Imagine you had a program that generated over $150,000 a year. Let's also imagine that this program always had a waiting list and that clients loved it. Would you stop the program, or let it run? In 2006, we started the Protege Program and by 2009, it came to an abrupt halt. But was it abrupt? And why did it stop in the first place?

These stories and more show up in the Psychotactics story. There's not a moment of boredom as we head into the roller coaster of 2009 and beyond. Where we explore the crazy world of workshops, this time outside the safety of California. It's one nutty, exciting ride. Buckle up, because it's action-packed and full of lessons for your own small business.

http://www.psychotactics.com/stopped-protege/

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Psychotactics Workshop Story: Part 2

“This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.”

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It was February 2006

I’d just started a crazy venture called the Protege. Well it was crazy for me at least. I’d written a sales letter promising that I would teach six courses in one year. The courses were Article Writing, Copy Writing, Information Product Strategy, Website Strategy, Core Marketing Strategy and  PR (Public Relations). And no sooner than the Protege sessions started up when I had this idea of holding a workshop for the Proteges in California.

There was only one problem

This workshop was not part of what I’d promised. It was an extra workshop of five days. For the first three days we’d be working on Website Strategy and the next two days would be closed-door Protege sessions. So the problem that arose instantly was one of scheduling, money, effort and a few dozen assorted issues. For me it meant that I had to book a room somewhere in the U.S., book flights and do an entire workshop in slides in less than eight weeks. What’s more interesting is that the workshop didn’t exist. Notes didn’t exist and neither did the slides.

This was compounded by a few interesting facts

The Protege year was something that was just dreamed up in a salesletter. No material existed for any of the six courses (today they all exist in audio/text, but back then I was creating it as the courses rolled along). So I had this cute little challenge of hosting live teleclasses (training calls), creating content on the fly, managing a forum with 15 proteges and preparing for a workshop all at once.

Admittedly those were problems that were pretty rough but that was the least of my problems

I also had a bit of a mutiny on my hands. I hadn’t made the workshop a compulsory attendance issue (you could attend if you like to) but I sure stressed it was important. I also required each of the proteges to cough up an additional $500 for the workshop (it was just to cover the costs of the venue etc.) This additional payment didn’t go down well. What made it worse was they had to travel to Campbell, California, stay in a hotel and had all of this additional expenditure—not to mention they all had to take at least a week off from work. They were not happy in the least. It was almost like a bit of bait and switch.

But in my mind it wasn’t bait and switch at all
I really felt that those five days would be of immense help to the Proteges. For one there was the factor of learning in a compressed state (over five days). There was also the factor of connecting with each other because when people connect, they work better after the connection. To me it seemed quite sensible to have a meeting like this totally out of the blue (just kidding). But this sudden move kicked up a ton of dust and I then spent a fair bit of time on the phone, and via the forums and email sorting things out.

Once things were sorted out the real work began

We had to find a venue and get on with the job of getting the show on the road. Because Renuka’s sister, Audrey lived in Campbell, she did some scouting around for us and we soon located a meeting room at the adorable Pruneyard Plaza just 5 minutes away from Audrey’s house. And unlike the earlier workshops there was absolutely no drama at all this time around.

All we had to do was land in San Francisco, and we were picked up from the airport. We were chauffeured around from Kinko’s (where we got our binders and notes photocopied) to Costco and just about everywhere. In fact the hotel even picked us up at 7am from the house every morning and dropped us back every evening (I bet no one has ever done that before or since). And the workshop went like a dream. Oh I forgot to tell you how we made a profit on the workshop. 

So here’s how we made a profit

$500 per Protege wasn’t even barely going to cover the airfares and costs of the workshops, and if you’re going to do a workshop might as well make a profit. That’s only part of the issue. When you’re doing a workshop, you want to make sure you have a full house. Having just ten or fifteen people in a room is nice, but having about 25-30 people in the room really creates enormous energy in the room. So we decided to sell 15 -18 seats (we only ever take 33-35 attendees—never more). And the good thing was that we had already “sold” 15 seats because  all the Proteges decided to show up. This created an instant urgency because 50% of the seats were taken. Bear in mind this workshop was selling at $2200 per head or thereabouts, so it wasn’t an easy sell. Even so, the workshop was soon filled. The Campbell workshop was well on its way.

The Campbell workshops and the Protege Program went on till the year 2008

The Protege Program was a reasonably profitable program generating anything between $100,000-$150,000 a year. And year after year we’d have the workshop in Campbell, CA and there were never any hitches. And it became part of the Prot’g’ Program. What was even cooler was we started speaking at the System Seminar in Chicago, which was often held around the same time as ourProtege sessions, and so we’d finish the Protege and head to Chicago, do a speaking engagement and head for a well deserved break either within the US or to Europe.

But then in 2008 we decided to pull the Protege Program

As I said, the Protege Program was a reasonable sum of guaranteed income year after year. But to my mind it wasn’t good for consumption. Expecting a client to learn five or six new skills in a year was like learning five or six new languages a year. It wasn’t just bad for consumption, but it wasn’t (in my mind at least) doing the customer any good. So we pulled the Program. And people often asked me what I would replace the program with. And I didn’t plan to replace it with anything. As far as I was concerned, I was more interested in teaching and getting the clients to learn and implement. To me the Protege Program, wonderful as it was, wasn’t achieving exactly what I set out to do. And so when we pulled the Prot’g’ Program, we pulled the workshops as well.

Not all workshops of course

We’d still do some workshops in Auckland, where we live in New Zealand. One or two a year if at all. But the workshops held locally didn’t require the same level of planning and precision as the international workshops. Plus there were no travel costs, hotel costs or any fancy costs. Even our core costs of the room hire and expenses were lower here (There’s no gratuity or tipping required in New Zealand and all costs are inclusive of taxes, so there are no surprises whatsoever).

And then the year 2009 rolled along. It was the first year we’d didn’t do any workshops. Not in the US. Not in New Zealand. And I hadn’t really planned to do any in 2010. In fact I was pretty much happy to be back in New Zealand after a three week vacation in Argentina and Uruguay. And we were sitting at our favourite cafe when Renuka suggested we do the US/Canada trip.

In every situation, I have an idea and Renuka says no

In this situation, I was saying no and Renuka wanted me to go ahead.
And we had a lead time of just four weeks. In four weeks we had to get at least 35 people to sign up at two venues: Vancouver and Washington D.C. And I wasn’t even keen on doing the trip. But Renuka said we had to do it.

Um did I say 35 people? I meant 70 people (35 at both venues).

It was a start of a mini nightmare.

The nightmare wasn’t so much getting the sign ups for the workshop

The nightmare was getting the venue for the event. You see, all those years of California sun had made us pretty complacent. Getting a venue for the workshop simply meant that we fixed a date, called the hotel and got our room. And bear in mind the booking is always temporary. Even though our workshops have always been solidly booked, we still will always make a temporary booking—just in case.

This time around there was no temporary booking to be had

Unlike the usual California venue, we were looking for places in Washington D.C. and Vancouver, Canada. And two instant problems cropped up. One was the obvious one: we’d never had a workshop in any of these places, so we were totally unfamiliar with the territory. The second one was that we had no relationship with the hotel—and hence not a clue of what to expect.

But at first it all seemed simple enough

I went online, and looked up hotel meeting rooms and there they were—dozens of options just waiting to be picked. What surprised me was that most of them were costing as little as $200 + taxes per day. I was astounded—truly astounded, because these were hotels in prime areas. Some of them were within walking distance of downtown areas, even the White House. But hey, I wasn’t going to complain. I now had a pick of hotels and I was going to do my cherry picking all right.

So I did what any sensible person would do

I emailed half a dozen hotels and asked them if they would be willing to book a meeting room for the dates we’d decided upon. And with that job done and dusted, I moved along to making sure I had the sales pages ready, because we needed to get participants to sign up as well. And the first email that went out was pretty darned heartening. Over 50% of the seats got taken in just a few days. This was looking better than I thought, until I checked my email.

The inbox was swamped with responses to my queries

But the common question I kept getting was: How many rooms can we block for your guests? Hmm, I figured 35 people were going to show up, so I told them we’d have at least 15-20 rooms taken up by the guests. But I couldn’t be sure, I admitted. After all, the guest may choose to stay at the hotel or elsewhere. So I asked them to block a temporary 15-20 rooms and as we signed up participants, we’d direct them to the hotel and they could sign up. Of course there would be a cut off date, so the hotel wouldn’t have to keep the rooms booked forever.

But the hotels didn’t want to play ball

They wanted us to guarantee the rooms. And guarantee at least 80% of the rooms. So if you consider 35 participants, then 80% is about 28 rooms. Consider that every guest stays 3 nights, and that’s about 84 bookings. Each room may be in the range of $100-$200. You get the idea, don’t you? The hotels were asking us to guarantee between $8500-$17,000 worth of bookings. And if the guests didn’t show up, we’d have to foot the bill.

So I changed the question.

I asked: If I don’t guarantee the rooms, what will you charge for the meeting rooms? $6016 came the answer from one of the hotels. That’s $6,016 per day. A lot better than paying $17,000, you’ll agree, but still not a risk worth taking. And now we were in a real soup. Most of the participants who’d signed up were told that we’d have the workshop in Washington D.C. and Vancouver, Canada, but the exact details were going to be revealed later. Now we had sign ups but not a meeting room in sight.

It was time to fill in every hotel form we could find

I don’t know how many forms I filled up, but I hated every one of them. It was the same boring set of questions over and over again, and because they’re all forms, both Renuka and I were cutting and pasting endlessly. And then the responses started coming in by the truckload. Every time we’d check our email there was a whole bunch of emails with counter questions: How many rooms will you book? Will catering be involved? What is the minimum catering you’d require. The answer was none, no and nothing. But it still took up hours and more hours every day. I was feeling like a zombie dealing with what seemed like an endless barrage of queries.

That wasn’t the only problem

The other problem was they were so many hotels (some with similar brand names) that they all started merging into one in my head. It was at this point that three saviours stepped right up. In Vancouver, Leanne asked if she could help. In Washington D.C., Marina and Natalya volunteered as well. By this point we were exhausted, but we’d managed to get a few hotels to agree to our terms. So yes, we’d do a temporary booking. And no, there’s no need of any fancy catering. And no we can’t guarantee the rooms. And some agreed. So now it was a matter of creating a shortlist.

Excel and me aren’t the best of friends

In fact we hardly know of each other. In all my year on a computer—and I’ve been on computers since around the early 1990s, I’ve never so much as opened up Excel, let alone do a spreadsheet. But as I said, I was desperate. Someone (I forget who) created a Google docs spreadsheet and we started to fill in whatever details were available. And things were starting to look good. The sign-ups had slowed down considerably since the early burst, but to be fair we’d only sent out one or two emails. Now that the hotels were kinda falling in place, we could have the luxury of filling in the rest of the seats.

Actually things were looking better than good

We’d settled on hotels that were in great areas: In Georgetown, Washington D.C and downtown Vancouver. At which point Marina and Natalya volunteered to look up the hotels. Natalya was in Washington with her husband and kids, so she jumped on the metro and very magnanimously checked out the hotels we’d shortlisted. And she came back with a “F” on the hotels. She wasn’t impressed. The one we’d set our hearts on, was in the basement, very squeezed and with a distinct odour of mildew.

But Natalya wasn’t giving up

Right at the start she’d hinted about a hotel called Hampton Inn, located near the Reagan National Airport. Now she set about checking it out as an alternative. And yes, the “shoe” fit. She approved of the meeting rooms and the hotel accommodation. But this close miss had set our hearts racing. What if we’d made the same mistake in Vancouver? This time it was Leann’s turn. She made the long drive from Whistler to downtown Vancouver just to recce the various options. And yes, lightning does strike twice. The one we’d originally chosen was a bit of a dump. Slightly tacky. Not so hot.

But just like Natalya’s story there was a happy ending

The Listel on Robson Street, Vancouver was actually happy with our crazy terms. And they were ready to make a booking for those meeting rooms. That Excel spreadsheet was finally down to two choices, one in D.C and one in Vancouver. But it’s not like the emails stopped. You see we’d contacted (I don’t know) maybe 40-50 hotels (maybe some twice, even). And they were all writing in asking to confirm. We even had some long distance calls to top up the emails. For a change it was nice to say NO. And yes, our trip was finally getting underway.

And not a moment too soon

Participants had to fly in—and some from tiny airports, so they needed to know quickly which airport to fly into. By this point we knew the answers. Luckily from that moment on, nothing much went wrong, but that week or two was pure misery. I’d go to bed completely drained—even frustrated. To have those rooms booked and the event underway was such a relief. All I had to do was make sure that the rest of the seats were filled and I got down to the business of making sure we got the blog rolling (to create a factor of excitement and anticipation) and the slides and the music for the event.

The Brain Audit workshops were kinda unusual

For one it wasn’t just a workshop. Every four years, we have a Cave Party + workshop. At this Caver Party, we not only learn, but we go out on a day trip, do a treasure hunt, sample the wines in wineries and spend lots of time over lunch and dinner. But I was still a bit apprehensive. Some of the participants had been with Psychotactics and 5000bc for a long time. And some of them had read The Brain Audit in Version 1, Version 2 and also Version 3. They were members. They’d been on our courses. And there I was, talking about The Brain Audit. I was afraid it would be super boring for them. I mean we’d gone over this stuff before in the books, audio and video. How could I straddle the expectations of those who’d just read the last version of The Brain Audit vs. those who’d read every version.

Sleep wasn’t easy to come by

And it wasn’t because of jet-lag either. Sure we’d flown in from New Zealand to California, woken up at 4am and got onto a flight bound for Washington DC. Sure we were tired and crossing squillions of time zones. But exhausted as I was, I couldn’t sleep. I’d wake up at 2am to practice my presentation and go over it again and again, making dozens of changes. Even the second day (which was the day off) had me a little perturbed. I wasn’t sure how we’d go about the treasure hunt. Were we going to play dodge ball? How would people react to having to spend an extra day for no apparent learning? These things bothered me a lot. And it wasn’t till Day 3 that I truly started to relax just that tiny bit.

I wasn’t well either

I was definitely very exhausted. Not sleeping well. Apprehensive. And yes, I had a reasonably irritating acidity problem as well. This meant instead of gorging everything in sight, I had to restrict myself to “baby food”. Anything that was bland, non-oily—as I said, baby food. Alcohol, chocolates, coffee, icecream: they were all off the menu. Of course I wasn’t paying much attention at first. So I went out. I ate Ethiopian food, then Mexican, then Italian—yes, back to back meals.

And I was in more than slight discomfort. That didn’t help me overall. And now I’m sounding like a real wus, but I managed to stiffen my shoulder and neck as well. So why am I telling you all this? Well there’s sympathy (ha, ha) but more because you need to know that these things happen. That you’re not going to get this free ride into everything turning out just hunky dory. And yet if you listened to the recording of the workshops or were there at the workshop itself, you’d notice little or nothing unless I told you about it.

The last night in D.C.

We’re all packed and ready to catch an 8am flight the next day to Vancouver, Canada. It’s an international flight, so we have to be at the airport by 5 am or so. And so we make sure we get to bed before 10pm. Then at 10:30pm, the fire alarm goes off. There’s this insistent beeping, and we’re roused from a deep, tired sleep racing around the room madly. I tried to call the reception, but the phone seemed dead.

Renuka ran barefoot into the corridor only to find it completely peaceful (Folks were coming back from dinner, and seeing Renuka barefoot, another woman took off her shoes). No one seemed slightly disturbed. It was like we were the only ones panicking. Then I looked at our bags. They were sitting right under the sprinkler. And I thought it was a good idea to move the bags before the sprinklers went off and soaked all the equipment.

As I moved the bag, the sound of the fire alarm shifted

Aaaagh! It was our travel clock. There was no fire. Somehow the travel clock had shifted and an alarm had been set for 10:30pm. And that’s what was going off. I know it seems funny to you. And it was funny too us. We enjoyed the madness for five minutes and then hopped back to bed and dozed off immediately.

By the time we got to Vancouver, my diet was doing really well.

The workshops were far more relaxing for me. I smiled a lot more. And then, after a few days in Vancouver, we were ready to go back to San Jose, California for a week, before heading back to New Zealand. The original plan was to have three workshops. One in Vancouver, Canada. One in Washington D.C. and one in London, UK. Thank goodness we stopped at two. I was exhausted. I was ready to see sheep and head back on my Air New Zealand flight back home. And we did. We had a little hiccup or two (the flight was delayed by 12 hours; I acted like an idiot and ate spicy Indian food and re-started up the acidity) but all in all it was just part of the game.

Workshops are stressful

There’s so much to do. So little time. It involves pre-selling, getting venues, making sure everyone’s comfortable, getting great content and running a tight ship in terms of budgets—amongst other things. Things go crazy in workshops. And not so crazy. And these experiences may intimidate you a bit. Believe me, you should have workshops. They’re what helps you connect with your audience in a way that no Internet browser can do.

They’re what help you become a better teacher, presenter and consultant.

And it forges a bond that causes clients to become friends. We went with Marcus Stout for sushi. Stew Walton spent close to 6 hours to come and say hello, join us for dinner, and then went back the next day (another six hour journey). Greg Lee brought his daughter, Rabia and his wife Penelope along to meet us for dinner. Marina Brito took us to lunch, showed us around, and hosted another lunch for several of us. Steve Washer helped us with the video shooting, production and editing. Tom Clifford helped us by being the perfect interrogator.

Karen Tiede and Warren Hayford made sure I ate sensibly at the workshops. The list goes on and on and these are just folks I’m mentioning from the D.C. Workshop. Everyone plays a massive role—way more than you can imagine. This isn’t just some passive “show up and learn” workshop. Everyone gets “goodies” from their hometown. Everyone takes pictures. They have long chats. Dinners. This is like Thanksgiving or Christmas lunch (without all the tension ;)). It’s magical. Often even very emotional. And yes it’s a moment in time that you can’t recreate by just being a speaker at some event. You have to wade in and it’s not always pretty, but it’s always exciting and memorable. And so far, it’s always had a happy ending.

These are events you can’t recreate sitting at your desk in the comfort of your office. You have to be a little brave. A little scared. A lot hassled. And you’ll find rich rewards in hosting workshops.

So there you have it. A glimpse into just some of the episode into our workshops. Let’s head off to the next chapter: the story of 5000bc.

Footnote: You always want enough people in the room, and it’s not because of cost and profit factors alone. There’s also the factor of having enough people in a room. If there are too few participants, it’s much harder for both the presenter and the audience. For the presenter, having a group size of between 20-30 ensures a high level of energy in the room. You get all sorts of folks when you have about 30 of them in the room, and invariably you get introverts, extroverts, funny folks, more serious folks. In short you get a good mix. This is critical for a presenter, because not only does it assist in the actual presentation, but also in group sessions where a good mix is pretty darned essential.

Still reading? Don’t miss the Psychotactics Workshop Story: Part 1

 

Imagine being a hostage at your own workshop! Imagine not having access to your own venue; having to take permission from someone else just to conduct your event. This is the crazy story of the very first Psychotactics U.S. Workshop. And while it's an entertaining story all by itself, there's a lot to learn as well.

What went wrong with the strategic alliance?
What did we do when the credit card company went bust?
And how did a hurricane come to our rescue?

Let's go on this on part one of this crazy roller coaster ride into Psychotactics land.

http://www.psychotactics.com/crazy-workshop/

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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: What went wrong with the strategic alliance?
Part 2: What did we do when the credit card company went bust?
Part 3: And how did a hurricane come to our rescue?
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
 

Useful Resources

The Brain Audit: Why Clients Buy (And Why They Don’t)
Another Psychotactics Story: The Early Years-Psychotactics-Moving to New Zealand
The Power of Enough: And Why It’s Critical To Your 

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Psychotactics Workshop Story: Part 1

“This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.”

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“You want a room for 150 people? Is that correct?”
“Yes that’s correct,” I said. “150 people.”
And then I put down the phone.

That was the booking I was making for our first ever Psychotactics workshop in the US.

And I did some quick calculations. I had watched other marketers fill up rooms with 1500-2000 people. And I figured, naively of course, that I could easily manage to sign up at least a hundred and fifty folks. And if you know anything about workshops, you’ll get to know one thing quickly: You don’t have a workshop unless you have a room. Because that’s the first thing a client will ask. They always ask you where you’re going to host your workshop, and ask for the dates.

And those dates need to be set in stone long weeks, sometimes month in advance. But hey, it wasn’t like we weren’t prepared.

We were so nervous about this event, that it was critical we planned about six months in advance.

It didn’t help that I had never been to the U.S. before. It sure as heck was scary that I had an Indian passport. Now it’s not like I wasn’t already a permanent resident in New Zealand. I was, but you don’t get New Zealand citizenship for five years, and so I was stuck with the Indian passport. And the passport matters. With an NZ passport I can just jump on a plane at five minutes notice. With the Indian passport, I needed a visa.

I was petrified because I was selling seats at a workshop, and wasn’t even sure I’d get a visa

It’s not for want of trying. I got in touch with the American embassy a few months in advance. They didn’t process visas that much in advance, they told me. All I could do was buy my ticket, get the requisite paperwork and book an appointment to get the visa. There was only one glitch. They would let me know about the visa a week before I was due to travel.

And that was only part of the “problem”…

On the other front we had the issue of signing up clients for the workshop. This as you can tell, was no easy task. The price of the workshop was $1500 per person. That didn’t include any meals, stay or travel costs. If a client was to agree to come to the workshop, they’d have to fly or drive to get to Los Angeles. And it’s safe to say that you’d end up spending another $500-$750 on top of the price tag of the workshop itself. I somehow had to make this workshop too hard to miss. I had to make it enticing enough so that people would somehow decide they just had to be there.

And so we did the Free 16-Week training course in advance.

In case you didn’t work it out, that’s four months of training week after week (kinda of tells you how much in advance we were getting prepared). And every week we’d have an hour’s worth of teleconferences. Each of the teleconferences had their own agenda. And their own set of complications.

The complications arose from not knowing how many people would show up on the call

It was the year 2004. And back then, if you had a teleconference, you had a lot of no-shows, but still a heck of a lot of people would show up. And when we announced the 16-Week Course we got over 2000 people signing up to the free course. Should we book 500 teleconference lines? Or 300? Or 150? It was not only difficult to take a decision on the numbers but it also cost a fair packet to reserve those many lines at a time. And don’t forget, we were just getting started at Psychotactics. Every dollar was extremely precious to us. Throwing dollars on excess conference lines wasn’t my idea of fun at all.

Reluctantly, very reluctantly, I booked 500 lines

And roughly 150 people showed up for the first call. I instantly slashed the number of teleconference lines down to 150. Sometimes the call was packed to the brim. Sometimes not. But I figured I wanted 150 people and the most interested of the lot would show up anyway. And yes we were recording all the calls as well, so the number of downloads were still reasonably impressive. If you looked at the operation from the outside, it looked like a well-oiled machine.

Yet it was rough for us at Psychotactics

We were putting out fires on many fronts. One big front was the content that had to be drummed up week after week. On most weeks, I had no clue what we were going to cover the following week. And despite the fact that it was free, customer expectations were sky high. We’d get dozens of emails asking for the topics for all the calls. We’d get emails asking for the agenda of each call. People even asked for transcripts. And creating content week after week was only part of the problem.

The other problem was our “alliances”

As I said: I was scared. This was our first trip to the US. I had no idea where to go, what to do, and whom to trust. So I created some sort of alliance with some US based marketers. And in doing so, created a bit of quicksand for myself. I asked them to book the conference room, and the hotels on my behalf. Bing! Another mistake. When you book the room, the hotel only deals with the person who’s booked the place. Any changes you need to make have to be routed through the person who’s made the booking. As you would expect the hotel was dealing with the alliance. I was paying the bill but they were taking the decisions and calling the shots.

The workshop hadn’t even started, and the alliance was starting to go pretty sour

And it was all my mistake in a way. I didn’t do my homework. I got into a discussion with another marketer in the US and told him of our ‘newbie in the US’ predicament. And he assured us that he’d help. In fact, he wanted to be part of our workshop. He would actually market it to his list as well, and he wasn’t really interested in making any money.

I didn’t think it was fair

If he was going to put in time, fly to the venue, market it and even do some public relations then in my opinion he deserved to be paid. I told him we’d pay him a percentage of profits. I forget how much it was: something like 20% or 30%. And so we got off to what seemed a decent start.

But looks can be deceiving

We were in trouble almost right away when deciding the number of teleconference lines. I wanted to have fewer and then ramp up the number if a lot of people showed up. He was adamant we needed to have more lines, seeing how many people had signed up. And while I could see both sides of the picture, there was a hitch. He wasn’t paying for anything. So if we had twice as many lines, I would end up paying twice as much.

The trouble should have stopped there, but it didn’t

The room was booked in his name, even though I was paying the bill. At first I thought I’d be able to attract huge numbers, but it soon became apparent that we’d only ever get to about 20-30 people. So I called up the hotel and asked them to change the room to a smaller size. Makes sense, doesn’t it? You don’t pay for a massive room if you’ve got a smaller group. That didn’t sit well with our alliance. He was furious that I’d changed the room without consulting him first.

The tough part was that I had to tread carefully

For all practical purposes, the room was booked in his name. If he decided to prevent me from having the room (for whatever reason), I’d be in big trouble. I’d be at the venue (if I ever got my visa) with all those attendees, and he could effectively lock me out. The pressure was building on all sides and it wasn’t hard to see a worst-case scenario for everything.

Just when you think the worst is going to happen, it doesn’t

Well it didn’t for us at least. We managed to sign up about 25 people. And the alliance brought along about six-seven of his clients (they didn’t pay, and I was OK with that. I’ll explain why later). And so we had a potential 30 or so people coming to the workshop. And a week before our visit, we went (nervously) to the American Embassy, and walked out with 10-Year business and tourist visas.

And then something completely unexpected happened

PaySystems went bust. You see PaySystems was the merchant account we were dealing with. And normally we didn’t have a large amount due to us. Our clients would pay through the website, and the payment would go to PaySystems, who would in turn settle most of the bill by depositing it in our bank account. There was always a fifteen day lag between the collection of the money by PaySystems and the deposit. So for fifteen days we were in limbo. As it happened, in the last two weeks before the workshop, many clients paid their amounts and their “food coupons” through PaySystems.

The fortnight we were collecting a huge chunk of money, they decided to go bust.

I don’t know how much we lost. It may have been about $6000 or more. It wasn’t just the money accumulated in those two weeks. Merchant account routinely keep a small percentage of every transaction as a “security” in case there’s a chargeback of sorts. Well, guess what? They keep that percentage amount for several months. So not only did we lose the money collected in that fortnight, but also a decent chunk of “change” collected over the months.

This was proving to be a regular rollercoaster ride…

And while it was at points very frustrating, it was also hugely exciting. There was nothing to do but stay on the rollercoaster and make the best of the ride. In fact, to reduce the stress we took a few extraordinary measures. One of those measures was to take all the three-ring binders with us, along with the printed covers.

I know it sounds insane

Imagine trying to put 30+ two-ring binders in a suitcase. Because it doesn’t fit in one suitcase It takes two whole suitcases. And though a binder doesn’t weigh much by itself, it really starts to add up once you put thirty or more of them in suitcases. And so off we went, on our epic workshop trip to the US of A non-stop to San Francisco.

Why San Francisco and not Los Angeles?

Because Renuka’s sister lived near Campbell (a town near San Jose) at the time. We needed some time to get used to things. And get over whatever jet lag were were going to run into. Besides we still had to do a fair number of things before the workshop began. Some of these things included getting the notes printed, making sure the audio guy knew what to do etc. But at least by that point we were ready to tuck into a nice lamb roast on board, Kiwi wine and good ol’ Kapiti ice-cream on Flight NZ8 to San Francisco.

It’s nice to arrive in a place where you have someone waiting for you

Having Audrey (Renuka’s sister) and Mangesh (her husband) around was a real blessing for us. We walked into a ‘chauffeur-driven’ set up. If we wanted to go here, there or anywhere, we would be willingly ferried around. We didn’t have to work out how to get an internet connection. We just walked into their home and connected our computer to their wi-fi. The fridge was loaded with more food than we could possibly eat (though we did give it our best shot). And as we settled into the California lifestyle, our days were filled with endless wine, rum, margaritas and massively-sized chip packets (all food was jumbo-sized, at least by New Zealand standards).

Once the partying slowed down it was time to get back to work

We didn’t know what to expect in Los Angeles. After all we were arriving there just days before the event. So we decided to print out all the sets of notes at a local Kinko’s (Kinko is a stationery chain in the US). Remember we had two-ring binders? Well it seems that the US had mostly three-ring binders. And while we got Kinkos to photocopy the set of notes, we forgot to tell them that they would go in two-ring binders. As you can imagine, they had to work out some additional costs, but hey at least they got the notes to fit in our “Kiwi” two-ring binders.

We also had to make sure we recorded the event

So we managed to hire a professional sound guy (he was from Oakland). And after some cordial chats we were able to get him to understand what we needed. It was still going to cost us about $3500 or so to record and edit the audio, but hey let’s face it: In the workshop we were talking about recording what you do (the three prong system). There was no way we were going to goof up on the recording. We just had to get it right.

Our alliances wanted to get it more right than us, as you would expect

They demanded three microphones. One for me, and two for them. They wanted massive speakers in a room, when in fact a room for thirty people isn’t that large at all and even computer speakers do the trick. We were beyond arguing at this stage, so we gave in to the demands no matter how crazy. We had bigger fish to fry.

Remember the stuff we printed at Kinko’s?

We printed about 35 sets of notes. Each set consisted of about 100+ pages or so. And the math is easy. That’s 3500-4000 pages. Ever tried stuffing about four thousand pages into suitcases? It makes me laugh now thinking about moving that much paper around (and let’s not forget the three-ring binders). What we did next was even more nutty.

We decided to get on a Greyhound bus Why Greyhound?

Why not hire a nice car and drive to Los Angeles? Or at least take a flight? I don’t know what possessed me, but as a child I had brochures and booklets about Greyhound. And for some weird reason I wanted to get on a Greyhound. This presented a whole bunch of new, unwanted problems. The trip itself was fine. It was getting to a Greyhound station and then from the Greyhound station that was a bit of drama in itself.

The Greyhound bus station was far away from everything

Of course at the San Jose side of things, it was easy enough. Audrey dropped us off. And the trip was very pleasant (despite everyone asking us why on earth we were going by Greyhound). By the time we got to Los Angeles, we were quite edgy. I went off to get a cab or shuttle and some guy kept pestering Renuka. Nothing too dramatic, but she was glad when I got back. I can’t exactly remember how we got to the hotel, but it was some crazy circuitous route that involved Los Angeles airport. I know this because I reckon I saw LA airport about five or six times while we were in that city.

I can tell you I was nervous

I’d done workshops in New Zealand. Yet somehow I expected Americans to be different. I can’t explain what I expected. But I was nervous despite the fact that no one could see it. I wasn’t sure how things would turn out, and where we’d run into our next hurdle. We found our room, and it was absolutely wonderful. Clean, neat. Very nice bed. And as we opened the drapes, there it was: The most welcoming sign of all.

It said: Air New Zealand

Our room was facing what seemed to be some sort of Air New Zealand building. And instantly a smile crept onto my face. I could see that things were really going to swing our way from here on. It’s funny eh? Little things calm you down. Under different circumstances, I could have seen that sign, and not be in the slightest bit interested. And here it was, a mere sign, acting like a lighthouse on what I perceived to be a stormy night.

Stormy? It was balmy…

From then on almost nothing went wrong. The biggest drama of the next few days was the Atkins diet. Apparently this new diet was out, and people were gobbling “protein” instead of “carbohydrates.” Apparently the hotel’s breakfast was too “carb-based”. But it really wasn’t my problem. It was the hotel’s problem. You see we used to serve some sort of meals at our workshop. At least a muffin at breakfast and some lunch and then coffees through the day. And you may never realise it till you do a workshop, but these meals eat into your bottom line like you can’t imagine.

What’s worse is that the feedback forms then switch to food

When you cater, and ask someone about the workshop, they invariably have something to say about the food. If the food isn’t up to their mark, or they’re on some crazy yo yo diet, they’ll find all sorts of holes to pick. What you’ve gone and done is reduced the impact of their workshop experience, because you catered. So long story short: No catering. This was the last workshop we ever catered for. Truly speaking it wasn’t catering. The participants had bought “meal coupons” and they were using them accordingly, but we were still being told about catering issues.

Other than food we had some minor hiccups

Footnote:

It’s easy to run up a coffee bill of $1000 or more for a three day workshop

And small additions of meals or cookies can all add up considerably. It may sound petty to worry about expenses and you have to remember why you’re in business. You’re in business to make a profit. You don’t spend months ramping up to a workshop, then do the workshop and then hoof it back home—only to find you’ve lost money on “catering”. Catering can absolutely eat into your profit and leave you in the “red”. And that’s not a pretty sight. Or a nice feeling.

So the simple solution is no food. Find a venue which has plenty of food around it and then let the participants find their own food. They don’t overeat (and hence stay awake) and there’s no grumbling. And you don’t go home broke. Now that’s a happy story, isn’t it?

The aftermath of the Workshop

So we were done with our workshop in Los Angeles. And we’d planned to go east heading to Chicago where we were scheduled to do some speaking engagements. And then off to New York, Florida, New Orleans before heading back to California. Chicago was a good stop because we got to see the city for the first time—and liked it too. Except that the speaking engagements were all over the place. One engagement was to a group of business owners. The other was to some folks in real estate investing. Both went incredibly well, but only one paid any dividends. And there’s a lesson here, of course.

If you want to do free speaking engagements, pick them carefully

It may seem all very obvious to you that you need to speak to the right audience, but when you’re starting out you’ll clutch at any straws. And in the process you’ll speak to audiences that simply have no need for your product or service. Now this isn’t a waste by any stretch of the imagination. Every speaking engagement is worth its weight in gold. You know how some idiot coined up that term “people fear speaking more than death”. Well the big reason for the fear is just a lack of practice speaking to all kinds of audiences. If you keep speaking on a consistent basis, the fear does go away (And if it doesn’t go away, there are EFT techniques that will help you relax yourself and make the fear go away). But I digress…

So there we were headed east and then onto this grand tour of the US till a hurricane stopped us in our tracks

We did our sightseeing in New York, taking a nice break in New Jersey and then planned to head to Florida. And when we looked around, we were the only ones heading in that direction. Everyone else was headed away from Florida. So prudently we changed our plans, did a little detour to meet an old acquaintance in Washington DC and then headed back to California.

And good thing too, because we’d have been in a lot of trouble if we hadn’t turned around

You see we’d recorded the workshop in California. And we’d promised there’d be a recording for those who’d paid for the recording. Well all hell broke loose when we got back. We found the sound guy (we had this professional sound guy, remember?) was editing the workshop audio to exclude all ums and ahs from the recording.

Today I have barely a few ums and ahs but back then there were hundreds of them.

And as he edited he kept track of the time, inflating the editing bill considerably. At one point he also decided to put in some opening music to each audio. No problem there till we realised he wanted to charge a royalty on every copy we ever sold (yes, in perpetuity). It was time to pick up the credit card, buy some royalty-free audio and put it into the audio. And at least that fire was put out.

But there was still the issue of listening to every audio file

This activity had to be done because we had to put the content details and the time stamp on the CD. So we needed to know which files were going on which CD, do the design of the CD and blah, blah, blah. There was also the “tiny” issue of paying our strategic allianceswhat we’d promised. Which was all very fine, except they insisted on an item by item costing.

So there we were having to dig up every single cost to present to the “alliances”, when in fact we were paying them from our profits (They hadn’t brought in a single paying customer, so we were paying them from the profits made as a result of selling to our own list). Anyway, Renuka is a bit of a maniac when it comes to storing even the cost of a single staple. So we had the information needed, but it was still galling (and very frustrating) to have to give this silly account when we shouldn’t have had to do anything like that at all.

And the months ticked by. We ate, we worked. We did a few trips. And then we ate and drank some more. Till it was time to leave. And get back to New Zealand. No Greyhound this time Just good ol’ Air New Zealand—and almost in time for summer too!

So what’s the moral of this story?

Every workshop has three core components. The pre-sell. The workshop itself and at least a week of post-workshop stuff (if you sell products/services or recordings of the workshop). Taking into consideration all of these factors is pretty important because it takes the stress off you. We got lucky with that hurricane. If we’d not turned round and gone back, we’d have dragged all the work back to New Zealand and been a lot more stressed. Because we worked in “vacation time”, we were able to simply tidy up the good, bad and nasty bits with minimal effort.

And that was International workshop No.1. There wasn’t going to be Workshop No.2 till the year 2006. Amazing as it may sound, that workshop wasn’t even planned. It was just something I thought up on fine day in February. And yeah, there’s a story in that too. And you’ll find out soon enough…

Coming Up Next: The Psychotactics Story—Part 2
Another Interesting Psychotactics Story: The Early Years-Psychotactics-Moving to New Zealand

 

 

When you're speaking to a client or presenting your product or service, do you have a ton of "ums" and "ahs"? Do you find it frustrating, but don't know how to get rid of that irritation? And if you're recording an event, a whole bunch of ums and ahs can cause a major headache in editing?plus push up editing time and frustration levels. So how can you get rid of all your ums and ahs in under 15 minutes?

http://www.psychotactics.com/speaking-professionally/

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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1:  How to get rid of ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ when podcasting or speaking in  under 15 minutes
Part 2:  The sound of spit and how to get rid of it
Part 3:  Why you need variation in your voice

Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.

Useful Resources

Read about: Why A Relaxed Brain Works Faster Than A Tired Brain
Preacher or Teacher? Why Our Clients Struggle To Learn Skills Quickly
Other techniques:  Why Variation Is The Hallmark of Outstanding Presenters

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The  Transcript

“This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.”

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This is The Three Month Vacation, I’m Sean D’Souza.

We’ve been podcasting since around November of 2014. One of the things that I never seem to cover is anything to do with podcasts. That’s not on purpose, it’s just something that I’ve never covered. Today I’m going to have this very short podcast, no stories, just a little technique that will help you as you’re going about creating audio or even speaking in public.

Little Technique To Help Creating Audio

There are a few things that we do when we’re recording podcasts that are very frustrating. The first thing that we do is we cannot help it and we go um, uh, um. These ums and uhs seem to infiltrate our speech whether it’s in a podcast or in an interview or just presenting to your client. On podcasts, you also get the sound of spit, yes? Moisture in your mouth. It sounds like [chump chump 00:01:06], like that. It’s very frustrating for you, not so much for the listener. After awhile even listeners start to tune in to that spit kind of sound. How do we get rid of that?

Finally the third thing about the podcast is just this variation in your voice. It’s very easy to start recording and forget that there’s an audience out there. You’re never speaking to an audience, you’re always speaking to one person and this is the mistake that we make. These are the three glitches that we make when we’re podcasting. Today I’m going to get rid of all three of them.

How to get rid of ‘ums’ when podcasting or speaking

Let’s start off with getting rid of all the um and the uhs that we have when we are podcasting or speaking to anyone at all. It doesn’t matter whether you use a PC or a Mac, you’ve seen that spinning ball on your computer haven’t you? When the computer’s trying to access something, it’s going through that, hey let’s get to this something. You can’t do anything and you’re just sitting there waiting for it to do it’s thing before you can continue working.

That’s approximately what your brain is doing, but at a much higher speed. It’s a better processor, your brain. What it’s doing is it’s trying to access the information. Every time a speaker says um or ah or like, that’s approximately what they’re doing. They’re accessing their database. How do you stop it? At all points in time, especially if you’re not reading off the screen, like right now I’m not reading off the screen. My brain has to work out what I’m going to say next and yet there are no ums or likes or ahs coming out.

The reason is, I’m pausing. I could say “Um what we need to do next is um” or I could say, “So … what we need to do next is …” It’s a little break. You’re noticing it now because I’m bringing it to your attention. That’s all I do. Whenever I’m making a presentation, whether it’s on stage or it’s a webinar or any kind of recording, I’m conscious about the ums and the pauses. All I do is stop speaking. Just let your brain access the information it needs and let a natural pause come in.

Now if your podcast is anything like this podcast, then there will be music in the background, and sometimes not even music in the background, but a lot of music, and the pause won’t be noticeable. If you’re speaking in public, it’s critical to get rid of the ums. If you’re doing a recording like this, it’s a nuisance to remove all the ums.

When I started out many years ago, when we did our first workshop in Los Angeles in 2004, there were ums and ahs all over the place. The more tired I got, the more ums and ahs just popped up out of the woodwork. I just had to learn to pause. I’m not saying that in a live workshop, which lasts two or three days, you’re not going to get ums and ahs. It’s just that you can reduce it dramatically. In a podcast or a speech like this where you’re nice and fresh, you can eliminate it completely. Just practice that for 15 minutes. Just pause whenever you think you should be saying an um and sooner or later you get rid of all the ums and the ahs. If one or two creep in, that’s easy to edit.

The second factor that we are dealing with when recording podcast is this sound of moisture in your mouth.

Whenever you sit down to do an interview, often you’ll find that the person on the other end of the line will say hey wait I’m going to get a glass of water. That’s because they want to keep their mouths nice and moist. Your voice doesn’t crack and it’s a really good idea, especially if you’re on a call for maybe an hour, like later today I’m on a call for an hour and a glass of water really helps.

When you’re doing something like a recording, you’re very close to the mike. Every little [click click 00:05:29] sound just clicks in as one more click. It’s very frustrating for you. What I tend to do is I record in short bursts. I’ll keep my mouth very dry, which is totally counter intuitive. I’ll keep it extremely dry, actually try to suck out all the moisture, and then I’ll record in short bursts. One sentence, two three sentences at a time and then I’ll stop and then continue.

It’s funny but if you concentrate on it, you will find that the moisture doesn’t enter your mouth at all. You can go for several sentences, as I’m doing right now. I haven’t really stopped, even though you don’t know, the tape is just rolling. The funny thing is that if you train yourself to speak for long periods without having to access any moisture in your mouth, you will find that you can speak for quite a long time without any of those clicks that you get from the moisture in your mouth. The trick is to just keep it dry. That’s the trick I use rather than moisten it. The moment I get access to water, I’m in trouble again.

This is not foolproof. Obviously some of the clicks are going to escape and they’re going to get on tape, but it doesn’t matter. You can go and edit it. You just have to do a lot less editing and you’re more aware of the clicking sound.

The third and final issue is one of speaking to an audience.

Often when we get in front of the mike, we think that we have the whole audience listening in. Good presenters and people who have been on radio know that you’re always speaking to a single person. When you’re speaking on stage, you have lights in front of you and often you can’t see much. You can’t see more than a few people in the front row. What you’ve got to do is start to pick on one or two people in the audience and speak to them as if you were having a conversation with them.

The same thing applies to the podcast. When you start to speak as if you’re speaking to an audience, it becomes less of a discussion, a conversation. Think of it more as someone sitting in the same room with you or at a café. Always use the word you.

The second thing that we forget is that we have to change our tone, our pitch, our speed. If you listen to this podcast you will notice that I will suddenly speak quickly and then really slow down. In real life we have variations. We speak quickly or slowly, we get all excited and go louder and then go really quiet. You can do this on stage, you can do this in your podcast, you can do this in your presentation. You have to be aware of it. You have to have this space or this sudden movement through it, and then it becomes like a conversation and it’s no longer this single paced monotone podcast where you’re speaking to an audience.

One last tip. When you’re recording audio, you want to smile. When you smile, I don’t know, something in your voice changes. When I announce this is The Three Month Vacation, I’m smiling. You can feel that smile. You can’t see me, but you can feel that smile. Smiling when you’re speaking- not all the time, just some of the time- the audience figures it out. I don’t know how.

That’s pretty much it for this podcast. Three things that we covered. Let’s do a quick summary. The first thing that we did was the ums and ahs. It’s very simple to get rid of the ums and ahs. All you have to do is pause. It sounds like a crazy long pause, but it doesn’t matter. Just pause. It’s fine.

The second thing is this moisture in your mouth which causes all these clicks.

The way to do that is not to have water around, or at least to keep speaking, don’t worry about your mouth getting dry, and if you get some clicks in, you can go and edit them later. Anyway, the clicks seem to come just before you start speaking or just after, so start speaking, leave a little gap, and then continue speaking. You’ll be able to edit out those clicks quite easily.

Finally remember you’re not speaking to an audience. You’re always speaking to one person, maybe two people. You’re always using the word you. It’s a good idea to vary your tone. When you press the pause button more often, the tone changes automatically. When you come back again, your tone has changed just a little bit. Because all of my recordings are done without a script, I have to hit the pause a lot of times. That’s why you’ll find the tone shifting a lot. I’m also conscious of the fact that sometimes I’m slowing down and sometimes I’m going really fast. Sometimes you go softer and sometimes you get more excited and you go a little louder. All of that creates for this variation that you find in normal every day speech. That makes it so much better to listen to a podcast.

There you go.

Finally some tips on podcasting. What’s the one thing that you can do today?

The one thing that you can do today is to put these gaps. It doesn’t matter where you speak, you’re going to have the ums and ahs come in because that’s how we access the database in our brains. If you just put in these pauses just like I’m doing right now and train yourself to do it, you’ll find fewer ums and ahs on a regular basis.

Another trick is to make sure that you have examples. For instance I will get a lot of ums and ahs when I’m doing an interview and I’m trying to work out some examples to give in that interview. If I’m talking about The Brain Audit, I need to have examples of the problem and of the solution. I need to have examples of the objections. When the person asks me about the problem or the solution, my brain is trying to access the examples and then I go um and ah. That’s another way to avoid it when you’re in a live call, when you’re in a live interview. To have the examples prepared in advance.

This is podcast number 72. That’s at psychotactics.com/72 where you can get the transcript and the audio. You’re listening to this podcast while we’re in Amsterdam. It’s going to be cold and freezing in Amsterdam. This podcast is being recorded while we’re still in Oakland and it’s warm and sunny out there.

We’re going through the United States, Amsterdam, Morocco, Singapore, before we get back to New Zealand. It’s going to be a long trip, a month away, and we’ve got to have everything cued up in advance. All the podcasts have been cued up and all the newsletters and all the 500bc newsletters, which is our membership site. That’s a lot of work, but once we’re done with that work we can go on vacation. We don’t have to check email, we don’t have to do any of that stuff.

If you have any more questions on podcasting, or you have tips on podcasting, send them to me at sean@psychotactics.com. I’m also on Twitter @seandsouza and on Facebook at Sean D’Souza. Bye for now.

Still reading? Don’t miss—Why A Relaxed Brain Works Faster Than A Tired Brain

http://www.psychotactics.com/relaxed-brain-faster/

Who's Doug Hitchcock? And in a world full of goal-setting exercises, why does Doug's system stand out? Find out why most goal-setting goes hopelessly off the mark and Doug's plan works almost like magic year after year. Find out not just how to set goals, but how to create a stop-doing list (yes, that's a goal too). And finally, learn why most goals are designed for failure because they lack a simple benchmarking system. Find out how we've made almost impossible dreams come true with this goal-setting system.

http://www.psychotactics.com/goal-setting-successfully/

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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1:  Why most goal-setting goes hopelessly off the mark
Part 2: How to set goals, but how to create a successful stop-doing list
Part 3: Learn why most goals are designed for failure because they lack a simple benchmarking system
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.

Useful Resources

Chaos Planning: How ‘Irregular’ Folks Get Things Done
Learning: How To Retain 90% Of Everything You Learn
5000bc: How to get started on your goal setting

-------------------------------

The  Transcript

“This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.”

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This is the Three-Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza.

Doug Hitchcock was my first real mentor and he had been bankrupt thrive. When I first moved to Auckland in the year 2000, I didn’t really know anyone. I was starting up a new business, I was starting up a new life. I joined a networking group and within that networking group I asked for a mentor. Well, no one in the networking group was willing to be a mentor, but someone did put me in touch with Doug.

The only problem with Doug was he had been bankrupt thrive. Now, when I say he was bankrupt thrice, it doesn’t mean he was still bankrupt. He just pulled himself out of the hole three times in his life and there he was, at about 70 plus, and he was my first mentor.

Before he starts to talk to me about anything, he asks me, “Do you do goal setting?”

I’m like, “Yeah, I have goals,” and he goes, “No. Do you have goals on paper?” I said, “No.” He says, “We have to start there. We have to start with goals on paper.”

That’s how I started doing goal setting, all the way back in the year 2000. Almost immediately, I got all the goal setting wrong. You ask, how can you get goal setting wrong? After all, you’re just putting goals down on a sheet of paper. How can you get something like that wrong? You can’t write the wrong goals, but you can write too many goals. That’s exactly what I did. I sat down with that sheet of paper and I wrote down all my work goals, my personal goals, and I had an enormous list.

That’s when Doug came back into the scene, and he said, “Pick three.” I said, “I could pick five.” He goes, “No, no, no. Pick three.” I picked three goals in my work and three goals from my personal life. You know what? By the end of the year, I’d achieved those goals. Ever since, I have been sitting down and working out these goals based on Doug’s method.

Doug may have lost his business thrice in a row, but he knew what he was talking about. Most of us just wander through life expecting things to happen. When they happen, we say they happen for a reason, but they don’t happen for a reason. They happen, and we assign a reason to it.

In this episode, I’m going to cover three topics. The first is the three part planning. Then we’ll go the other way. We’re create a stop doing list. Finally, we’ll look at benchmarks and see how we’ve done in the year.

Let’s start off with the first one, which is the three part planning.

Does the San Fernando earthquake ring any bells in your memory? Most people haven’t ever heard of this earthquake, and yet it was one of the deadliest earthquakes in US history. It collapsed entire hospitals, it killed 64 people, it injured over two and a half thousand. When the damage was assessed, it had cost millions of dollars, and yet it could have been the disaster that eclipsed all other US disasters.

That’s because the earthquake almost caused the entire Van Norman Reservoir to collapse. The dam held, and yet, if it had collapsed, the resulting rush of water would have taken the lives of more people than the Pearl Harbor Attack, the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, 9/11 and 1900 Galveston Hurricane combined. In barely 12 seconds, the top section of the dam had disintegrated and yet, the surrounding areas were extremely lucky. The reservoir was only half full that day.

The aftershocks of the earthquake continued to cause parts of the dam to break apart. A few feet of free board was the only thing that stopped a total collapse. This total collapse is what many of us come close to experiencing as we try to clamber up the ladder of success. We try to do too many things and we don’t seem to go anywhere. In effect, this is like water cascading down a dam. There’s too many things and we have no control over it. What’s going to stop it?

The only thing that seems to stop anything is some kind of focus and goal setting is focus. The way we go about our goal setting is the way Doug showed me. The first category of goal setting is what we want to achieve at work. The second set comprises of our personal goals. The third, this is the most critical of all, what we’re going to learn.

Should we start off with the first one, which is our work goals? Well, that’s not the way we do it as Psychotactics. The way we work at Psychotactics is we look at our personal goals. Our own lives are far more important than work. What we do is we sit down, and first, we plan vacations. As you know, we take three months off. We’ve been doing this since 2004. We started our business at the end of 2002. Yet by 2004, we had decided we were going to take three months off.

The thing is that your vacations also need planning. Our vacations are broken up into big breaks, small breaks, and weekends. Now the big breaks are the month long vacations, and then the small breaks are in between that. We’re go away for a couple of days somewhere, and that’s our small break. I’m saying weekends, because before I wouldn’t take weekends off. I’d be working on the weekend at least for a few hours on Saturday morning and a few hours on Sunday morning, and I don’t do that any more. Now that’s almost written in stone. It’s very hard for me to get to work on weekends. I’ll slide sometimes, but it’s very hard.

The most critical thing to do is to work out the long breaks. When are we going to have those, and then the shorter breaks. That comprises that whole vacation concept, but you also have to have other personal goals. Maybe I want to learn how to cook Mexican dishes, or maybe I want to learn how to take better photographs. Now, these are personal projects. They’re not not pseudo work projects. They’re things that, at the end of the year, I go, “Wow, that’s what I’ve achieved. That’s how much I progressed.”

That’s how you start off with personal goals. You plan your breaks. You plan what you want to do personally. Once you’re done with that, then you go to your work goals. We have a lot of work goals, we have the article writing workshop coming up, we’ve got the 50 words workshop, which is, how do you start up an article. We’ve got a whole bunch of things, because we’ve got products, we’ve got courses, we’ve got workshops. All of this has to sit nicely between, so that we work for 12 weeks and then we go on a break.

We’ve decided that we’re not having any workshops next year. We’ve had a lot of workshops this year, no workshops next year. Now, this leaves us the chance to focus on the courses and the products. Now my brain is like that dam, there’s always water rushing over. I want to do a million projects, but then I have to choose. The article writing course is one of the things that I want to do for sure. I want to do a version 2.0 of it. The cartoon bank, I’ve been putting that off for a long time. That’s definitely something I want to do. Then I’ll pick a third one. Do I stop at three? No, but I make sure that I get these three down. The three that I’m going to do, they go down on paper. Some other projects will come up, a lot of stuff that I might not expect, and yet I’ll get all of this done, but these three, they’ll get done. Those three vacations, they will get done.

Then we get to the third part, which is learning.

What am I going to learn this next year? Maybe I’ll learn a software, or maybe I’ll learn how to use audio better. The point is, I have to write it down, because once I write it down, then I’m going to figure out where I have to go and what I have to do to make sure that learning happens. This is not just learning like reading some books or doing something minor like that. This is big chunks of learning, so that by the the end of the year, I know I’ve reached that point.

When it comes to planning, the first thing that we’re always doing is we’re looking at these three elements, which is work, vacation, and learning. If we have to do other sub projects, we’ll do it, but these nine things get done. Year after year after year. This is what Doug taught me, he gave me this ability to focus. I consider myself to be unfocused, I consider myself to want to do everything and anything. That was the gift of Doug.

In the year 2008, we had a program, it was a year long program. You probably heard of it. It was called a Psychotactics Protégé program. We would teach clients how to write articles, how to create info products, public relations. Lots of things along the way in that year. As you’d expect, it was reasonably profitable. 15 students paid $10,000, and so that was $150,000 that we would have in the bank before the year started.

In 2009, we pulled the plug on the Protégé system. Why would we do that? We started it in 2006, it was full, in 2007 it was full, in 2008 it was full, in 2009 there was a waiting list. We decided not to go ahead with it. We decided it was going to go on our stop doing list. We were going to walk away from $150,000, just like that. Yes, some clients were unhappy, because they wanted to be on the next Protégé program. They had seen the testimonials, they had seen the results. They knew that it was good enough to sign up for. They knew that $10,000 was a very small investment, for a year long advancement. On our part, we realized that we had to walk away from $150,000 that we were getting on cue, every December.

This is what’s called a stop doing list. We’ve used this stop doing list in our own lives. When we left India, and got to Auckland, it wasn’t like we were leaving something desperate. We were leaving something that was really good. I was drawing tattoos all day, going bowling in the afternoon, having long lunches, Renuka’s company was doing really well. They were picking up all expenses, and the only thing we really had to pay for was food but, at that point in time, we decided we had to make a break. We had to stop doing something so that we could do something different. We don’t know whether that different is better, but at that point we have to stop it, so that we can explore what is coming up ahead.

There are two things that you put on your stop doing list.

One, something that is working exceedingly well. The second thing, something that’s doing really badly. Or something that’s getting in your way. Now, the first one doesn’t make any sense. If something is doing exceedingly well, why would you stop it? Well, the point is that if you continue to do something, then you can’t do something else. You don’t know how good that something is until you stop doing it and then you go on to do something else.

Last night, I was reading The New Yorker, and The New Yorker is one of my favorite magazines. There’s James Surowiecki saying exactly the same thing. He’s saying that Time Warner should sell HBO. HBO has now 120 million subscribers globally. It has earned over 2 billion dollars in profits last year. It’s stand alone streaming service has got over a million new subscribers since last spring. What does the article recommend? It recommends that they get rid of it, they sell it, they get the best price for it at this point of time, when they’re doing so well.

What if it doubles in its value? That’s the answer we’ll never know, but the article went on. It talked about ESPN and how in 2014 it was worth 50 billion dollars. Disney owned it, they should have sold it, they could have banked the money. They could have focused on something else, but no, they kept it. ESPN is still doing well, it’s still the dominant player, but you can see that it’s not exactly where it was in 2014.

The Protégé program was doing really well for us, clients were with us for the whole year. They would then join 5000 BC, we’d get to meet them. It was a lot of fun, and it generated a sizable revenue and we walked away from it. It enabled us to do other stuff that we would not have been able to do. When you say stop doing list, it’s not just the bad stuff that you have to stop doing. Sometimes you have to stop doing the things that are very critical, like next year we’re not doing workshops. Workshops are very critical to our business, but we’re not going to do the workshops. Instead, we’ll do online courses. Instead, we’ll do something else.

We’ll create that space for ourselves, even though the workshops are doing really well. The other side of the stop doing list is stuff that’s driving you crazy. You know it’s driving you crazy, but you’re not stopping it. For instance, in September of this year, we started rebuilding the Psychotactic site. Now, there are dozens of pages on the Psychotactic site and I want to fiddle around with every single one of them, and do things that are interesting, different. The problem is that there are other projects, like for instance the storytelling workshop. Of course, vacations that get in the way.

The point is that, at some point, you have to say, okay, I really want to do this, but I’m not going to do this. I’m going to put it off until later. This is procrastination, but it is part of a stop doing list. You can’t do everything in the same time. Last year, this time, we had the same dilemma when we were going to do the podcasts. I wanted to write some books for Amazon, and I wanted to do the podcast. Every day, we would go for a walk, and it would run me crazy. I didn’t know where to start, when to start, what to do first. I had to sit down and go, okay, what am I going to stop? I just dumped the Amazon books and started on the podcast. Now we’re on podcast number 70, and it’s not even been 52 weeks.

It shows you how that stop doing list can help you focus and get stuff out of the way. Sometimes you have to procrastinate to get that point. Now the stop doing list is not restricted to work alone. You can take it into your personal life as well.

For instance, I used to get my hair cut by a hairdresser, and I was dissatisfied for a very long time. You come back in, you grumble, and my wife, Renuka, she said, “Okay, stop grumbling. Go and find another hairdresser.” I ran into Shay, now Shay was cutting my hair so well, it was amazing. I wasn’t the only one who thought that was amazing. Usually, I was on a waiting list at a barber shop. I would get there, and there were two people in front of me, waiting for Shay. While a few of the barbers just stood around, doing absolutely nothing because no one was interested. Then, one day, involuntarily, Shay went onto my stop doing list. Kimmy was around and Shay wasn’t and so Kimmy cut my hair. She was better than Shay. I thought, “Oh my goodness. I should have done this a long time ago.” Then Kimmy got transferred to another branch, and now there’s Francis. You’ve heard about Francis in other podcasts. Now Francis is my top guy.

There you go, even in something as mundane as cutting hair, there is a stop doing list. You have to push yourself a bit, and at other times you have to pull back and go, “No, we’re not going to do that.” The stop doing list is for good times, as well as for pressurized times. You have to decide, I’m going to stop doing it, I’m going to move onto the next thing.

This takes us to the third part of planning, which is benchmarks.

Now what are benchmarks? Often when we set out to do a project, say we’re going to do that website. What we don’t do is we don’t write down all the elements that are involved in doing that website because a website can go on forever, can’t it? It expands exponentially. When you are saying, I am going to write books for Amazon. Well, how many books are you going to write? How many pages are the books going to be? What’s the time frame? Where are you going to get the cartoons from? Who’s going to do all the layout?

Having this kind of benchmark in mind makes a big difference. When we plan for something, for instance if I’m planning for the article writing course, which is version 2.0. I’m going to have to sit down and work out what I’m going to have to do. When I’m doing the stock cartoons, I’m going to have to sit down and work out what kind of stock cartoons, how many. It’s perfectly fine to write a top level goal. You should do that, you should say, “Okay, I’m going to do the website,” but then you have to get granular. The granular bit tells you, have I reached my destination. Otherwise, people don’t get to their goals, and that’s why they’re struggling, because there’s no clarity.

Usually, you’re going to get the clarity when you have only three things to do, but even so, if you don’t have benchmarks you’ll never know when you’re reaching your goal or if you’re going to reach your goal.

That brings us to the end of this episode.

Summary

What did we cover? We looked at three sets of goal setting, and that is your personal goal setting, your work goal setting, and your learning goal setting. Instead of having 700 of them, you just have three things that you want to achieve in the year. Three major things that you want to achieve in the year. Logically, you start with the work, but don’t handle the work. Just go to the breaks. Organize your breaks first, because you get reinvigorated and you come back and then you can do better work. First, fix the breaks and then go to the work, then go the learning. That takes care of the first set.

The second thing that you want to do is you want to make sure that you have a stop doing list. Sometimes, things are working, they’re going your way, and they still have to be dropped. That’s what we did with the Protégé program, that’s what we did with our move to New Zealand, and a lot of good things have become better, because we’ve decided to move along. Sometimes, you’re just confused because you have too many things to do, and procrastinate. Go ahead. I mean, I know this about planning, not procrastination, but procrastination is a form of planning, when you have too much to do.

Finally, have the benchmarks. Make your goals a little more detailed so that you know when you’re hitting those benchmarks. Plan it in a little more detail. That’s how you’ll reach your goal. This is what goal setting is about. It’s very simple. People make it more complicated than it needs to be.

What’s the one thing that you can do today?

Very simple. Work, vacation, and learning. Get your paper out, get your pen, and start writing. Three goals. You can start off with seven, or ten, but whittle it down to three. Oh, and make sure you write it down. When you write it down, things happen. It’s like magic when you write it down. Keep it in your head, it’s not as powerful. Write it down, it happens.

If one of your goals is to join 5000 BC this year. That’s 5000 BC, our membership site. You’ll find that it’s quite a nice place to be. It’s a very warm and friendly place. It would be great to see you there. It also gives you the opportunity to be first in line for any of the online courses that we’re having. That might not seem like a big deal until you see how cool the online courses are at Psychotactics. It’s not just another information dump, you actually get the skill. If you set out to be a cartoonist, you become a cartoonist. If you set out to be a writer, you become a writer. It’s not just information that you’re getting, it’s all very practical.

Being a member of 5000 BC gives you that little edge to get in there before everybody else. You have to read The Brain Audit, however. You can get that at psychotactics.com/brainaudit or on amazon. Com. If you’ve read The Brain Audit and you would like a special collector’s edition, then email us at Psychoanalytical. We’ll give you instruction on how to get the special collector’s edition.

That’s it from me at Psychotactics and the Three Month Vacation. Bye for now.

One of the biggest reasons why we struggle with our learning is because we run into resistance.
Resistance is often just seen as a form of laziness, but that is not true at all. There are hidden forces causing us all to resist doing what we really should do. This slows us down considerably. Find out how to work with resistance, instead of fighting it all the time. Click here to get the free report on ‘How To Win The Resistance Game’.

http://www.psychotactics.com/free/resistance-game/

What's wrong with this statement? 
Instead of wondering when our next vacation is we should set up a life we don't need to escape from.?
There doesn't seem to be anything wrong, is there? And yet this entire line is based on a myth. And that's not the only myth that circulates so well and widely. Another myth is that a business has to grow; has to increase clients; has to increase revenues. But is that why you really got into business?
Did you set out to create a life that's work, work and more work? Join us as we explore three big myths, and destroy them:

Myth 1: That your business needs to constantly grow bigger. 
Myth 2: Somehow you'll have more time, and your business will be on auto-pilot / Myth 3: That we need to set up a life where we don't need to wonder about our vacations. / / Yup, incredibly silly business myths. Let's take them head on and get some sanity back into our lives, instead.

http://www.psychotactics.com/three-business-myths/

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In this episode Sean talks about

Myth 1: That your business needs to constantly grow bigger
Myth 2: Somehow you’ll have more time, and your business will be on auto-pilot
Myth 3: Vacation is the enemy and work is everything
Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.
 

Useful Resources

The Power of Enough: Why It’s Critical To Your Sanity
Three Obstacles To Happiness: How To Overcome Them
5000bc: How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems

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The  Transcript

“This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.”

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This is the Three Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza. Imagine you’re a band, but not just any old music band. Instead, you’re the most popular band in the whole world. You’ve sold over 200 million records. You’re in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, and probably only five or six bands have sold more than you in the entire history of pop.

Barry Gibb has never done this before, never taken the long walk to the stage by himself.

Speaker 2: Is it important for you to do this?
Barry: Yeah, it’s everything to me. It’s all I’ve ever known. I don’t know how to do anything else.
Speaker 2: t went pretty well, though.
Barry: I can’t get a job.
Speaker 2: He’s the only surviving member of one of the 20th century’s greatest vocal groups, and this night, at the TD Garden in Boston, he’s about to begin his first ever solo tour.

You have to ask yourself why. Why would Barry Gibb, with all his success and all the money that they’ve earned over the years as the Bee Gees, do his first solo tour. It’s not like he needs the money or the fame, because they’re the only group in history to have written, recorded, and produced six consecutive number one hits. As Barry Gibb himself boasted, “We weren’t on the charts. We were the charts.”

In that spring, as he hit the road across North America for six solo shows, every show was costing him half a million dollars a night. He said he would be lucky to break even. But that’s not the point. “I have to keep this music alive,” says Gibb. To me, that’s what embodies what I do. I want to keep the music alive. I think this is true for most of us. Most of us aren’t really looking for this magic pill. We’re not looking to double our customers, triple our income, do any of that kind of nonsense.

What we’re trying to do is keep our music alive. We’re trying to get some purpose in our lives. The money, the fame, all that stuff’s really nice, but does it matter in the long run? At the height of The Beatles’ fame, John Lennon said, “Work is life, you know, and without it there’s only uncertainty and unhappiness.” When you look at someone like the guy who runs Uchida, a little restaurant in Vancouver Island, the restaurant is only open from 11:00 to 2:00. When you get there you eat some of the most delightful Japanese food I’ve ever eaten, and I have traveled to many places, including Japan. That magic is expressed in his work. He gets to work and he stays until the restaurant closes at 2:00. It doesn’t open for dinner because from 2:00 to 9:00 he’s preparing the next day’s meals. Every day the meal is just so amazing. It’s different every single day. It’s a big surprise, and it’s always amazing.

Today I’m going to talk to you about three myths about business.

We’ve run Psychotactics for the past 13 years, but the business goes back a long way when I used to be a cartoonist. I’m going to bring to you these three myths which I think are important. I think they’re important because everyone is talking about the other side, about more money, more customers, doubling your income, doing all that stuff. As I said, that’s really nice, but is there a flip side to it? That’s what we’ll cover in today’s episode.

First up on the menu today is the fact that you have to grow. That’s myth number one.

Myth number two is that things get easier as you go along.

Myth number three is that you have to create a life that you don’t need a vacation from.

Let’s start off with the first myth, which is you have to grow.

Once a year, we have a really important meeting at Psychotactics. My wife Renuka and I meet with our accountant Steve, and we go over our accounts. We look at how much money we made in the year. How much are our profits? What are the expenses? All the stuff that you do with an accountant before you sign off everything. We’re in 2015, but when I look at the accounts, it looks exactly as it did in 2007.

2007 was a really good year. We earned twice, maybe thrice as much as we needed. Of course a third goes to the government. That’s just what you do; you pay tax. Even so, you had twice as much as you needed, and our needs are not much. We take our breaks. We go on vacation. We buy little goodies here and there, but we’re not flash people. We don’t have the flashiest car. We don’t fly business; we always friendly economy. We keep our expenses under control. But even so, having twice as much as you need, that’s quite a lot.

The way that a lot of businesses go about this situation is to say let’s double it, let’s triple it. Here’s what I’m telling you. You don’t have to double it. You don’t have to triple it. You don’t have to enter that rat race. All you have to do is stay comfortable. That was your goal in the first place. Your goal as a business owner was to start up a business, to have control over your life, and be comfortable. It was not to struggle anymore. It was never to double and triple your income.

In fact, when you read the stories of business owners that have doubled and tripled, and I don’t know, quadrupled, quintupled their income, you find that there is a huge sacrifice. That sacrifice is their family, their life, their health, everything else. When people talk about all of the extra stuff, the extra money that comes in, the extra fame, they don’t talk about that part until a lot later when they’re doing their memoir. The reality is you have to double or triple nothing.

When we look at our list, for instance, our list grew from 200-300 people. Now there are 37,000 people. It might seem quite small when you think about it, because we’ve been around since 2002, to have only 37,000 people. I know it sounds like a lot if you don’t have 37,000 people, but if you’ve been around since 2002, you should have 350,000 people. Here’s the reality. Those 37,000 people don’t open the newsletter. Maybe 4 or 5,000 people open the newsletter at any given point in time. This is a reality. Out of those 4 or 5,000 people, probably 400 people generate more than 90% of our income. Most of them are our members at 5000bc.

At this point, this whole message seems very conflicting, even hypocritical, because what we’re saying is we’re very comfortable. We are earning thrice as much as we need. We’ve got this huge list. I’m saying to you, don’t do that. Don’t go crazy over stuff. We could have had a list of 350,000 people. We could have ten times the income. What would we do with it? How many sacrifices would we have to make to just do that kind of stuff. Instead, the sacrifice comes from other places. This is where the growth really matters.

When you look at many of the products at Psychotactics, you will find that they have been polished over time. When you look at The Brain Audit, it started with version 1, and then version 2, and then version 3, and then 3.2. that’s where we grow exponentially. When you look at the courses, they improve by 10% or 15% every year. How do we know this? Because we get feedback. Every course has one full day of feedback where clients tell us what we did wrong and how to fix it. We have to fix it, and that takes a lot of time.

There there is the growth. We still take exactly the same number of clients for every course as we’ve always done. We never exceed 25. If you’re in a workshop, it’s never 30. There is never this need to continuously grow and grow bigger, and grow fatter, and grow … I don’t know. There is no need. The need is in making magic, in getting your work better. Why is this need so important? Because you as a person, you feel satisfied. You feel wow, my work has got better over the years. You’re fixing it and it’s improving and it’s evolving.

Then you look at your clients and see that they are achieving these skills. Their business is growing. They’re more satisfied. They’re taking more vacations. You think, my mission is on its way. It’s not finished. It’s on its way. The benchmark needn’t be the fame and the benchmark needn’t be the money, and the benchmark needn’t be the growth. That’s one of the first myths that I want to take apart. Because almost every book out there is talking about something quite the opposite.

In fact, yesterday I was on Facebook and there it was again: double your income, lessen your work. No, your work is interesting. Your vacations are interesting. I get the point. You can’t sell a book that says stay stagnant with your income. Stay stagnant with your revenue. Stay stagnant with your clients. It’s not going to sell. Maybe it will, I don’t know, but the point is it’s a myth. You have to be satisfied first. Your work has to bring great satisfaction and you have to be comfortable. That’s all that really is required from you as a small business. Let the Apple and the Google and all those big companies do whatever it is that they want to do. Let them double and triple and do whatever they want to do. That’s probably not for you.

If you’re the person that enjoys your family time, and enjoys your life, and enjoys the little things, then this is how you go about it. Because, as we saw with the Bee Gees and Barry Gibb, the fame didn’t make that much of a difference. It made a difference, but at the end of the day, it’s about keeping the music alive. It’s about keeping the magic alive.

That brings us to the end of the first part.

Now we go to the second myth, which is things get easier.

Back in the year 2000, if you went to a site called millionbucks.co.nz, you would find our site. Yes, I’m embarrassed by the name, but that was what I wanted to do right at the start. I wanted to grow the business, make a million bucks, do all the stuff that we’re told we are supposed to do. Unfortunately, no one, or very few people were making money online at that point in time. The online space was not seen as some place where you could go and by stuff. It was always about information and sharing that information.

It’s not until 2002 that we launched Psychotactics. That’s when we sold our first copy of The Brain Audit. That was a big surprise. We were forced to setup our credit card system by someone else who kicked us into doing it. Then someone showed up and bought the first copy, took us completely by surprise. Then my wife Renuka would do a happy dance. She would get up from her chair and do a dance in the room. Then of course, as the months passed, we would get some more sales, and every time a sale came she would do a happy dance.

It does get to the point where you can’t dance anymore and you have to sit down and do your work. You also buy into this idea that things will get easier. Because when we started out, we were working five, six, seven days a week. I realise there are only seven days in a week. But we were working all the time. We thought things will get easier, and they have got easier. But wait a second, we still put in five full days. We take the weekend off now but we still put in five full days, so how much easier has it got?

The point is that if you want to do superb work, things don’t get easier. Because you’re always making it somehow better. You’re always learning. You’re always getting feedback, and feedback kills you. Because feedback tells you that your work isn’t as superb as you think. That dish that you just cooked, that you’ve been raving about, that you think everyone should praise you for, it’s too oily. There’s too much salt in it. Or maybe there’s just over the top salt and it tastes good but that’s too much salt for human consumption.

You cannot take that feedback because that feedback means that you have to fix something. Clients will come back right after we’ve written a book and they’ll say, “You should fix this part or you should move that part.” They’ll get onto our courses and they’ll start to move things around. They’ll suggest different types of technology. We have to listen. All of that listening means all of that doing, and doing means that things never get easier. It’s like the story of the Golden Gate Bridge. They say they start painting at one end and by the time they get to the other end, they have to paint it again. I don’t know if the story is true, but that’s approximately what your business is going to be like.

It’s going to have lots of ups and downs, but more importantly, it’s not going to get easier. If you want to improve your work, if you want to make it magic, you’re going to get that feedback. You’re going to ask for that feedback and you’re going to get that feedback, and you’re going to have to fix things. When you fix things, it’s work. When you create new stuff, it’s work. All of this work brings an enormous amount of satisfaction. I can look back at a lot of the things that we’ve done, and if it weren’t for the clients, I wouldn’t have done it. If it weren’t for the deadlines, I wouldn’t have done it. But all of it is work.

You look at the storytelling workshop that we’re doing now in Nashville and Amsterdam. I would never have written the notes. I’ve written a series on storytelling. It’s available as a book. But this is more comprehensive. This is more in-depth. I’ve had to spend weeks working it out. I sit at the café looking pensive, drinking my coffee. Then it’s work. To me, it never gets easier, because you’re always trying to explore that depth, as it were. You’re trying to get that magic. You’re trying to keep that music going.

We all start out with this dream of sitting on the beach and doing nothing. That’s not how the brain works and that’s not how the body works. In fact, if we sat at the beach and did nothing, we’d soon be a vegetable in no time at all. If we don’t do our daily walks, and we don’t exercise, and we don’t meditate, and we don’t do all the stuff that we’re supposed to do, we don’t do all this “work,” there’s no satisfaction in life.

Today I can write an article in 45 minutes. I can do the podcast. I can do webinars. I can do a lot of stuff. What happens is you get much faster and better at doing stuff, and you want to get faster and better all the time because it improvements your work. You put more cartoons in the books. You tweak the workshops. You do stuff that only brings more work. Of course that’s why you need the vacations as well. Because you need to wind down. You need the weekends to wind down. That’s really how life continues. It’s not about the beach. The beach, that’s vacation time. There’s a separate time for it.

The third myth is that vacation is the enemy and work is everything.

Because we’ve been talking about work, haven’t we? Let’s look at this third myth, which is that vacation is the enemy. But is vacation really the enemy? It seems like it, doesn’t it? Because wherever you go on Facebook or on the internet, you run into this little saying by Seth Godin, and it says, “Instead of wondering where your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.” When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense to have a great life and you don’t need a vacation.

It doesn’t make sense to me at all. Because when you look at that saying, what it’s saying is that your job, whatever you’re doing right now, or your business, whatever you’re doing right now, is so tedious that you’re not enjoying yourself. It’s saying that the enemy is that bad job, that unsatisfying job, that unsatisfying business that you’re running right now. And that you need to find something that is satisfying. That’s the enemy.

Look what happened here. Vacation came in. Vacation came in as the enemy when vacation is not the enemy at all. That bad job, that’s the enemy. The good job, that’s your friend. Vacation is the time where you get better at what you do. You take time off just like a flight takes off, and it lands, and it has to refuel, and it has to be maintained. That’s what vacation is all about. It’s about going to new lands, learning about stuff, learning the different types of food, enjoying yourself, reading, sleeping, drinking, doing stuff that we did as kids.

When we grew up, we weren’t working all the time. We’d go to school and then we had vacations. Vacations weren’t the enemy back then. How did they become the enemy all of a sudden? It’s because we’ve got this crappy job or we’re doing this business that is deeply unsatisfying. Then you have a statement like this, which is probably just off the cuff, but it has made vacations the enemy, and vacations are not the enemy at all. They are the friend.

That’s myth number three, that you don’t need vacations. You need the break. Think of yourself back when you were a kid and you just enjoyed the time of absolute nothingness. You would like to get that again, wouldn’t you? What’s the point of sitting at work the whole time? There is really no point. You can fool yourself, but the reason why we sit at work the whole time is because we get what is called work momentum. We work and we work and we work and we work, and then that momentum takes us into more work.

The moment we go on vacation, we’re thinking of what? Work of course, because that’s what we’ve been doing for so long. Then when you go on a vacation, if you have enough time on your vacation, you get into vacation momentum, and then you get more and more relaxed. Then when you get back to work, it’s very hard to get back to work. This management is important, this management of work and life. It’s important not to just take anything you see on Facebook, this nice little phrase, just because it came from Seth Godin or some other guru, and then take it at face value.

You want to deconstruct it and understand why you did things the way you did. You want to see it from your perspective as a human being. You want to see it how you were when you were a child. Because vacations are like a drug. Once you take vacations, work becomes so much more satisfying. Okay, I’ll stop ranting and raving.

This brings us to the end of the episode.

What have we covered in this episode?

We covered three things.

The first thing we covered was this factor of doubling and tripling your income, and your customers. At Psychotactics we’ve grown organically. We’ve just done things and the list has grown to quite a sizeable number, but it’s very slow. It does matter. If you do what you love and you do it really well, and you will over time, then you will find that there are clients and there’s enough revenue, and you live a very comfortable life. You’re spending time with your family. You’re doing things that you really want. That’s what’s important.

That takes us to the second myth, and that is that life doesn’t get easier. It gets easier if you do nothing with your work, if you don’t take feedback, if you’re not big enough to take that feedback. Because most of us are insecure and we feel like someone is attacking us when they give feedback, so we don’t ask for feedback. We ask for praise all the time. But praise doesn’t improve your work so much; feedback does. When you get that feedback, you have to do some more work. Of course that takes more time, and so things don’t always get easier. You just get better at it and your work gets better, but never easier.

The final thing is that vacation is not the enemy. It has never been the enemy. We’ve made it the enemy because of crazy sayings that float around the internet. When you look into your childhood and your early years, vacation has always been your friend. You’ve just forgotten the friend and decided to adopt another friend, who’s a workaholic. Well, get rid of the workaholic and go back to your childhood. Go back to your young years and you’ll see that it’s a lot more fun.

That brings us to the end of this episode. What’s the one thing that we can do today?

Well this episode was not quite the things to do episode, but even so, one of the things that you can do today is make more work for yourself. Whether it’s in your personal life, the hobbies that you have, or whether it’s in work, you want to ask for feedback. You want to ask people to tell you what you can fix. Stop asking for so much praise. The praise is important, but the feedback is just as important. Create a little more work for yourself and then take a vacation. Because, as Barry Gibb said, you want to keep the music alive.

When you listen to this podcast, we’re likely to be on vacation. We’re going to Morocco. Our trip is across the United States, then to Europe, then to Africa, then to Asia, and then back to New Zealand. Amsterdam is one of our favorite cities on the planet, and after our trip Nashville we’re going to be in Amsterdam for quite a while before heading to Morocco. It’s going to be fun in Morocco. No tourists because it’s not as hot this time of year. We’re going to be at a seaside place, really nice place, do nothing, just relax, just paint, eat, drink and sleep.

The reason we’re headed back to Auckland in a bit of a hurry is because Auckland is amazing at this time of the year. It’s summer; there’s no one in the city. We go for long walks. When we get back after our vacation, we’re going to take another month off until February. That’s when we get back to work. If what I’m describing to you sounds so unreal, then remember that it was unreal for us as well. We decided that this is what we want to do. We want to take time off. We want to take weekends off.

We put these things into place, and that’s what you should do as well.

That’s exactly what the next episode is about. It’s about goal setting, but goal setting our way, and you would expect it to be different, so listen to it and tell your friends about it. If you haven’t given us a rating on iTunes, then please do so. If you would like to give us a one-star rating or a two-star rating, that’s fine. But give us a rating. If you haven’t done that already, go to iTunes, give us a rating, and total your friends about the Three Month Vacation. That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye from Psychotactics and the Three Month Vacation. Bye bye.

Still reading? Find out—The Three Obstacles To Happiness (And How To Overcome Them)

http://www.psychotactics.com/three-business-myths/