CONDITIONING YOURSELF TO SUCCEED

by Willard Barth and Steve Pavlina

Sometimes you may encounter situations where you know what you should be doing, but you find yourself having a tough time getting yourself to do it. Or perhaps you’re able to get started on a task, but you just can’t seem to maintain the momentum to see it through to the end. If this kind of problem continues for too long, you’re bound to start to seeing a detrimental effect on your overall confidence level. You may begin thinking you have a motivation problem, as if maybe you just don’t want to succeed badly enough.

One solution to this problem is conditioning, which comes in two primary forms: thought conditioning and behavioral conditioning. Thought conditioning focuses on controlling what you think. This is a cognitive model of success, where you rely on the assumption that if you think the right thoughts, you’ll take the right actions, and thereby get the results you want. Examples of thought conditioning include speaking or reading positive affirmations, visualizing a positive outcome, transformational vocabulary (choosing positive words to describe your situation as opposed to negative words, as in, “I’m having a fantastic day”), and certain forms of meditation. And in many situations, thought conditioning is very effective, particularly when problematic thoughts are the root of the problem, such as a negative attitude causing you to rub people the wrong way.

Behavioral conditioning comes from a behavioral model of success. This model assumes that if you take the correct actions, you’ll achieve the results you want, regardless of what your thoughts are. Behavioral conditioning focuses on forming new habits of action with little concern for what you think. Many behaviorists believe that if you take the right actions, the right thoughts will follow anyway. Examples of behavioral conditioning include setting your alarm clock to wake you up each morning, giving yourself a tangible reward for working an extra couple hours, or punishment for inappropriate actions.

I have used both forms of conditioning with great success. Years ago, I used mostly thought conditioning. Today, however, I find that a combination of thought conditioning along with behavioral conditioning is more effective for me and a lot faster. One of the problems with just relying on thought conditioning is that if you fail to take the right actions quickly, then your behavior can de-condition the very thoughts you’re trying to adopt. For example, if you’re trying to quit smoking, and you focus on thinking that you’re a nonsmoker and do some daily affirmations to that effect, but you keep lighting up in the meantime, then you’re sending mixed messages, and you’ll most likely slip back into the previous thought patterns and habits. Your continued behavior is an affirmation too. But if you can manage to physically stop lighting up, even while you’re thinking you’re still a smoker, that behavior will tend to induce thoughts of being a nonsmoker. Behavioral conditioning works best when merely changing your behavior (regardless of how you think) is enough to guarantee a result. For example, if you stop making impulse purchases, you will save money, regardless of what you think about it. When you combine behavioral conditioning with thought conditioning the results are exponential!

I do need to say that I agree with the behaviorists that motivation follows action. When you get yourself to take action, even when you aren’t initially motivated to do so, you will find that your motivation automatically increases. Having a productive day can be very motivating. This is a huge part of the principle behind The 90 Day Transformation Challenge that I facilitate.

The basic idea behind behavioral conditioning is control and substitution. Figure out what actions you need to take to get the results you want (i.e. how you need to behave). Then condition yourself to take those actions. You’re always behaving some way — so make sure your behavior will give you the results you want. If you find you aren’t behaving in a manner that’s congruent with your goals, then take control of the situation and substitute the correct behavior for the incorrect one. For many goals it’s enough for you to simply put in the time — just investing enough time gets you 80% of the way there.

For example, this morning I could have slept in until 8am (Ok, that’s early for some people), had a leisurely breakfast, and binge watched Netflix. And that would have yielded a result of … pretty much nothing. I’d be no closer to my goals. It wouldn’t even be that exciting or fun either… just lazy.

But today I got up at 6am, went straight to my computer, spent 2 hours doing my morning rituals which includes meditation, exercise, reading 14 pages of a document I created that lays out my goals, who I need to be to achieve them, incantations, my values and rules that allow me to feel successful and fulfilled, as well as my identity statement and other reinforcing statements to help me maintain my focus on who I choose to be. Then I had a quick breakfast while discussing plans for the day with my assistant, spent another hour doing reading and watching course materials to continue expanding my mind and skill sets, wrote an article, had 3 calls with clients and then started this 2nd article for the day. So on a Monday morning, I completed eight solid hours of productive work that moves me closer to my goals. And it wasn’t difficult. I simply substituted this kind of morning for the lazy morning. Consequently, I feel energized instead of tired. And I still have 3 more hours of calls on my schedule for the day!

The problem is that most people unknowingly condition behaviors that will guarantee mediocre results. Look back on your behavior over this past month. Have your results been congruent with your actions? If you spend the next month behaving differently, will it change your results? Where do you see incongruencies between the results you want and your current habits of behavior? What changes would you like to make?

In the next entry, I’ll explain exactly how to use behavioral conditioning to break bad habits and form new habits. And it doesn’t involve willpower.

THE BEST ADVICE TO FOLLOW

by Willard Barth and Steve Pavlina Article 4

Over the years I have really enjoyed attending educational seminars, workshops and networking events. It’s not just about the presenter and the topic of the event. Often it’s about the individuals I meet, the relationships that are developed and the conversations had in the hallways, over coffee or on the phone that develop after the event itself. I attend these events because I want to surround myself with likeminded people, but also I make sure to choose events where I will surround myself with people who are further along than I am at the moment.

I can’t tell you how many times I have spent an extra 30 minutes or even a couple of hours and performed some surgical brain-picking, getting loads of outstanding advice and ideas in empty hotel ballrooms or convention center parking lots after an event. It’s one of the greatest opportunities to be able to hang out with people who have more than 10 times my level of experience and knowledge in some specific area. Learning from these people is a major shortcut to success in any endeavor.

I used this same approach when I decided I wanted to make a full-time living from coaching back in 1999. At the time I was making only about $1,000/month from doing coaching part time for another company, but I needed to be making a minimum of 10x that amount to leave my full time position DJing in NYC if I was going to sustain my lifestyle at the time. So I started attending events and signing up for courses where I identified people who seemed to be making at least $50-100K per year from selling coaching. Then I proceeded to pick their brains as much as possible, mostly by engaging in email dialogs.

But I also realized if nobody knows who you are, then you’re not going to get much good advice from successful people. So I became part of the board of directors of an organization that promoted events for personal and professional development and helped them found a 501c3 non-profit. Before long I was vice-president of the organization and soon after that president. I ended up having more influence, people began to know who I was and that created even more opportunities to spend time with successful people. I also started leading other meetings and speaking in front of small organizations and I built a reputation as a contributor, not a leech. If you are looking to gain knowledge from someone, it has to be a game of “pith and catch”. You can’t just pick people’s brains if you don’t give them a piece of yours in return. But as my knowledge and influence grew, the net result was that I could very easily solicit advice from people whose coaching income was 10x higher than mine and more.

I just kept going from there, soon hitting six figures a year in my coaching business, always identifying people who were already making my target level of income. But I also applied the same principle in my other businesses and other areas of my life. If I wanted to learn about health, I learned from the best. If I wanted to learn about speaking and selling from the stage, I learned from the best. If I wanted to learn about any specific subject, I sought out and learned from the best.

A big mistake people make when trying to increase their success in some area is that they’ll ask advice from people who aren’t getting the right results. For example, let’s say you’re making $60K per year right now, and you want to be earning twice that amount. Most people will seek advice from all their friends who are making $50-90K per year. And they’ll get lots of advice. But it will be essentially worthless. It’s far better to talk for 15 minutes to a person who’s making $150K per year than it is to spend a full day seeking advice from people who aren’t at that level yet. This might sound like an exaggeration or cold, but I honestly don’t believe it is. I’d rather get answers to just one or two questions from someone who’s far more successful than me in some area than to chat all day with people who are roughly at my own level.

One strange paradox is that advice from people who are at your level often sounds very good and sensible. But it’s often bad advice because although it “sounds good”, it may be a far more difficult path to success, and often it just won’t work at all. On the other hand, advice from people who are far ahead of you will often initially sound bad or reckless, but if you actually apply it with a bit of faith, it often works wonderfully. And the reason is… because that is the path they already walked to success. They’re not sharing what they “think” will work. They KNOW it works!

Here’s a simple example:

When I started a training company in mid-1999, I wanted to build it up fast. So I asked advice from a number of people on how to do this. People who were making $3,000 or less per month doing small seminars almost invariably gave me ideas about ways I could improve the program itself. So they focused on the “product” and on essentially creating more work. But one person I asked who was earning around $10K per month told me to stop that and spend 80% of my work time just marketing the product I had for the next several months. He said to market it every single day — and learn more about marketing every single day. I took his advice because he was already getting the results I wanted, and I knew he was being sincere. So for the next six months I did little else but learn marketing and do marketing. And it worked. It didn’t feel right at first to spend so little time working on the program, but I couldn’t complain about the monthly increases in cash and clients.

If I had followed the advice of my peers, I understand now that I would have only gotten minimal results, even though their advice sounded good to me at the time. Focusing on the product would have been the wrong strategy — I would have invested a lot of time and energy and gotten very little out of it. Focusing on marketing was harder for me, and it wasn’t initially the kind of answer I wanted to hear because I wasn’t yet too skilled in that area, but it was the thing for me to focus on in order to achieve the level of success I wanted.

When many people start a new business, they’re likely to miss the importance of marketing. It’s not at all obvious just how important marketing is, especially if you’re in love with developing new products or services. The product is important, but without enough time and energy spent on marketing, hardly anyone will know about your product. Jay Abraham says that marketing is the single greatest way to gain leverage when you want to increase your sales. Now having over 33 years under my belt as an entrepreneur and 21 years as a business consultant I can tell you with absolute certainty he’s right. I’ve failed in business and I have succeeded. And the key difference has been in marketing.

Unless your product or service has serious flaws, you can often get much greater leverage from a full day, week, or month invested in marketing than you can in tweaking and improving the product/service itself. The fact that this is fairly unintuitive may help to explain why so many new businesses fail or plateau.

But going a little deeper, I think there are other reasons people fail to seek advice from those that are doing much better than they are in some area. For one, there may be a degree of intimidation. The only thing I can suggest in that situation is to go ahead… feel intimidated and ask anyway.

But an even deeper issue may be that people don’t want to hear the kind of advice that will make them face their own fears and weaknesses. For example, if you aren’t good at marketing or don’t like marketing, then hearing someone say that this is the key to greater success may not be what you want to hear. So it’s easier to listen to people who tell you to tweak your product or service, especially if that’s already your strength. But if you take that easier approach, you’ll always be denied greater results. After a few years of that, you’ll feel like you’re stuck on a treadmill, doing all this work that just doesn’t get you anywhere. You’ll have gotten a lot done, but it just won’t produce very strong bottom-line results. And the reason this happens is often that you’re unconsciously modeling people who are stagnating too.

Seeking and applying advice from those who are already getting the results you want sounds like common sense. Yet actually doing this consistently is anything but common. So why not choose to be uncommon if it will get you to where you want?

WRITING AS A WAY TO SOLVE PROBLEMS

by Willard Barth and Steve Pavlina

One the most powerful personal development tools is simply to sit down and write or keep a personal journal.

I’ve been keeping a combination of paper journals, computer journals, audio and video diaries since 1989.

What do I do with these documents and recordings? Although many people use journals or diaries to keep a record of life events, I don’t normally bother with those types of entries, and I rarely even go back and review past entries. For me it’s primarily a problem solving tool, a way to think through complex decisions until I reach the point of clarity. I average about 5-10 journal entries a month, and I usually begin a new entry by asking a question or addressing a problem I want to solve. Then I proceed to explore the options of potential solutions to the problem. And I make sure to use these 3 filters when I start. 1) Every idea is a great idea 2) No idea is a bad idea and 3) Just because an idea didn’t work in the past does not mean that it may not work now. I’m just capturing options at this point.

Sometimes the problems may be very simple, such as “What topic should I select for my next presentation (or article)?” But other times I explore much broader subjects, like “Where do I want to be in 2020, and what do I need to start/stop doing now in order to get there?” Sometimes I’ll just brainstorm possible solutions, while other times I’ll write about a problem from different angles to understand it more fully. For example, I might ask myself, “How would Albert Einstein solve this problem? Leonardo da Vinci? Elon Musk? Captain Picard?” Or I might ask myself, “What’s actually good about this? Is there an option where I might avoid even needing to solve this problem? Is it really a problem at all? What would the optimal solution to this problem have to look like?”

I find these kinds of exercises extremely valuable. When I work at solving a problem just using the thoughts inside my head, I often find success with simple problems, but thinking things through often fails to solve the more complicated problems. Either I won’t find a satisfactory solution at all, or I won’t create a clear understanding of the problem that will allow me to feel good about the solutions I do come up with. Other times I’ll find a solution that I feel good about in that moment, but after I’ve slept on it and looked at it with a fresh set of eyes the next day, it doesn’t seem quite so intelligent anymore. So instead of thinking things through in my head, I tackle those big, complex problems by writing them through or recording them on audio or video.

Thinking can often become circular, and our brains have a tendency to delete information, distort our perceptions and generalize data. Example: we’re always looking to simplify things by classifying them according to patterns. A situation happens and we immediately ask ourselves, “What does this mean? What should I do?” and we search our memory banks looking for similar situations and patterns. In doing so, we delete, distort and generalize the data to find matches in our past and the patterns that are “similar”. However, sometimes it’s more important to consider the raw facts of a specific problem without trying to prematurely pattern-match it to a previous problem we’ve already experienced or solved. For example, if you run your own business and experience a temporary sales drop, which happens to be a problem you experienced and overcame once before, you may still need to consider the possibility that this sales drop has a unique cause and is in actuality in no way similar to the previous experience. Therefore it cannot be overcome by re-applying the previous solution.

By exploring problems on paper or recording them, I avoid circular thinking, and it’s also easier to identify gaps in the possible solutions that have yet to be considered. Once I’ve captured my thoughts about a problem from a particular angle, I can put that part to rest and move on to exploring the next part, and knowing that I have already captured my earlier thoughts makes it easy to consider the problem from a larger number of different perspectives to leave me feeling confident that I understand it fully enough to make an informed decision. So essentially, journaling allows me to overcome some of my brain’s functional limitations. Similar to a computer, I’m expanding the working memory that’s available in my mind for solving problems.

Some problems, by their very nature, are just too big to fully understand in our thoughts alone. We can only focus our conscious minds directly on a small part of any given problem. We are limited by our 6 senses as to what we can perceive from our specific vantage point.

Look, it’s no secret that our brains are extremely powerful, but our conscious minds are still very limited in their ability to hold onto multiple simultaneous thoughts. For example, you can close your eyes and visualize a sunset, but can you visualize that sunset from one hundred different angles all at the same time and select the one with the most breathtaking view?

Even a question as simple as, “What should I have to eat?” is enough to run us up against our mental limits. To truly make the best possible decision, we would have to consider all possible foods we might eat, prioritizing their taste, texture, nutritional value, cost, convenience, etc. Now for a fairly simple decision like this one, we might again “generalize” and consider just three or four options and then pick the one that seems best to us in the moment. But what if we’re faced with a much more significant decision with far-reaching consequences, where it’s much more important to feel confident that our choice is at least close to optimal?

Life is full of these kinds of choices. Should I make this investment? What career should I choose? Should I start my own business? What is the best diet choice for me? Where should I live? Should I get a divorce or remain in an unhappy marriage? These are all major life-changing decisions. You can certainly choose to make them haphazardly and with limited thought, but you’ll be the one who has to live with the consequences. If you fail to put in the effort to apply the full potential of your intellect to making the best possible choices when the stakes are so high, then what does that say about the value you place on your own life?

Look, even journaling or recording your thoughts can’t overcome all of the major limitations of our conscious minds allowing us to systematically consider every solution when there are potentially millions of possibilities. But capturing these things and thinking them through is at least a step in the right direction. We will still end up delegating a major part of our decision-making to our subconscious minds, to our intuition, and to our emotions. But the more of this process we can pull into our conscious minds by using the tools we’ve mentioned, or even better, working with a trusted advisor who can ask us quality questions and get us to see the problem from even more angles, the more clarity and focus we gain in knowing that our decisions are the right ones.

In the long run, by continually exercising the mental discipline to make more conscious decisions, we will reap the rewards of more consistent and greater results.