Ready Set ACTION
In our most recent podcast JB and the Doctor discuss action vs inaction. In a salute to pseudo-science JB described inaction as the smart move sometimes and referenced the scene from Jurassic park where standing still insured you wouldn’t get eaten. Generally, the Doctor prefers to use a more scientific approach than a blockbuster movie from the 90s. Our inclination as high-performance coaches is to recommend taking action. Action should never be taken without regard to direction. To say that another way – we believe in thoughtful, intentional, deliberate action. You won’t always choose the best action, but we’d rather have you going 100 mph in any direction vs 0 mph in no direction. Movement requires inertia and inertia requires energy. It takes much less energy to shift direction than it does to get moving. Work through a decision, make your decision and then don’t get too locked into where you’re going. Keep your awareness up so you can confirm you’re moving in the right direction. Remember, the best and greatest businesses are all adaptable. To adapt you have to already be doing something. Doing nothing might save you in Jurassic Park but it likely won’t save you in the long term in business! You can listen to the rest of our podcast here! To gain access to our best free content and a community of professionals dedicated to pursuing our vision, a world in which every single person in business, dreaming of opening a business or is even interested in business can achieve success join our private facebook group here!
Getting Real with the Real Estate Chick
Ever go out of your way to make sure you won’t see someone, or won’t have to speak to them? Or maybe you’ve been in a situation where you bit your tongue and didn’t’ speak your mind. Perhaps you’ve chosen not to share your opinion or feelings so as not to rock the boat or cause waves. Why are we so quick to avoid certain things that make us uncomfortable? We asked our recent podcast guest, Nicole Vernon, your Real Estate Chick here in South Florida about her journey and why it took so long to jump into the world of running her own real estate business. Here’ what she had to share. JB: Before you chose this route, what about being an entrepreneur turned you off so much in the past, was it panic? Anxiety? Something else? Nicole: It’s fear. It’s fear of the unknown. It’s fear of where is the money going to come from? It’s fear of, can I motivate myself? Am I a self-starter? It’s limiting belief, it’s everything. It’s the brain, the brain really is a complex thing, but if you can control your thoughts and get out of your head and get out of your own way, you have really mastered {…} the basics. There’s two takeaways here that really stand out to us. We use avoidance to protect ourselves from something we fear. Some things we should fear, this is not always an unhealthy response or behavior. It can be an effective and powerful tool to protect us. Don’t want to get in a car accident and you’re afraid of driving at high speeds, perhaps it’s best for you to avoid the highway (and best for everyone else as well). Avoidance can be beneficial. It’s when avoidance inhibits us from achieving our dreams and when we create fear from the unknown that can really push us into our security blankets and away from success that we run into trouble. The second take away is we can acknowledge our fear. We can respect that we have fear and it’s there and it’s a natural emotion. What we cannot do is allow ourselves to succumb to our fear without really pausing and determining: is my fear justified? Is it based on reality? What really are the true consequences. The fact is, rarely does the reality of a situation equal the monstrosity we make of it in our minds. In other words, are fears are often much greater than what we experience in real life. Ask anyone who has spent some time on a stage presenting and they’ll share the same sentiment. We all have the ability to control our minds and control our fears. We do this by determining carefully what is an acceptable risk and outcome and should we be avoiding this or should we be stepping outside of our comfort zone. For more from our discussion with Nicole you can listen to the rest of our podcast here! For more resources or to join our private Facebook group you can request access here!
What’s your favorite position? Erm, favorite positioning.
In a recent podcast Doc and I explored common mistakes and best practices when it comes to positioning. Here are 3 quick hits to remember anytime you have a chance to position your services. It’s not about you. Never start off positioning about yourself. People do this all the time. It seems simple, and it is. Oftentimes the simplest things are the hardest to do consistently. Frame it from your client’s perspective. It’s not about +you, it’s about them! Stop talking about yourself and start talking about what problems your clients have that need to be solved. Hyper focus on your client’s needs. Know your client better than anyone else. Know exactly who your ideal 1,2 or 3 clients or customer avatars are and what problems they have. You’re solving their problems with a unique solution. Positioning is built around their problem. You are unique, the first way to show this is to show you understand what is keeping your clients up at night! Listen to your clients. Be prepared to communicate that you understand your clients pain in terms they understand. In other words, double – click on your clients needs, get confirmation and affirmation from the client. Use common language they understand and address the meat of their need, you should not be in the weeds. This is how we show clients that we are listening. Client’s will listen when they know you care and you are listening and understand THEM. These are simple and incredibly powerful tips to take your positioning to a level that few entrepreneurs and service professionals ever really achieve. PS: Next time you’re listening to someone speak about what they do. Catch how many times they talk about themselves versus how often they refer to their client’s needs. You’ll be shocked at how many people fail to really position themselves well. Failure to plan for positioning is the fastest way to lose a sale before you even have a shot at getting a sale! To listen to this episode of our podcast click here. To gain access to our best free content and a community of professionals dedicated to pursuing our vision, a world in which every single person in business, dreaming of opening a business or is even interested in business can achieve success join our private facebook group here!
We Had a Senior Moment, Jodi Glacer Took Care of Us
Positioning yourself well in business is essential to your success. When you think of the word positioning what you should be thinking of is; how will a total stranger perceive me? What do I want to look like? It’s almost as if you had the power to change how you look to a stranger, forever. Want to be the most beautiful person in the room, you can do that. The most original, get at it! The fiercest, whoa cowboy/girl take it easy! Positioning comes in many shades and flavors and it can be accomplished successfully in a number of ways. In our recent conversation with Senior Care franchisee Jodi Glacer we discussed how education and preparation can position you as an authority and resource for your clients and on a whole other level, the people who are most likely to be in contact with your ideal clients. This allows you to scale your sales and your business in a truly powerful way! JB: Jodi, what you’re doing {…} position yourself as a really powerful resource for your clients and other business people out there, and I think that’s incredibly savvy and not a lot of people are able to do that. It sounds as if some of the education, some of the pre work you’ve done has really put you in a good position to do so. Jodi: In corporate America and the job that I was at the longest, we did a lot of cross-selling {…} so I had that background already were I understood that a large part off being a professional in the sales industry is to be able to know other resources that my clients would need and make those introductions. So I’ve taken that piece of corporate America to the elder care space and I built relationships with the people who are also service providers in the elder care space for a couple of reasons. One is that I want to be able to give my clients options when they need that, but also because a large part of my business comes from those other service providers {…} that’s where I get most of my leads for my clients! For more from our discussion with Jodi you can listen to the rest of our podcast here! We Had a Senior Moment, Jodi Glacer Took Care of Us ~ Episode 28 For more resources or to join our private Facebook group you can request access here!
Taking Recovery and Entrepreneurship to the Next Level
Nature, by definition, lives in a state of equilibrium, or what we can more easily refer to as balance. An ecology, without outside stimulus, will always find balance. Too many deer, for example, and wolves will grow in population, hunt more deer and the deer population will revert back to a balanced level. Remove the wolves from the ecosystem and all of a sudden nature will run unchecked for a period of time until something else evolves to reduce the deer population. For example, the food source for the deer might become scarce and starvation will reduce the deer population or force them to relocate. Given time the ecology will find balance again. In all things business and entrepreneurship, balance is essential. Whether you have a family, a business, children, non-profits, hobbies to balance or perhaps you are balancing your own physical, mental and spiritual health along with the hours you’re putting into your business, there is always a need for balance. At JB and The Doctor we speak to balance often because every service based professional and entrepreneur needs balance in order to pivot. Without the ability to pivot, you are now looking at a very, very vulnerable business or position to be in, just like a deer facing down a pack of wolves would be. On our most recent podcast we spoke with Blake Cohen co-founder and partner of Next Level Recovery Associates and we asked him specifically about how having balance benefitted him when opening a business right at the start of Covid in March 2020. JB: A lot of entrepreneurship, it’s about finding balance between action and strategy {…} finding that balance is not easy…can you talk about balance a little bit? Blake: “There was something I learned early on called emergent strategies, and understanding that there should never be a strategy or a procedure that you have in place that is completely 100% rigid, and you need to have the ability to adapt as you go, on the fly and really trust your instincts, your professional instincts as you’re going to say, Okay, this isn’t working, let’s change right now, let’s try this, let’s try that, and be willing to go through that trial and error process in any given situation to find something that’s going to work.” We couldn’t agree more, unlike other thought leaders, we don’t believe 10,000 hours of practice leads to success, we believe 10,000 experiments leads to success. In order to have 10,000 experiments you need to be able to pivot and to pivot you need balance. If you’re a service based professional and entrepreneur and you have balance, congratulations, you’re a wolf! Lacking balance, you might just be a deer caught in the headlights. To hear more of our interview with Blake Cohen you can listen in here. For help with balance, entrepreneurship mastery, and becoming the wolf, you can take a closer look at our 2 on 1 and group coaching here!
Setbacks? Conquered… Ask Coach Sen
Setbacks. We all deal with them. For some of us, it can feel like we’re dealing with one after another after another. Frustration, fear, doubt, can and will take hold to many of us when we deal with setbacks. Yet, failures and setbacks while may be analogous are not necessarily the same thing even when they feel that way. Perhaps, most importantly there are processes and routines to help deal with setbacks. Our recommendation is to always reflect on a setback. Was it in your control? If so, how can you be more conscientious about preventing a similar setback in the future? What can you learn from the setback and apply to strengthen yourself and your business moving forward? If not in your control, have you recognized this and actually accepted it? In doing so, have you put thought into how quickly you responded to the setback and in what way? Did you beat yourself up, did you work through the emotions of it, have you identified the impact of the setback, and adjusted your plans accordingly? Reflection becomes incredibly important as does an analysis to our responses to setbacks, this means how we respond emotionally, spiritually, and the specific actions we took. For more help with working through setbacks, we offer group and 1 on 1 coaching to help service-based professionals and entrepreneurs quickly work through and move on from setbacks to supercharge their performance and get to the next level of success they’re looking for. You can learn more about our coaching here. Mastery With Science Coaching In our most recent podcast, we asked our guest, Coach Sen about some setbacks she’s dealt with. Here’s a portion of the podcast. JB: I gotta imagine you’ve dealt with a number of setbacks over the years. Is there anything that stood out to you and anything that you really felt like, ‘Wow, this was not only a setback but here’s how I overcame it and learned a valuable lesson for me?’ Coach Sen: “I would think that my major setback that propelled me forward was in 2015, and often entrepreneurs talk about the entrepreneur journey and leave out the personal journey behind it, for whatever reason, we don’t like to be public about our failures or arch challenges, and we want to care of college, sometimes we’re afraid of criticism or whatever it is on social media, but 2015 was a really difficult year for me because at that time I was married and I went through a separation, which was a surprise for me, I didn’t expect that at all. It kinda came out of nowhere that my spouse wanted to be separated and get divorced, so at that point in time, that was the year that I had just incorporated myself and decided to become an online coach, and it was at the same time that I was moving from New York City to Florida with my daughter with two suitcases with no plan, no job, I lost everything in that year, that was like 2022 for me, and it was starting from ground zero now, because I have to start over my whole life, and I had just had this idea that I was gonna have this coaching business and help all of these people and do great work in the world, and it was pretty devastating for me having to switch gears and just do so many changes at the same time {…} Trial number two, and I incorporated myself in Florida, so that was around 2017. It took me a little bit of time to get used to live in in Florida, get my daughter acclimated to the environment in school, and when I started again in 2017, I started the way that I should have been 2015. I started hiring coaches, taking programs, and it was like feeling my way through the dark, but this time I had a flashlight.” Fast forward and Coach Sen runs a successful coaching business has established the Conquer Network and has overcome some unimaginably difficult circumstances to achieve success. Her success is in large part due to her setbacks and her ability to learn from them and find the resources to make her so successful. As we’ve said before, success does not come overnight and setbacks will happen. How you respond to them will determine your success in large part. You can listen to more of our conversation with Coach Sen here! Setbacks? Conquered… Ask Coach Sen ~ Episode 26
Being Schooled by Dr. P, Will Get You Psyched Up
In the last 20 years we’ve seen an enormous uptick in the concept of client relationship management (CRM). All too often when we hear this term our thoughts go straight to software. You might even think ‘salesforce,’ as a synonym for CRM. What is CRM then, is it truly just software that helps us track contact with clients? Or, is it more? The software a CRM is run through, is simply a system. A highly organized and interconnected system, but a system nonetheless. CRM then isn’t the actual software – it’s what the software does and all the processes and routines the software follows to allow for maximizing appropriate levels of contact with clients, business partners, and outside organizations. Today we took a unique look at the CRM from a different perspective. The perspective of someone who doesn’t come from a sales background or isn’t working through the eyes of silicon valley. Our most recent guest of our podcast, Dr. P (Doctor Priscilla Kucer) of Priscilla Kucer Consulting is an entrepreneur, school psychologist, and executive coach with a focus on leadership development, strategic planning, and executive coaching. Dr. P’s background includes not just school psychology but also industrial organization. When asked about client relationship management, Dr. P. had a response far different from what we tend to think of when we talk about CRM. At its heart, Dr. P’s response and insight dive straight into the heart of a CRM. How we create a system that provides us the tools to communicate to our clients via the platinum rule. How do we establish expectations and create the framework for communication for both parties. JB: Dr. P, do you have any systems that you put in place for yourself or for your clients when it comes to relationship management? (…) Dr. P: “What comes to mind to me is Boundaries., boundaries are so important. It’s not just for the business relationship it’s also for your personal relationship. We have to have boundaries. If you want to stay focused on what we need to do, we have to have boundaries. You really have to understand where your boundaries are, and not everybody gets boundaries…” This response absolutely floored us, here’s why. It’s all well and good to have a system for tracking when to call or email someone, or to send out a mailer. Keeping notes is important and tracking buying decisions matters. All of these things are ancillary to 1 primary law of business and communication. Both you and your clients/prospects need to have very defined and understood boundaries in what is acceptable and what is not. Without those boundaries, you will never be successful in your relationship with someone whether it’s business, personal, or both. So far all of you out there thinking of ‘x, y, z CRM’ let’s not forget where the rubber meets the road. Communication, respect, and boundaries between two human beings! For more insight from Dr. P, you can check out the rest of our podcaster here! Being Schooled by Dr. P, Will Get You Psyched Up ~ Episode 25 If you need help managing your clients and you’re a service-based professional, JB and The Doctor are here to help you. We’re hyper-specialized in clarifying your presentations and positioning, improving your productivity, and supercharging your sales. You can check out some of our other resources like our Time Management Mastery course here! Join us back in the lab, anytime!
Couples Money Challenge
Cupid’s Arrow. It’s an appropriate symbol of the Valentine’s Day holiday and of relationships in general. Valentine’s Day is a holiday that comes with a host of challenges and it’s not uncommon for it to be exciting, romantic, and full of love. It’s also common to come across as painful, insufferable and miserable for a number of people. When it comes to relationships and couples it’s almost as big of a day as your anniversary is. Valentine’s Day is also an expensive holiday, the price of roses spikes, cheap chocolates are pushed to the side and replaced by expensive and your average lunch or dinner goes from a normal night out to a price fixed menu or brunch or special that all of sudden is on a whole new level of expense compared to a regular date out. This holiday isn’t just about your relationship with your partner it’s also about your relationship with money. One partner might expect a lavish, expensive evening out with extravagant gifts. Maybe the other partner just wants a night in, together. This kind of friction can lead to conflict, anxiety, anger, depression and a host of other relationship challenges. In a recent conversation JB asked The Doctor his thoughts on couples relationships with each other and money and how to overcome some of the challenges we run across since we are less than a week away from Cupid and his arrows! JB: Doc, is there a specific challenge or are there any common strings or threads that you run across with couples when you’re discussing the relationship with each other and money? The Doctor: “The biggest thing is communication, or the lack there of usually leads into the biggest challenges (for example). Now, I don’t want to talk about this, right? Or even past that, I’m afraid to talk about this because I don’t know what the reaction is going to be. So they put up the walls. Before the communication even starts. And they could possibly even be on the same page on a lot of the stuff, but just the fear of even having that conversation drives a lot of it, and I think it makes a difference. Again, different people, different situations, is it a new relationship, are you guys just starting to date, did you just move in together? That plays one role. Are we about to get married? Is there a pre-nup? Do we have to discuss it in that way? There’s another part of the role, and we’ve been together for decades and it’s just become old hat and we’ve changed our financial situation, or we changed our interest, our needs, do we need to re-address that conversation and what does that look like? Because we don’t like change. So there’s so many different ways this plays out, depending on what situation you’re in, but across the board, it always comes back to communication.” Communication is essential for any relationship whether it’s in our personal lives or with the work we do and the businesses we run. We have a private Facebook group available for those of you looking for more insight into how to manage our lives and our businesses: The Entrepreneur Mastery Lab. In the lab we focus on topics like these and others as we help people develop and maintain a Be RICH mindset.Rise to MasteryInspire GreatnessCelebrate KnowledgeHelp Others For an invitation to the group you can go here! You may also (this is strongly encouraged) want to take a look at our Time Mastery With Science course where we walk through EXACTLY how to manage your day and your time. For those of you looking for even more assistance, we offer 2 on 1 coaching for service based professionals and entrepreneurs where we are hyper focused on improving positioning and presentation, powering up your productivity and supercharging your sales.
Tom Brady, The Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Be RICH mindset.
In our most recent quick hit episode of our podcast, JB and The Doctor, Mastery With Science we explored how incredible it is to see Tom Brady’s journey from a back-up quarterback at the University of Michigan to an individual with more Super Bowl rings than any single FRANCHISE. One of the items we focused on was how Tom Brady epitomizes the Be RICH mindset. Yes, we all know he IS rich, but what does it mean to Be RICH? R – Rise to mastery. Nobody can argue Tom Brady’s ascension as an absolute master of his craft. Tom was plugged into a brand new system during a pandemic, with limited opportunity to develop a rapport with his teammates, and still managed to lead his team to a win at the super bowl. His mastery cannot be disputed and has taken years to develop. Perhaps most importantly, Tom continues to hone his skillset and push the boundaries of what it means to be masterful at the quarterback position. I – Inspire greatness. What isn’t inspiring about a leader who continues to display excellence even at an age far beyond the norm in his industry. Tom Brady is the sole remaining player in his draft class and is still the pinnacle of efficiency and effectiveness in his role as a quarterback. Add to that the fire and passion he still carries for the game and his business and it’s incredibly inspiring to watch him play. C – Celebrate knowledge. How do you take someone that plays under a different playbook and integrate them into your own system successfully? Now that we’ve chewed on that, how do you do it and overcome all of the challenges that come up and end up as the most successful team in the country. The only way to do it is to truly embrace KNOWING the business. Mastery is all about knowledge, knowledge not only of your own playbook and system but on others. Know your competitors and know the strategies that work. Tom Brady is a phenomenal example of someone who truly celebrates the knowledge he has. He is like having an offensive coordinator in the huddle with the rest of your team. H – Helping Others. Football is a team sport. In that sense, it shouldn’t matter if Tom Brady is the quarterback or not, the team won, not Tom. Yet, if we take a look at Tampa Bay’s postseason record let alone their Superbowl record it becomes pretty apparent that Tom Brady was able to help the organization in a way that is unique. Awesome. More importantly, at this moment is Bruce Arians’ role in helping others. Bruce will go down in history as the first head football coach with all 4 of his coordinators being minorities, as well as having the first team to ever carry two full time coaching positions held by women. Incredible. Helping others is about giving back so that others can achieve. When we lift others, we rise with them. Helping others is an essential part of the Be RICH mindset. If you believe in the Be RICH mindset we encourage you to listen to the rest of our podcast here. Tom Brady, The Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Be RICH mindset – Episode 24. Keep an eye out for our upcoming private Facebook group. Designed to create a space for service-based professionals and entrepreneurs to give and get back it is built on the bedrock of our value system. The Be RICH mindset is a way of life and core tenets to JB and The Doctor, Mastery With Science.
Controlling Your Calendar – Thoughts on structuring your time
Time is our most valuable resource. Not maybe, not kind of, not quite. It is. Hard stop. Yet we rarely feel like we have control of it (we do), we rarely feel like we have enough of it (we do) and we rarely feel like we can do everything we want to do (we can). We recently had a chance to catch up with AJ Bishop CEO of of AJBishop.co and My Wealth Conscious Coach to ask her about her transition from the corporate world where her time was in a lot of ways outside of her control to the world of entrepreneurship where she had control of all of her time. Here’s what AJ had to say. AJ, when when you look at the corporate world there is a lot of structure, a whole lot of structure, and then you go into entrepreneurship and you end up really with every path you can imagine in front of you, how have you adapted to how you run your days? Now that you have that freedom to really build out your days as you see fit, how have you managed to structure that and what have you done differently, and how have you adapted? “Well, this is a beautiful question, because it was an adjustment to say the least, it was an adjustment, at the level of leadership I was at, I had no control over my calendar. It was, go to this meeting, go to that meeting. Be on this conference call, go to St. Louis for this, go to LA for that. And it was always me showing up every day, and my calendar actually owning me versus me owning my calendar, and that was what I was doing for 10 years. I did what my calendar told me to do, so coming into entrepreneurship and owning my own businesses, it was a complete shift and a huge, very, very eye-opening experience to realize that I really sucked at time management. I thought all these years I was great at managing my time, because I could have 10 or 12 meetings on my calendar. And I was there and I was present and I was doing all of the things, but when I had this wide open calendar, I realized I actually had no clue what it meant to be good at time management, I had no idea what it meant to be productive in so many ways rather than being busy. I would say the first couple of months was me being busy, I was busy, looking busy, I was busy creating things, but I wasn’t productive. What I did recently was sat down for, especially for 2021, at that time of year where everyone either looked at their New Year’s resolutions and they’re still on track or they’re re-adjusting, but I looked at 2021 and said: What do I want my day to look like? I’m naturally a morning person, of course, now, because of the market here on the West Coast opening at 6-30, so I’m usually up by 5, 5:30 or 4:30 with the time difference. I used that time and I just found a brilliant book for anyone who’s listening called The 5 AM Club, I’ve been reading it, and it’s all about getting your mind right first thing in the morning, so I spend the first hour or just being mindful and present by myself and quiet versus in the past, it was me on conference calls or it was me getting prep for the day, and I find that that quiet time in that structure just helps me get aligned with what I need to do for the day. Every month I have five initiatives that I’m working towards, and I just slowly do what’s called time blocking, where I spend time every day on all five of those initiatives and to push those forward… Obviously in corporate America, I had a big team, a big team to do the things that I didn’t want to do or I wasn’t good at, and now I am lucky, I do have a team, but we’re not a 20-30 person team. So a lot of what I’ve had to learn about time management as well as delegation, which as a type A personality is always… It’s always something I’m working on.” The insight AJ shares here is brilliant. High powered, uber successful corporate executive who really never had to manage her time because it was managed for her. AJ ends up learning a lesson that all of us need to work through, being busy does not mean being productive. Running through our day at full speed doesn’t mean we’re really mastering our day or our time. If controlling your calendar and your time is a problem you find coming up constantly you’ll want to ask to join our private Facebook group: Entrepreneur Mastery Lab. In the lab we focus on topics like these and others as we help people develop and maintain a Be RICH mindset. Rise to Mastery Inspire Greatness Celebrate Knowledge Help Others You may also (this is strongly encouraged) want to take a look at our Time Mastery With Science course where we walk through EXACTLY how to manage your day and your time. For those of you looking for even more assistance, we offer 2 on 1 coaching for service based professionals and entrepreneurs where we are hyper focused on improving positioning and presentation, powering up your productivity and supercharging your sales. You can catch the rest of our conversation with AJ on our podcast here: 3 Coaches Chat about Consciously Controlling your Calendar ~ Episode 23