The Importance Of Mindset In Business With James Wedmore

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

Think about the thing that scares you most, and the thing that you have put off doing in your business because of fear. Once you’ve identified it, choose not to ‘feed the fear’ and you’ll be able to grow more than you can ever imagine.
Most people think that the reason their business isn’t growing is because they have a lack knowledge. In some cases, this may be the case, however, it comes down to having the mindset to be able to apply it to your business.
Whilst hustling is important, you DON’T have to hustle to be successful. At the end of the day, it’s how you see business that determines what is possible for you. You are so much more than just your work ethic.
Feeling guilty for taking time off from your business is a form of fear getting in the way. It’s so hard to ‘stop’ working as an entrepreneur, but this can be incredibly detrimental for your business.
The reason you can’t afford to hire someone and outsource is because you haven’t been outsourcing. Outsourcing tasks that you find you have to do more than once can free up time for you to focus on the things that are important.
You don’t necessarily need to know how you are going to reach your goals in order to set them. Be okay with not knowing how.
Learning about your relationship with money and how to live in abundance can drastically improve your life (and others).

THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…

You are the author of your own life and you write the story anyway you like. The story you tell is the story you experience, starting from that very first blank page. If you’re struggling in business it becomes part of your story, just an obstacle you had to overcome.

HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS

Introducing James Wedmore – 06:30
What It Means To Be An Entrepreneur (And Getting Over The Fear) 11:30
How To Keep Yourself Driven And Motivated In Business 19:30
Debugging Common ‘Entrepreneur Myths’ 32:16
Stop Feeling Guilty About Taking Time Away From Your Business 43:32
Being Responsible For Your Own Business And Forgetting The How 54:00
Creating Your Story 01:02:48
Living In Abundance 01:09:09

LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S EPISODE

Transcript below

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. As you can hear, I still have a slightly strange voice from my cough and cold, and that because I am trying to get ahead and therefore, I'm batching intros and outros, so you're going to hear this voice, I'm afraid, today as well as last week. Then hopefully, by the next time I come to do more recording, I will be better and my voice will be back to normal, which would be lovely because I'm personally getting a little bit sick of it now, but nevermind.

Anyway, onto today's podcast episode, which I am so excited about because as you know, if you've listened to my podcast, I am a huge fan of James Wedmore. Now, I discovered James' podcast I think at least a year ago now, maybe a bit longer. I can't remember. I have to say, the podcast and him and the work I've done with him since has honestly changed my business, me, and my life.

Now, I know that sounds really dramatic, and really amazing, but I promise you, he has. The things he says, the stuff he's woken me up to, the concepts he's got me to understand have honestly been amazing. In total honesty, a lot of that has come from his podcasts, his free content that he's putting out every single week. In fact, several times a week, he is giving you such good advice.

So, the reason I say these things about James is because as I've talked about lots of times before, I've worked in marketing a long time. Therefore, for me, the tools and tactics and strategies have never really been a problem. Also, I am very keen to keep learning. So, just because I did a degree, in fact, I bet hardly any of my degree I use now because it's changed so much, but I learn all the time. I do courses all the time. I read a lot. I listen to a lot of books. I listen to a lot of podcasts. So, I was always updating myself with the changes because the digital marketing landscape is a forever changing thing. So, I'm always trying to keep on top of that.

So, I felt very confident that I have the tools and tactics that enabled me to do these amazing things in marketing. I knew this as well because I was doing it for clients. I was helping clients create online marketing and build their email list, and create memberships, and successfully launch products. So, I knew I knew that bit, and I felt fairly confident in that. Yet, I have these amazing dreams to build my own business in a different way, which I had already built it.

So, obviously, I have an agency, but I wanted to focus more on the Teresa side of the business. I always talk about myself like, “I'm a therapist,” but the Teresa side of the business is things like this. It's the podcast. It's doing more speaking. It's selling courses that help you. It's providing you the membership that can support you. I really wanted to grow this side of the business, but I wasn't doing it. Literally, didn't do anything. It wasn't through lack of knowledge because I knew how to do it, and I couldn't work out what the problem was.

Anyway, I started to listen to James, and I started to just be a bit more open to I guess a more spiritual mindset side. Please don't let the word spiritual turn you off if you're not spiritual because actually, there's some amazing things coming up in this episode, but I started to open my mind a bit more to those things. I have to say, the stuff he taught me and the stuff I learnt has made a huge difference to me and my business, and things like not being scared to do something because I let fear hold me back a lot, and I think, in fact, this is probably one of the main reasons I haven't, at this point, launched the stuff I want to launch. It's nearly there, and it's probably days away by this point, but that's possibly one of the reasons I didn't do it because I was scared, and I let that fear stop me.

So, James has been amazing. He has really helped me understand this side, really helped me focus on me as a person. Another thing that we talk about on the podcast that's one of the reasons I really like him is because I was an employee. I was employed for years. I didn't know how to be an entrepreneur. I didn't think I was an entrepreneur. I knew how to do marketing. I knew how to help clients better market their business, and I thought that's all it took, and of course, it isn't all it takes. It's about how to keep yourself motivated, how to keep yourself on track, how do you run your business. Actually, again, he talked about all of that side.

So, anyway, I'm going on way too much, but you are going to love this episode. Like I said, he is a hero of mine. So, before we jump in, let me just quickly go over his bio. So, for 10 years, James has taught entrepreneurs and online business owners how to leverage the power of online video and YouTube marketing to reach more people, share their message, and convert to customers. In 2016, James made a massive shift to focus on a gap that he felt was missing from this marketplace, the mindset needed for entrepreneurship.

So, he launched, he totally woo-woo, his words, not mine, podcast, although I do like it, called The Mind Your Business Podcast. I will link that in the show notes. I listen to it every week. He also then created his signature programme, Business By Design. Today, he helps coaches, experts, content creators and authors not only to craft better marketing messages, but also how to ditch the hustle mentally and create success from the inside out. I promise you, you're going to love this one. So, without further ado, here is James.

Introducing James Wedmore

Okay. I am so excited and so very honoured to welcome today's guest of the podcast. Welcome, James Wedmore.

Hey, Teresa. Thanks so much for having me.

Oh, no. Honestly, the pleasure is all mine. James, you've been on my list for a long time, and having been a huge fan of your podcast, to have you on mine, and that we get to have a conversation is a bit of a business dream come true. So, thank you so much for that.

Wow! Well, thanks for listening to the show. I really appreciate that.

Oh, no. I love it. In fact, it was probably one of the first I really got into, and the main one I listen to all the time now, and it's one that I recommend to anybody that listens. So, I know my audience are going to know who you are because I talk about you a lot, but just in case they've missed it somehow, it will be great if you could just tell us a little bit about who you are and how you got to do what you're doing now.

Sure. So, 11 years ago, I got an idea to start a business on the internet, but I had no idea what I was in for, what I was doing. Fast forward to several years later, through a lot of trials and tribulations, a lot of ups and downs, a lot of struggles, frustrations, long nights, a lot of just pounding the keyboard, I managed to build a rather successful seven-figure digital business around my content expertise, and I became known as the go-to YouTube and marketing guy in the industry.

So, that was really amazing. That was a big dream of mine was just getting paid. That was my little vision for myself was I wanted to get paid to make videos because doing videos, creating videos, writing, scripting, editing, all that stuff was something I really love. I still love it. So, that was a driving question for me was, “How do I get paid to do this? How do I get paid to do this thing that I love?” I managed to do that.

That was the original objective. That's what I set out to do. There's the difference between what you think you want versus, well, what you really get. What I got was a crash course in life, business, and entrepreneurship. I think there was a point in time where I was teaching people how to make videos and stuff, and Teresa, if you're a student, your win, your transformation would be like, “James, I made a video.” There came a point in time for me that I was just like, “I think I want to do more. I think I want to help people with more than that.”

So, I really looked back at my journey and realised that what really got me to that place was so much more about what was in between my ears, and how I was thinking, how I was feeling, and really, how I had to shift everything from the inside out. I said, “If I'm not …” There was just a moment where I was like, “If I'm not talking about this, if I'm not teaching this or sharing this, and I just tell people the only reason I'm successful is because I made a bunch of videos, it's like I'm just scratching the surface, and I'm doing such a disservice.”

So, about three years ago now, I came up with the idea to start a podcast, and the podcast is called Mind Your Business, and it was basically everything else that to me was so critically relevant to the entrepreneurial journey, which is really a conversation of instead of looking externally to what funnel do I need, what launch should I do, what's the strategy, how do I create a landing page, and all these things that are such surface level, you can learn all the tech, you can learn all the landing pages and all the funnels and still be broke and not help anybody.

It's not until we start looking within and saying, “Who am I being? How am I showing up? What behaviours, thoughts, beliefs, actions am I taking, and how am I showing up in the face of adversity, in the face of a problem or a breakdown? Am I going to let that stop me? Am I going to let the slightest criticism, the slightest breakdown be my demise?” I realised I just had to learn so much of that internal world and really change the way I think and feel, and that was ultimately what I credit to my success.

So, that's spawned an entirely new direction for me of really showing people what it takes to step into that role of being a digital CEO, the mindset that goes along with it, and the right habits and behaviours. So, that was a long-winded answer. Boy, I hope that-

What It Means To Be An Entrepreneur (And Getting Over The Fear)

No, no, no. It's cool. Yeah, that was awesome. So, there's a couple of things I wanted to bring up with you. So, first one was, obviously, the fact that you realised that there was so much more to being an entrepreneur than just the fact of physically doing the thing you were doing. So, just the fact of putting those videos out there. Was there ever a time where, and I guess I say this because I initially come from corporate world. I spent 10 years in corporate world where to talk anything around mindset, perhaps now is different, but certainly when I was there, it would have been a big no-no. Also, please don't take this in the wrong way, but for a male to talk about it would have been definitely a no-no. So, was there ever a point where you were nervous to go, “I want to bring more of this to the forefront. I want to talk more about this, and how it can help people”?

Well, I actually did an episode on this, and me releasing the podcast was the scariest thing I had ever done in my business. The biggest leap, the biggest “Oh, crap,” because what people don't realise is that when you build up a business, you have now something to lose. The grass is always greener, right? When I look back to those younger days when you're just trying to scrap anything together, you're just throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks, there's nothing to lose. You don't have a reputation at stake. You don't have an audience and customers that you're going to disappoint or upset or offend. So, there's a lot of freedom in that.

I built up this 150,000-200,000 person email list, millions of views, all this audience waiting for me, and they wanted James, the video tech guy. All of a sudden I'm like, “Hey. So, I've just released a podcast and it has nothing to do with video, it has nothing to do with tech, it has nothing to do with marketing. It actually has lots to do with how I'm incorporating a lot of spirituality and mindset into my life and my business.”

You must be so scared.

Well, yeah, I was really scared. Of course, people were like, “Hey, not my cup of tea. That's not what I signed up for,” and that's fine, and a massive cleansing, but I knew that that's what I wanted to be sharing. So, you're always going to have fear. You're always going to have those things that scare you. One thing is to train ourselves to lean into that fear, to realise that that's what we came here to do is to do the things that are outside our comfort zone, and that's why there's a little fear there is because it's new, it's in the unknown, it's uncertain, and that makes it exciting. It makes it exhilarating, really.

So, what's funny is that when I did that episode talking about this fear, I had just this interesting realisation that for most people, and myself included at the time, that fear was like a stoplight. We feel the fear and then we go, “Oh, so I shouldn't. I'm afraid, therefore, I won't.” That's such an interesting concept. It's such an interesting thing. We've just started to adopt this belief that when you're afraid, it means you shouldn't do it.

I really got present to that, and I was like, “Wait a second. Here was this thing that was one of the most successful things I did. Just launching that podcast was such a huge win, but it was also the thing that I was most afraid of.” I was like, “What's going on there? If that fear was really, normally, when you have a fear of a mountain lion, it's like, “Okay. Don't walk towards it.” You listen to that fear, but what was I really afraid, I was afraid of what people would think of me, and what they'd say, and if it didn't go well, and if it imploded my business, all these irrational things that don't exist.

Today, I've just learned, and I think that's why we continue to grow and our students continue to grow is the fear is really an indicator that you're on the right path, and you want to lean into that fear. So, we did thing inside one of our coaching programmes called The F of Fear Challenge. We've seen more breakthroughs, more ahas, realisations, and business growth from our students in the past 30 days than for some in entire year because we started with, “What is the thing that scares you the most that you know would grow your business, but you've been putting it off because you're choosing fear over your commitment to what you're up to? Are you committed to your fear or are you committed to the outcome?”

In these 30 days, people chose the outcome, they chose their vision, they chose the dream life, the dream business. They chose why they're doing this, whether it's for their family or for themselves or for the impact. They chose that, and they chose not to feed the fear. That's where they had the biggest growth. So, that was massive for me, so massive that now I listen for the fear, I watch for the fear, I observe it, “Okay. That means that's where we need to go,” because that's where you grow.

It's such a big thing because actually, like you said, most people would just steer away from it. They would think all the fear would stop them. Actually, when you look at the people who are the most successful, they obviously had those fears, too. You had those fears, but you went ahead and did it, anyway. You went ahead and just thought, “You know what? I'm not going to let this stop me.” Maybe when you look at the success of some entrepreneurs over to others and why some people are wildly successful, they just went, “You know what? I'm not going to let that stop me, and I'm just going to keep going.”

Absolutely. To speak more like what your first mention in your question of the difference between the corporate world and entrepreneurship, this is your words exactly. There's so much more to being an entrepreneur. I don't have a corporate background, but I did have plenty of jobs including being a bartender. One of the first things I … My thoughts on being an employee, and again, nothing wrong with it. What is wrong, and this where people think I'm judging. It's always, “Everyone should be entrepreneurs,” no, not at all.

My gride is, is that if you take everything you've learned, which society has taught us to be really good, hard working, permission-seeking employees, and you take that same way of being, that same thinking, that same strategy into business, your own business, you're going to fail. That's what I see really at the core level of what's going on with so many people.

As an employee, we are taught what to think. That's what's going on. That's why mindset is a big thing because when we bring this conversation … and I don't even love the word mindset, but it fits. So, I think part of why the mindset conversation for an entrepreneur is so important is because it's an opportunity to learn how to think.

When we coach our clients, a lot of times they come with us with these expectations of like, “James is going to be my personal Google. If I just ask a question, he's going to have the answer,” and then quickly realise that that's not what I do because it's the whole idea of feed a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish, you feed him for life. So, I want to teach people how to think like an entrepreneur, not just be their personal Google. I think most people their entire life, they've just been taught what to think.

In an corporate environment, it's the same thing. It's like, “I'm going to teach you what to do, what the answer is, what the company culture is, what the directives are, and do your job,” and you just rely for the most part, of course, it's not universal, you're relying for the most part on effort, and willpower, and time, and energy. You're trading time for dollars, “Okay. This is the job. Do what you're told. Follow directions,” and that's great, but that's not how entrepreneurism works.

If it all came down to the harder you work, the more you hustle, then we'd all be successful because that's really easy, and we all know people that are working really hard. They're hustling, they're doing the 14-hours days, and they have nothing to show for it, nothing to show for it. So, in the world of entrepreneurship, mindset is critical. Absolutely.

How To Keep Yourself Driven And Motivated In Business

I just want quite the fact of you … I've watched something. I watched the Digital CEO series that you did, which is amazing. Also, you talked about at the time the fact of when you were in school and you're brought up. Actually, you're right. So much of it has laid down what job are you going to get, what career you're going to have. What was really fascinating is I never ever had the intention of having my own business, not once. It never crossed my mind, never thought I'd do it.

Then a series of very strange events happened, and I got my own business, and I decided that I've been doing this thing for all these years for other people, I could just do this myself. I was a great employee. I joke that I was a really good employee because I did as I was told. I always met my deadlines. I was very organised, and I used to look at my boss who was an entrepreneur, who was the business owner, and I used think, “Oh, my God! You're so disorganised. Why can't you just focus?”

Then I got my own business, and oh, my word! I didn't have the faintest idea about what it was like to run a business, what it was like to be an entrepreneur, how to keep yourself driven and motivated, and I got to the point where I've been in marketing for 15 years. I learned so much stuff. I take on every course that's going. I suck up all this information, and I've got it all. I knew how to do the funnels. I knew how to do the advertising. I knew the lead magnet. I knew all of that stuff, and I was doing it for clients, and not for myself.

That's what brought me to you because I knew something was wrong. It wasn't the case of I didn't know how to do it. It wasn't the case of I didn't have the tools or the tactics, but for some reason, I've got all these big ideas in my head, but I just wasn't doing it, and I couldn't work out why.

Then I can't even think how I discovered you in the first place. I think because, obviously, I told you before that Amy was the one who suggested Business By Design. So, maybe it was through one of Amy's podcasts or something she did or you turned up something with Pat, but I can't remember how it was, but the minute I started listening to you, I was just like, “Oh, man! This is what I've been missing. This is what I've been not doing wrong, but not acknowledging.” I just thought, “Okay. Take the boxes, got the tools. Done. Now, I can be amazing.” Of course, it wasn't happening.

Yeah. Well, something that you said I think is really important for your listeners to really get is that most people I see chuck up a lack of results to a lack of knowledge like, “The reason I'm not growing my business, and the reason I don't have the results I want, the sales, the revenue, whatever, is because of a lack of knowledge.” I mean, this is really interesting because we've been taught, especially in this industry, that that is actually the problem, and you got to go out there and keep learning, and you just don't have the right system yet, and you got to go get this funnel, and you got to get this process, and et cetera, et cetera.

I mean, there's some truth to that. There really is, but notice in what Teresa just shared, I'm speaking to the listeners directly, she knew all those things. She knew all those thing, and yet was like, “Why can't I apply this myself?” So, the knowledge, the information required, what you need to know is 10% of all of this, and the 90 plus percent, and some people say it's even 99% is our own psychology or mindset around it.

This just unpacks so much here, but if you're telling yourself a story that the reason you haven't launched, sold, put it out there, started or whatever is because you're still waiting to connect all the pieces, there's still more information, I'm going to tell you, 11 years in, oh, my goodness, there's still so much I don't know. If you make your MO about just being the knowledge-seeker, the knowledge guy, let me collect … I'm a knowledge collector. You will never get to the finish line. You'll never get it all collected. You'll never learn it all because there's so much out there.

Then at one point, if it hasn't happened already, there'll be this tipping point where now, the information you've acquired and collected now creates more problems. There's always the law of diminishing returns. There is such thing as too much of a good thing. When people get too much information, they get completely overwhelmed, and that is what's really happening now with so many people is there's too many options, there's too many the one solution, the one secret that's going to solve all your problems that now people are like, “I don't know what to choose.” We even need to look at that and say that most people when they're stuck in this indecision, they're really operating from a fear, and it's a fear that they're going to make a mistake.

Again, a lot of it does come down to the fear, how we're stopping ourselves self-sabotaging is there's a lot of fear. It's fear of I'm going to do the wrong thing, fear I'm going to waste my time, fear I'm going to fail, fear I'm going to look bad, fear I'm going to get criticised, fear I'm going to look stupid. Because that fear is more prevalent, it tends to determine a lot of our decisions, and the actions we take or inevitably don't take.

So, the thing is, is you can be the encyclopaedia Britannica of online business and have all the information at your disposal, which at the end of the day, we do. We have Google, we have YouTube. You even said yourself, there's so many courses out there. So, that's just more evidence that knowledge isn't the issue because it's all out there. If you're more driven from fear, even if you have all this information, what type of decisions do you think you're going to make out of fear? What type of results do you think you're going to get when you're operating from fear? You're not going to get very far, that's for sure, and that's what we see is happening with most entrepreneurs. When you've never done it before, of course, there's going to be fear. Of course, that's natural. We don't want to drive your life and to drive the future of your business.

Yeah, absolutely. Like you said, I think the fear thing for me, personally, was and is still fairly huge, the I'm a perfectionist horrible trait I have because it just stops me from doing everything because I just think, “Oh, it's not quite right.” Even today, interestingly enough, saying about my sore throat, this morning, I woke up, I go, “I can't do the interview. I've been looking forward to this for weeks and weeks,” but I started going, “Oh, my God! This is a crucial interview and I can't do it because my voice isn't right.” So, everything steps in the way. It will give me every excuse under the sun not to do something.

It's just trying to protect you. That's the thing. It's trying to protect you. I was in fear about releasing my podcast, and that fear was trying to protect me. Now, the funny thing is, is that's really well-intentioned. It's like, “Oh, yeah, yeah. We don't want you to look like an idiot or make a wrong mistake,” but when you look even closer, you realise that it's not actually protecting you from anything. You're not actually at risk. Nothing we're doing … I mean, yes, there is more risk in entrepreneurship than a job in one way you look at it. You can look at it from any perspective.

I can sit there and make an argument and say that being an employee is the riskiest thing ever because your paycheck, your money, your livelihood, your career, your future is in the hands of a boss that just could decide one day, “I don't want to run this business anymore.” That's the thing is you can even be the hardest working, most high performance result getting individual in a company, and the boss could just say, “I'd like to retire today,” and you don't have a job anymore.

So, you're putting a lot of power and control. Again, not saying it wrong or bad, but in an argument where people say, “Entrepreneurship is riskier,” it depends how you want to look at it because in a lot of ways, it's not because the way I've always looked at my business or not, maybe not always, but finally got to a place, and this is the beautiful thing about entrepreneurship is that we are in the driver's seat of our financial destiny. We can create money on demand.

If my wife told me, God bless her, that she's like, “I want to go buy a $10,000 purse right now,” the beautiful thing, and first, I'd be like, “Wow! Why a purse is $10,000?” She's not like that at all, which I love. I feel like some of my friends' wives are like, “Well, you just had a launch. Let's go buy me the most successful handbag or a pair of shoes,” but if she did, the whole thing is, is that I can sit there and be like, “Great. What could I go sell? What could I go offer my students or my list or audience in order to pay for that handbag?” That's creating money on demand. That's so powerful.

That's what people want. I think what's they want. When we talk about what entrepreneurs want, nine out of 10 of them it comes down to freedom. Freedom is just this broad word, but freedom is doing what you want, when you want. The thing is, is everyone has a relationship with money. That's a whole another topic, right? You have a relationship with your father, you have a relationship with your mother, living or dead, and you have relationship just like you have a relationship with them, you have a relationship with money. Some people don't like to look at it. Some people have uncomfortable time letting it go. Some people have a hard time receiving it, and everything in between.

You can see, you can start to get a glimpse of what your relationship with money when you look at your bank account. At the end of the day, if you want to be a successful entrepreneur, the game we play is counted. The points are counted in money. So, if you have a bad relationship with money, you're going to be losing this game that you decided to play, but that's what people want is they want this freedom, and a lot of that freedom comes when you have the ability, you've mastered that ability to create money on demand, money that go, “Hey, I want to go on this trip,” or “Hey, I want to take some time off,” or “Hey, I want to do this,” and you have the money to do it. You have the resources to do it, but that's what people want, and they want all of the good stuff, but they don't realise what they're also, most entrepreneurs don't realise what they're also signing up for when they say, “Yes, I want that.”

A part of what they're signing up for with freedom is that there is no inherent structure. There's just this empty void of uncertainty. It's like you're looking at everyday in front of you as this blank, white, empty canvass. To some people, most people, I think, that's really scary because as an employee, there's a lot of structure. It's like, “Teresa, I got this job for you. Here's exactly what to do. Here's why I want you to do it. Here's the right way to do it. Here's what not to do. Do these steps. Follow these instructions, and every time you do this, you're going to get rewarded. You're going to get money. You're going to get incentivized.” It's like, “Oh, okay. Great. Just do this.” There's so much comfort and there's really nice things in that.

Entrepreneurship, there's none. There is none. Even if you take 100 courses, it's like, “No. You're starting with a blank, empty canvass.” You can either to choose to look at that as, “Oh, no. What do I do? I'm scared. I'm uncertain. There's no plan. There's no path. There's no structure,” or you can choose to look at what I believe all successful entrepreneurs do is they look at that blank canvass, they stare at that blank canvass right in front of them, and they go, “Wow! Anything is possible. Anything is possible. I can do anything with this.”

That's really the difference. That's what we're signing up for is you're operating in a lot of uncertainty all day long. That's what resilience is, and that's why it's so important as an entrepreneur is how comfortable can you be in that uncertainty. I can fill my day with all kinds of things on the calendar to distract me, and that's what most people are doing. They're staying busy in their business to distract themselves from the 5% of activities of what they should really be focusing on.

So, it's really easy for me to just fill my day with stuff that will keep me busy, but can you get present to the fact that there's only a few things you actually need to do to grow your business, and no one's going to really tell you what those are. You got to be willing to just go out and do them. Yeah.

Debugging Common ‘Entrepreneur Myths’

So, I wanted to touch on when I started listening to you, and this is a bit cringe with you, I apologise, but I literally feel like you've changed not only me as a person, my business, but also my life. Even now, and this is amazing, it's so silly, but it's amazing. My husband, he's in the military, has been for 24 years. He's an engineer in the military. So, him and I coming together, we've been together for five years, when we came together, my world and his could not be further apart. Then the new world I'm moving into and understanding more of the stuff I'm doing with you and Business By Design and next level, again, is a real stretch for him in terms of where he's lived and his whole world. He started listening to your podcast as well.

I have to say, I am so excited because he is like, “Oh, my God! There's this, and there's this.” Some of the things that you said that have changed my world, I just want to touch on some of those things, and just get you to say what your thoughts are around them.

Let's do it. That's awesome, by the way. I love hearing that. I really do.

Oh, honestly, and you know what? He's entered your competition. In fact, it just closed, hasn't it? So, you come to Laguna.

Yes, I did.

He came to Laguna with me when I went in October, and on the last day of the event when it finished, Chelsea and Jimmy in the bar, and we sat and had a drink with them which was so lovely, and yeah, he's totally brought into all this. He's very excited. Hopefully, the scary thing for him is he's just handed his notice in. So, he has to give 12 months notice. Like I said, he's been in the Air Force for 25 years. It's a huge step for him. He's very nervous, understandably, and ideally, we want him to come work in the business. So, we've got to see now what can I do and what can we do for the next 12 months.

One of the things that's on my list is you say that you drastically overestimate what you can do today, and don't underestimate what you can do in 12 months. So, I'm putting that one to the chance because ideally, we want him in the business in 12 months, but yeah. So, no, it's awesome. I'm so excited. So, okay.

So, some of the things that you've said that I've gone, “Poof!” and my head has exploded and then not to get your head dry and go, “That's amazing.” So, the first thing I remember hearing you say is talking about the fact that you don't have to hustle. You don't have to work 24/7, and it doesn't no longer your time equal money, which is what it does in a workplace. So, can you just touch on that?

Yeah. I'm going to touch on this from many different aspects because unfortunately, too, you see successful people saying this. You got to hustle till your eyeballs bleed. I went to a gym once at a hotel. I was at a conference, and there was that quote, “No pain, no gain.” I'm like, “Yeah, maybe that applies at the gym because you want to reach that last rep.” Then there's, “Nothing is worth pursuing that doesn't take sacrifice,” or something like that. It's like, “No, false.” It's just not true.

At the end of the day, how you see business determines what is possible for you. You're creating the rules of the game, okay? So, if you say you have to work hard, you have to hustle to be successful, guess what? Again, remember, blank canvass, right? You guys keep that in mind that we are creating from a blank canvass.

So, the first thing you're putting on your canvass is that you have to work hard to be successful. Well, then that means the moment you say that, the moment you believe that, and for most people, it doesn't show up as a belief, it shows up as the fact, the way it is. The sky is blue. The sun sets and rises everyday, and you have to work hard to be successful. When you do that, it means it can be no other way, which means the only way you'll operate and show up is through hard work, is through hustle.

The thing is, is that is bringing in the employee mindset into entrepreneurship. Your value, what you bring to the world, how you get paid, it can, it can be hard work. Again, I started out and I was a mobile bartender. So, I was a bartender, and then I became a mobile bartender. I was getting paid to mix drinks for people at parties and stuff, and weddings, and birthdays, and stuff. That took work, but that's not what got me the jobs. That's not what got me paid.

That's the funny thing is people think, “Well, if I just become a better bartender, if I just work a little bit harder and a little bit faster, I'll make more money.” No. What made me money was I figured out, I asked myself, “How can I get found? How can I put myself in front of ideal clients?” This is 15, 14 years ago before I started my online business, and it was like I researched how to do SEO, and got in front of … In Google, you type in Orange County bartender, bam! I was the number one result, right? It was that. It was spending 30 minutes there figuring out, “Oh, how can I get found?” Those were the things that was generating the money for me, right? That was getting me clients. That was allowing me to raise my prices.

That's an interesting thing right here is one of the easiest ways that anybody here listening can make more money in their business would be to raise your prices. Raise your prices. Now, let's just look at that for a moment because this is one of my favourite conversations to have is that raising your prices. Let's look at the physical act of raising your prices. If I ask everyone here, “Hey, go raise your prices,” what are the actions that you would have to take? Step one, go log in to your website or your landing page software or whatever it is where your rates are, and change the numbers. Delete, add some numbers, save. That's the physical action steps that it takes. Probably one of the most simplest things you can do, but how hard do we make that? “Oh, I can't. I'm afraid.”

“It's so hard.”

Yeah. We just make it so hard, but if I just told you that that can be one of the easiest ways that you can make more money is just to raise your prices, notice how we're so ingrained in this, “You got to work hard to make money. You got to work hard to be successful,” that we even make raising our prices hard, and it's so simple because you can always change it back. Add a zero. See how hard it is to just add a zero to whatever you sell. That took no work and effort at all, right?

There's someone out there that will pay it. Maybe you're not in front of them yet. Maybe they haven't found you or you haven't found them yet, but it isn't this hustle and effort. Now, there's a deeper conversation that we can begin to have. What I was really touching on here is that there's just 5% of activities on your to-do list that are directly responsible for the results that you want. Money, sales, customers, impacts, 5%. So, you can work hard and hustle on the 95% of other activities and not get any results. So, it doesn't come down to it.

Now, again, I do want to emphasise that I'm not saying be lazy, and I'm not saying it won't be challenging and hard. I'm saying if you think your superpower, if you think the number one criteria that's going to make you successful is that you're just going to work harder and longer than the next person, I want you to get that you are so much more than that. Every single person listening, you are so much more than just your work ethic, how many hours you slave away. You're capable of so much more. To sum you up as your worth and value as a human being, it comes down to how long you're willing to work in a given day, and how fast you're willing to work is nonsense. You're so much more than that.

So, if we want to take this down into an even deeper conversation, where I like to go, is that if we're talking about hard work and hustle and sacrifice is not the number one factor or essential ingredient for your success. Well, how do we measure success? The way we measure it is income and impact. That's our business. Now, that's the funny thing. The fallacy and saying in all that is like, “Well, what does success mean to you?” Everyone needs to have their own definition of it, and it's what's important to us.

To me, success is getting what's important to you with the least amount of work and effort as possible. So, for us, it's income and impact. How can we make more money and have a bigger impact? Because you can't have one without the other. In fact, the more money we make, the more impact we can create. I can build a bigger team. I can spend more on Facebook ads. I can run more marketing campaigns. I can do all of that stuff. It's a tool, right? It's also an indicator of the impact. So, they go hand-in-hand so beautifully well.

So, we talk about money, we talk about money. Sorry. We talk about money, we talk about income. Money is energy. Go back to this relationship with money. You can be the hard, and I've seen it, I've seen it time and time again, you can be the hardest working entrepreneur on the internet, and if you have the worst relationship with money. What would that look like? Telling yourself stories like, “I don't deserve money. I'm taking away …” A lot of people feel a lot of guilt when they charge high prices. “I'm taking away money from somebody else.” That whole, “Money doesn't grow on trees,” and “Easy come, easy go,” all these beliefs and stories, these relationships, a lot of them we got from our parents and our environment growing up.

I want to keep that in mind, by the way. You get our stories in relationship and mindset around money from a very young age, mostly from our parents, and there's been more change in our world in one generation than I think the last 20 generations or at least the last 100 years. So, to adopt your parents' model of money in today's society and where we're going is very dangerous because it's just so different today. The world, the landscape is so completely different that you're running a broken model if you keep holding on to those stories.

So, money is energy. Money is consciousness, and most people just have a really poor relationship with money, and because they have a poor relationship with money, they rely on this sweat equity and work ethic, just pushing harder and faster and longer as their only means. I know we're getting into some intellectual and intangible and theoretical stuff, so I'm more than happy to ground this and make it more specific, but at the end of the day, my business has continued to grow by leaps and bounds every year, which means more money, more impact, and I'm working less each and every year. So, we have to break that model of hustle is the secret to success.

Stop Feeling Guilty About Taking Time Away From Your Business

It's so good. You know what else is really interesting? Sometimes in our own businesses, so for instance, let's say it's my daughter's nativity play and I'm going to take the afternoon off. I even feel bad like, “What is that about?” That's just such a crazy thing to think about when often we come into having our own businesses for that freedom. One thing that I love seeing with you and what you do is the fact that you'll serve a lot. You live in very beautiful Laguna beach, so you're very lucky there, right on the water. Why not? Why should you not be able to do that? Who says that you've got to be … Like you said, don't get me wrong, you've worked hard and you're very smart with how you work, but why should you be tied to your desk from 7:00 till 7:00 every single day in order to have a successful business? That's not successful in your life, is it? That's not making your life an enjoyable place to be, really, is it?

Well, it's not. It's just interesting what you said about feeling bad when you take time off. This is a very common thing for entrepreneurs at every level. What I want to offer here is that I want people to recognise this. If this was the only thing people took away from this episode, I think this would be extremely valuable. You want to notice when you start taking time off how you feel. Do you feel guilty? Do you feel bad? I can tell you right now, this is a form of fear showing up. This is just an indicator of we're really already sabotaging ourselves in a lot of ways because what's happening is first of all, it's so easy to stop at the end of the day when you're an employee. You just clock out and you mentally and physically have to clock out.

In entrepreneurship, if you don't do that, the business is on your mind all day, all night. You can't sleep. You can't take your mind off it. That's super detrimental. Also, that doesn't inspire creativity, innovation, new ideas, and possibilities. So, that's why it's also going to really hurt you. There's something I want to offer here, and it's that one of the reasons why people are hustling so much is they found … Remember what I said is that entrepreneurship is like living in this realm of uncertainty, and how comfortable you can get with it.

Well, people have used work and hustle as a coping mechanism. In other words, “I don't know what to do. There's a blank canvass staring at me, almost like this blank void of there's no plot, there's no path, there's not certainty. So, if I just stay busy, if I just keep moving, I can distract myself from the fact that I don't have a plan or a path or there's things I need to be doing that scare the crap out of me.” Those 5% activities, revenue-generating activities are usually for most people listening are outside your comfort zone. They're things you've never done before. They're things that put you at risk, and I mean your reputation, what people think of you, what they say.

So, it's so much safer and so much easier to just stay busy, to just focus, keep your head down and focus on the thing in front of you and just work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work. It's a form of laziness. It's lazy thinking. It's totally lazy thinking. I used to do that as well.

So, what we have to do is, is I really want people to notice that, is just catch themselves when every time they stop for their daughter's recital or play and they feel bad or guilty that this is a really huge opportunity for some massive breakthroughs in your life. For me, what really helps with that was understanding what our value really is in our business.

Now, it's different for everybody, okay? That's a great question to be asking, “What is my value really? What is my value?” It's a couple of different ways we can ask this. “What is the thing that I and only I can do? What is my unique superpower? What is the highest level activity or result that I can be responsible for?” and to really ask yourself these questions because what started to come up for me is that being the digital CEO and being the role that I am today is so much about the vision, and the innovation, and the new ideas, and the new possibilities. Chances are, that's what it is for you as well at some level.

Those results don't get done in the work. They get done in the rest. Have you ever noticed why the best ideas come to us when we're in the shower or we're on a long drive? It's because those are the times when your mind is not focused on the problem or the task in front of you. The mind is left open to daydreaming, to imagination, to creativity. When your head is down and you're on the factory floor all day putting the knot on the bolt and screwing it in and next one, next, busy, busy, busy, “Look how hard I'm working and look how fast I'm making this happen,” and blah, blah, blah, you're not putting your creative, imaginative, problem solving, innovative mind at work.

So, I told myself a long time ago because I noticed myself getting guilty is the rest is the work because if I'm not innovating, if I'm not dreaming bigger and thinking bigger, if I'm not focusing on what's the next thing that we're up to, who is? Who is going to do that? If you're not doing it, you can't outsource that. You can't outsource the work of the CEO to somebody else, “Hey, I would like you to just be responsible for all innovations, for all goal setting, and all the big planning.” You can't do that. That's going to be you. So, if you're not doing it, who is?

Like you said, if you're in the weeds doing all the work, then when do you get the chance to do that? So, I love that.

Yeah. Now, let's bring in something else, though, because you just said it. People say, “This all sounds great, Teresa. This sounds great, James, but I'm just starting out. I'm on a shoestring budget. I can't afford. I got to do it all myself. I got to spend 12 hours a day in the weeds.” I'm just going to say a couple of things here because this is the big objection. First of all, it's not true. This is you operating from your current circumstances.

Now, your current circumstances, which is like, “I don't have the time and I don't have the money,” if you operate from your current circumstances, you repeat your current circumstances, and you stay in a vicious cycle, you remain stuck. This is why so many people stay stuck because your current circumstances, the amount of time, money, resources, whatever you have at your disposal now, who do you think created that? How did you get there? How did you wind up with the amount of time and money that you have right now? Do you think that you're a victim and someone just spewed this onto your life, that you have no control, that you have no say in how your life goes? That is victim mentality.

When you remain a victim, it's an illusion. The power is always there, but you believe, you buy in to this belief that's false that you have no power, that you have no responsibility to create your life as you will. It's like looking at a blank canvass and having your hands, and the blank canvass is your life, and your hands are tied behind your back saying, “Sorry. I can't actually paint this. I'll let someone else do it.” No, it's your life. It's your life, and this is your business.

If you're letting your current circumstances dictate your thinking, your actions, your behaviours, determining what's possible for you, you repeat your circumstances because your current circumstances are a result of your past thinking and acting. It's what got you here, right? How you were thinking and acting, and believing in the past got you to the current circumstances.

So, what ultimately is happening is your past is creating your future. So, if your past is creating your future, you'll think you're changing, you'll think you're doing something different, but you're not. You're getting the same thing over and over and over again. This is why people never change. This is also why New Year's resolutions just die by the end of January, right?

So, the first thing I want to say here or the 100th thing I want to say is that if you can't afford to hire someone, if you can't afford to outsource, it's simply because you haven't been outsourcing, you haven't been delegating. The very act of saying, “I don't have the money, therefore, I'll do it myself,” is the thing that would be keeping you broke because when you have to do it yourself, all of your life force, your time, your effort, your energy is going to a $5 an hour activity, which means the business is only making $5 and you can't survive off with that $5, and so you go, “Crap! When I'm making my money, so I need to work more,” and it goes back to that, “Oh, if I work harder and longer, then hopefully, one day I'll be successful” mentality, and that's not true.

If I told you earlier there's only 5% of activities that are directly responsible for the growth of your business, the revenue-generating activities come down to just 5% of that, that to-do list, how are you supposed to spend 100% of your time on those activities when you're spending all your time on the other stuff? At the end of the day, when you realised that you can hire a virtual assistant for just a couple of dollars an hour, $3, $5, $6 an hour, and that can give you an hour, two hours, three hours of your day back.

Can you imagine what becomes possible when you get an hour a day back in your business? That's one hour more that you can now spend on the revenue-generating activities. That's an hour a day, that's five hours a week. What is that? 20 hours a month. That's how you create time. Most people aren't willing to do this. It's because they're living conditionally. They're saying, “Well, once I have more money, then I can hire. Once I've built the business further, then I can bring this on.” Unfortunately, it's backwards. It's backwards because they're waiting for everything to change before they're willing to change. It always, always starts from within first.

Being Responsible For Your Own Business And Forgetting The How

Got it. You've just said so many things that are on my list in terms of some of the things that are some of the biggest shifting in my mind. So, one of the things you just touched on there was the fact that you're responsible. I can't remember if it was on a call or whether on a podcast, but you told the fact that we are 100% responsible for everything. I think it was in the course of Business By Design, actually. It's a really hard concept to get your head around because we do blame other things and other people, and I have to say, I don't think for one second my mom ever would listen to this, but I have been brought up by a bit of a martyr. So, I have to watch myself because she has quite martyristic traits, and there are lots of people in my world where it's always someone else's fault.

So, you talked about the fact that you are 100% responsible for everything, literally everything. So, the fact that you touched on that in terms of this scenario that like you said, if you're sat in a position and you go, “Well, I don't have time for that,” or “I'm too busy for that,” or “I can't do that,” well, whose fault is that? This isn't about laying blame. It's about, I guess, awakening you to the fact that, well, if I put myself here, I can change myself. I can someone different.

So, the other thing that came out from what you said was one thing that again is really interesting is the visualisation, is the looking forward, and the thinking, “This is how I want to be,” and you have this great saying of, “F the how for now,” because your instant reaction is to go, “Well, how? How am I going to do that?” In fact, today, I was just doing some work going through traction, which is a book that you recommended, and I will link up to it in the show notes.

One of the things it talked about was your 10-year goal. Never even thought about it. I'm almost hesitant to tell you what I wrote down, but my 10-year goal-

Does this scare you?

Oh, my God! It literally. I think I've lost my mind. So, it jumped into my head before I even thought about it, which again is something you've talked about, and it was 10 million, to turn over 10 million in 10 years as in when I hit 10 years, I'm turning over 10 million.

Is that starting now, 10 years from now or 10 years?

10 years from now, yeah.

Okay. So, here's something that's so silly. We're very close to 10 million. I've been doing this for 11 years. Wherever you are, wherever many years you are, you're light years ahead of where I was. So, even 10 years is that's easy. It's actually really easy from where you are now. Obviously, you don't even know what 10 years looks like in terms of the evolution and growth. I think it's going to even happen faster than that, but it's so funny. You saying this to most average people and they'd think you're crazy.

They would.

I would say we did it in about 11 years. We're very close now with 11 years, but first of those five years, we're struggling to just make a dollar. So, once I've figured out how to make a dollar, that was in five, six years we've gotten this close to 10 million. You know what I mean? That's not even anything I would call slightly crazy, which is so funny. That's totally doable.

Because I sat there like if I had to write it down, and I said to my husband, “Oh, my God! I just thought and if James is here, he'd say, “Well, that came into your head. It's got to be that.” I was like, “That's too much.” So, instantly, the fear in me went to a million, jumped from 10 down to a million, and luckily, I thought myself, “No, this is ridiculous. You write 10 million because 10 million in 10 years,” and 10 years like you said is a hugely long time. The world and how it can look away, we can be and what we're doing is, well, the possibilities are endless, aren't they?

Totally. What I think you're also getting into as well, this F the how for now, is that, “Okay. It scares us. Great. Can you stick with the fear a little bit? Can you just be present to it and just not ignore it, not like, ‘Oh, okay. I'll just take it down to a million'?” Then also, what a lot of people do, most of us do, I'm very fascinated with this concept, and this is just powerful, is people say, “Okay, I want this thing,” and it pops up in their brain, and then the second thing, it immediately happens right after, and you guys can certainly notice when you do this, you go, “Okay. So, how do I do it?”

If the answer is, “I don't know,” then people immediately say, “Therefore, it's not possible.” That's why I say F the how for now. Just because you don't know how does not mean it's not possible. It doesn't. That's such a crazy concept to me. It's like, “Wait a second. Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” You don't need to know how in order to hold the possibility of it because the longer you hold the possibility of it, the longer you sit with the vision and the outcome and not make it wrong, not tear it down, not be in fear around it, the faster the answers and the clarity on the how will come in. I guarantee you. You just sit with it and be okay not knowing how because otherwise, you'll never know. You'll never know how if you immediately say it can't be done.

If you're operating from this idea of it's not possible, it's not possible, it's not possible, well, then when you're right, you're right because how you see business determines what's possible. How you see yourself determines what's possible. So, if you say, “This business is impossible,” then you're right, and you'll never find the way, but if you sat there and say instead, which is what the successful entrepreneurs do, “I want to do this crazy thing. I don't know how the hell I'm going to do it, but I know that I am. I'll find a way. I'll figure it out. It will come to me. The right solutions, answers, and clarity, plan and path will present itself, and I'll know it when I see it.” Holy cow! That's powerful. Okay. That's huge, and that is taking responsibility for your life, which most …

Look, I don't think you can be a successful entrepreneur and not take responsibility for your life. The funny thing is, is you all are already responsible for your life. You are. The question is, are you choosing to operate from being responsible or are you choosing to live in a false belief that you are a victim and everything that you have in your reality is something that others have done to you, are present at this, are [inaudible 01:00:40] This has all been done to you by others. That's an illusion. It's a total lie.

The reason why that's a very dangerous lie to believe is because the moment you blame, the moment you play victim, the moment you say, “No, no, no. I am this way. My business is this way because of someone or something else,” what people don't realise is the moment you do that, you also give away all power to change it.

If your life is the way it is because of any other person, including your spouse, then you're doomed. You've doomed yourself because you're also declaring that there's nothing that you can do about your life. If other people determine how your life goes, you do not have the power to create it, and that's simply not true. Those are all illusions, lies and beliefs we tell ourselves because taking that responsibility is scary. It is, ironically, a massive amount of responsibility to take responsibility for your life because you have to take a good hard look and say, “Everything you created, everything, the good, the bad, the ugly, all of it,” and it's easy to take credit for the good parts, but it's really hard to just sit there and say, “Okay. What was my role in this? How did I create this? How am I responsible? What's my part in this?”

The things that we don't like in our life, that's a really hard pill for most to swallow, but that's actually the pill of personal power, and you can't create the life of your dreams, the freedom, the financial income impact that you want without first having that personal power.

Creating Your Story

You're so right. It's so hard to sit there. We're more than happy to take credit for the good things or at last we did it, but to sit there and go, “Actually, that was me,” but the stuff that we're not so happy about, much easier to blame parents, blame siblings, blame husbands, blame the economy, blame everyone else but ourselves because then we don't have to admit that, A, it was our fault or our doing, and B, that we can change it.

Another thing that you say to touch on that was some, you talked about the fact of trying to find an example of someone who's doing it. So, when you said it's the economy, it's the president, it's whatever it is, well, does that mean there's no one in the world who's being successful at the moment, does that mean that there is no other person who is in this position like me that is not doing a good job? Actually, there are always examples of people who are making it, and doing it, and achieving those things, aren't there?

Yeah. I mean, and I've said this before on my podcast, and it really stirs up some good controversy is that we're also just arguing for our limitations when we do that. You argue if you get to keep them, right? So, something to just really try on is whatever you're telling yourself right now about why it's not possible for you, a lot of times people say, “Well, easy for you, James. You have a team,” but I've started exactly where you did or worse.

That's something to really consider is that there is somebody out there that had less time, more problems, more kids, they have more kids, they have the more pain in the butt, unsupportive husband, they had less time, less money, more in debt, less resources, less knowledge. There's someone out there that had more problems than you, and less resources than you, and they made it possible. Period.

It's because they chose … This is what it all comes to, by the way. They chose to tell a better story than you. When I use this analogy, the blank canvass, I like to go between you're the artist painting your life, you're creating it how you want, so you can either create or paint on your canvass no time, no money, no resources, stay stuck, and also this analogy of, people have heard this before, you're the author of your life, and you can write the story any way you want. The story you tell is the story you experience. They're just simply telling a better story.

That's something I had to do that my story shifted, and when I shifted my story, because you see, most people when they hear … We have this multi almost eight-figure business, multimillion dollar business, and they just hear that and they go, “Oh! Well, there must be something special about James,” or “He was born with a skill or a trait that I just don't have,” and I don't know, maybe someday, one day, but I look back and it was like, “No. I struggled bad, really bad.” It was tough. I was the smartest person I knew, and the hardest working person I knew. I couldn't figure it out.

What shifted was when I told a different story. The story shifted at my lowest point. I mean, I was at a really rock bottom low. Nothing was working. I was just so broke. It wasn't even funny. I had to move back in with my parents. I remember a particularly frustrating night when I had just pounded my keyboard because I was so angry and I broke it. A key came popping off of it. I'm like, “Great.”

So, I went outside. I went to go just yell up at the stars, just scream. I didn't simply because we had neighbours, and I didn't want them to call the cops or freak. So, it was just silent scream and I'm clenching my fists. A thought popped into my mind. I'll never forget this because it changed everything. It was a pinnacle turning point for me because it was just a simple thought in so much anger and impatience. Frustration was really what it was.

I said to myself, this thought that just popped in, it said, “At least one day, I'll get to tell the story.” That was all it took because in that moment, my story began to shift. My story shifted from, “Why isn't this working? This is too frustrating. I'm working too much, too long. It's not working. I don't know how much longer I can keep this up,” to a story of, “My success is inevitable. One day, I'll tell the story. This is just part of my story.”

You go watch a movie and every movie has a problem, and a cliffhanger, where the protagonist reaches that low point where it's the lowest, worst point, and everything is either going to go really bad or it's going to turn out, and it always turns out well. So, we're all living that same story, but we get to choose when we want to change it from the low point into the happily every after.

Whatever's going on right now for you is just that drama. It's just that climax. It's just that tension in the movie, and it will all be over soon, and everyone has a happy ending, but you have to start telling that in your story first. That was when everything shifted for me as I said, “Hey, one day, I'll tell this,” and I do, and I tell it all the time, and look at me doing what I thought I was going to do years ago. I started creating a new story, and it started happening.

It's just so cool, isn't it? You have this other thing that I heard you say, and it was so funny because you were speaking to someone at the event, and they kept basically saying, “I would do this but …” and “I can do this but …” They kept giving you all these reasons why it was so hard. You immediately turn around and went, “What if it was easy?” It seems like such a simple thing to say, but something that people wouldn't ordinarily say to themselves because what if it was? What if I told myself the story that this is easy, this is how you do it?

It's just in your head. Your head is stopping you because like you said, putting a price is a great example because the physical aspect of doing it is the most simplest thing in the world. It's your head going, “Oh, but this, and this, and I can't.” Then you would say, “How hard it is for you to put up your prices?” Well, it's not. It's really easy. You just need to tell your mind it's just easy. So, yeah. I love that one. Okay.

Living In Abundance

Now, I'm really aware of your time. You've been so generous with it. So, one last one because again, it's one I really struggled with, and I still struggle a little bit with it, but it's living in abundance. The way you talk about the fact of the money mindset because again, I was brought up very much on money doesn't grow on trees, we don't deserve this, we won't have this, we will never have it. It was so funny because I saw my family over Christmas and my dad and I were talking, and he was a bit laughing about the fact of where I am in my life now, and how my level of expectation about what I am and what the business brings me and his level are two very different things.

He's like, “If I've got five pounds in my pocket, I feel like I'm winning.” We laughed about it, and it was funny, but my mindset has come from that. So, to live in this world of abundance where you give it and you know it's coming in return, and you have faith that it's going to be fine and all right. It's one that I'd love you to touch on because it is something that I'm still working on, and I think for lots of people, that's probably an area that could do or could make a difference in their life.

Absolutely. I think we can create an entire hour just from this one.

Yeah, just on those. Yeah.

I grew up with that. My dad grew up out of the great depression. I grew up with … A lot of what I teach is because of my dad. He was total lack mindset, and still is. I mean, he still is. You're not here to convince anybody else how to see the world. I just put out my message. I stopped trying to convince my dad otherwise. He gets to choose how he thinks. It's not our job to fix or change anybody. When you realised how hard it is to change yourself, you can only imagine how hard it is to try and change somebody else, right?

He grew up out of great depression. So, I grew up with things like if you left the door open, you'd get yelled at because you're letting the heat out, and the heat costs money. If you leave a room, you better turn those lights off because, oh, my goodness, that extra seven cents it's going to cost you in your electricity bill. Oh, my gosh!

Now, some people just scoff at this and say, “Well, you're just being wasteful.” No. It's good to not have a huge impact on the environment and be negligent and wasteful, but for the most part, things like this are coming out of a fear of lack and scarcity, and that's what my dad really was raised in, where there was no money. In the great depression, there was no money, and his parents were immigrants. So, he grew up in a lot of poverty.

Even though my dad became financially successful, to a certain degree, there's still a massive amount of that. So, I noticed that in me. I noticed that I just adopted that. The fact is, is abundance is all around us. We are trained to operate from lack. I mean, this is a really hard concept to grasp. I mean, there's entire books written about this. So, that's the first really big leg on my journey that I had to shift was if I want to be financially successful, I had to change my relationship with money, and adopt a more abundance mindset.

What is it is it's a choice. Right now, as you're listening, people are listening, and maybe they're in their car, and if you're driving in your car, do you notice, or maybe you're sitting down at your desk, do you notice the seat beneath you? Do you notice how it feels as you sit in the seat that you're sitting in? Most people don't realise it until I call their attention to it.

So, this is just more evidence that your conscious awareness can only focus on a few things at a time, right? So, until I told you about the chair, you probably weren't noticing how it feels. Well, why is this relevant? Because even though these things exist like the chair always existed, you didn't really pay attention to it consciously until I brought your attention to it.

So, where you put your attention is everything. So, if you're constantly putting your attention on lack, that's what you tend to get more of. What you focus your energy on is what you get back. Just like the chair, there's abundance all around us. There is evidence of more than enough of stuff all around us, all around us, all around us. You just start looking.

So, that's really the first step in the work is just like I put your attention back on the feeling of the chair is can you consciously and deliberately start to put your attention on the things that are around you right now that you have an abundance of? I posted about how lack and limitation is an illusion that people are choosing to believe in on my Instagram. Someone replied back and it says, “I hear what you're saying, but it's really hard to ignore the fact that I have to choose between what I eat or paying my bills every month.” My reply back was, “Do you know how many people in the world don't even have the luxury of that choice, that you have a house, a roof over your head, that you have heat, running water, and a toilet?”

My wife and I were in Africa this summer in Kenya. We got a tour of the villages of where these families that got … I mean, it's a whole host of … I'll keep the story short, but the whole travesty of how they got displaced from their homes, and they're living in dirt huts that are just like the size of the office I'm in right now, and they have seven family members.

We are choosing to put our attention on, “Here's what I don't have,” versus in that moment, you could still say, “Hey, look at what I do have.” Look at the abundance all around you. That's a choice. It's a lens. It's a filter that you can choose to look at the world from. It's not right or wrong, okay? Are you going to look at the world through, “Let me find more evidence of the abundance all around me.” There's an abundance of air that we can breathe. Let's start with that. You can all take a breath right now, and there's no shortage of air coming in to your lungs. Boom! Abundance. It's all around you. You are alive. Accept it. Okay?

Then we can say, “Wow! I have all the water I can drink,” for most of us listening, “and the food that I can eat.” If I look at the ocean everyday because I live in the beach, I go, “Look at how much water there is.” There's a great analogy, I think, maybe you've heard this quote. People ask for a little bit, and it's basically when they're asking for something, it's scooping in a thimble of water into the ocean. That's how small people think in comparison to how abundant the world is, how abundant the universe is. When someone asks for something, they're asking for a thimble of water in a sea of abundance.

I just look at the ocean everyday and I remind myself of that. I'm like, “There's so much more out there.” When it comes to things like money, people look in terms of a fixed, finite number, a fixed pie. If Teresa wants to grow her business to 10 million, she must be very careful that she doesn't think that she's taking that 10 million from somebody else because that's just not true. It's not true, and that's another way in which we operate from lack.

So, abundance is all around us, and we can look for it in every single different way, even the simple things. It really just starts to feel really, really good. Abundance doesn't necessarily have to deal with just money because money is a tool for stuff, right?

Yeah.

It's not the only tool we have at our disposal. It's a tool to help us get what we want, more freedom, more happiness, whatever, but they're not prerequisites, right? The money is a tool to pay the bills and stuff like that, but there's so much more abundance of everything else like abundance of relationships. The amount of people that you could connect with today, that could give you what you need, the information, the resources, the other connections, they're all right in front of you. So many people.

Even just when we look at other people that are successful, people tend to go, “Ugh! Why them, not me?” We beat ourselves up when we compare ourselves. It's like, “Whoa! Wait a second.” This is a constant reminder to our coaching clients. I'm like, “Every time someone shares a win, every time someone else becomes more successful, you realised you're connected to that person. You're one phone call, text message, PM away from gaining and downloading their experience, insight and wisdom.” That's abundance, an abundance of knowledge, an abundance of connections and relationships, an abundance of support. I mean, it's all around us, but it's a choice, and we've been trained our whole lives, we've been lied to to believe that we live in lack, and it's waking up to the fact that there is an abundance of everything you ask for because what you put out is what you get back.

So, if you continue to operate from lack, you continue to see lack. You continue to look for sea. Teresa, look. There's a shortage of this. That's what you're going to continue to get. How you see business, how you see your life determines what's possible for you. The filter, the lens, the perspective through which the glasses that you look through life with will reflect back exactly what you're already looking through.

Honestly, it can make such a difference to how you fill content. It seems so simple in the fact of … I have a great example. My daughter and I were shopping right before Christmas. As you can imagine, the supermarkets were really busy. We stood in this huge queue to try and pay for our shopping. My daughter said … She's only nine, so she's only young, and we tried really hard to talk about this kind of thing. We're talking about it, and I said, “You know what? How lucky are we that we get to stand in this queue with a trolley full of food that we're buying for our Christmas day.”

Interestingly enough, when I was at the event in Laguna, there was a [inaudible 01:19:49] and they talked about that charity, and I sponsored a child through the charity. I purposely did it with the intention of not only for myself, but for my daughter because she lives in this nice world that we've created for her, where she doesn't go without a lot, and she has food, and she clothes, and a house, but she doesn't obviously sometimes appreciate those things.

So, we have this young boy called Nabuth that we write to, and we'll often talk about the fact of imagine what he's got or when my daughter was saying … She always on her iPad and I think I said no, and I said, “What do you …” Yeah. Honestly, first of all, problems. It's like, “What do you think Nabuth does everyday when he's not at school apart from the fact that he's probably got to work and do things? What do you think he does with his spare time? How amazing do you think it would be if he just had some crayons and a piece of paper?”

We try so hard to constantly come back to that, take it right back to that level, which seems so extreme, but actually if you're really going to be super grateful and super living in abundance, you almost need to take it back to that and go, “We're not in a mud hut. I have a TV, and a sofa, and a carpet, and a house, and food in the fridge, and all those things,” that like you said, we just take for granted for every single day, don't we? We don't even think about it.

Totally. Yeah, that was really awesome. Just to recap that, that was a really awesome experience for us as well. Dr. Shannon Irvine is a good friend of ours. She's also a client. She's running this charity for 14 years. We decided to sponsor her charity at our three-day event with the intention of having people in the room raise money for it. It became a big lesson in abundance, too. I think, especially the time of year with Christmas and stuff, too. It's also such a great opportunity to practise abundance because it's so much more about giving and letting money go out. If you operate from abundance, it's very easy to let money go out.

I don't share this to brag or anything, but I share this as simple demonstrations to inspire and encourage other people, but Christmas Eve day, I was picking something up at the supermarket, and there's a family out there. It's tragic to just see an entire family, the husband, the wife, and the kids the day before Christmas just sitting there, swallowing their pride and just asking for money.

I happen to keep a couple of $100 in my wallet at all times, also because it gives me a feeling of abundance. I just gave it all to them. I love doing that. That's something that can really drastically help your relationship with money as well is that understanding that the more money you make, the more impact you can create, the more that you can use this tool for good. Money doesn't have a label attached to it. Money isn't good or bad. Money is just money. It's neutral. It's what you do with it.

A hammer can build your dream home, and it can also take a life. That doesn't make a hammer good or bad. It just makes it a hammer. So, you are, really, the ultimate determination of how you're going to use this tool. So, it was so awesome to see members at every level, people just starting their business, people already successful giving what they wanted to, what they felt inspired to give. During those three days, and we raised over $90,000. I think it was $95,000.

Yeah. It was amazing.

It was more money than she's ever raised at a single event in 14 years of running that, 12 or 14 years of running that charity, more money than she'd ever raised. At the end of the day, we've done multimillion dollar launches. I've done a lot of things that I'd be really proud about and accomplished. Nothing has more of a lasting and deep fulfilling feeling than doing something like that. I didn't donate all of it, the members did, but it was mostly the members, right? That to me has crazy thoughts because I'm like, “Well, not only are we contributing our tool of money, but we're inspiring others to do that as well,” and that has compounding effects.

You could not be more understanding of the point of abundance being sat in Laguna beach, obviously, because I'm from the UK going over there. It's amazing. We sat in Laguna beach in a lovely room, with amazing people, with coffee on top, and just sit there and see what some of these young people go through. You couldn't sit there and honestly think, “I don't want to give anything,” or “I can't give anything,” because you sat there thinking, “I sat in Laguna beach in California. This is amazing. So, surely, I can give something to these young people.” So, it was. The event itself was fantastic.

While I was at the event, and I talked about this on the podcast, I went to the event as Business By Design, and moved up to the next level because I knew that what I needed more of was that coaching and that interaction. One thing that's really interesting with your coaching that not only you do, but the other coaches do is like you said, you don't give us a handbook.

We're not sat there with a list of James says do this, do this, do this, do this. It would be really easy if you could. That would be great, but it's a case of you're equipping us because you're asking us the questions. You're making us find the answers and dig a bit deeper, and work it out for ourselves because ultimately, as much as we all love to have you in our lives, we need to do this for ourselves. We need to be able to get these things done and understand these things. It's that constant practise of those things.

So, for me, I'm super excited about the next year coming because I've just joined next level. You did an amazing thing where the next level people got to come on stage and say what their big wins were for the past 12 months. I sat there and thought to myself, and again, it's so silly because I'm a little bit embarrassed saying it, but I sat there thinking, “I'm going to be there. I'm going to be stood on that stage. I'm going to be one of those people that gets to tell the rest of the room what I did in that 12 months.”

So, I am so very excited to see what's going to happen, and how things are going to change for me, and the impact that you're going to have even further on me and my business. So, I just want to say thank you again for coming on the podcast. You've been a great guest. Obviously, I will hook up to everything in the show notes. I'll make sure we've got links to your podcast because … and you're doing three a week now, aren't you?

Every once in a while. I definitely do one every Monday, and then we've created two additional segments, and I do a Wednesday episode where we share a case study of a student who's kicking butt, and then Friday is more of a practical business tip, and then whenever I feel inspired to do them.

It's hard work. Honestly, doing a podcast, I can appreciate how difficult it is, but to do more than one a week, you're like a machine. That's amazing, but yeah. Thank you so much again, James. I really appreciate you coming on the podcast and sharing such insightful, amazing things with my audience.

Well, thank you. Thanks for having me.

No problem.

Oh, wow! So, I don't know about you, but I loved that. Not only, obviously, did I love being able to interview James because he's a bit of a hero to me, but I just love everything he has to say. He just says things in a different way that makes you think, “Well, if I have an open mind about this and you know what? Maybe, maybe this might work or it's worth giving a go or that's a really interesting view on that point.” So, I'm really hoping you enjoyed today's episode and I would love to hear what you think. So, please come and find me, DM me or send me an instant story and let me know what you think. Tag both James and I in because I know he gets super excited about people coming back to him in terms of his own podcast. So, I'd love him to know what you guys think, and I really hope you got some amazing stuff from this episode.

So, thank you so much for listening. Next week, we're doing another interview because I've got so many good ones lined up that I wanted to get this year off to a really good start. So, next week, I am interviewing the wonderful Benji Travis and Sean Cannell, who are video influencers, and talk about how to use YouTube and online video to market your business and influence people. So, this is a really, really good one. These guys are full-time YouTubers, but also have a really successful video influencer page with great adviser businesses and entrepreneurs. It's a really smart one. You're going to love it, and I will see you next week.

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