question though, based on your past experience,
how much did you earn in the last 12 months? I earned 60 grand.
Okay. Well, maybe they just had a bad year. What happened the year before that?
Oh, it was 60. Okay. And the year before that?
60. So we've got three years of consistent 60K.
(22:42):
Now, I'm not saying that you can't go from 60 to a million because you can.
But what I'm saying is the probabilities based on the experience that you've
got, the knowledge that you have, the skill sets that you've got,
the chances of you achieving that is probably in a decimal place with many,
many zeros in front of it.
Now, is there a chance. Yeah, you might have a one in a billion chance,
(23:03):
but if you're going to bet your life on that or you're going to bet your life
savings on that, it's probably a pretty shitty goal.
What I would rather do is create a better probability. If someone walks into
the gym and they say, I want to lose 20 kilograms, perfect.
We can do that. But now the question is what's the timeframe?
If the person needs to lose 20 kilograms and they need to lose it in two weeks
(23:25):
because it's their wedding, the only way that that's going to happen is they're
going to have to either cut the fat off and have surgery, which means their
wedding is going to be really uncomfortable because they're going to be in full-blown
recovery from a major surgery,
or they're going to have to chop limbs off, or it's completely impossible.
So that's a shit goal.
What I'm saying here is that people need to treat goals like a probability.
(23:47):
Then if you get feedback that your goal-setting ability is not good,
then you need to use that data and change the way you set goals.
If I want to go from, let's say, a $1 million business to a $10 million business,
but we've been sitting at $1 million for the last two to three years,
going from one to 10 to 12-month period is probably highly improbable.
(24:08):
It's not saying it's not impossible, but it's highly improbable unless a lot of inputs change.
So now what we probably need to do is go back and reassess. Even growing 100%
in 12 months is pretty tough.
So let's go back and let's figure out how we're going to do this and create
a pushing ourselves to the point of burnout, exhaustion, anxiety, stress, frustration.
(24:28):
What that tells me about that individual mentally and emotionally,
and I'll get to the third pillar in a minute, by the way, what that tells me
about that individual is that they love setting them up for failure because
failure and consistently beating themselves up and feeling like shit is actually
their motivator and their driver.
And so people who beat the crap out of themselves and feel really bad all the
time, they will go through a cycle where they self-depreciate,
(24:49):
beat themselves up, and then they'll go really, really hard again in order to
prove their value to themselves again, and in order to prove their worth.
And then they'll go really, really hard. They'll overexert themselves.
They'll burn out. And then they'll beat the shit out of themselves again so
that they can get back into that self-depreciating state, and they just stay in that loop.
It's not a way to a great life. You're getting closer to death.
Not a great way to live. Not not going to enjoy life.
(25:10):
Might achieve some things. It's not going to be fun. It's a shitty way of living.
So anyway, I know I went off track, but that other pillar, we need vision,
mission, and goals, and they got to be set clear.
That's pillar number two, and they have to be done right. Most people do them wrong.
Almost every business owner that I work on with their mission,
their vision, their values as a company guide and as their culture guide is wrong.
(25:32):
And that's why they're stressed. That's why they're frustrated, not getting results.
Knowing a whole bunch of psychological principles so that you can fine tune yourself.
So there's a whole bunch of different things. There are principles that I use
day in, day out with clients that I use on myself.
One of them is energy over effort.
Most people will work harder and think that hard work is going to be the thing
that gets them to the place that they want to get to.
(25:54):
That's not true. Warren Buffett, one of the richest people on the planet,
he works less than what I do.
At the end of the year, when he does his tax return, his tax return is $200
a million dollars and I'm running a seven-figure plus company,
does he work harder than me? No, I'm grinding my ass out.
He just has a better ability to manage himself differently. Now,
(26:16):
he's in his late 90s. So I think he's like 96 or 94 or something.
So he has... I'm 40 now. I just turned 40.
He's got a lot of extra time. He's got an extra 50 years on top of what I have.
I know my knowledge is compounded.
When I was in my 20s, I was like, Like, why aren't I there yet?
And then I got into my 30s and I was like, holy shit, the shit that I used to
(26:37):
think about when I was 20, that Michael was a completely different person.
I can't even think like that guy anymore because everything compounds.
Someone said something really cool. They gave a wicked analogy the other day.
And they said, if you put one piece of paper, like if you lift one piece of
paper up, it's very light.
But if you put a couple of pieces of paper, it gets a little bit heavier and
(26:57):
it gets a little bit more solid.
But if you get a real big book that's really thick and it's It's got thousands
of pages. That's extremely heavy.
Now, that is built one layer of time.
Now, in our life, people want the book of knowledge, but they're not building
their knowledge one layer of time.
And knowledge is built one layer of time, one day at a time,
one year at a time, and so on. And we build that.
(27:20):
So every year, we get stronger and more effective, providing we're learning
and implementing and executing and growing through problems and expanding through challenges.
When we do that, we keep learning and learning and learning.
We just layer, layer, layer, layer, layer. player.
And now these days, I talk to some business owners and I'm like,
man, you just don't get it. You don't get it because I have so much knowledge.
(27:41):
The knowledge gap between my knowledge and their gap is here and I have to drop
back down and remember what it was like 10 years ago or 15 years ago when every
day was just an absolute struggle. It felt like I was drowning.
So you need to have those tools or those frameworks or principles in the way
you operate because if you don't have that third pillar, it's extremely hard to stay consistent.
(28:03):
So energy over effort. Got to manage your energy because if not,
then the only thing you can manage is your effort and you'll eventually burn out.
So you want to be managing your energy. That's just one.
But there's a whole bunch of other frameworks and stuff that I run off of as
well. There's a heap of them actually. I got here, I'm running a leadership
course next week. So there's a heap of them there.
Fantastic. Sorry for the short answer. No, not at all.
(28:26):
That was a great answer. And I think the guests will certainly be able to relate
to what you've shared through these three steps that can really be a powerful tool for change.
And you did touch on consistency. So, you know, you could be applying all these
things, but if you're doing it here and there and it's not consistent,
(28:47):
you're not going to achieve long-term results.
So what do you see as the key to upholding the consistency, the habits,
and the strategies so that you're actually getting somewhere with it? Yeah.
So again, I have another framework that I use all the time with clients,
whether it's personally or professionally or in their business.
(29:08):
Clarity times by standards plus environment equals your success or equals your
fulfillment or equals the results you want.
So if we just go back to the start of the framework, it's clarity.
Clarity comes before standards. If you don't have clarity, standards drop.
So if someone wants to improve their standards, which might be that they're
(29:29):
more consistent, it might be that they are more courageous.
If you don't have clarity around why that's important, it's hard to uphold that.
Before this interview, I've been working since like seven o'clock this morning back to back.
It's now like seven o'clock at night here. So it's been a 12-hour day already
and I got heaps more work to do. Now, some days I work from like 4 a.m.
Until eight or nine o'clock.
(29:49):
And then other days, like, are a bit more chilled and a bit more cruisy.
But I love this stuff, right? Like, why? Why is that important for me?
I have to really think back to like, why do I do this stuff?
Because if not, you get caught in your emotions.
Now, all emotions are volatile. So what goes up comes back down.
What's positive ends up negative and what's negative then becomes positive again,
and we keep going around in circles.
(30:11):
So when you have clarity, I just focus back on, why am I doing this? Now, why am I doing it?
Because I want to grow a business that helps people perform better,
right? It's the mission of the company.
Well, the vision of the company is to build businesses that help people perform better.
The mission's a lot bigger than
that. and there's a lot of parts of that mission, but that's why I do it.
The other thing is that I wouldn't do this stuff if I didn't feel like I had
(30:34):
some inner calling that allowed me to do what I was highly effective at.
Now, I've obviously learned a
lot and developed skills like the ability to talk on a podcast like this.
I remember the day I recorded my first video for YouTube.
I recorded it and I actually put it off for about four or five days.
I kept thinking, I'll do it tomorrow,
I'll do it tomorrow, and then I'd go watch TV, I'd go have a coffee,
(30:55):
then I'd go for a walk then I'd come
back and I'd watch some more tv and I put it off for like
a couple of days then I came back I recorded the video I
watched it I was like this is crap and I deleted it that happened
for like a week right like it was a
couple of days where I just kept recording stuff and then deleting it because
I hated it and then eventually I thought you know what
one of the one of the principles I have is you
(31:17):
always have to start shit first and
I don't mean start shit as in start the object i mean
you are going to be shit when you start so when
you know that you're going to be shit then you don't put these high standards
on yourself and pressure like most people do where they're like i've got to
be good if you look at me on a podcast i was talking about this you know in
(31:38):
my podcast i do a podcast five days a week monday to friday most weeks not not
all the time but then i do three guest podcasts or two guest podcasts minimum every week.
And I have been doing this for
a long time. So there's probably like 250 podcasts in with other people.
Do I think that I'm amazing at them? No.
I just try to work on one thing every podcast and get a little bit better at
(31:59):
it, just like people should do.
But if you look at that and you go, wow, I should be like his level,
then that self-comparative, you're going to crush yourself in it.
You're better off just starting and being shit and realizing that your first
podcast, no one cares and no one listens.
And your mom and dad or whoever in your family are probably going to tell you
that it was great, even if it sucked.
(32:20):
But by the time you actually get good, like this year, I'm doing a tour in the
US and I'm working with some big names over there and things like that.
By the time you get that opportunity, you have developed those skill sets that
allow you to be there because you've earned the right.
I've seen people who've taken shortcuts and gotten on those big stages.
And the problem is their communication skills are crap.
They don't know what they're talking about. They don't have frameworks.
(32:42):
So they essentially copy other people's material, and then they get caught out.
And then they get ridiculed and judged and criticized. And then eventually,
they just fall off the face of the planet and you don't see them again.
So even though it sucks that it's taken me years of doing this stuff to get where I am,
the thing is that that consistency and the
reasoning behind the consistency so having a real clear mission and
(33:04):
vision and and that purpose that why behind why you
do what you do it helps you to create that that consistency and then that consistency
over time is that layer of paper one layer of one layer of time until you become
so good at something that by the time you are noticed for being good at it you
do really really well i hope that answers the question It certainly does.
That's such a good answer.
(33:25):
And so you also talk about emotions because everyone, you know,
goes through challenges.
Everyone goes through experiences that aren't the best, that probably they might
feel a bit depressed or unhappy about.
And one key to success and even performance, you know, performing better is
(33:47):
being able to manage your emotions effectively.
Effectively so do you have a framework or a
set of principles that you guide people or
your customers through to be able to better manage
themselves emotionally yeah there's not
so much one framework there's a bunch of different frameworks that i've learned
over the years so like breath work is a big thing at the moment right like it
(34:10):
is the coaching industry like i've been in the industry for so long now that
you see there's these fads and like i remember i first I first heard about Wim
Hof and Ice Bass like 10 years ago, I think.
Something happened and it was like one of his first YouTube videos.
And my friend said to me, you heard of this guy called the Iceman?
I was like, never heard of him. He showed me. I remember watching it at dinner
(34:31):
and I got home and I was watching it.
And he hadn't even launched his online subscription platform yet.
That came like a year or so later.
And I was watching this guy and I was like, man, that's cool.
So I started having cold showers. That was like 10 years ago and I started doing his breath work.
And then I watched it like it slowly started and the movement grew and the movement
grew and the movement grew.
And now it's like every coach on the planet is like, got to have an ice bath,
(34:54):
got to have an ice bath. And even people who aren't coaches are like, man, ice baths.
I'm seeing it all over Instagram.
Yeah, but it's a fad, right? I mean, that's been there for a long,
long time. It's just that people get hold of it. The same as breathwork.
Breathwork's been around for thousands of years, but it's this new thing.
And then everyone comes out with their new bullshit methodology is like,
(35:15):
yeah, but you have to breathe through one nostril and then you got to push your
ear back and then do it this way because it's like, they all try to find their
unique spin on some bullshit.
That happens all the time in the coaching industry. And then eventually it dies
out and then there's the next thing and then it dies out and then there's the next thing.
What was your question again? I just had a complete mental blank and I think
(35:35):
I went way off track. It's all good. So just going back to emotions.
Emotions. So with emotions, we have to understand what emotions are.
Now, if you look at the research around what an emotion is, there is so much
conflicting evidence. Now, here's the crazy thing.
Science doesn't even know. If you look at the literature, science actually doesn't
(35:56):
even know what an emotion is.
They know that we have them, but it can't clearly define what an emotion is
because there's too much debate around what it is.
So that's pretty crazy considering that people can be diagnosed with emotional
disorders, such as depression, anxiety, things like that as well, or mood disorders.
Emotions are up for debate. But when I did a lot of research,
(36:19):
what I found was that there seemed to be a causal chain.
And I talk a lot about this in... I run an event called called Thrive Time.
And that's the event where we help you build your success map.
But when we go into the emotional stuff and the mental stuff,
there was a causal chain that took me about six years of study to try to figure out what it was.
Now, essentially what happens is if we go to birth.
(36:39):
You have an egg and you have sperm. When they come together,
you're essentially taking the genes of the father and the genes of the mother
and combining the both of them in order to make the genes of yourself, right?
Now, in that process, there's something called epigenetic tagging.
That epigenetic tagging has a lot to do with our parents' mental and emotional
states and the challenges that they're having in their life at the time of conception.
(37:02):
So our parents essentially gift us with a life journey of problems.
Now, remember how I said that evolution is essentially solving one problem and
creating another problem.
So we never get rid of our problems, although the delusion that humans have
is that we're going to get rid of problems.
So business owners who are the most stressed think that they're going to get rid of problems.
And they think that if they can just solve all these problems,
then life gets easier, and it doesn't.
(37:23):
The problems just get bigger. My financial problems now are way bigger than
my financial problems when I first started.
Because now my tax bill has a lot of zeros on the end of it,
whereas when I first started, my tax bill was nothing. Nothing.
And no one sues a broke person. And now with more staff, there needs to be more management.
There needs to be more systems, more processes, more infrastructure. That causes problems.
(37:48):
And I was talking to a business owner about this tonight, and I'll come back
to the emotional imbalance stuff.
I said, you've got to be clear about the problem that you're solving in your business.
Because if you're a business owner and you're trying to solve cashflow,
it means you need to get sales.
When you get sales to solve the cashflow problem, it creates a delivery problem.
So the example of this is like if I'm selling hats, if I sell 10,000 hats,
(38:10):
now I need to deliver 10,000 hats.
So I need to now go to China and get these 10,000 hats, get them put on a boat over here.
Now, if I've already paid for the hats, there's a massive problem with cashflow
because I'm waiting for 10,000 caps to land before I sell them.
So I've got a huge cashflow problem. So now I've sold these 10,000 caps.
I've got to wait for them to get here. Customers start complaining.
Now I've got customer service problems because they're waiting.
(38:31):
The boat's been held up for an extra two months.
They're at customs. Then from there, I get them and I go, oh, shit.
One out of every 10 caps, so 10% of them, faulty.
Shit. Now I've got to send a bunch back to China. I've got to get them to send
these other ones back across. So now these other customers have...
But here's the thing, we've sold them. So now we've actually solved the cashflow
(38:53):
problem, but now we've got customer problems.
All that happens is in business and in life, we just keep revolving around in problems.
Now, if we do a good job, there's something called a noosphere that Vanasky
spoke about, the philosopher.
And what he said is that we go through these spheres of growth.
Where you're at right now in your life, this is anyone listening to this,
when you're going through any challenge in life, you're stuck at a level.
(39:17):
Those levels are like school. In grade one, you're like, oh,
cool. It's fun. You're in grade one now. You're a bit bigger than reception.
You're like, yeah, cool. This is good. It starts off easy.
Everything's great. You start learning some stuff. You mess around a little bit.
You might do some homework. You might not, if you're like me,
get in trouble a little bit.
And then one day the teacher comes in after a whole year's worth of work,
(39:40):
or it might even be a whole term, and they hit the big T word.
And they go, we've got a test. And you're like, oh shit, not a test.
And then you get all stressed out. You start worrying. You're like,
crap, I can't remember half this stuff. I better study. You've got a cram.
It forces you to grow. It's uncomfortable. It sucks. You're afraid.
What if I fail? All of these things come up. It's like the most uncomfortable time.
(40:05):
Then you go through the test and after the test, you're like.
Well, I've either failed or I haven't. Let's see. Now you get your results back. Cool. I passed.
And then you go back to that same journey again, where you learn,
you grab a whole bunch of skills and then the test happens and then you get
fear, worry, stress, concern.
(40:26):
There's all these challenges and you've got to then grab all the knowledge that
you've got from the past learning experiences, piece them together in order to pass the test.
That's the exact metaphor for life.
And so when all these business owners come to me and all these people come to
me, they're like, yeah, but I'm so stressed out because of all these things.
I'm like, yeah, but you're just going through a test.
Here's the thing. If you fail the test, what happens? You repeat the grade.
(40:49):
Now, if you've been stuck in life for 10 years or you've been stuck financially,
it already tells me everything that I need to know about you as a person.
It tells me that every time it comes up against a test, you run away from it,
you're scared, or you're not learning fast enough in order to break through.
That's why you're stuck. So there's only a couple of options.
You stay where you are right now, and you can just keep repeating grade two, or you go to grade three.
(41:14):
But in order to go to grade three, you've got to have all the stress,
all the pressure, all the learnings. You've got to integrate all your thinking.
You have all the doubt, all the fears, everything like that.
And then you have this huge breakthrough. through.
And then after the breakthrough, you have something called an identity crisis.
I was the first person on the planet. I did a whole bunch of research on this.
I'm the first person on the planet to realize that when you have a breakthrough,
(41:34):
you have an identity crisis.
And so you start questioning yourself about everything again.
You're like, I don't even know what I want to do anymore.
I don't even know if I'm going in the right direction. Is this for me?
I don't know whether I want to be married.
I don't know whether maybe my relationship's not working. I don't know.
Should I quit my job? Should I not quit my job?
Am I making enough money? Do I really want to be here? I don't know whether
like, what about my kids?
All of those what ifs and all of the questions start resurfacing again.
(41:58):
And what it does is you've got to reconfirm you as an individual and where you're going.
Should you reconfirm it again, hence the need for a success map like I teach,
once you break through, all of a sudden you're like, cool, now I got clarity
again. Bang, and now I'm off. You're learning.
You're having this experience. Life becomes fun again. You enjoy everything.
And then after a period of time, depends on how fast you're growing,
(42:21):
you sit there again. You're like, oh shit, everything's getting tough.
There's all these challenges. Oh man, this is tough.
Now we're getting the next challenge again. Are we going on from grade three to grade four.
Do you know the beauty is at grade one, you get grade one problems,
you get grade one challenges, you get grade one lessons, but you also get grade one rewards.
People want grade 12 rewards, but they don't want grade 12 challenges.
(42:46):
So when someone comes to me, like I had a business owner who's a big property
developer, and I went to his office because he hired me and he called me down.
He's like, right, I need your help. I've worked with with him for years.
And he said, mate, I'm getting sued. This guy's suing me for like $3 million. And I was like, okay.
And as we're walking, the whole time he's complaining, this is bullshit.
I told staff this. And I said, hey, stop.
(43:08):
Now, this guy was homeless. When he was 16, he was living on the street.
And he speaks about part of his journey of having to use a toilet block to wash himself.
He would go into a public toilet block and wash under his arms and his groin
and stuff like that because he was sleeping on the street because his parents
were were abusive and he left home.
And I said, can you remember if you go back to that time in your own head and
(43:30):
you think about living on the street, if I told you back then that someone was
going to sue you for $3 million, what would you think?
And I watched him stop and it clicked. And he said, well, first of all,
I would have thought that you were full of shit.
And I said, I know. And I said, the other thing is, does anyone sue a broke person?
So is someone suing you because you don't have $3 million or are they suing
(43:52):
you because they know you've got heaps of money?
And he stopped and he smiled and he's like, of course they're suing me because
I have heaps of money. And he goes, and I said to him, that's my problem.
Because the only reason why you're in this position is because of the level
of the game that you're playing.
So I appreciate the level. I appreciate the game.
Music.
Thank you for listening to the Will to Win. I hope today's episode was overflowing
(44:15):
with value and helped inspire you.
Music.
Music.
(00:07):
Welcome to The Wheel to Win, where emerging entrepreneurs come to learn the
best tips, strategies, and techniques to unlock their potential and become more successful.
Music.
I'm your host, Steve Scarni, and each week I will bring on the most incredible
guests who are going to share their own unique stories, knowledge,
wisdom, and insights about how they've been able to close the gap between failure and success,
(00:30):
and then go on to live a life of greatness.
Here at The Will To Win, we are dedicated to educating and inspiring you to
be able to maximize your potential and make what seems impossible, totally possible.
(00:52):
Michael, Mojo, welcome to The Will To Win, episode 13, where we will be talking
about out how to master your mindset, transform your performance, and win big in business.
Thank you for the opportunity to have you on the show. My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
(01:13):
Obviously, you've got a wealth of business experience and expertise over many
years, and you have a very unique name.
I bet lots of people who don't know who you are are asking the question,
what is Mojo Michael Mojo. What does Mojo stand for?
(01:34):
Yeah. So Mojo became a bit of a weird thing for me. The way it all started was
I've been in the personal development industry for a long, long time now.
I've been coaching people for 20 years, about 20 years now.
And so I was with a friend. So my original business was called Ultimate Achiever.
And it was okay. And I I was doing a lot of like corporate business work and
(01:56):
yeah, I was just, I was, I was doing some like public speaking and things like
that. And we'd run some smaller events and stuff around the place.
There's a certain type of clientele I enjoy working with. So I love working
with small business owners, especially.
I love working with driven people. My community is called the Driven Mofos because
everyone's driven for more.
(02:16):
They want more out of life, really. Driven for better health,
driven for better finances, driven for better relationships,
better communication, better businesses.
The usual things that people are driven towards, I think most people.
But I was just getting some more corporate-y type work. And I think that the
corporate environment isn't my environment.
(02:36):
I'm a coach, not a speaker. So I did some work a couple of weeks ago for a large
business organization.
And they said, you know, Michael was a speaker, like a public speaker and whatever.
And I said, I'm not. I'm a coach. I help people to solve problems and to move
forward and to progress and achieve more.
It's a different skill set than standing up on stage and giving a motivational
(02:56):
pep talk that then people feel good for 24 hours and leave.
But anyway, I was doing that in the corporate industry for a bit and I wasn't
really enjoying it because I felt like there wasn't the growth there in people.
I like seeing people grow. I like seeing people overcome their problems,
overcome their barriers and keep pushing towards growth.
I think that's the greatest gift we have in life is the ability to grow and overcome our problems.
(03:18):
And we solve one problem, we create another problem and so on.
I was doing that and I was feeling a bit, I don't know, a bit lost because it
wasn't the people I really enjoyed working with and so on, but I was doing all
right financially and whatever.
And then one day I woke up, I'd spent all night working on this new website
with a couple of other friends of mine.
Back in startup days where you just, your mates come around,
(03:38):
you sit there and you build a website.
Everyone's enthusiastic and you're all like, in your early 20s.
And then it's just like, you've got this crazy amount of stupid energy that,
normally gets misplaced.
But that had happened. So we'd pretty much pulled an all-nighter.
And then I went to a friend's house to train in the morning.
I'd had a couple of hours sleep and he said, what's been going on?
I told him we'd pulled this late night and we're building a website and he goes,
(04:02):
man, you're like this mojo dude. I was like, oh, mojo dude.
I thought about it and it sat with me for a couple of days and I was like, mojo dude.
Then I remember just something clicked and I ran into my wife's office.
She had this little office at the time and I ran into her office and I'm like, I'm the mojo master.
She's like, what do you mean? I was like, I'm the Mojo Master.
And she goes, I hope I can swear.
(04:23):
But she's like, I'm the Mojo Master. And she's like, I don't know what you mean.
Whatever you're saying is, I don't know. And I said, look, we have to rebrand as the Mojo Master.
So that was sort of our transformation from the ultimate achiever,
which was our original business, to the Mojo Master. And then that business
operated under that brand for a period of time.
(04:43):
But what I realized was there was a bit of a disconnect.
I liked the name, but I didn't really connect with it.
And then over time, the branding shifted and I created Mojo Human Performance
Institute because I wanted to have bigger impact and bring in other coaches
and have different types of events and build something to scale.
My big business mission is to build businesses that help people perform better,
(05:06):
both in life and business.
And so I knew I needed to leverage more people and I couldn't build it off my personal brand alone.
So I created Mojo Human Performance. And then I realized that if I keep calling
myself the Mojo Master, that's going to put limits on our growth.
And so I just changed it to Michael Mojo and it sort of stuck.
And now I go places and people are like, Mojo.
And so Mojo is like the thing that's stuck. And even people wouldn't call me
(05:29):
the Mojo Master, they'd just call me Mojo.
So that's why I kept the Mojo part.
But really Mojo, when I looked it up is an African folklore.
In certain tribes, they used to carry around a bag of mojo.
A bag of mojo would keep away bad spirits or bad energy and bring in good energy
and good spirits and good luck.
(05:50):
I was like, that's essentially what I do.
Sorry. Apologies. It's okay. That's quite an inspiring story.
Thank you. it's everything sort of came together naturally and it was sounds
like it was just a process that evolved over time and now here you are really
(06:10):
dominating your your industry in performance.
Helping people get the most out of their lives and achieve the highest levels yeah,
something you mentioned was like evolution i think part of the process of life
which most people mistake is we're always evolving i always say this in my events
like if someone can describe me in two years from now as being the same person
(06:30):
as I was two years ago tells you a lot about that person.
I want people to say, Michael's like this, but what they're describing is who I was, not who I am.
Because who I am is an evolution of myself, someone who's consistently growing
and learning and adapting.
I sometimes go to my parents' house for dinner and they'll say,
yeah, but you're always angry.
I was always angry, right? I'm a redhead. I got expelled from school for fighting.
(06:55):
I had my nose broken. I got stabbed in the head with a bottle.
I used to be hyper-aggressive and that's who I was back then.
But it's not who I am. Now I'm pretty calm.
So when I first started the business, I had people, old staff members who left
and they're like, Michael's a radic.
I was erratic when I first started my business because I didn't know what I
was doing. Now, I'm really calm. I'm a lot more structured.
(07:16):
I like to hear people describe me who I was because that's a past tense.
It means they're stuck in it, but I've outgrown them.
If people keep describing who I was in the past, it tells you that they haven't
grown, but I have because they don't have the ability to adapt to realize that
people around them grow as well.
Life's an evolution. Business is an evolution. Everything's always changing. It's always in flux.
(07:41):
It certainly is. And just expanding on the point of evolution,
you talk about creating a winning mindset.
And my question for you is, what are some of the processes that you help your
clients or the people that you speak to when it comes to achievement?
(08:02):
How do you help them develop that mindset of no limits of pushing yourself to
new levels and becoming a whole new you?
I mean, it's a very broad question because it depends what the problem is that
we're trying to solve, right? Yes.
You know, if someone comes in and they're a business owner and they're stressed
out, burnt out, tired, frustrated, they feel stuck, that's going to be different
(08:23):
than someone who comes to me with a relationship problem and says,
my relationship isn't working.
Now, there's some foundation principles that I can go over because I think that
strategy always has to be built on principles.
And most people make this mistake of trying to build a strategy without understanding
the principles of what winning or what working looks like already.
We know the principle of health is we probably need to move X amount of time every day.
(08:48):
We probably need to eat fairly healthy.
And then what are the principles of what does good eating look like?
And so when we research that, we find that there are principles,
so like frameworks that we can sort of sit in.
Now, the principle of eating vegan to vegetarian to paleo doesn't really matter,
providing that the framework is correct.
If we eat more calories than what we burn, we're probably going to put on weight
(09:10):
and it doesn't matter whether we're eating vegan, paleo.
So that's a principle. Then from there, we look at strategies and structures,
which then can be refined over time.
What most people do is they want the strategy without understanding the framework
or the principles that they're trying to achieve things under.
But if I look at what are the common principles that make someone do well in
(09:35):
life, their personal life?
Now, if we look at business, like I'm a business owner, if I'm not doing well
personally, my business is screwed.
Most people don't realize that. In fact, I was just on the call with one of
my clients I've been working with now for five years.
We've grown their business from doing about a million dollars a year in revenue.
And I think at the moment, they're doing about 14 million on average and their
profit margins are wild. Yeah. So their profit margins are good.
(09:58):
They're making over seven figures profit every year.
Actually, it's well over seven figures.
Anyway, my point is that when I was working with him tonight,
I kept coming back to the core fundamental principle is that your external world
is a reflection of what's going on internally.
If you're stressed in your head and you can't control your own stress,
(10:19):
the world around you becomes highly stressful.
Now, what most people do is they try to solve the external issue without solving
the internal issue, and so they keep repeating patterns.
So the business owner who's stressed thinks that if they get rid of one shitty
staff member and they hire somebody else, that somebody else is going to make
the business perform better.
And normally it doesn't. It
just creates the stress again. And then in six months, they fire somebody.
(10:41):
And then they just have these cycles that they go through.
People get into an intimate relationship, and then they end up breaking up three,
four years down the track.
And then they get back into a relationship, and three, four years down the track,
they break up again, or they go through their second divorce or whatever. Whatever.
What they're not realizing is that every time we look outside of ourself,
we're essentially looking into a mirror of ourselves.
(11:02):
If we don't learn to look within ourselves in order to solve the external problems
that are around us, then we don't actually learn to grow.
Now, as business owners, that's one of the key things is like with this guy
tonight that I was working with, part of the thing is I'm building his leadership
skills now because the business is working well, but his team aren't as effective as what he wants.
My first thing is, is let's go back to you.
(11:23):
What's going on with you? Now, he's like, well, I'm just stressed out.
I'm frustrated. There's all this chaos. I'm like, ah.
You're mentally, internally stressed. You're internally chaotic.
Now, you're projecting that out.
You think that if everything outside of you can be less stressful,
then you'll be less stressed on the inside.
He said, well, that's exactly right. I said, it doesn't work like that.
You go deal with your stress and the problems that you're perceiving on the
(11:47):
external will seem a lot easier to solve versus the other way around.
Is you keep thinking that if I'm in a rush or I can quickly fix all this stuff
on the outside, then I'll feel better.
That's a really shit way of living in the way that most people live.
Coming back to the frameworks, which was the original question,
the framework for helping someone to achieve great things in their own life
(12:08):
where they enjoy it and they're fulfilled,
I have something that I help people build, which is their success map.
Their success map is essentially three key pillars.
The first pillar is understanding what fulfills them.
Because if we want to achieve anything in life, we have to understand what type
of life do we want to build.
Now, I don't want to build a business where I wake up in the morning like most
(12:29):
people where they're like, oh man, I got to get up and I got to go to work and
I got to do... I don't want that.
I want to wake up in the morning and just be like, fuck yeah, let's do this.
And I want to wake up next to my wife where I look at her and I'm just like,
Like, hell yeah, let's go have some fun today.
That's the life that I want. It's like, I want to enjoy my clients.
I want to enjoy running a business.
I want to enjoy life. Now, does that mean that I always enjoy it? Hell no.
(12:49):
There's problems every day. Like being a business owner, I essentially wake
up, there's a bunch of problems, I solve problems, and then I go to bed,
and there are more problems.
So business owners who can't control their internal, they try to solve all the
external problems without realizing that that's our job, is we essentially wake
up and we solve problems, and that's called evolution and growth. both.
I might have a staff problem today. I fixed the staff problem.
(13:10):
Now I've got a cash flow problem.
Then I fixed the money problem by getting staff more effective.
Then all of a sudden, I got a taxation problem.
And so all the time, you're just dealing with these problems.
I love that. To me, that's like, cool.
Now I get to solve the next one. And I keep doing it. My company grows. My team have fun.
Life's good. But when I work with all these other business owners that have
been trained that the goal is to get rid of problems, and so they surround around
(13:33):
themselves with problems, they stress out, then eventually they either melt
down and burn out or they run away from them. I've got to go on a holiday. I've got to get away.
But they're always trying to escape their own life and they think that something
else outside of themselves is going to solve it.
So we want to understand what fulfills you in life. What's the thing that you
love to do that you're going to wake up and do? Not the thing you're passionate
about because passion means to suffer.
(13:53):
So I don't want to do things that I'm passionate about. I don't give a shit about passion.
What I care about is what do I love to do? And love, you've done some work with
Demartini, haven't you?
Oh, look, I've been to some of his seminars and know some of his basic principles.
So yeah, go ahead. Yeah, so he talks about love as being, and so do all the great philosophers.
(14:15):
Like some of the books back there are some of the greatest philosophers in history.
They talk about the idea of avoiding passion and finding love. Love.
Love is a symmetry of both positives and negatives. I love running a business,
but every day there are positives and there are negatives.
Every day, the shit hits the fan somewhere. There's always a problem.
Staff come to me, oh, this happened and that happened.
I'm like, that's cool. We'll fix it. Let's work through it all.
(14:37):
I train them and I develop them and I help them.
The better that they get and the more effective they get in life,
the better the business grows.
The more effective my customers are, the more money they make,
the more money I make because they keep reinvesting in our products and our services and so on.
As we evolve, if I evolve myself, then I can evolve my team.
It's the I, we, and all principle.
If I evolve, I can evolve my family and those close to me.
(14:58):
If my family and everyone are evolving and I'm evolving, then I can go out and
evolve my business and people around me and my community and so on.
But most people make the mistake of can't even change their own thoughts.
It's a stupid principle and it creates a lot of stress and a lot of problems that are unnecessary.
So pillar number one is fulfillment. What fulfills you? What would you love to do?
(15:19):
What challenges would you love to solve every day?
What stresses would you take on? What pressures would you take on?
Because pressure creates expansion.
Stress creates growth. Most of our society want to avoid stress and avoid pressure,
and therefore, they don't grow and don't expand.
It's a fundamental law of physics. Everything in the universe is expanding or
contracting. Nothing stays the same. And everything on earth either grows or
(15:41):
dies. Nothing stays the same.
So if we're not growing through stress and we're not expanding through pressure,
then we're not getting anywhere.
So we have to embrace that fundamental principle. And the question is,
what stress do I want? What pressure do I want? And let's go after it.
The pressure and stress that I love is building people.
I love building people to be more, whether that's through business or whether
(16:02):
that's through my one-on-one coaching or whether that through my events and
seminars. I just want people to be better.
And so that's what I do every day. Is it easy? No, because people are people.
People complain, people get stressed, people get frustrated.
They're people, right? Now, I'm pretty lucky because I have a good group of
community, but we still get people who slip in who are unappreciative or who
(16:25):
expect too much from us and things like that.
And it causes problems, but that's part of my job is to solve those problems.
So that's number one is the fulfillment pillar is important because if you're
fulfilled, are you more likely to stick at something for a long period of time?
You do something well for a long period of time, it creates compounding, right?
Whereas the people who want to get rich quick or do shit quick,
(16:46):
they're the people who get somewhere quick and then just drop off the face of
the planet and then they go to the next thing and they never really get anywhere.
I used to be like that. I'm not anymore.
We need to do something that we're fulfilled in so we can do it over a long
period of time so that we get compounding effect.
Also, we want to do something that we love because every day we're a day closer to death.
I want to know that today my life was worth it because today I'm one day closer to dying.
(17:10):
I don't know when it's going to be, not yet, but what I know is that I'm a day closer.
If I died tomorrow, did I enjoy today? If I didn't enjoy today,
and I'm not talking about the usual enjoyment that most idiots,
when I say idiots, I mean that in the most fundamental way, which is low-minded,
when someone's trapped in an idiotic way of thinking,
(17:30):
they think fun is getting drunk, partying, drugs, but they're essentially the
seven deadly sins in Christianity, or the Greeks had the eight evil thoughts.
What they're saying is, those things there, although they're pleasurable in
the moment, they create pain afterwards.
That's why most people live on a pendulum of pleasure and pain,
because they chase pleasure, get it, it leads them back to pain.
(17:53):
Then when they're in pain and suffering, they want more pleasure.
And so they forward between the pleasure and pain.
But that never gets you to where you want. I don't care about pleasure.
I don't care about it. What I care about is I love the growth.
I love waking up every day and going, you know what? I changed five or six people's
lives today by just moving them a little bit closer to their goal.
I got to inspire my team and we move forward a little bit. And you know what?
(18:15):
I got rewarded because I'm good at that financially, which then means I can
go back and reinvest in myself through learning and growth and development,
doing things that I love to do, traveling and so on.
And then I get to go and invest in my team more. And we keep doing that.
And now you're expanding as a business. You're expanding as a family.
You're expanding as a community.
So we've got to find out what we're fulfilled in doing, or if not,
(18:37):
we chase pleasure and pain all the time, which always leads in circles.
Hence the seven deadly sins or the eight evil thoughts from the Greeks.
Also, a lot of people in the personal development field quote people like Marcus Aurelius.
In Marcus Aurelius' book, he clearly states that we need to avoid the passions.
Yeah, almost everyone in the personal development space talks about finding
your passion, doing things that you're passionate about, whereas the greatest
(18:59):
philosophers in history spoke about avoiding the passions because passions are pleasure.
Anyway, that's fulfillment. The second pillar is you need to know your direction
because without direction, you won't have drive.
So we want to be driven towards something that's meaningful for us,
which comes from a long-term mission, documenting our visions.
Now, we all have unique visions that pop into our mind and things that we believe
(19:22):
we can achieve in our lifetime.
I personally have never thought about going to space. I don't think about it. I don't really care.
I think about building a massive business where I'm running events and seminars
with tens of thousands of people and working with the best people on the planet
in all different fields, which I've been able to already do,
from Olympic athletes to rich listers and so on, they've been my private clients.
(19:44):
So that is a vision that's etched in my mind that I keep working towards and I keep building.
You have your own unique visions and so does everybody else.
They need to be documented because that documentation gives you clarity on your mission.
The mission is the path to get there and then you set goals.
Now, goals, most people mess up goals as well because normally they get excited.
And if you get excited about goals, you think that you're more skilled than what you are.
(20:08):
When you do that, you set big goals with a small skill set and then you fail
at them and then you beat the shit out of yourself because you feel like you
didn't get what you wanted and you feel guilty and ashamed.
That's that negative cycle, the negative loop that most people get into.
Something that's really important is your goals. I talk to business owners all
(20:29):
the time about this, but also this relates to the general public.
When you set goals, any goal or anything thing that we're doing into the future
is essentially we're looking into a crystal ball.
Now, if I said to you, you should invest in a certain, let's say I'm going to
tell you that I think you should invest all your money into,
let's say, abalone farming.
(20:53):
Do you know what abalone is? That's interesting.
So abalone, for those who don't know, is like a seashell. Is it a mollusk or whatever?
But essentially, they're an ocean fish that is quite expensive, right?
It's not even a fish, but anyway, it's like a shellfish.
There's probably a marine biologist on here who's going to flip out,
but anyway. That's good promo.
(21:16):
Yeah, if I told you to do that, you'd probably sit there and go,
this guy had a mirror ball.
If you went to your friends and family and said, this guy had a mirror ball,
and he said he looked into the future and he saw that abalone farming was going
to go really well, what would your friends and family think?
They'd think that you're a weirdo. Yeah, what's wrong with this guy?
Yeah, who has this magic ball, right?
(21:38):
Because we all know the magic person who can see into people's future and we
all know that it's bullshit.
Now, when people set goals, we're essentially looking in our own mindset into
the future, trying to create predictable patterns.
And if we look at our past behaviors and our past way that we utilize our own
(21:58):
skill sets and the people around us and our own resources and other people's
resources, it should give you some sort predictable pattern.
Now, that predictable pattern should lead us towards the goal.
But again, it creates a probability.
When people set goals, they're like, I'm going to go carve this thing into stone.
I'm going to over-exaggerate my skill set.
People come to me and they're like, I want to be a millionaire in 12 months.
(22:21):
And I'm like, cool, you can do that.
Just a quick question though, based on your past experience,
how much did you earn in the last 12 months? I earned 60 grand.
Okay. Well, maybe they just had a bad year. What happened the year before that?
Oh, it was 60. Okay. And the year before that?
60. So we've got three years of consistent 60K.
(22:42):
Now, I'm not saying that you can't go from 60 to a million because you can.
But what I'm saying is the probabilities based on the experience that you've
got, the knowledge that you have, the skill sets that you've got,
the chances of you achieving that is probably in a decimal place with many,
many zeros in front of it.
Now, is there a chance. Yeah, you might have a one in a billion chance,
(23:03):
but if you're going to bet your life on that or you're going to bet your life
savings on that, it's probably a pretty shitty goal.
What I would rather do is create a better probability. If someone walks into
the gym and they say, I want to lose 20 kilograms, perfect.
We can do that. But now the question is what's the timeframe?
If the person needs to lose 20 kilograms and they need to lose it in two weeks
(23:25):
because it's their wedding, the only way that that's going to happen is they're
going to have to either cut the fat off and have surgery, which means their
wedding is going to be really uncomfortable because they're going to be in full-blown
recovery from a major surgery,
or they're going to have to chop limbs off, or it's completely impossible.
So that's a shit goal.
What I'm saying here is that people need to treat goals like a probability.
(23:47):
Then if you get feedback that your goal-setting ability is not good,
then you need to use that data and change the way you set goals.
If I want to go from, let's say, a $1 million business to a $10 million business,
but we've been sitting at $1 million for the last two to three years,
going from one to 10 to 12-month period is probably highly improbable.
(24:08):
It's not saying it's not impossible, but it's highly improbable unless a lot of inputs change.
So now what we probably need to do is go back and reassess. Even growing 100%
in 12 months is pretty tough.
So let's go back and let's figure out how we're going to do this and create
a pushing ourselves to the point of burnout, exhaustion, anxiety, stress, frustration.
(24:28):
What that tells me about that individual mentally and emotionally,
and I'll get to the third pillar in a minute, by the way, what that tells me
about that individual is that they love setting them up for failure because
failure and consistently beating themselves up and feeling like shit is actually
their motivator and their driver.
And so people who beat the crap out of themselves and feel really bad all the
time, they will go through a cycle where they self-depreciate,
(24:49):
beat themselves up, and then they'll go really, really hard again in order to
prove their value to themselves again, and in order to prove their worth.
And then they'll go really, really hard. They'll overexert themselves.
They'll burn out. And then they'll beat the shit out of themselves again so
that they can get back into that self-depreciating state, and they just stay in that loop.
It's not a way to a great life. You're getting closer to death.
Not a great way to live. Not not going to enjoy life.
(25:10):
Might achieve some things. It's not going to be fun. It's a shitty way of living.
So anyway, I know I went off track, but that other pillar, we need vision,
mission, and goals, and they got to be set clear.
That's pillar number two, and they have to be done right. Most people do them wrong.
Almost every business owner that I work on with their mission,
their vision, their values as a company guide and as their culture guide is wrong.
(25:32):
And that's why they're stressed. That's why they're frustrated, not getting results.
Knowing a whole bunch of psychological principles so that you can fine tune yourself.
So there's a whole bunch of different things. There are principles that I use
day in, day out with clients that I use on myself.
One of them is energy over effort.
Most people will work harder and think that hard work is going to be the thing
that gets them to the place that they want to get to.
(25:54):
That's not true. Warren Buffett, one of the richest people on the planet,
he works less than what I do.
At the end of the year, when he does his tax return, his tax return is $200
a million dollars and I'm running a seven-figure plus company,
does he work harder than me? No, I'm grinding my ass out.
He just has a better ability to manage himself differently. Now,
(26:16):
he's in his late 90s. So I think he's like 96 or 94 or something.
So he has... I'm 40 now. I just turned 40.
He's got a lot of extra time. He's got an extra 50 years on top of what I have.
I know my knowledge is compounded.
When I was in my 20s, I was like, Like, why aren't I there yet?
And then I got into my 30s and I was like, holy shit, the shit that I used to
(26:37):
think about when I was 20, that Michael was a completely different person.
I can't even think like that guy anymore because everything compounds.
Someone said something really cool. They gave a wicked analogy the other day.
And they said, if you put one piece of paper, like if you lift one piece of
paper up, it's very light.
But if you put a couple of pieces of paper, it gets a little bit heavier and
(26:57):
it gets a little bit more solid.
But if you get a real big book that's really thick and it's It's got thousands
of pages. That's extremely heavy.
Now, that is built one layer of time.
Now, in our life, people want the book of knowledge, but they're not building
their knowledge one layer of time.
And knowledge is built one layer of time, one day at a time,
one year at a time, and so on. And we build that.
(27:20):
So every year, we get stronger and more effective, providing we're learning
and implementing and executing and growing through problems and expanding through challenges.
When we do that, we keep learning and learning and learning.
We just layer, layer, layer, layer, layer. player.
And now these days, I talk to some business owners and I'm like,
man, you just don't get it. You don't get it because I have so much knowledge.
(27:41):
The knowledge gap between my knowledge and their gap is here and I have to drop
back down and remember what it was like 10 years ago or 15 years ago when every
day was just an absolute struggle. It felt like I was drowning.
So you need to have those tools or those frameworks or principles in the way
you operate because if you don't have that third pillar, it's extremely hard to stay consistent.
(28:03):
So energy over effort. Got to manage your energy because if not,
then the only thing you can manage is your effort and you'll eventually burn out.
So you want to be managing your energy. That's just one.
But there's a whole bunch of other frameworks and stuff that I run off of as
well. There's a heap of them actually. I got here, I'm running a leadership
course next week. So there's a heap of them there.
Fantastic. Sorry for the short answer. No, not at all.
(28:26):
That was a great answer. And I think the guests will certainly be able to relate
to what you've shared through these three steps that can really be a powerful tool for change.
And you did touch on consistency. So, you know, you could be applying all these
things, but if you're doing it here and there and it's not consistent,
(28:47):
you're not going to achieve long-term results.
So what do you see as the key to upholding the consistency, the habits,
and the strategies so that you're actually getting somewhere with it? Yeah.
So again, I have another framework that I use all the time with clients,
whether it's personally or professionally or in their business.
(29:08):
Clarity times by standards plus environment equals your success or equals your
fulfillment or equals the results you want.
So if we just go back to the start of the framework, it's clarity.
Clarity comes before standards. If you don't have clarity, standards drop.
So if someone wants to improve their standards, which might be that they're
(29:29):
more consistent, it might be that they are more courageous.
If you don't have clarity around why that's important, it's hard to uphold that.
Before this interview, I've been working since like seven o'clock this morning back to back.
It's now like seven o'clock at night here. So it's been a 12-hour day already
and I got heaps more work to do. Now, some days I work from like 4 a.m.
Until eight or nine o'clock.
(29:49):
And then other days, like, are a bit more chilled and a bit more cruisy.
But I love this stuff, right? Like, why? Why is that important for me?
I have to really think back to like, why do I do this stuff?
Because if not, you get caught in your emotions.
Now, all emotions are volatile. So what goes up comes back down.
What's positive ends up negative and what's negative then becomes positive again,
and we keep going around in circles.
(30:11):
So when you have clarity, I just focus back on, why am I doing this? Now, why am I doing it?
Because I want to grow a business that helps people perform better,
right? It's the mission of the company.
Well, the vision of the company is to build businesses that help people perform better.
The mission's a lot bigger than
that. and there's a lot of parts of that mission, but that's why I do it.
The other thing is that I wouldn't do this stuff if I didn't feel like I had
(30:34):
some inner calling that allowed me to do what I was highly effective at.
Now, I've obviously learned a
lot and developed skills like the ability to talk on a podcast like this.
I remember the day I recorded my first video for YouTube.
I recorded it and I actually put it off for about four or five days.
I kept thinking, I'll do it tomorrow,
I'll do it tomorrow, and then I'd go watch TV, I'd go have a coffee,
(30:55):
then I'd go for a walk then I'd come
back and I'd watch some more tv and I put it off for like
a couple of days then I came back I recorded the video I
watched it I was like this is crap and I deleted it that happened
for like a week right like it was a
couple of days where I just kept recording stuff and then deleting it because
I hated it and then eventually I thought you know what
one of the one of the principles I have is you
(31:17):
always have to start shit first and
I don't mean start shit as in start the object i mean
you are going to be shit when you start so when
you know that you're going to be shit then you don't put these high standards
on yourself and pressure like most people do where they're like i've got to
be good if you look at me on a podcast i was talking about this you know in
(31:38):
my podcast i do a podcast five days a week monday to friday most weeks not not
all the time but then i do three guest podcasts or two guest podcasts minimum every week.
And I have been doing this for
a long time. So there's probably like 250 podcasts in with other people.
Do I think that I'm amazing at them? No.
I just try to work on one thing every podcast and get a little bit better at
(31:59):
it, just like people should do.
But if you look at that and you go, wow, I should be like his level,
then that self-comparative, you're going to crush yourself in it.
You're better off just starting and being shit and realizing that your first
podcast, no one cares and no one listens.
And your mom and dad or whoever in your family are probably going to tell you
that it was great, even if it sucked.
(32:20):
But by the time you actually get good, like this year, I'm doing a tour in the
US and I'm working with some big names over there and things like that.
By the time you get that opportunity, you have developed those skill sets that
allow you to be there because you've earned the right.
I've seen people who've taken shortcuts and gotten on those big stages.
And the problem is their communication skills are crap.
They don't know what they're talking about. They don't have frameworks.
(32:42):
So they essentially copy other people's material, and then they get caught out.
And then they get ridiculed and judged and criticized. And then eventually,
they just fall off the face of the planet and you don't see them again.
So even though it sucks that it's taken me years of doing this stuff to get where I am,
the thing is that that consistency and the
reasoning behind the consistency so having a real clear mission and
(33:04):
vision and and that purpose that why behind why you
do what you do it helps you to create that that consistency and then that consistency
over time is that layer of paper one layer of one layer of time until you become
so good at something that by the time you are noticed for being good at it you
do really really well i hope that answers the question It certainly does.
That's such a good answer.
(33:25):
And so you also talk about emotions because everyone, you know,
goes through challenges.
Everyone goes through experiences that aren't the best, that probably they might
feel a bit depressed or unhappy about.
And one key to success and even performance, you know, performing better is
(33:47):
being able to manage your emotions effectively.
Effectively so do you have a framework or a
set of principles that you guide people or
your customers through to be able to better manage
themselves emotionally yeah there's not
so much one framework there's a bunch of different frameworks that i've learned
over the years so like breath work is a big thing at the moment right like it
(34:10):
is the coaching industry like i've been in the industry for so long now that
you see there's these fads and like i remember i first I first heard about Wim
Hof and Ice Bass like 10 years ago, I think.
Something happened and it was like one of his first YouTube videos.
And my friend said to me, you heard of this guy called the Iceman?
I was like, never heard of him. He showed me. I remember watching it at dinner
(34:31):
and I got home and I was watching it.
And he hadn't even launched his online subscription platform yet.
That came like a year or so later.
And I was watching this guy and I was like, man, that's cool.
So I started having cold showers. That was like 10 years ago and I started doing his breath work.
And then I watched it like it slowly started and the movement grew and the movement
grew and the movement grew.
And now it's like every coach on the planet is like, got to have an ice bath,
(34:54):
got to have an ice bath. And even people who aren't coaches are like, man, ice baths.
I'm seeing it all over Instagram.
Yeah, but it's a fad, right? I mean, that's been there for a long,
long time. It's just that people get hold of it. The same as breathwork.
Breathwork's been around for thousands of years, but it's this new thing.
And then everyone comes out with their new bullshit methodology is like,
(35:15):
yeah, but you have to breathe through one nostril and then you got to push your
ear back and then do it this way because it's like, they all try to find their
unique spin on some bullshit.
That happens all the time in the coaching industry. And then eventually it dies
out and then there's the next thing and then it dies out and then there's the next thing.
What was your question again? I just had a complete mental blank and I think
(35:35):
I went way off track. It's all good. So just going back to emotions.
Emotions. So with emotions, we have to understand what emotions are.
Now, if you look at the research around what an emotion is, there is so much
conflicting evidence. Now, here's the crazy thing.
Science doesn't even know. If you look at the literature, science actually doesn't
(35:56):
even know what an emotion is.
They know that we have them, but it can't clearly define what an emotion is
because there's too much debate around what it is.
So that's pretty crazy considering that people can be diagnosed with emotional
disorders, such as depression, anxiety, things like that as well, or mood disorders.
Emotions are up for debate. But when I did a lot of research,
(36:19):
what I found was that there seemed to be a causal chain.
And I talk a lot about this in... I run an event called called Thrive Time.
And that's the event where we help you build your success map.
But when we go into the emotional stuff and the mental stuff,
there was a causal chain that took me about six years of study to try to figure out what it was.
Now, essentially what happens is if we go to birth.
(36:39):
You have an egg and you have sperm. When they come together,
you're essentially taking the genes of the father and the genes of the mother
and combining the both of them in order to make the genes of yourself, right?
Now, in that process, there's something called epigenetic tagging.
That epigenetic tagging has a lot to do with our parents' mental and emotional
states and the challenges that they're having in their life at the time of conception.
(37:02):
So our parents essentially gift us with a life journey of problems.
Now, remember how I said that evolution is essentially solving one problem and
creating another problem.
So we never get rid of our problems, although the delusion that humans have
is that we're going to get rid of problems.
So business owners who are the most stressed think that they're going to get rid of problems.
And they think that if they can just solve all these problems,
then life gets easier, and it doesn't.
(37:23):
The problems just get bigger. My financial problems now are way bigger than
my financial problems when I first started.
Because now my tax bill has a lot of zeros on the end of it,
whereas when I first started, my tax bill was nothing. Nothing.
And no one sues a broke person. And now with more staff, there needs to be more management.
There needs to be more systems, more processes, more infrastructure. That causes problems.
(37:48):
And I was talking to a business owner about this tonight, and I'll come back
to the emotional imbalance stuff.
I said, you've got to be clear about the problem that you're solving in your business.
Because if you're a business owner and you're trying to solve cashflow,
it means you need to get sales.
When you get sales to solve the cashflow problem, it creates a delivery problem.
So the example of this is like if I'm selling hats, if I sell 10,000 hats,
(38:10):
now I need to deliver 10,000 hats.
So I need to now go to China and get these 10,000 hats, get them put on a boat over here.
Now, if I've already paid for the hats, there's a massive problem with cashflow
because I'm waiting for 10,000 caps to land before I sell them.
So I've got a huge cashflow problem. So now I've sold these 10,000 caps.
I've got to wait for them to get here. Customers start complaining.
Now I've got customer service problems because they're waiting.
(38:31):
The boat's been held up for an extra two months.
They're at customs. Then from there, I get them and I go, oh, shit.
One out of every 10 caps, so 10% of them, faulty.
Shit. Now I've got to send a bunch back to China. I've got to get them to send
these other ones back across. So now these other customers have...
But here's the thing, we've sold them. So now we've actually solved the cashflow
(38:53):
problem, but now we've got customer problems.
All that happens is in business and in life, we just keep revolving around in problems.
Now, if we do a good job, there's something called a noosphere that Vanasky
spoke about, the philosopher.
And what he said is that we go through these spheres of growth.
Where you're at right now in your life, this is anyone listening to this,
when you're going through any challenge in life, you're stuck at a level.
(39:17):
Those levels are like school. In grade one, you're like, oh,
cool. It's fun. You're in grade one now. You're a bit bigger than reception.
You're like, yeah, cool. This is good. It starts off easy.
Everything's great. You start learning some stuff. You mess around a little bit.
You might do some homework. You might not, if you're like me,
get in trouble a little bit.
And then one day the teacher comes in after a whole year's worth of work,
(39:40):
or it might even be a whole term, and they hit the big T word.
And they go, we've got a test. And you're like, oh shit, not a test.
And then you get all stressed out. You start worrying. You're like,
crap, I can't remember half this stuff. I better study. You've got a cram.
It forces you to grow. It's uncomfortable. It sucks. You're afraid.
What if I fail? All of these things come up. It's like the most uncomfortable time.
(40:05):
Then you go through the test and after the test, you're like.
Well, I've either failed or I haven't. Let's see. Now you get your results back. Cool. I passed.
And then you go back to that same journey again, where you learn,
you grab a whole bunch of skills and then the test happens and then you get
fear, worry, stress, concern.
(40:26):
There's all these challenges and you've got to then grab all the knowledge that
you've got from the past learning experiences, piece them together in order to pass the test.
That's the exact metaphor for life.
And so when all these business owners come to me and all these people come to
me, they're like, yeah, but I'm so stressed out because of all these things.
I'm like, yeah, but you're just going through a test.
Here's the thing. If you fail the test, what happens? You repeat the grade.
(40:49):
Now, if you've been stuck in life for 10 years or you've been stuck financially,
it already tells me everything that I need to know about you as a person.
It tells me that every time it comes up against a test, you run away from it,
you're scared, or you're not learning fast enough in order to break through.
That's why you're stuck. So there's only a couple of options.
You stay where you are right now, and you can just keep repeating grade two, or you go to grade three.
(41:14):
But in order to go to grade three, you've got to have all the stress,
all the pressure, all the learnings. You've got to integrate all your thinking.
You have all the doubt, all the fears, everything like that.
And then you have this huge breakthrough. through.
And then after the breakthrough, you have something called an identity crisis.
I was the first person on the planet. I did a whole bunch of research on this.
I'm the first person on the planet to realize that when you have a breakthrough,
(41:34):
you have an identity crisis.
And so you start questioning yourself about everything again.
You're like, I don't even know what I want to do anymore.
I don't even know if I'm going in the right direction. Is this for me?
I don't know whether I want to be married.
I don't know whether maybe my relationship's not working. I don't know.
Should I quit my job? Should I not quit my job?
Am I making enough money? Do I really want to be here? I don't know whether
like, what about my kids?
All of those what ifs and all of the questions start resurfacing again.
(41:58):
And what it does is you've got to reconfirm you as an individual and where you're going.
Should you reconfirm it again, hence the need for a success map like I teach,
once you break through, all of a sudden you're like, cool, now I got clarity
again. Bang, and now I'm off. You're learning.
You're having this experience. Life becomes fun again. You enjoy everything.
And then after a period of time, depends on how fast you're growing,
(42:21):
you sit there again. You're like, oh shit, everything's getting tough.
There's all these challenges. Oh man, this is tough.
Now we're getting the next challenge again. Are we going on from grade three to grade four.
Do you know the beauty is at grade one, you get grade one problems,
you get grade one challenges, you get grade one lessons, but you also get grade one rewards.
People want grade 12 rewards, but they don't want grade 12 challenges.
(42:46):
So when someone comes to me, like I had a business owner who's a big property
developer, and I went to his office because he hired me and he called me down.
He's like, right, I need your help. I've worked with with him for years.
And he said, mate, I'm getting sued. This guy's suing me for like $3 million. And I was like, okay.
And as we're walking, the whole time he's complaining, this is bullshit.
I told staff this. And I said, hey, stop.
(43:08):
Now, this guy was homeless. When he was 16, he was living on the street.
And he speaks about part of his journey of having to use a toilet block to wash himself.
He would go into a public toilet block and wash under his arms and his groin
and stuff like that because he was sleeping on the street because his parents
were were abusive and he left home.
And I said, can you remember if you go back to that time in your own head and
(43:30):
you think about living on the street, if I told you back then that someone was
going to sue you for $3 million, what would you think?
And I watched him stop and it clicked. And he said, well, first of all,
I would have thought that you were full of shit.
And I said, I know. And I said, the other thing is, does anyone sue a broke person?
So is someone suing you because you don't have $3 million or are they suing
(43:52):
you because they know you've got heaps of money?
And he stopped and he smiled and he's like, of course they're suing me because
I have heaps of money. And he goes, and I said to him, that's my problem.
Because the only reason why you're in this position is because of the level
of the game that you're playing.
So I appreciate the level. I appreciate the game.
Music.
Thank you for listening to the Will to Win. I hope today's episode was overflowing
(44:15):
with value and helped inspire you.
Music.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
Ridiculous History
History is beautiful, brutal and, often, ridiculous. Join Ben Bowlin and Noel Brown as they dive into some of the weirdest stories from across the span of human civilization in Ridiculous History, a podcast by iHeartRadio.