Transcription
[Music] Well, I mentioned I would talk about the real reason I believe we sabotage ourselves. What's limiting you from the profit, success, impact you want are not all the reasons your reptilian brain has seduced you into believing. What's holding you back is what I call your sabotur. Here's what I mean by that.
If you could turn to page three of your workbook and if we could go to the visualizer please. So as entrepreneurs most of us stay within the safe harbor of the known. We think the same thoughts. We communicate with our team in the same ways. We take the same route to work. We basically perform and occur in the world and at the office in the same ways.
What starts to happen is we are presented with an opportunity. I call this the entrepreneurial stretch. So what starts to happen? We seize an opportunity. We set a goal. We come to an event like this. We say I want to take my business to a whole new level of sales. I want to have a high-erforming team. I want to grow my brand. I want to innovate and have the single best products and services in my business.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have suggested to you that is the most evolved part of your brain in action. It's called the neoortex which is the seed of the intellect. So you come here, you write down here's how much money I want to make. Here's what I want my brand to stand for. Here's what I want my life to look like. We set these goals. Perfect. Fantastic.
But at the same time, we then initiate a war. We then initiate a struggle because our intellect says, "I want to make 5 million or 10 million. I want to grow profits. I want to have this kind of a team. This is what I want my brand to stand for. Here are the countries I want to be in. Here's the life I want to live." That's all intellectual within the realm of the neoortex.
But the emotional part of us, the reptilian part of us, that darker part of our human nature begins to get frightened because in order to move towards our goals and our dreams and our closely cherished vision, we must leave what I call the safe harbor of the known. And ladies and gentlemen, we literally must bump up against our perceived limits.
And almost, and here is the real key, most entrepreneurs, what I call ordinary entrepreneurs, they bump up against their perceived limits. And here's the key thing. They don't even know it. It's subconscious. And they begin to make these excuses. They begin to get involved in these sabotaging behaviors that they think are real. and they literally retreat back into the safe harbor of the known.
So, what I'm suggesting to you is the real way to get to where you want to get to, and we're going to talk about the tactics for building your business, tactics for building your team Saturday and Sunday. But the real key is to moving through your perceived limits into growth and progress and your next level of entrepreneurial excellence.
Here's the real idea. Let's say you're writing a book. As you get closer to finishing that book, your sabotur screams more loudly. Let's say personally you want to start saving more money, growing your net worth. As you start to get closer to your net worth, as you start to save, as you start to invest, as you start to seriously look at how you're spending your money, your sabotur gets scared and you start doing all these things you don't even see you're doing that begin to sabotage you. Why? Because we don't want to leave the safe harbor of the known.
Here's my point. Let's go to the next screen, please. Seven saboturs. Number one, ordinary entrepreneurs, when they bump up against their limits, when they begin to change, when the reptilian brain starts screaming because people get afraid of loss, afraid of being laughed at, afraid of being disliked, one of the ways we sabotage ourselves is we wait for perfection to launch our gamechanging move.
Ladies and gentlemen, one of the things the best entrepreneurs do, one of the things the best entrepreneurs do is they prototype and then iterate. It's a very simple but powerful point. Do not wait until your product is perfect to launch it. Don't wait until your product or your service is exactly where you want it to be before you sell it. One of the great things that the best entrepreneurs, truly remarkable entrepreneurs do, they are masters of prototyping. they put out the beta version and then they start iterating it.
So when you are you have this goal to grow your business, to grow sales, to grow profits, you start to move towards that goal, the deeper part of you, the sabotur gets afraid because since we were kids, we were told it's bad to have what we want. We don't want to change. We don't want to fail. We don't want to succeed. Here's one of the ways we subconsciously sabotage ourselves. We wait until perfection before we do the thing that we know will change the game.
Number two, how many people in this room are really busy being busy? Put up your hands, ladies and gentlemen. One of the single best ways to sabotage yourself is to get really busy being busy. Here's what I challenge you. What if all that busyness was a symptom of fear? What I've been inviting you to wrap your brain cells around is every single one of us in this room biologically as confirmed by science has a biological fear system. It served us a thousand years ago when we faced dinosaurs and some of the physical dangers that we needed as human beings. But we still have it now and it goes off when we begin to change.
And so there's that struggle between our neoortex and what we want intellectually here in this room and our emotional side and that reptilian brain. The second way we sabotage ourselves in the middle of when we should be doing our best work, here's a very valuable idea I suggest to you. Do your best work doing your best hours. If you study human energy patterns and cycles, you are most creative and most productive early in the morning.
On Sunday, I'm going to take you through how people like John Gisham, people like film actors, creative types, what they do to get their creative results. Almost every one of them get up early and they work first thing in the morning. Why? Because physically that's when we're at our best. Creatively, that's when we're at our best. So, what do most of us do? We get up in the morning, the the worst thing you can do is you get up in the morning, you start checking your email.
Here, just to show you, everything I'm sharing with you comes from science. According to latest research, on an average day, the average person is wasting 2.1 hours a day in distraction. You're spending 2.1 hours a day checking your Facebook, Twitter, emails. It's a great way to sabotage yourself. How many times you're working on that project that you know will take your business to a whole new level, ladies and gentlemen. Or you're coaching a teammate, you're doing something really important versus busy, and you distract yourself.
What if that pattern is because you're afraid to leave your safe harbor of the known, go out into the unknown, and achieve the sales, profits, success, happiness you deserve. Why? Because it's that little four-year-old inside of you that says you can't have what you want. It's wrong.
Third saboter. I've seen this all the time. I've seen this with people that I've worked with. I've seen it with many CEOs of the organizations that we have coached. They say, "Why isn't my team engaged? Why isn't my team passionate? Why doesn't my team come to work and give their best work?" And then I study the CEO and I shadow the CEO and I realize the CEO's neoortex wants a worldclass team, but the CEO's sabotur is tearing down every single one of her people.
Ladies and gentlemen, what you're going to hear this weekend at the Remarkable Entrepreneur Super Conference is very simple, but it's not easy. When I read your questionnaires, a lot of you said, "Sher, I want to hear Robin's secrets. What he's learned from Nike and FedEx and IBM and BP and Royal Bank of Scotland and here in Canada, the Bay and Shoppers Drug Mart and in, you know, India, the Camir Bera Group and in Latin America, Banko Popular."
Ladies and gentlemen, you already know a lot. You're going to hear a lot of fresh ideas. I guarantee you. Guarantee you. But it's the execution. And really, this weekend is about how to execute around your ideas. I would rather have a mediocre idea with a team that can flawlessly execute it than a genius level idea that never sees the light of day. Is that a valuable idea or no? It it's about executing around the few things that are most important.
So a very simple idea is our job as leaders is to lift people up versus tear people down. And ladies and gentlemen, if that was such an obvious idea, why do so few people do it? I mean, how many people really, if you were to look in the mirror, are you do you truly leave people better than you found them? Seriously. You know my my thing with the book the new book it's leave without a title right I think the only title that matters is CIO chief inspiration officer but let me ask you how many right chief our our job is to energize people you know what someone said about Steve Jobs they said I didn't understand the meaning of charisma until I met Steve Jobs you know what Steve uh Bill Gates said, he said, "I want to build an organization where people they're feel they're part of a dream." That is so powerful.
Did you know literally human beings are hardwired to look for some kind of a cause they can give their gifts and their talents to? Wow. We say that's soft. Bill Gates or excuse me, Bill Gates was I want to build an organization where people feel they're part of dream. What did W and Steve Jobs say? They didn't say, "I want to be billionaires." They didn't say, "I want to own sports teams." They said, "I want to build an organization where people feel they can make a dent in the universe." Our job is to help people do work they never thought they were capable of doing.
If you build a culture, we're going to talk a lot about culture tomorrow. If you build a culture where people feel they're growing, they're stretching, you're pushing them, you're coaching them, you're mentoring them, they're actually coming to work and using each day at work as a platform to express more of their creativity and their potential. If you can do that, you'll have their fidelity and you will build a great team.
How else do we sabotage ourselves? We make excuses we think are real. You know what I was reading? I love it. Rudyard Kipling, you know what he said? We all have 40 million reasons and not a single excuse. I've heard the excuses. I make them myself from time to time. I'm too busy. Globalization hard to find good people. Commoditization in our industry. Profits are shrinking. Does it sound familiar? No. Just two people. Huh? Okay.
I'm going to open you up this weekend, my friends. What if your excuse is I don't have enough time to work out. What if your excuses it's too urgent to develop my team? What if your excuses for even not taking more time off? I'm going to share with you how you can make more profits and take more time off. It's called the milliondoll vacation strategy. No one wants to hear that one, huh? But here's the thing. What if your excuses were a form of sabotage?
And you Here's an idea to play with. The more you recite your excuses, the more they become your beliefs. Let's go back to the science. What's a belief? It's nothing more than words. You've repeated yourself over and over. We think through words. Is that a helpful idea? We think through words. We recite the words enough becomes a belief. Show of hands. I'm curious. Fantastic.
Here's another idea. If you look at the best leaders, they manage their words with impeccability. I was dealing with an organization the other day. You know what the woman said to me? Just real world stuff this weekend. You know what she said to me? I asked her for something. She said, "Don't be silly." How many people in this room would talk to a guest like that? Don't be silly.
I I remember I was in one hotel. I spent a lot of time in hotels. I asked for a reservation at a nice restaurant in that city. Woman calls me back five minutes later. You know what she said? She said, "I've got some terrible news for you." I was wondering who died. She said, "I couldn't get your reservation." How many times do you hear your teammates or you yourself say, "I'm dying of this. I'm sick of this. I'm tired of this." What if you repeat it enough times, you actually become tired of this?
Is this soft stuff from some self-help book? Study neurallinginguistic experts and they will share with you that the words you use affect your emotional state. A problem is only a problem if you call it a problem. Problem is an opportunity to stretch, to grow, to iterate, to build better systems, to build a better organization, to become tougher. excuses. Remarkable entrepreneurs do not make excuses.
This weekend, I challenge you because I just want the best for you. Start to look at your excuses. What are your excuses? And what if that's your reptilian brain? What if it's a great way to sabotage yourself? You seduce yourself into falling in love with your excuses so you don't have to change, you don't have to grow, you don't have to stretch.
Fifth way, death by meeting. death by meeting. How many of us spend so much time every day analyzing, overanalyzing? What I'm gently challenging you to ask yourself is, is all this meeting and overthinking a great way to prevent you from making the changes, from getting results? Even overthinking. How many people buy books and you buy another book and you listen to another audio and you read the blogs and that's all you do. But you don't grow your business. You don't hire the teammate. You don't develop the culture.
Oh, I'm learning. I think you get to a point where you want to learn, but then you want to put down the books and you want to pick up the phone and make the sale and grow the team and grow the culture. Here's another one. as entrepreneurs, ordinary entrepreneurs, how many of you in this room, you don't measure your numbers at world class. One of the things I've seen when I work with ordinary entrepreneurs, I, you know, on teams, ordinary entrepreneurs, they don't want to look at the books, they don't want to look at the numbers. They say, "I just want to do the creative things." How many people experience that? Show of hands. You just want to do the fun stuff.
How can you build a world-class business if you're not looking at the dashboard at least every seven days? Building a world-class business is not difficult. It's simple. It's the execution. So, most of us, what do we do? We say, "Oh, no. I don't want to meet with the accountant. I don't want to, you know, set aside the numbers. I don't want to study how we're doing. I want I don't want to I don't like that stuff." It's a great way for your sabotur to prevent you from growing your business.
And even personally, I just want to go back to that. Even personally, how many of us in this room, how many of us in this room on point number six, we say, "I want my net worth to be whatever." And we write down the goal. Our neoortex writes down that goal. And then what do we do? We go on shopping sprees. We spend money like it's water.
What if that's a fear response because the deeper part of you, the unconscious part of you is literally frightened because you would have to become a different person to be at that level of net worth. And just to challenge you, what if net worth isn't really the point? It's who you have to become to get to that level of net worth.
And number seven, most ordinary entrepreneurs, they spend more time planning their summer vacations than they do planning their lives. You see, ladies and gentlemen, most people are so busy climbing these mountains. But what if at the end of the quarter, end of the year, end of the decade, you have climbed the wrong mountains? I guess what I'm suggesting to you is clarity precedes mastery. And I know it's really easy to talk about this. It's so easy that most people don't do it.
What I'm suggesting to you is how can you hit a target you've never seen? How can you hit a sales number if you don't even know what your quarterly, yearly, threeyear, 5year sales numbers are? Let me ask you, show of hands. How many people know what your ideal sales number is two years from now? Show of hands. Be honest. Rooms full of sophisticated people, I'd say 20%. How many people know three years from now, five years from now, 50 years from now?
You know what Warren Buffett said? He said, "I'm really concerned about this company, not now, but 50 years from now." See, if you know what 50 years out looks like, then you can manage for the future today. And if you share it and evangelize it with your team every single week, every single and it you plaster it on the walls, that magnificent obsession becomes the mountaintop that the entire team is engaged around.
You want more energy? How many people in this room want more energy? We're going to talk a lot about energy on Sunday. Some great fresh ideas for you, I promise. But few things are as powerful to energize you as some kind of a magnificent obsession. Goals, a mission, a vision with staggering clarity releases energy.
And so a great way a lot of us sabotage ourselves, the sabotur at work, what do we do? We don't plan. We don't have a goal. We don't know our mission. How many people in this room know the five words you want your culture to stand for 24 months from now? Show of hands. Five people. Just if you don't know what you want your culture to stand for, did you know according to one research report, you can grow your profits 144% by one thing? Work on your culture 144%.
When I read your questionnaires, you said, "I want to grow profits. It's not sexy. It's It's not create the iPod. It's not build a Zapos. It's not start a FedEx. Yeah, it's work on culture. 144% increase in your profits if you get your culture right. And we're going to talk a lot about that tomorrow. You do not want to miss this.