Transcription
[Music] I'm curious how many of this strategic blind, this strategic time blocking concept seems to be creating a lot of chat and discussion and conversation. Show of hands. Yeah. Fantastic. Fantastic. How many people are willing to make a commitment in this room right now to apply it for at least 12 weeks? Show of hands. Fantastic. Apply it for 12 weeks and judge by the results.
>> Yes. A few questions. Yeah.
>> A very, very good question, Sarica. Uh, how do some of, how do you adhere to it when you're traveling? So you set the, just because you're not in your usual routine doesn't mean you still can't schedule as, as well as you can. So Sunday morning, you schedule your week. You've got your flight. You've got your this. You're in the, you're going to be in the hotel room the next day. You've got your morning workout. You've got your meeting. You just schedule it. It might look different from when you're on the ground, but you still schedule it. It's just, this is one of those things where once you experience it and you see how well it works and how much it locks you in, you just keep on doing it.
Yes, my friend. Right? So that's fine. Work three 90-minute intervals. Perfect. And the rest in blocks of time. I'm just sharing that what I found is when I work in 90-minute intervals and take a break, the stamina, energy I have is unbelievable.
Number six, ruthlessly eliminate distractions by systems. Ruthlessly eliminate distractions by systems. The simplest system I can offer you is when you are working in these chunks of time, turn off your technology. Have I not suggested that over and over and over and over again? Don't rely on fighting human instinct. Every single one of us has a deep need to feel important. So, we love finding out who's sending us digital letters. How many people, when no one's looking, you're checking your Twitter numbers? No one in this room, or your Facebook numbers, or who's sending you the messages. So, what I'm suggesting to you is eliminate distractions by systems. You've got an executive assistant, tell your executive assistant, from 9:00 to noon on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays, I simply will not be available to talk to anyone. Do not rely on willpower. Build the system. Like, in other words, McDonaldize it so you have a system. Would that be valuable to you if you just did that simple idea? Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 9 to noon, you're no longer available for anyone. Show of hands. And what do you do? You work on your most important things.
Okay, one of the big ones. So, five o'clock club. How many people really want to have more energy than you've probably had in the last 15 years? Show hands. Seriously. Okay, take lots of notes here. I'm going to take you through exactly what I help my one-on-one clients do. And this is what I do myself when I'm in what I call my high excellence cycle to play at my best. Number one. Okay. So, this is called the pro-athlete protocol. The pro-athlete protocol. Why do I call it the PAP? It's because you will have so much energy as a result of running this daily system, or just do it five days a week. You know what I find sometimes? Some days, sometimes I cannot do this, or I choose not to do it because I have too much energy. Literally, I go, "I just have so much energy. I need to take a day where I don't run it because I need to just relax." And it's unbelievable what this will do for you. Fasten your seat belts, please. Okay, here we go. Here we go. I am so delighted to share this with you. This is game-changing.
P.A.P. Pro-Athlete Protocol starts at 5:00 a.m. How long does it take you to install this habit? Roughly 40 days. Can you give yourself 40 days? 40 days to install the neuro-pathway, right? Neuroplasticity. Your brain can change. Please don't say, "I can't change. It's impossible for me to change. My mother couldn't change. My grandpa couldn't change. I do not have changed genetics." You are built to change. The brain is plastic. You take the first step today, the first step tomorrow, the next day, 40 days later, guess what starts to happen? Almost automatically, you start getting up at 5:00 because it is a new neuropathway. How many people in this room, just to get a show of hands and a sense that this is real? You've read one of my books, been to one of my events. You started getting up at five o'clock and it became a whole new behavior for you. Show of hands. Look around the room, ladies and gentlemen. Okay, so it's possible to do it.
Now, what do you do when you get up at 5:00? First thing you do, just to get to a really granular level, brush your teeth. Do what you need to do. I'm taking you right through it. Is this okay? Is this helpful? How many times do you go to a seminar and they just go, "Big picture, big sky, change the world, sing kumbaya, build a great business, goodbye." So, I want to be of service to you. Here's what you do. You get up at 5:00. You brush your teeth. What I do, what I encourage our clients to do, first thing you do is you work out. First thing in the morning, after brushing your teeth, you work out. Why? Because once you work out, as you are working out, you literally dump endorphins into your bloodstream. What are endorphins? They're the body's naturally occurring opiates. Even if you're a really cranky person, you cannot help but be really happy because you're really taking control of the chemistry and the physiology, physiology of your body.
So now I'll just share myself what I do, not what our other clients do out of protecting their confidentiality. I go downstairs and I've got an exercise bike set up. I've also got a gym-quality treadmill set up. First thing I do, get on the bike. I start biking. I don't know about you guys, but for me, running in the morning, I run a few days a week, but running in the morning, it's, it's easier for me to make an excuse. Show of hands. Anyone with me on that? Some of you like running. Fantastic. Great. I'm just talking about for myself. It's really hard for me to make an excuse not to walk down the steps to the basement, get on an exercise bike. Family's still sleeping. I'm on the exercise bike.
Step number two, I've got a bottle of water. I put a green powder in it. I can explain it on the break. It has to do with the body's alkalinity. Stress creates acidity in the body. Disease occurs amidst a stressful environment. I pour the green drink. The one I use is called Greens Plus. Pour a little scoop into the water. Is this tactical enough for you?
>> I'm now on the bike. But here's the other thing I do. I don't just sit there and ruminate over my challenges or my frustrations or maybe things that I'm dealing with. I take control of my intellectual dimension because I've set up a TV. And what do I do? I'm now on the bike. I'm drinking my water. I'm rehydrating myself. You've been asleep eight hours or however much you sleep. Your body is depleted of water. You, you haven't hydrated yourself. So you wake up in the morning, you're dehydrated. Interesting idea. So now number one, you're on the bike. You're dumping endorphins into your bloodstream. You start feeling happy automatically. Here's the second thing it does. You're jumpstarting your metabolic engine. You're jumpstarting your metabolism because you're working. Make sense? You're drinking the water. You've got the green drink in there. And the final piece to this equation, you're learning. I've got a TV set up. I've got these DVDs. Depending on the mood, it might be marketing, leadership, communications, work-life balance, philosophy, goal setting. Oh, you say, "Well, I don't have a TV." Fine. I've got an iPod. How many people can afford an iPod in this room right now? How many people have an iPod for me? Right. So what are you doing first thing in the morning while your competition is snoring? You are amping up your game psychologically, physically, emotionally, spiritually. You're feeding your dimensions. You're learning. You're saying, "You know what? He's right. This guy, this guy on the TV screen is right about entrepreneurship or right about this." What else can you do while you're on the bicycle or whatever it is you read? Okay, you with me so far? Show of hands. Fantastic.
Then what do I encourage people to do? Go upstairs. I pour myself personally. I'll just share personally what I do. I have my cup of coffee. One of the, one of the greatest health drinks. It's an antioxidant. You have a cup of coffee. How many people really adore coffee? Show of hands. I just love coffee. It's beautiful. Drink my coffee. But here's a real key. Within one hour after waking up, have breakfast. A real key to energy. This is what we're talking about, energy. The pro-athlete protocol. You have your coffee. What I love for breakfast is my absolute favorite breakfast. Egg white omelet, pure protein, egg white omelet, little bit of oatmeal on the side. Here's another simple tip. Don't switch up your breakfast and your lunches and your dinners. Eat the same thing as much as you can stand it, right? I don't have to think. I do my egg white omelet. I have my oatmeal. Lunch. I might do the same smoothie, dinner with the family, chicken breast, grilled vegetable. I don't have to think about this stuff. And then you say, Robin, when do you enjoy? Believe me, I enjoy what I enjoy. One day a week, I might have a cheat meal. Okay, so where are we? You have your cup of coffee. Within an hour after getting up, you have your egg white omelet. You have your breakfast. The food you eat will determine how much money you make. How's that for an idea? You have a bad breakfast. You don't have any energy. You have a big lunch. You're exhausted in the afternoon. How can you implement and execute around the genius-level ideas you have? Your number one asset as an entrepreneur, ladies and gentlemen, is your energy. It's your energy.
Okay, drinking your coffee. What do you do? I've given you some inside under the kimono ideas that I share with our clients that I apply on your Apple Mac. You've got on the screen the rotating pictures of you and your family, you know, skiing, sailing, perfect moments. How many people in this room have had some nice moments with your family? Could you please put your hands up? You put those moments, your your your prized, cherished moments on a rotating slideshow. You're drinking your coffee. You play some music. What does music do to your state? You've learned it here in this room experientially. Lifts your energy.
Okay. So, now you're probably about half an hour in. You've had, you know, all it takes is 20 minutes on the bike. That's all you need to do. I'm going to really challenge you though. Don't let me forget about telling you this. I call it the two workout routine. I'll tell you about it. First thing you do on the bike in the morning. All I need is 20 minutes from you. 20 minutes. That's it. You get on the bike. You amp up your metabolism. You dump the endorphins. You're feeling good. You're drinking the coffee. You're going to have some breakfast in the first hour. Make sense so far. Simple. You've got the music playing in the background. Maybe light a few candles just to set the vibe. You've got the pictures going, so you're going, "Yeah, that was me skiing. Yeah, I've achieved a lot. Yeah, I've come a long way."
Now, what do you do in the final 20 minutes of this one-hour protocol? Bunch of things you can read. Read. So, I'll sit there with my coffee and I read. What do I read? I read Ben Franklin's autobiography. If I'm having a difficult time in my life, I'll read The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. If I'm in a high excellence cycle, I'll read about what geniuses do. I read about business building. I read books by Ted Turner and Richard Branson. I read psychology. I read about marketing. I read about sales. I read about philosophy. I love reading works of really old people because I want to find out when I get to the last day of my life, how will I wish I will have lived. And if I can figure that out by studying really old people, then I can reverse engineer it and live it now. Does that make sense by show of hands? Okay, 20 minutes of reading, what's happened? My perspective has changed. I realize life is about heroism. I realize business is about value creation. I leave the the weeds and the grass and I go up to 40,000 feet because I've connected to what business, life, value creation, excellence, productivity is all about. Do you think I'd feel different at this point of the day? Absolutely.
Here's another thing you can do. Sometimes I'll read, you know, all I'm doing is reading and I'll go into other cycles where I don't feel like reading. Anyone ever experienced that? Fantastic. So, just run with that cycle. In those situations, I journal. If you looked at my journals, if, if you saw my journals, you would say, "This guy is a serious student of leadership, entrepreneurship, life." I remember one year, no different from anyone in this room, a thousand pages of journaling. Why? Because when you get in that cycle of confusion in your business as you grow, personally, as you grow, one of the best places to figure it all out is on the crisp white pages of an empty journal. And let me shift from business to personally. How many people perhaps in this room right now, or in your life, you've suffered very painful times? Show of hands. I'll put my hand up. Would you rather take that pain, anger, frustration out on your team, your family, strangers on the street? You ever seen people on the street these days cut in front of them? "I'm going to kill you." It has nothing to do with you. It has everything to do with what they're dealing with. But no one has ever given them the tools, the systems, the beliefs in how to deal with that. Just shifting from the business to personally. If you're going through a difficult time, or when you do, pour your pain, your frustration, your confusion, your hurt, your bitterness out onto the pages of a journal. So, you let it go. You let it go and you don't because really, one of the ways that a lot of leaders destroy their cultures is they're really angry, frustrated people. And through passive-aggressive or overtly aggressive ways, they minimize their people. They make their people feel small. They lash out at their people. They control their people. It's not about their people. It's about them.
Also in my journal, that's when I write gratitude. I write gratitude probably every day. What do I write about? Blue sky. In fact, I have healthy kids. Right? That old Persian proverb. I cursed the fact I had no shoes until I saw the man who had no feet. As an entrepreneur, please don't suggest to me this is not relevant. When you literally in your journal every morning ask yourself this question. Here's a great question. What are five things I'm grateful for? Yeah. Then you will train your mind. The question will elicit the response. So in your journal, just write down the things you're grateful for. You live in the United States. You live in Canada. You live in Switzerland. You, you, you live in Singapore. You live in Dubai. Wherever you're from, from around the world, 26 countries here this weekend, there are many things you're grateful for. But through the process psychologists call hedonic adaptation, we adapt to the good things and we start looking for the bad things. Our job is to fight that human instinct. How do you do it? You pull out a piece of paper and you say, "What am I grateful for?" Wow, I've got shoes on my feet. Wow. In a world where a billion people went to bed hungry last night, I had food on my table. Wow, I can read. Wow, I have a team that really cares about our mission. Write it down. Next day, different ones. There's one client that I worked with, very successful entrepreneur, actually a few. You know what I did 30 days as part of my coaching? I asked them, "Send me an email every single morning. Five things you're grateful for. Just don't repeat it in 30 days." I checked in after 30 days. Of course, I checked in weekly, but I checked in after 30 days. The psychology, energy, focal points of that entrepreneur significantly shifted.
I have my breakfast. Kids are up by this time. I probably shouldn't do this, but I give my kids coffee. They love coffee. They wake up, you know, and I, I've got that old Italian stove top. Ever seen those old Italian stovetop coffee makers? Right. So, I pour it out. It's like this ritual and they're there and they're, they're, they're waking up and they sit, we've got this counter and they sit on these stools and I take the coffee and I put it in there and I put it on there. We start talking about their day and I go, "Come on, you guys set some goals." They go, "Yeah, goal setting, Dad. Give us a break." And we talk and we connect because business is a conversation. You lose the conversation with your clients, you'll lose your business. Family is a conversation. You lose the conversation with your family, you'll lose the conversation. They drink a little bit of coffee. Seriously, I put a lot of milk in there as well. It's like a super latte, right? Super latte. I then go up, I get them off to school almost every day. I'm at home and I'm at home a lot. There's this perception people say, "When are when are you ever home?" When I work, it's intense. We go out on the road. It's a blitz. Eight countries, two and a half weeks sometimes. That's what we did in February. Seven countries, eight cities, excuse me. And then I'm home. And almost every day I'm driving the kids to school, hanging out with the kids, drop them off at school. Then what I do? I either go to the office. If I go back home, I take my shower.
Okay, here's the key thing. In the shower. And I know this is very granular, but don't waste your shower time. It's, it's, it's a fantastic time to do your affirmations. And look, I'm a hardcore entrepreneur, but I cannot tell you how many hardcore entrepreneurs in this room use affirmations to rescript your mindset. So, you are uber-focused, unstoppable. Show of hands. Look at that. Look around the room, please. But no one wants to tell you they want to do it. I just want to be of service to you. They're doing it. They just don't want to tell you because they think you'll laugh at them. So what do I do in the shower? It just takes a few statements to redirect, refocus your psychology because beliefs are installed through words. You're going to be thinking all day long anyway if you keep on saying, "I won't do this. I can't. I'll fail. They'll laugh at me. What will they think?" If that's what you've been doing for the first 40 years of your life, you've got a lot of work to do to reinstall the beliefs we talked about this weekend. How do you do it? Words come from science. Beliefs are made up of words. The way you process the world is from words. If I said your wife, your husband, you think, right? Pictures and words. So in the shower, say to yourself, "Today I will be uber-focused on the nanowins," or "Today I'll be the most positive person in the organization." I don't know what yours are. One of the ones from Emil Coué many years ago. "Every day in every way I'm getting better and better, stronger and stronger." "Every day in every way I'm getting better and better, stronger and stronger." In one of my books, there was a line. It was what was it? Maybe it was Monk, "The world is inside of me," or something. I don't know. I just, I, I just wrote it. What was that one in the, in the Monk or one of the books? In every, "The world is inside me." And then Jeffrey mentioned he repeated that as part of his book, right? Every, what did he say last night? "Everything is already inside of me."
>> All I need is within me.
And, and here's a world-class entrepreneur telling you that was a core belief that he installed to launch him to stratospheric, and he's a humble guy, and I'll respect what he said last night, but to stratospheric success. And he said it, so I'm not speaking out of school. He said it. Achieving the kind of success that you only see in movies, those were the words he used. So these things work. Pro-athlete protocol. Let's go back to the other screen, please. Why should you do it? Because you will have more energy than you can ever imagine. I don't feel like sleeping. People go, "How do you feel like you, how many hours do you sleep?" They send me things on Twitter, Facebook, "How many hours do you sleep?" So much energy comes from running this system that literally I have to say, "I'm not getting, I'm not doing it today because I don't want that much energy. I don't want to be that effective." See, I hope I'm saying this with the respect and the humility I mean it. But literally, I go, "I don't need to be a machine every single day." But if you run this, you will be like a machine. And no one's suggesting you don't be human, enjoy the journey. I'm not saying that. Pick and choose what days you want to be world-class productive.
Number eight, celebrate weekly progress versus perfection. So many entrepreneurs I've coached, guess what they do? They go, "I'm at $50 million and I'm so frustrated because my golf partners are worth $440 million." They say, "I just moved into the 20,000 square foot house." I go, "Congratulations. It was one of your goals. We did it." But my neighbor's 50,000 and look at the arches and they've got a helipad. It, it's, it's a drug of choice. It's hedonic adaptation. If you fall into the trap of thinking the better car, the higher net worth will make you happy, it won't make you happy. What's the key? Celebrate the journey. Celebrate progress. Take pictures. Grow your team. Build your business. Celebrate not where you're going, but how far you've come. It's a really powerful idea to stay centered, focused, productive, full of energy. Because if you measure your success against your mountaintop, you will feel frustrated and discouraged. And no entrepreneur does their best work when they're discouraged, frustrated.
Sleep is more important than eating. You might be surprised to hear me say that. But what I'm learning is 7 hours is optimal. For years, I've gotten by on four to five hours of sleep. I encourage you now, one of the things I've realized, you're not at your best if you're sleep-deprived. So sleep is more important than eating.
Number 10, I've talked about that. The million-dollar vacation ritual. If you can make an idea that will, we talked about it. I took you through it. You agreed with me. One great vacation, you can make get that idea worth a million dollars. Then when you use the Buffett formula, cost versus value. The cost of the vacation, the cost of the best hotel room, the cost of the best wine or the best food, the cost of not being at the business is minimal as compared to the return on in value. Show of hands. Does that make sense? So, why wouldn't you take regular vacations?
And number 11, routines. I started the day early on talking about routines. Why? Because those routines will promote you shifting automatically into a creative, productive state. I think it was Gisham, wasn't it? He said, "Once I sit down here and I get to the desk and I start writing, literally at some level I say to my, some part of me goes, 'Okay, got it. Routine. I'm ready to dream.'" And how does the subconscious mind and the part of the brain responsible for creativity reply? It's in a certain environment. It's in a certain structure. You've built the system in the routine. Boom. It's understood. You've trained it. Give the idea. Give the creativity. A lot of information. I think we should take a break.