Clients can be great?or monsters! And once you have a client who's a monster, it's easy to blame them for all the issues. Often, the problem lies with us. We don't put things in place, in advance, and then get into all sorts of trouble.

 

To get hidden goodies, go to http://www.psychotactics.com/magic

To also get the coolest headline report on "why headlines fail", go to http://www.psychotactics.com

TimeStamps

00:00:20 Start
00:01:35 The Riot Act
00:01:56 Part 1: The Barrier
00:06:57 Part 2: Your Philosophy
00:12:20 Part 3: Firing the Client
00:14:25 Summary
00:16:08 Your Action Plan
00:16:30 Final Comments + Psychotactics Workshop 

Transcript

Sean D'Souza:The year was 1998, I think 1999, and I had a massive headache. The reason for my headache was that I wasn’t being paid on time. Just to get paid, I had to follow up several times and then I was lucky if I got the full amount. These are clients that drive you crazy and often the question is, what are you going to do with clients like these? Whose fault is it?

Our natural instinct is to say that it's the clients' fault. Really, is it? I think it's just our fault. Why is it our fault? How do we decide when do we get rid of the client? Shall we get rid of them now? Should we get rid of them 6 months from now?

We're not very sure but The Riot Act puts everything into perspective and it saves you from the trouble that I had. I not only had headaches but I had hypertension and all kinds of things and I was not even 30 years old. If you want to avoid that kind of thing, you will need to know how to use The Riot Act.

There are 3 parts to The Riot Act. The first is the form or the barrier, the second is the philosophy, and the third is the right to fire the client. Let's see how this all pans out.

The first part of The Riot Act is the barrier. Without the barrier, without the form, nothing happens. When I started my career, I started out as a cartoonist and the clients always have the upper hand. I was just a teenager out of university; in fact I was still in university.

At that point in time, the newspapers would tell me what to do and they would decide when they had to pay me and so I would spend a lot of time in this follow-up just trying to get my payments, just trying to get the jobs, just trying to just go crazy doing what I thought should have been easy and pleasurable. You get into this rock you think that there is never going to be another way.

Then one day, I was sitting at the dentist and the dentist gave me a form. Here I was doing a transaction. I was going to pay this guy to drill my teeth. He wasn’t going to do it until the form was filled.

Later, I went to a yoga class that is several years later. They weren’t going to allow me to the yoga class until I filled in this form and agreed to sit in a number of classes. I thought, "Wow, this is really cool."

What's happening here is the expectations are being set right at the start. The barriers are being put in place. I thought, "This is incredibly powerful. I wonder if I could use this in our business."

As you know, Psychotactics is mostly about books. It's about workshops. It's about training. What we had at that point in time was a consulting program. Because I live in New Zealand, this consulting is done by a telephone. Still, I got people to fill in the form. They had to fill in our big form and then get back and then we went ahead with the consulting.

The same applied with the protege program. This was a year-long program. Again, they had to fill in a form. Because it was more detailed, more intensive as it were, they also had to go through a 45-minute interview.

Think about it for a second. You are sitting there and you're about to take money from a client but you're putting them for a barrier. Would they agree to such a barrier? The answer is yes. When you look around you, most of the successful businesses have some contracted place.

At that point in time, we only had a single document, a book called The Brain Audit and so we made that our biggest barrier. If you wanted to go to workshop, you had to read The Brain Audit. If you wanted to join our membership at 5000bc.com, again, you had to read The Brain Audit. You had to buy, you had to read it.

At that point in time, I was still doing one-on-one consulting. What we had to do was put together a barrier and the simplest barrier of all is a form. You get the client to sit down and go through a whole bunch of questions. They answer the questions. They qualify themselves and that becomes the first barrier. That’s it that dawned for the relationship.

You may not want to have a form. You might want to have some other kind of barrier in place. Maybe they have to read through a couple of pages of something. Maybe they have to listen to an audio. It doesn’t matter what it is. Having the barrier in place gets the client to qualify themselves and that is the first step towards getting rid of that headache.

You know what's the sad thing? The sad thing is that we haven't always taken our own advice and sometimes we've let the barrier down. For instance, once we were having the workshop in Washington DC and we said, "It's The Brain Audit workshop. Everyone has read The Brain Audit. They're going to be here and we don’t really need to have any barrier in place," and we let that barrier down.

Someone slipped through the net. She was just disruptive, asking all sorts of crazy questions, not participating in the group sessions properly. She drove us crazy. We had to send her home after a couple of days. This is not something you want to do in the middle of a workshop. The first step in your Riot Act is to make sure that, "Hey, you've got a barrier."

This takes us to the second step which is the philosophy. Do they buy in to your philosophy? Do you know if they're buying in to your philosophy? Because if they don’t buy in to your philosophy, it's getting into relationship where you don’t the other person at all.

Second thought, philosophy. What is so important about the philosophy and how do you get this across? You don’t have to write a book or have something sophisticated about your philosophy. Most of our philosophy is embedded within our documents, whether it's a report or a book or an audio. The philosophy is there. People have to listen to something specific before they join.

This is the trickiest thing to achieve when you're in consulting, because the client is very eager to get ahead with the job and it almost seems like you're slowing them down. Getting them to read even a couple of pages or listen to something is very critical. Maybe you get them to read just a few pages of your website or maybe a single page.

Having that philosophy in place makes a big difference. For instance, ours is a 3-month vacation philosophy, which is that we work for 9 months and then, of course, we go out for 3 months in the year.

This doesn’t fit really well with clients if they don’t know this right at the start. Let's supposing you're a member of 5000bc and you join and you think, "Sean is going to be there right through the year." I'm not and I go on vacation for a whole month at a time and should I go back into 5000bc I get thrown out. I get thrown out by my own members because they go, "You're supposed to be on vacation."

This is a complete fit of philosophy. They understand where you're coming from. You understand what you need to do. Unless you get this message across right at the start, you're going to run into a clash and you're going to lose. The client is going to get upset with you. They're going to recall your money. They're going to give you all kinds of trouble because they feel that they're in the right. You haven't let them know right in the start what your philosophy is all about.

Let's take an example of this yoga class that I visited in South India. Their philosophy is very simple. You had to be part of that yoga class for a week, not for a few days but for a week. You had to be vegetarian for the entire week. You had to spend an hour or so in meditation every day. That was part of their philosophy. If you didn’t agree with that, then you couldn't be part of their group.

When we do our courses, which is training which is different from a service like a yoga class, we do something similar. The philosophy is about tiny increments. It's not about big jumps. It's not about instant success. It's not about get anywhere quickly. It's about very, very tiny increments.

For this to happen, the clients have to show up every day. They have to agree to this philosophy. They have to agree that they're going to be there 5 days a week going forward step by step as we go through the whole minefield of information and getting things implemented.

In a way, a philosophy is your way of life but it's also the rules that you put together. While it's quite easy to put it, you're offering a service or training. It probably is a lot harder when you're selling a product. What do you supposed to do if you're selling shampoo or soap? There is a philosophy.

If you go to this site at EcoStore.co.nz, you will find that the owner put together a philosophy and you can see the philosophy in the website. It's very clear. They do not want anything to do with chemicals so all their soaps, all their products are made without any chemicals whatsoever. They spend thousands or tens of thousands or probably hundreds of thousands of dollars to make sure that it's absolutely pure that it doesn’t remove the oils from your skin that it doesn’t affect you in any way. They don’t say it but I think you could drink some of their soap. That’s their philosophy.

Your philosophy is the core of your business. It is why you started out in the first place. It is everything. If the client doesn’t get a complete dose of this philosophy, they don’t know what do you stand for. You get into this relationship not knowing how it's going to work out. That’s not a good thing. You want to make sure that the client reads or listens to this philosophy and make it short. Don’t punish them.

This takes us to the third part, which is the right to fire the client. You probably don’t think of firing the client very much, do you? The client pays your bills, sends you on vacation. They're there for your benefit and yet you need to fire the client.

When most of us start up in a relationship, we don’t outline the exit plan. In most cases, especially in personal relationships, it's not necessary. In a business relationship, it's very important that you have some exit plan in place.

In the very first meeting, what you need to do with the client is sitting down and tell them that they have the right to fire you. They have the right to fire you if you don’t meet with the obligations, the specifications of the contract. Then you tell them that you in turn had the right to fire them if they don’t meet up with the scheduled payments, if they don’t behave like normal people should.

When we do this, we are very clear about the fact that it's an equal agreement. Nothing is ever equal that’s always the shift-in power balance but even so, you're not making it so unequal that it causes you trouble. It also sets the benchmarks so you know that, "Hey, at this point in time, I have to get paid. If I don’t get paid, we're walking. We're firing you."

If I had these systems in place when I first started out, it would have saved me a lot of grief. In a lot of cases, I didn’t get paid anyway. In other cases, the trouble of trying to recover the money, the hassle of having to deal with clients that suddenly reduced the font size from 17 to 3, it was not worth the trouble. When you set this whole agenda in place, it makes it much easier for the relationship to continue and to be very, very respectful.

If you were just selling a product online or a physical product, yes it cost you money but it's not as damaging as training or consulting. Especially if you're in training or consulting, you want to make sure that you have this Riot Act in place. Let's go over the 3 parts of The Riot Act.

The first part of The Riot Act was simply the barrier. You've got to have some barrier in place. This could be that they have to read a booklet or a book or filling a form or do something.

The second step is simply to have a philosophy. This might be a short document. It might be a single page. The client has to know your philosophy and, of course, you have to know your philosophy and put it down so that they agree with it.

Finally, you have to make sure that right at the start the client knows that they can fire you but you can fire them. This sets a benchmark, were you going to paid at this time, you're going to get this at that time. It sets this whole relationship right at the start and prevents all the hassle that most of us have had at some point with the other.

We've run Psychotactics for almost 13 or 14 years now and we've had only 3 or 4 clients that have been toxic clients the whole time. That’s a very long time to not have clients that are real thing.

The reason for that is very simple. For most of our products, our services and whenever we do consulting, we make sure that we have the system in place. You'll find that work is an absolutely pleasure, which is the way it should be, not being pushed around all the time by someone else, so put The Riot Act in place.

The simplest thing you can do today that’s the one thing that you can do today. What is it? The one thing that you can do today is put a barrier in place. Even if you don’t have your philosophy in place, even if you don’t have the guts to go up to the client and say, "We're going to fire you," have the barrier. Small barrier, big barrier, whatever barrier, have a barrier in place. When the client gets over their barrier, they qualify themselves and that makes the big difference.

With that, we are shuffling towards the end of this podcast. I just want to tell you, if you want more goodies, which are not available in the website, you can go to psychotactics.com/magic.

On another note, we're having a workshop on information products. It's interesting but a lot of the stuff that you see free on the internet has very little value because there's so much free stuff. It is more efficient to get clients through workshops or training, something that they pay for and yet structuring a book or a workshop or a webinar is critical, how you make it so exciting that people want to come back time and time again and then buy more stuff from you.

That’s what we're going to cover in the information products workshop where we show you how to reduce the amount of information and yet get clients to come back. This is nothing sleazy. It's what we really need at this point in time in our history. That’s happening in the first week of May 2015. We'll have more details on the podcast and on the website, so be part of the newsletter at psycotactics.com.

 

Finally, I'm writing a book on pricing, yes pricing, and how to get better prices without losing customers. That’s it for now. That’s me, Sean D'Souza saying bye from the Three-Month Vacation podcast and psychotactics.com. If you haven't already gone to Psychotactics, go there today. Bye for now.

 

 

Whether you run an online or offline business, there's a point where the business will take control of you. And then it doesn't let go. All those marketing strategies and "four-hour workweek" formulas are totally useless. So what works? And why does it work? Here are three core steps that will get you out of the muck and back on dry land. And yes, on the road to the three month vacation.

 

00:00:00 Introduction: Getting More Control in Business

00:02:22 Element 1: Learning Core Skills

00:06:44 Element 2: Flying Solo is a Problem

00:12:19 Element 3: Input and Output

00:18:02 Summary

00:19:35 Ending Notes

 

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Sean D'Souza:Hi, this is Sean D'Souza from Psychotactics.com, and you're listening to the Three Month Vacation Podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead, it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time. 

If you go to a restaurant, just about any restaurant, and if you go to sit down you would notice that some days the restaurant is absolutely full and on other days it's completely empty. What's really happening here? What you're noticing is the lack of control over the business. It doesn't matter whether you own a restaurant business or a gym or you just have a service, you have to have control over your business. How do you have this control over your business? I didn't have to answer to this several years ago. I'd run a cartooning business since I was in university and I ran a business for about ten or 12 years without any control. I didn't know where the next client would come from. While I did some amount of promotion, sometimes I had enormous amounts of work so I wouldn't get any sleep. At other times a whole month could pass and I'd have nothing to do. 

The only way to have complete control over your business is to use the concepts explained in the three prong system. Now if you didn't listen to episode number two then that's where you need to go right now, or just after you listen to this episode. That's because the three prong system has stood the test of time. When you look at all the religions of the world that have lasted 2,000 years they use the three prong system. When you look at businesses that have done really well over the years they too use the three prong system. You want to go back to episode two and listen to it. 

The three prong system brings strategy but to your business, but on a day to day business you need to some strategy as well. This episode talks about the strategy that you need on a day to day basis. As usual, we're going to cover three things, and the first thing we're going to cover is the factor of core skills. The second thing we're going to cover is about how to get help or why you should get help, and the third is input is equal to output. 

Let's start out with the first, which is learning the core skills. What is this all about? The biggest problem that we have and the reason why we can't earn more or take more time off is because we spend so much time not learning core skills. Let's say you were a golfer and you wanted to get really good on the golfing circuit. What would you do? It's pretty obvious, isn't it? You'd go out there and you'd practice and you'd get a coach, and you'd work that so that you were very good at golfing. Otherwise, you'd just your Sunday golfer, go there, hit some balls, and hope for the best. In a business, hoping for the best is not a good idea. It's not your hobby as it were. This is your passion.

When you're passionate about something you have to be like Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo. When you're passionate about something you have to have that core skill in place. You know it's in place because you can do it exceedingly well and exceedingly quickly. For instance, if you had to write an article, say 800 to 1,000 words, how long would you take to write that? I'll tell you how long it used to take me to write it. I used to take two days. I'm not kidding. I would start on the first day and then write, and then stop and edit and write and stop and edit and write and stop and edit. 

By the end of the second day I was not really sure that the article would be any good. I was a cartoonist, not a writer. I spent a lot of time just trying to get into that writer mode, because I knew as a small business owner that's what I needed to do. I needed to write books. I needed to write articles. I needed to get the word out there. Article writing, which wasn't my core skill, had to become my core skill. I had to communicate that way. I got all the material I needed to study. I got a lot of information that I was deconstructing, and then that didn't help me at all. I still had to write the articles. 

Luckily for me, at that point in time there wasn't as much content on the internet. A website called marketingprops.com, they wrote to me and they said "Can you send us some articles?" Then every week the publisher would bug me and say "Can you send me some more articles?" Even though I was not keen on writing the articles I had this person nudging me all the time and so I was forced to write the articles. 

Today I can write an article in 45 minutes, but not just an article, but a very, very good article. This is what you've got to do. You've got to figure out what are those core skills. Sit down and work out what are the things that I have to get very good at, and then you proceed to get very good at it. Another core skill, to just be updating your website or knowing more about your website. A lot of us have websites, and of course we have web designers and programmers and stuff. That's very important. We have that too, but you also need to know enough to fix your pages, to put in graphics, to do whatever you want to do. Because having to wait on someone for a day or two days, it slows you down. It frustrates you, and you don't get the results.

While it's all very fine to say outsource this and outsource that, you have to also remember that there are certain core skills that you have to learn, and unless you get very good at these core skills you remain an amateur. You continue to be someone for whom the business is just a hobby. I'm saying hobby; I know it's not your hobby but that's how it ends up being. For me, that key component towards my three month vacation, and your key component, is going to be getting control over your core skills. You have to make a list of the few things that you want to do, not run after every shiny objective that comes your way - because there are lots of shiny objectives there on the internet - and develop your core skill. 

This takes us to our second topic, which is about getting help. Our business is incredibly small. It's run by just my wife and I. When I started out it was just me. Then my wife Renuka came along and people said "I wish had someone like Renuka. I wish I had help as well." This is what I tell them at that point in time. I said at the point that Renuka joined Psychotactics she was earning $85,000 a year. By quitting her job what we were doing was talking a hit of $85,000. Remember, at that point in time I wasn't really earning a lot. I was probably earning about $1,500 a month in marketing. This is very important because you might think that you can't afford to get any help and it's just impossible to run a business all by yourself. There are far too many things to do, far too many things that you have to juggle if you're going to be running a business by yourself. 

Now the first obvious thing to do is to outsource some of the things, and then you start outsourcing more things. At some point in time you just have to have someone on a consistent basis that does consistent jobs so that you don't have to do everything yourself. The biggest problem with a business is just that you lose too much energy. I've spoken about this before. It's not about time, it's about energy. Once you do task one and task two and task three and task four you're getting very, very tired. At the end of the day you may still have some time, but you just don't have the energy. 

Think of it as a plane. Now if you ask a pilot, they don't need two engines to friendly that plane. But if one of the engines quit it's not such a good feeling. You can friendly your plane with one engine but it gets very frustrating, and there are times when that one engine fails and then it's more than just frustrating. I know this is hard advice to give. How do I give you this advice? How do I say to you: Go out there and find someone. Go out there and pay for the services. But the problem with trying to do it all yourself, this flying solo business, it just doesn't work in my opinion. 

We've run our business now at Psychotactics since 2002. I really thought that it would get easier over the years, and you know what, it might have got easier if we were doing exactly what we were doing in 2002, if we were earning exactly what we were earning in 2002, yes. But given my aspirations, given the things that I want to do, given the books that I want to write ... and these are just passions. This is less about the money that we're going to make. I'm really fascinated with writing about pricing. I'm really fascinated about writing about talent. I'm really interested in doing something about Photoshop. 

This is why we started a cartooning course even though it was free. We started out a cartooning course even though I'd been a cartoonist for 15 years. People knew about my cartooning, and it was free. Without that support that Renuka brings it would be impossible. It would be completely impossible for me to do the things that I really want to do. Over the years we've added bits and pieces here and there. We got someone to do our blog, as in post the information to the blog. Then we got someone to put together the reports, so I write all the information, I do the cartoons, but someone puts it together in an InDesign file and I showed them how to do that. 

This is what allows me to do what I want to do. It allows Renuka to do what she wants to do. It gives us time. More importantly, it gives us that energy that we so desperately require. That's all I can say. This advice is like a halfhearted, half-baked advice, because I don't know how you're going to do it. I just know that you have to do it. If you want more control of your life you have to get that second engine. Don't go up in the air with a single engine because it's just too much. Yes, I can go on and on about how we take three month vacations but this is the big secret as it were. 

The first thing is that you need to have core skills. You need to be able to do stuff that is critical to your business and do it very, very, very quickly. The second thing you definitely need is that second engine. I don't know how you're going to get it but you need it. The third thing that to me is critical is this whole concept of input is equal to output. 

The other day I was in an interview and I was being asked how to be a good writer. It's very tempting to keep talking about the techniques and the methods and the secrets, and all the stuff that goes into great writing. I don't believe that to be true. I believe that the writing part is the execution of what goes in in the first place. I believe that input is equal to output, or at least input really helps the output. To me, reading is more important than writing. Or should I put it another way: it's equally important. 

Without the reading part of stuff it's probably not going to end up with great writing. People make a mistake with input. They take in too much information, and that doesn't really work to your advantage. That just sends you scattering in every direction. Now don't get me wrong, at the same time that I'm learning how to use my camera I want to learn how to use InDesign and I want to learn how to do character design in cartooning, and lettering, and all kinds of things. Those are hobbies, and there is my work. When it comes to my work I'm doing something completely different. 

My input day goes like this. I start out the day and I go for a walk. I make sure that I'm listening to stuff that is interesting to me or important to me. Ideally I don't listen to podcasts. I know it's ironic since you're listening to a podcast, but I don't listen to podcasts because a lot of people ramble on endlessly, so I listen to an audio book. I listen to a course where I know they're not rambling on. Mostly audio books because they're structured, they're edited, and there's less chance of this ramble. I'm not trying to remember. This is the mistake that a lot of people make with audio. They don't treat it like radio, and you should treat audio like radio. You shouldn't really try to remember anything. It's all sitting in your head bit by bit. Listen to one book and another book and a third book. Soon enough, all the thoughts become input; they sit in your head.

Again, I'm not saying that you should not make notes. I'm not saying that you shouldn't make mind maps. I'm not saying you shouldn't do anything you do not want to do. I'm saying that there is so little time in the day that when you're driving, when you're walking, you need input. Then you get back to your office, your place of work, and then it's time for output. Over the years I've found that just by increasing the input and also cross-pollinating the input, so I'll listen to a whole bunch of different things on the way in. Then we get to the café, we discuss what we've learned along the way, and maybe we've not learned a lot, and then we turn round and come back. Then I will probably listen to something lighter or learn a language. 

That's it. That's the input equals to output. If you want to become a great writer you have to listen to and read great writing. If you want to become a great artists you have to go to galleries. You have to look at art books. You have to do all that stuff. That's all the input part. The same thing is with business. If you're going to go chasing after some guy that promises you a lot of money, some guy that promises you a lot of customers and you think that's a good idea, well it might be a good idea but often, and especially if you're listening to a podcast like this, you probably not going to fit in. That input is wrong. That input signal becomes erroneous, and therefore you don't get the output. All you get is frustration.

Control your input signals and then you start to get better output signals. The output is important as well. Every time I put out a book I'm not really sure that someone is interested in it. Every time I do a course I'm not sure that someone is interested in it. I do it for myself. I think that it really matters. I think that when you put your passion into it you then need to sustain it. It's the same thing with this podcast. I don't know if you've realized it, and I probably mentioned it before because I've been mentioning it to everyone, but it takes about 20 minutes to record a 20 minute episode, or 15 minutes to do a 15 minute episode. But it takes about two and a half hours to then put the music. The only reason why I continue to do this and will continue to do this is because I'm fascinated with it. 

I'm listening to podcasts where they have great music and I'm listening to stuff where they have great content and great interviewers, and that becomes my input. That's why you're getting this output. Let's wrap up today and let's summarize. We started out with control. You have to know the things that are important. Writing is important. Being able to tweak your website, that's important. Your sales letters, what's wrong with it, what's wrong with your email, understanding that whole sales thing. I think these are critical for a business. If you don't have those critical elements at the tip of your fingers then you're struggling.

The second thing is just an energy factor. If you don't have enough energy at the end of the day then it just becomes one mindless, endless loop. You have to get that second engine. How you get that second engine, whether it's by hiring someone or getting someone in your family to help out, that's something you have to figure out and figure out quickly. You can't friendly solo. I can assure you that. It's very, very, very hard. 

The third thing is input is equal to output. The quicker you realize that you don't have that much time in the day and you need great input, the quicker you realize that there is no shortcut and all these guys who offer you this quick route to success, you need to get off that input because it's driving you crazy. It's distracting you. Listen to stuff that is important. Read stuff that is important. That is your key to a sensible future. That is your key to the three month vacation. 

That brings us to the end of this episode. We're now on episode 15. Wow, that was quick. Anyway, if you haven't already subscribed ... I've said this a million times before and I'm going to say it again. If you haven't subscribed to iTunes, go there, subscribe; and yes, leave a review. Please do leave a review because it really helps us. I read the review everyday. If your reviews not there then I'm looking out for that review. 

The second thing you want to do is you want to go to psychotactics.com/magic because even if you are subscribed to iTunes or Stitcher or anywhere else, the magic that's where you're going to get your stuff. There's a form there. Fill it up and we'll occasionally send you some magic from there. Finally, if you're not already part of Psychotactics, then get to Psychotactics. Get there and subscribe to the newsletter. It's really cool stuff. It's stuff like this, except it's written down. That's me, Sean D'Souza, saying bye for now. Bye bye.

Oh, I almost forgot purpose of one thing that you had to do today. Yes, the one thing that you can control today is input. I am sure you can go out there and get someone over time and get control over all the things you do, but input, you can listen to stuff like this or you can get an audio book or start reading. Have that input every single day, 30 minutes of learning every single day. It will make a big difference for your life. Get rid of those idiots that promise you the world. Yep, that's it. I'm done, really done. Bye bye.  

 

Getting things done isn't as easy as it looks. So what gets in our way when we run our small businesses? Do we simply run out of ideas? The Three Month Vacation Podcast examines how to get out of your own way and get your online?or offline business working smoothly. The key to getting things done is the trigger. How do you create and sustain that trigger in your small business?

To get hidden goodies, go to http://www.psychotactics.com/magic
To also get the coolest headline report on "why headlines fail", go to http://www.psychotactics.com

Time Stamps:

00:00:20 Getting Things Done:
00:02:08 How Do We Make The Trigger Work?
00:04:03 Table of Contents
00:04:24 How To Activate The Trigger
00:09:29 How The Trigger Builds Momentum
00:14:33 Summary
00:17:47 Final

Transcript:

When I was little my uncle gave me a game. It was called Snoopy Tennis and it was a little console, a video game from Nintendo. All you had to do was play tennis. Lucy from Peanuts and Charlie Brown from Peanuts as well, they would hit the ball towards you and you as Snoopy had to return the service. Lots of people played those games. Millions of kids played those games across the globe, but mine was different, mine was unique. My console had a crack in it. It had fallen at some point in time, so I can see the ball heading towards me and I have to listen for it. It would go beep, beep, beep, and then I had to push down on the red button that would ensure that I hit the ball, got the service back over the net as it were. 

 

What was interesting was that I wasn't looking for the visual anymore. I was listening to the sound and responding. That sound was a trigger. One of the biggest reasons why we can take as much time off as we do is because we have these triggers in place. Without the triggers it's very hard for us to get anything done. That is because as adults we have so many things to do and so many responsibilities that when we try to do something, when we try to finish a book or write an article or do anything at all, we struggle. We struggle because we don't have that trigger in place. 

 

What is that trigger and how can we make it work for ourselves? Let's start with the things that I don't like very much. One of the things that really bug me is having to exercise. As I've mentioned before, I don't care much for exercise, and yet you'll notice that I'm reasonably fit. This is because I end up doing between 80,000 to 100,000 steps a week. You have to ask yourself how does someone who doesn't like exercise doing such a lot of walking. Well, I use a trigger. In fact, two triggers. 

 

The first trigger is just the coffee. that is when I get up in the morning I am not headed for a walk, I am headed for a coffee. I'll wake up, I'll get my iPhone on, put on the audio, and then head towards the café. When I reach the café that's my reward. What's really happening here is that the walk is not something that appeals to me that much. However, the coffee does appeal to me. That sense of reward, that carrot and stick as it were, is what helps me. 

 

That's the trigger. 

 

The second trigger that I have in place is I have a little pedometer called Fitbit. I have other friends who are also high achievers who do 70, 80, 100,000 steps a week. I want to compete against them so that becomes my second trigger. What I'm saying here is that I don't care much for walking. I would rather sit here and do a podcast and do some music and draw some cartoons, and do all kinds of stuff. Yet no matter what the weather, whether it's rainy or windy or hot or cold, I end up going for a walk - and that is because of the trigger. Triggers work both ways. They work for good and evil. 

 

What we are covering in today's episode are three things. The first is how to activate the trigger. The second is how it helps you build and sustain momentum. This is very important. The third thing is what happens when you go offtrack. How do you get back on track? Let's start off with the first one, which is how do you activate the trigger.

 

Now in a normal day what I have to do is I have to write articles, I have to draw some cartoons, I have to do a whole lot of things. While a trigger might seem like a reward, because I was talking about coffee earlier, well it's not necessarily a reward. It's just that beep beep headed towards you. How do you install that beep? One of the things that I found very useful for me and to get things done is to keep things open. Now I draw a daily diary in my Moleskin diary.

 

 I do a painting every single day, and I've been doing this since 2010. 

 

How do I achieve this? It's a very busy day. It's quite easy to put it off. It takes a lot of time to do it. What I do is I don't keep the diary in my bag. I don't keep the paints in my bag. I don't keep the pencils in my bag. They're all ready on my desk and they're open. Just before I sit down for breakfast, every single day I will say "Well, let me just sit here for five minutes. Let me just do a little wash. Let me just paint a bit." I'm always trying to fool myself there. 

 

The thing is that the diary is already open, the paints are already there, the water's already there. If I were to spend just a few minutes trying to find the paints or the diary or the pencils and the pens, that could distract me enough for me not to do that painting for the day. I've tried this. I've kept it in the bag, and just that little distraction, that tiny distraction can slow you down. 

 

Slowing you down often leads to complete derailment. It's the same thing when I'm trying to do a podcast for instance. At the end of the day I don't have much energy but I do have energy to keep my Garage Band, which is my software, ready and open. When I show up here at 4 in the morning, and that's just me, it's already open. Before I check any email I'm looking at Garage Band staring at me in the face. The moment I see that I know you've got to do this podcast now, and then you can do the other stuff. 

 

This concept of keeping things ready and open seems almost remarkably too simple and yet it is a trigger. It is a trigger that helps you get things done. This is what successful people have known for a very long time. I once read a book by Twyla Tharp, and she talks about getting into a taxi. 

 

Now Twyla is a very famous dancer and choreographer. She needs to practice. When you wake up in the morning you don't feel like practicing. What she does is just get dressed and gets into a taxi. Often she says "When I'm in the taxi that's when I realize I have to practice." The taxi becomes that little trigger. It's like that beep beep beep. 

 

The mistake that we often make is we have our to-do list and we don't realize that the to-do list is not what gets things done. The to-do list is almost t end point. What gets things done is the trigger that leads us to that to-do list, the trigger that gets us on the bike, the trigger that gets us for the walk, the trigger that gets us to pick up that racket and hit the ball back to Lucy and Charlie Brown. 

 

If you want to get things done you have to isolate that trigger. You have to figure out what is the thing that comes in between me and the task. What is that one thing that will start me off and get me to that task? Then you have to put the trigger in place. 

 

to activate the trigger we have to have that isolation point. We have to figure out what is that one thing that comes in between that will help us to get to the trigger. It will be different for different things. We know email is a trigger. We know Facebook is a trigger. These are triggers that are designed to get our attention. That's why they flash on our phones. That's why they show up on our screens. 

 

Because once we have that trigger we are forced to go to the next step. If these distractions help us waste time in the day, well there is a good chance that you can use the trigger to your advantage as well. It works for good; it also works for evil. Harnessing it for our good is probably the better way to go, isn't it?

 

That brings us to the end of the first part, but the second part is what is really critical, and that is the factor of how the trigger builds momentum. When psychologists look at how to improve your memory what they realized is that something that is not done takes up an enormous amount of energy. What they did was they took two groups of people and they gave them tasks. One group was supposed to finish their tasks and the other was not supposed to finish their task. At the end of the exercise they were supposed to write down the tasks that they had completed. 

 

The groups of people who had completed the tasks didn't have such a good memory, as in they forgot some of the tasks that they had completed. But the groups who had not completed the tasks remembered stuff. What did they remember? They actually remembered the stuff that they had not completed. You see, in the exercise these people were given the tasks and then almost as they were completing the tasks, the tasks were taken away from them. That stuck in their head. Later on when they had to fill in the form they remembered the tasks that they had not completed. 

 

What was happening was those incomplete tasks were taking up an inordinate amount of energy in the brain. They had to remember those tasks even though they were not trying to remember any of them. This is what happens to us all the time. For instance, I came back from the information products course that I had in Vancouver and I had to write a tiny little booklet about something. I can't even remember now. I've completed the task. It was a tiny bonus, and usually that would take me about a day, maybe two days if I was really slow. 

 

But instead it took me a month. Everyday when I went for my walk that's all I could think of: I have to finish this bonus. I have to finish this bonus. I have to finish this bonus. What that was doing was killing my momentum. Because I couldn't complete or wouldn't complete that task it was draining all my energy for all the other tasks, so it was like a game of dominoes. It was one task not being done, that was dropping into the next and the next and the next. When we look at the reverse thing, which is when we have that trigger in place and we get the task done, then the next task moves along and the third moves along, the fourth moves along.

 

One of the reasons why I go for a walk in the morning is because I complete so many things. I get my exercise. I listen to the audio. I talk to my wife. We also learn a language and we drink coffee. Before 8:00 in the morning a lot of stuff gets done, but then that leads to the second task and the third task and the fourth task. When people say "I'm not getting a lot of stuff done because I don't have enough time in the day," they probably are referring to not time but energy. Time is different from energy. The lack of completing one task leads to a depletion of energy, which then spills onto the second and the third and the fourth and the fifth. 

 

You know it's energy because sometimes you have the time and you spend that time on Facebook, and you spend that time just lying there on the sofa saying "I'm so tired." That is a depletion of energy, not a factor of time. When you get stuff done, when you use triggers to get stuff done, your energy level is so much higher. You know this; I don't have to tell you this. Your energy level is just bouncing and you get more done. 

 

This brings us to the end of the second part. The third part is just as important because often we go offtrack. Supposing you've gone on vacation for instance. The moment you get back you're offtrack, or say there's been some kind of problem or urgency and now you're offtrack. How do you get back on track? I wish there were a magic pill to tell you how to get back on track, but I've struggled with the same issues. I'll stop painting and then before I know it a week has passed or two weeks have passed and I haven't done a painting. I say I paint everyday. Yes I do but only if the book is open. 

 

I have to go back to the same concept, which is what is that trigger. If the book is open then I'm going to get it done. If the program is open I'm going to write t book. That's just how it is. I wish there were a simpler way. I wish there were a magic button but there is no magic button. The magic button is to isolate the trigger. Whatever that trigger is, you have to isolate it. 

 

This brings us to the end of this episode. In this episode what we covered was just the whole factor of activating that trigger. We activate that trigger by isolating it. We saw how the coffee motivates me, but it's not just a reward. It is any sort of trigger. Just keeping the book open makes a difference. Just keeping the program makes a difference. Just getting to the taxi makes a difference. 

 

You might get on a bus or in a car and when you get in that car you switch on, not the radio, but listen to some audio that helps you learn instead. That's your trigger. That trigger helps you get smarter. You go to your networking meeting, you go to your meeting, you go to your office. You know more, you feel better, that sets off the other triggers, the other tasks that get better and better everyday. 

 

This is the key to getting things done. A lot of people think that getting things done has to do with the to-do list, but it doesn't. The to-do list is at the end of the rainbow. Now you saw what was happening there. I had the trigger. That was my trigger to go for a walk. That was my wife calling up and I'm off right now. Even though I might feel like finishing this podcast I'll have to come back to it and complete it, because that was my trigger. 

 

Just before we I go I want you to know that I'm not always like this. I'm not always hyped up, ready to go. There are some days when I'm just lazy, and that's okay to be that way. Not because I'm saying so but because it's okay to just have down time. Just know that when you're working, work out the trigger that gets you to work more efficiently. That is probably the best thing you can do for yourself. That's the one thing that you can do for yourself: find that trigger. 

 

Here we are at the end of this episode. If you're keen on learning more about planning, then I have a book there for you. It's called Chaos Planning. I find that most people plan without taking chaos into consideration. It details how we go about our three month vacation and how we plan stuff, and why is it so important to plan with chaos in mind. Now chaos is your best friend. It may not seem like that but if you make time for him then he does help you out a lot. Look for Chaos Planning.

 

Now if you're ever wondering how do I get this podcast on a regular basis, we have it on iTunes, we have it on our website, we have it all over the place. There's one central point; that is Psychotactics.com/podcast. It doesn't matter whether you're on iTunes or off iTunes or any other way. You can get all the details on that page, so go to Psychotactics.com/podcast today. And yes, send me questions. If you have any questions I'd be more than happy to take them on, and feedback. Whatever you'd like to improve, whatever you'd like to see, send it to me at sean@psychotactics.com. That's it from the three month vacation land. Bye for now. Bye bye. 

 

When we set about creating a new product or service, we look for a catchphrase. And while a catchphrase or slogan is very useful, it's not a lot of use when it comes to driving home our uniqueness or positioning. So how do we create that USP or uniqueness? The best way to go about this exercise is to avoid the line completely, because really, your clients can't remember it any way. What you need to focus on, is the story. But how do you create this story line? What's the secret link between storytelling and uniqueness? 

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Time Stamps

00:00:20 Uniqueness and Story: Introduction

00:02:11 Table of Contents

00:02:25 Element 1: How The Story Helps in Uniqueness

00:07:57 Element 2: How To Create The Story-Emperor

00:11:40 Example: Psychotactics Article Writing Course

00:14:39 Example: Golden Moon Tea

00:16:19 Element 3: Why Is the Story More Important Than The Slogan?

00:19:01 Summary

00:20:25 Final Resources + Goodies

 

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Speaker 1:Hi, this is Sean D'Souza from Psychotactics.com and you're listening to the three month vacation podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less, instead it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time. 

When someone tells you their name, do you remember it? Often when we meet someone they introduce themselves, we introduce ourselves, and then later we cannot remember their names. We think we're really bad with names, but as you know, that's not true at all; no one is good with names. The reason why we don't remember names is either because it's not important or we don't have a story. How important is this story when it comes to uniqueness? 

 

What I'll do right now is I'll read out a whole bunch of slogans from airlines and see if you can remember which airline they come from. I bet you won't remember any of them, or very few of them. That's because they don't have a story. 

 

Here it goes. Number one, making the sky the best place on earth. Number two, the proud bird with the golden tail. Number three, world class, world wide. Number four, we really move our tail for you. Number five, something special in the air. 

 

You're getting that blank feeling aren't you? It's like when you meet that person again and you can't remember their names. That's because there is no story to it. The key to remembering someones name is to assign a story to it. That's exactly what you have to do when you're creating your uniqueness. If there is no story, it becomes impersonal and you can't remember it. More importantly, your client can't pass it on to someone else.

 

In today's episode we'll cover three points, as always, and that is: how does the story help, how to construct that story, and finally, why it's so important because  it needs to be passed on to someone else.

 

Let's start off with how the story helps. One of the worlds best know slogans is simply, "Thirty minutes or it's free", and that came from Dominos Pizza. That sounds like just a line, doesn't it? When you think about it, is it just a line? There is a story behind it. 

 

there is a story of this pizza guy desperately trying to get the pizza ready right after you've put the phone down, and then getting across to you and ringing your doorbell at the 29th minute. Then you hoping, somehow, they'll miss it by a couple of minutes and then you'll get it free. 

 

Notice how easy it is to tell this kind of story to a friend. The reason why this whole slogan seems to work is because the try is unfolding in your brain. You can actually see this story unfolding even with that single line. The line doesn't really matter, what really matters is the story behind the line. 

 

Let's take a product like ioSafe. These are indestructible, or seemly indestructible, hardware - external drives that you use for your computer. They sell for a lot more than the drives that you get anywhere else. What's the story behind it? It's boiled down to this one word, which is indestructible. I don't think they have a great line, but their story is really powerful.

 

They take the drive to a shooting range and shoot at it, they take a road roller and run it over, they take it and throw it in the swimming pool, they do all kinds of things that would normally destroy the data in the drive. Yet that data is completely secure. 

 

We may not remember the line, and who cares if we remember the line or not, because we're now telling the story to someone else. We're telling them why they should buy this product or service. 

 

Every morning when I go for a walk I usually have an umbrella; it's a red umbrella. It rains a lot when I go for a walk, so I have to take an umbrella. What's different about this umbrella? For one it costs about $100, when the other umbrellas you can get them in the story for about 10 or $15. Why buy and umbrella for $100 when you can get one for $10? 

The answer lays in the uniqueness. Because New Zealand is a set of islands and it's pretty narrow, we get storms and winds and often the umbrella just turns inside out. Not the Blunt Umbrella. 

 

To test the Blunt umbrella what they did what run it through wind tunnels. A wind tunnel will probably demolish your $10 umbrella; it will go to pieces. Often you'll find umbrella in garbage cans all over the place. Just thrown always because  people are so sick of them. They're twisted, broken, absolutely useless. The Blunt Umbrella has been tested so that it works under crazy wind conditions and doesn't turn inside out. 

 

You may say that's a lot to pay for an umbrella that doesn't turn inside out, but as you look on the street more and more people have a Blunt Umbrella. More and more people feel the need to stay dry in the rain. It's not so weird after all, is it? 

 

I'm pretty sure that you will agree with me that all of theses three products are pretty unique. Let's go back and look at what their slogans are. 

 

We start off with Dominos Pizza, and everyone remembers that it's "thirty minutes or it's free." that I can remember. What is the slogan for ioSafe? It is "Disaster proof software." It's less on the memory scale, but I can still remember it a bit. Finally we go to the Blunt Umbrella. Their slogan is, "The worlds best umbrella."

 

You see the problem here, don't you? The slogan doesn't matter at all, does it? It's the story behind it that makes all the difference. You remember the story about the Blunt Umbrella, and how those windy conditions and the wind tunnel makes all the difference. You also remember Dominos offer of giving you a free pizza if they're not on time; that's another story. Iosafe dropping their hardware from a height, or throwing it tin a swimming pool, or getting a road roller to go over it. 

 

What you remember is the story. This gives us a clue as to how we should go about creating our uniqueness. The slogan doesn't matter; what matters is the story behind it. Now that we know the story is more important, how do we go about creating that story? 

I personally don't think that any of the great stories come from an advertising agency. If they do come from an advertising agency, it's because someone in the advertising agency had the sense to actually look at the product or the service and figure out, "Hey you guys, this is what you're doing really well."

 

The story can come from you, the business owner, the creator of the product or the service. You do this by playing emperor. 

 

When you look at the story of Dominos, it was back in the '70s, and if you ordered a pizza it could take and hour or more to get a pizza. What they did was they decided that they're going to have a pizza that wasn't the tastiest or the spiciest or the biggest, it was just the fastest pizza delivered to your door. That got peoples attention, but they decided that. They decided that we're going to set up this system that is build around speed. 

 

When you look at ioSafe, which is that indestructible hardware, it's the same thing. External hard drives have existed for a long time, but now we have this hard drive that is just so indestructible. In effect, they're trying to find ways to destroy it. 

While nothing is completely indestructible, they come pretty close to showing you what would happen if you had a fire. What happens when you have a fire? For starters you're hardware is toasted, then right after it's toasted the ire brigade comes in, the fire truck comes in and then they pour water all over it. That toasted hardware is now soaked as well.

 

Do you think any of the data is going to survive that? Yes, it's find to say you can do an online backup, but what about those big files that you wrote to your computer just 30 minutes ago? They're all securely backed up.

 

What they're demonstrating is how indestructible it is. The way the go about it is to say, "Let's create something like this." Rather than, "I wonder what we can find in our product or service that's unique." 

 

We look at the third example, the Blunt Umbrella, we get the same scenario. The scenario is someone got sick of umbrellas that had to be tossed away every time the wind blew a little harder. They create a great looking umbrella, but predominately an umbrella that could withstand a wind tunnel blast.

 

This doesn't solve your problem, does it? You're still wondering, how do you play emperor? Imagine this situation, imagine that you are standing on the edge of a cliff and that was your city sprawled before you. At this point in time you're supposed to ask yourself, "If I could change this city, what would I do?" Naturally you would come up with a list of things, maybe the list would be 10 things, or 15 things, or 2o things. What you want to do is you want to whittle that down to 5, and then to 3, and then to finally the one thing that the city desperately needs.

 

The same thing applies to your product or service. Let's way you're about to create a product or a service, you have to ask yourself, "How would this product be completely  different from any other products or service?"

 

For instance, when we create the article wring course, our article writing course was approximately the same as every other article writing course. It wasn't the same, but from the outside work it was just another article writing course. 

 

we had a lot of trouble filling up those courses. It would take 3, 4, 5 weeks to fill up a course. When you think about it from a business point of view, that's a lot of energy that you have to spend just to fill up a course. 

 

We got lucky, the first thing that happened was one of my instructions was misunderstood. In earlier courses clients would write four or five articles for the duration of the entire course - which meant for about 12 weeks. In this course one of the participants misunderstood the instructions and they thought that they had to write 5 articles a week. They started writing 5 articles a week and then others in the course looked at what he was doing and thought, "That's what I have to do", so they followed along. 

 

Soon enough it became very very hard. Try writing one article a day, five days a week - in this case it was 6 days a week. You will know what I mean. It's very very hard. By the end of the course one of the clients who had done the course said, "This is the toughest course I've ever done. It's almost like having a baby. There's a dog level course, a cat level course, a baby level course." 

 

There was the story in plain sight of us. There was the cat level course when you don't have to do much, just like cats; they take care of themselves. then there's the dog level course, where you have to go out with the dog for a walk; there's more maintenance involved in having a dog. Finally, a baby level course, where you kept up half the night, you don't sleep very much for three months - that's how the Psychotactics article writing course became the toughest course in the world. 

 

That slogan is not as interesting as the story of the dog level, the cat level, and the baby level toughness. That's the part that you remember, that's the part that clients remember, and that's why our courses fill up in probably half an hour or 45 minutes. 

 

you'll say, "wait a second, you didn't come up with whole scenario", and sometimes you don't. In this case the client came up with the scenario. We had a whole bunch of happy misunderstandings and we got a great story from it. Then we ran with that story and it had run ever since. 

 

While my advice is always, play emperor, sometimes it just pays to listen to what the client is saying and how they perceive the product, or the course, or the service to be. Then use it as your story line.

 

Another good example of this is Golden Moon tea. This is run by Marcus Stout. Marcus is a friend and client of mine. When he started out the tea company it was just like any other tea company, but he decided to play emperor.

 

A couple of years ago he decided that even in the tea there were so many chemicals. You can get away with a lot with the label "organic"; you're actually allowed to put in a whole bunch of chemicals, even if it's organic. He decided to make his teas chemical free. 

 

This took a lot of work because you can't just say, "Hey, this is chemical free." You have to be there at the farm, figure out stuff, you have to travel a lot. He wanted to create a tea company that he could be assured he could say, "Yup, this tea is chemical free. There's not a trace of chemical in it." Not 3%, not 5%, not nothing, just chemical free.

 

Do you know how hard it is to find tea that doesn't have some kind of chimerical, genetic modifications, artificial flavors, or toxins within it? That's the tea that we've been drinking all this while. 

 

By playing emperor, Marcus has decided this is how it's going to be. Now you don't care what his slogan is, you don't even remember his slogan, what you remember is the story behind it. 

 

This brings us to the end of the second part of this episode. In the first part of today we covered how does the story help. Then we went on to, how to construct that story and how to ignore the slogan completely if we need to. Now we move to the third part, which is why is this so critical, why is so important that we create a story before we create any kind of slogan, if we create a slogan at all. I think you already know the answer to that question.

 

The answer is just that it's memorable. You don't remember peoples names and you don't remember slogans of airlines because they're just words strung together. Sure, every now and then you get a slogan that's memorable like, "thirty minutes or it's free", but for the most part, you don't remember it. Yet we spend hours, and days, and weeks, and some people spend thousands, and tens of thousands of dollars coming up with a slogan that no one remembers.

 

The story really helps because it's helps people to transfer the message across. It helps people to tell people why they buy this product or service over the next product or service. When you're buying a $100 umbrella instead of a $10 umbrella, you need to know why you're doing that. More importantly, you need to justify to someone else who's going to laugh in your face when they see you with such an expensive umbrella.

 

The story really makes a difference. You feel like owning an ioSafe because you know someday there might be a fire at your place, you know that you're out with that umbrella, you know that you drink tea and you would prefer to have tea that has no chemicals - not just organic, but no chemicals whatsoever. 

 

It's the same story that drives people to buy into the article writing course, even though we sell it 6 months in advance and at a reasonably high price. This story takes a lot of time to create. Once it's in place, you get better customers, you get higher prices. 

 

Of course all of this adds up in the sense that you can now put all that money and time towards your vacation, which is critical. Vacation is not just something you have to do because you can do, it's something that enables you to calm down, to relax, and to just come back fresh so that you can tackle your work with even more gusto. it's not just going eating, drinking, it's also just relaxing your mind and coming back refreshed. 

 

Let's get back to today's topic. The three things that we covered today are: story helps, we figured how the story helps and how it's more powerful than those terrible slogans that you heard at the start. We also very briefly connected with the construction of that story line. Whenever you're coming up with a product or a service, play emperor and create the story line rather than some slogan that no ones going to pay attention to. Finally, we saw the importance of this story line. It enables people to pass it on, to justify what they bought, and get better use out of it as well.

 

That brings us to the end of this episode. What is the one thing that you can do today? The one thing that you can do today is to play emperor. Make that list; make the list as long as you need to then cut it down to 10, then to 5. Then you'll really struggle because you'll want to talk about everything, but then cut it down to three, and then finally to one thing. 

 

What is that one thing that you really want to do for this product or service. Do this every time you start up a new product and service, because every product or service requires it's own uniqueness. Play emperor, or get a client to play emperor, and you'll be amazed how that very same product or service gets an enormous amount of power and clients are immediately attracted towards it.

 

Now it's time to close the episode, so if you haven't already done so, go to Pyschotactics.com/magic. That's where you get some magical stuff and some goodies that we won't offer anywhere else. Go there, there's a form, fill out the form - it's a very short form. It's Psychotactics.com/magic. If you've already started the year and you need to do some planning, you're frustrated with goal setting, there is chaos planning which is built around chaos. 

 

Go to Psychotactics.com and there in the product section you'll find a product called chaos planning. It's very unusual, and I think you'll like it.

 

I'll say bye for now, and thanks for being on the show. Bye bye. 

 

Are you still listening? You remember that thing about not remembering peoples names? You can remember peoples names if you assign a story to them. To try and find some new people to meet today and see if you remember their names - you'll do very well. You'll find that your memory isn't as bad as you though after all.

 

 

So you're new. No one knows you from a bar of soap. And everything that needs to be said has already been said before. Whether you're in online marketing, health and fitness, or just about any small business, it's been done. Or has it? Why would customers continue to seek you out even if you're seemingly a nobody. It's because customers don't necessarily seek out just a name. Instead they seek out a voice; a system; and the way you explain that system.

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 Time Stamps:  

00:00:20 Introduction

00:01:31 Table of Contents

00:01:57 Element 1: Your Voice Matters

00:06:39 Element 2: The System That You Follow

00:12:41 Element 3: Your Examples

00:16:40 Summary

00:19:52 Action Plan: The ONE Thing

00:20:42 Final Statements Including Info-Product Workshop in Washington D.C. + Goodies

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Transcript

Sean: One of the biggest things that we seem to battle with is our own minds. It doesn't matter how good we are or how good we get, there is always this battle in our own minds. We always wonder about the things that we are writing, about the audio that we're creating, of the video that we're creating because there is so much information out there isn't there?

 

You think, "Well, surely someone has done this before. Surely, someone has covered this before. Surely my work is just going to be irrelevant. No one's going to pay attention. No one will want this." You know something? You would think that this feeling goes away. It never goes away. Here are the three main reasons why you should persist nonetheless.

 

The three main reasons why you should continue to write, to create audio or video or a presentation is simply because people want to hear you. The three things that they want to hear are, your voice, your system, and the third is your examples. Let's go into a little detail about what these three things signify and why they are so important to your customer.

 

The first thing that we're going to cover is just the factor of your voice. When I write an article, people know that that article has come from PsychoTactics. When I draw a cartoon, you know that you can recognize my cartoon from everyone else's cartoon. 

 

You know this for a fact because there are thousands or tens of thousands of cartoonists out there, probably even a few million considering the population of the world. Yet, when you see a cartoon from me, you know instantly this is Sean's cartoon or someone that is trying to copy the same style. If that were to apply to cartoons, that also applies to writing, to speaking, to video, to audio.

 

This audio for instance is constructed in a completely different voice. It's a different way, there is no hype on it. There is no fanciness. But there are clear tiny increments that you can implement, things that help you move forward. You will notice for instance that when I'm speaking, I don't bring up money. Now, there are no how to make six figures, how to make seven figures, even if that is the case, it never comes up. That's because I believe that it's crass, it's low class to talk about money that way. Talking about money and making other people feel miserable or feel uncomfortable because they don't have the same situation, I think it's crass to do that.

 

I also think that it's silly to have all these gaps. Today I was listening to a podcast and someone said, "OK you can build this product and all you have to do is just get one customer a day. The product costs $497 and you just have to have one customer a day." Wait a second, you don't even have to have one customer a day, you just have to have one customer every other day and you make all of this money and you gave her $191,000-something figure. He just managed to leave out, how are you supposed to have that [half 00:03:45] customer a day?

 

I think those things are crass. It doesn't come out in my voice. It doesn't come out in my podcast. It doesn't come out in me audio, or my video, or my presentations. For the most part, we will stay within how do you actually move your skill ahead. How do you get these skills? That's my voice. For the most part it stays consistent. I'm not saying that I've never brought it up before. I'm saying for the most part, it stays consistent.

 

This is what you've got to understand. That for the most part your voice is going to stay consistent and you're going to attract customers and clients that like that voice. It might be a voice that talks about money all the time. Yes, that's great because that attracts that kind of audience. Then yours might be about hard work. We talk about the article writing course, which is the toughest writing course in the world. Clients will write in and say, "You got me at that line." Why would I sign up for anything if it wasn't tough or if it weren't tough, that's right English.

 

They tell me that this is what they want from life. They want to work hard, they want to create magic, that is the voice that I'm sending out. That's the voice that your clients are responding to, that's the voice that my clients are responding to. Whenever you have that bully brain coming in saying, "oh no, this has been done before. Oh no you shouldn't be writing or speaking or doing whatever it is you're doing", then shut down that bully brain and say, "This is my voice. I have grown up. I have learned things. It is my duty and my privilege to pass it on."

 

Your voice will come out and your people will listen to you. I know this is sounding very religious or cult-like but I will listen to pretty much any music that Sting brings out because I like his voice. If someone else were to sing the exact song, I don't think it would matter to me as much. That's what you have to understand, that once you've created your voice you're going to have an audience that is willing to listen to you, that's the first thing. Your voice really matters.

 

Let's move on to the second thing which is the system that you follow. When I first wrote the Brain Audit, it was more about a factor of just writing something down on a piece of paper. Someone wanted the notes, I wrote the notes, it became a book and that became the Brain Audit. Today, that document has become like the Bible for us at PsychoTactics.com, for all our as well. What you've got to understand is just this, that when I wrote that book, I didn't have a system. I was trying to create a system. I was trying to create a system for myself because someone ask that question, I answer the question but now you have to put it together in a way that is consumable, that someone can use. That's what I did. I put it together in the system.

 

It not only became a system for me, but also for my clients. Maybe I should put it the other way. It not only became a system for my clients but also a system for me. This is true for everything that I do. When I did the info-product scores, it generated a system in my brain. When I wrote any of the products like, the about us page, or the homepage which is about website components, and you'll see this in our product section in PsychoTactics, all of those things I wrote because I wanted to write it because I've been doing things over the years and most of them are nice, they work. In retrospect, it's nice to look back and see how they work. But it's so much better to have that system, to have that checklist. 

This is the kind of thing that people are looking for. Whenever they buy into your product or your service, they are looking for that system, not A system or B system or C system, they want your system. They like your voice, they like the way you operate, now, they want your system. If you don't give them that system, in a way, you're doing them a big disservice. You may think, "well, who am I to tell them how to do things?" But this isn't about how to thing, this is about a student in the 3rd grade teaching someone in the 2nd grade. If you know just a little more than the kid in the 3rd grade, you can help that kid.

 

If you know a little more about fraction, if you know a little more about spellings, you can help that kid in the 2nd grade. That's where you have to come from. The point is that you know your system is slightly different from any other system out there. That's all I'm interested in. I'm not really interested in the other systems. This becomes even more relevant in today's world where there are so many people who are totally hopeless of what they do but they are good at marketing. What they do is they'll do a lot of advertising, they'll do a lot of marketing, they'll do a lot of joint ventures, they'll do all that kind of stuff and people are buying into those products, sometimes the products are just $50, but sometimes they are $15,000.

 

It doesn't matter whether you spend $15 or $15,000, it's still a waste of your time and money. Those people are searching for someone who has a system. Those people are searching for someone who can put that system together in a cohesive way, and that is you. Put together that system and this is why you need to make sure that you get your information out there and you get it there sooner than later, that even if you get it 70% right, it's enough. You can go and fix it later.

 

Think of your system as software. Think of all the software you've used over the years. Think of how you've bought version 1, version 1.2, 2, 3, 4 and you don't feel bad about it do you? If you are such a perfectionist, which all of us claim to be, but of course, there is no such thing as perfection. Go back, just go back and fix it. Do version 1 then do version 1.2, 1.3, 1.7, go to 2. That's all we did. We did that with the Brain Audit. We sold version 1, we sold version 2, we sold version 3. The same people that bought version 1, also bought version 2 and they bought version 3 of a book.

 

It's not software, it's a book. You can do that as well. Believing your system, that's the second point. The first point that we covered was your voice. It needs to be your voice because want to listen to you. The second thing is just the system. Your system is totally different from everybody else's system.

 

The third thing are your examples and this very, very, critical. What is it about examples that make a difference? You can have a system, you can have a voice but somehow the examples that you use are going to be totally different from somebody else's examples. Maybe you'll give case studies that are totally different. Maybe you talk about stories that are your own personal stories or stories that you know from somewhere else. Maybe you'll use analogies that are different. People learn in different ways. When you give that specific analogy, when you give that specific story, the lights go off in the head and you felt this before haven't you? You feel this.

 

I was at a workshop once in Spain and there was this guy who is talking about values. Now, values are a system that you use in water colors top make your character stand out. I had read at least 50 books in water colors. I had gone to courses in water colors and I could never understand values. He came up with this system and these examples. The example was about how the values represent coffee and tea and milk and all that kind of stuff.

 

Of course it doesn't make any senses to you right now but the point was that that was my light bulb moment. That was the moment where I thought, "Wow this is so cool, I have never figured this one out before. I could go another 20 years and never figure this out." I figured it out at that point in time.

 

I'm sure that Spain helped. I'm sure my mindset helped. I'm sure that a lot of things helped. But the point is that you examples, your analogies, your case studies, they're going to be different. That's what you're going to take away from it. Just like I used the analogy of the Brain Audit. How we did version 1 and version 2 and version 3, you probably heard this whole thing about "Don't be a perfectionist". That story is going to stick in your head. I know it now. Even as I speak, I know that story is going to stick in your head. Every time you slow down, you're going to think of that story.

 

There you go, three things. Let's go over them quickly, shall we? The first thing that we covered was just your voice, people want to listen to your voice, it's very, very important. Whether that voice is a grumbly voice or a spammy voice or [inaudible 00:14:05] voice or whatever voice, that's the kind of client that is interested in your voice. It doesn't matter whether you consider it good or bad, your audience will be attracted to that. The second thing is just the factor of your system. Your system is going to be different. Even if you move just one peg away from the other peg, from somebody else's system, it's still your system and that's what I want to buy into. The third thing is your examples, your analogies, your case studies, your stories, one little thing in your book, in your audio, in your presentation could trigger off that magic. That's the magic that you want to bring to the table.

 

This is why you should never give up. This is why you should never consider yourself irrelevant. This is why you should push that bully brain far into the background and say, "you sit in a corner and when you're 35 years or up, you can come and bug me again." That's what you do.

 

Well, this is me Sean D'Souza. If you like this audio and you like this information, pass it on to a friend, pass it on to someone, so that they can benefit from it as well. Do write in and ask me the questions about info products or marketing or anything specific that you want to ask because you never know, I might run in it in an audio podcast, in fact I will do that. You know where to find me, it's at PsychoTactics.com. Go to PsychoTactics.com and we'll meet you there.