About 3 years ago I asked myself the question “Who am I? And can I be in business? And which path to take – with business or not.” After a year of thinking, I decided that I would still moderate my ardor and moderate it... pretty much, to zero.
Today I sat at a master class and realized that the girl who is now speaking in front of me has started doing exactly what I gave up exactly 3 years ago. Then my head was working and there were clients tearing me apart: “Only you can help here!”
And now she’s over there on the podium and explains to me everything that’s already in my head. Moreover, everything was on a much steeper scale for me. But it was hidden deeply of my own free will, since I gave up on myself, saying: “No, I won’t be doing business, other things are a priority.” I lost my ambitions and collapsed.
This is a quote from a private school chat. Elena exhaustively described how, after a year (!!!) of thought, she did not dare to move on, and her resource future collapsed.
I regularly encounter long periods of thinking and deliberation in my students. And the more a student thinks, the less likely he is to take the first step towards a new future.
Bodie Schaefer in one of his books gives the 72-hour rule - if you put off doing something planned for more than 72 hours (or 3 days), most likely you will never do it again. Almost all my statistics on students confirm this rule.
I've put together a list of 10 tips to help you get started.
Remove uncertainty: record your plans and make a schedule for their implementation
The first stopper of movement is the contradiction between the desire to eat the whole hippopotamus with a complete lack of understanding of how to do this. The mouth is small. I want a million a month, but I don’t understand how to do it yet and that’s why I’m standing still.
The first stage from which training begins at my school is the “Big Plans” training course. I teach how to cut a hippopotamus into pieces. I’ll tell you step by step how to specify your desires and create a business plan for achieving them. We are talking specifically about a business plan, since the main task of a business is to provide resources to fulfill the desires of its owner. We budget for the student’s desires and draw up step-by-step parameters for business development that will allow them to achieve these desires.
One of my students just opened a new office in Moscow. He had been nurturing this idea for a long time, but it happened after we sat down with him and outlined what steps and resources were required for this. One of the limiting beliefs that stopped my student was a large budget for implementation. When we laid everything out in detail and went through several options, it turned out that he was within his budget.
Stage 4. Harvesting
This is a long-awaited, but very dangerous period. Having reached the Land of Harvest, people think that the hardest part is over and they can relax. Because of this, they fall into traps that can easily lead them back to mediocrity. In this part I will tell you about the most dangerous of them.
Beware of Divideness (How Fame Can Destroy Your True Self)
It's not a fact that you will become famous. But at least you will definitely be famous in your circle. And no matter how many followers you have, 10 or 10,000, they will have a certain impression of you. This does not always correspond to reality. And at this moment you will have a desire to play along with their expectations. So you risk leaving your own path and following someone else’s. Be careful - only follow your dreams.
Keep cultivating your fields
Doing nothing is definitely mediocrity. Therefore, if you stop working on yourself and your business, you will quickly slide back to where you started. Even if you reap the well-deserved fruits of your work, you will have to work hard, otherwise the fields will be overgrown with weeds.
Don't chase quantity
When you reach a certain level of mastery, many will tell you: “More!” Expand production, write more posts, hire more workers, earn more money!” At this moment you should ask yourself the question: “Why?” Is it worth spending more time at work if you spend less time with your family or give up a hobby? Extraordinaryness is not a quantitative characteristic.
Don't be afraid of the harvest
In other words, don’t be afraid of success. A paradoxical but very common problem. This is especially true for people who have had too many failures in the past. Some people are simply afraid of change as such. Some people hide their problems in other areas of life in this way. You have to accept your success and live through it. Just like we experienced failures before. Then you will not only be able to fully enjoy it, but also discover new opportunities to develop your originality.
Get started now
“I’ll start testing this sales channel later”, “I’ll work on this method of growing the average ticket later”, “I’ll think about this marketing tool later”, “I’m in a bad energy state right now, I’ll launch this product later”, “cool sales case - I need it implement later."
People are waiting for Monday, better times, lucky stars, a sign from above.
I give you a sign from above - start right now! Do something right now that you have been putting off for a long time. Put a clear deadline in your calendar for the next 72 hours to take the first step towards your goal.
Continuing the case of the student with the opening of the office - He went on reconnaissance to Moscow almost immediately after our conversation. He did this one day - he left in the morning by Sapsan, and returned in the evening. I collected a lot of useful information, visited competitors and looked for a place for an office. Based on what we collected, we made several hypotheses, which he began to test.
An example of how to start right now with a complete breakdown from Evgenia from Petrozavodsk:
I took action and opened my first business in a state of complete loss of strength. After a long illness, I sat with my mother all winter and watched TV series, and one spring I thought “to hell with it, let’s try,” since there was nowhere to go any lower, I just started doing it, and my appetite came while eating)... That was a year and a half ago and now I have two working businesses, the first (hairdressing salon) has paid off and is in the black, the second (coffee to go) is not yet).
Possible steps to get started in any endeavor
Just as a child cannot be born without going through the stages of conception and intrauterine development, the necessary solution cannot appear without the completion of the hidden life processes that precede it.
After all, if the birth of a child for an outsider looks like the beginning of his life in this world, then for his mother it is a natural result of secret and, one might say, intimate processes hidden from prying eyes.
From this point of view, any initial action is a natural stage in the development and completion of earlier processes invisible to outsiders.
Very often we hear stories of financial success of this or that person. At the same time, people's attention is focused on its final results, and the initial stage and the entire process of its development remains in the shadows, just as the underwater part of an iceberg remains invisible to the navigator.
Eliminating unfinished business
Understanding this truth became for me a kind of revelation regarding how to begin to act in this or that matter. After all, whatever one may say, the moment of starting any new business acts as a kind of ending to the previous undertaking. Nobody starts, for example, building the third floor in a house if the first two are still missing.
It is for this reason that it is impossible to start something new when something old has not yet been completed. Only when a sufficient amount of practical experience and knowledge has been accumulated in the area of interest do they begin to develop a personal strategy and begin, so to speak, military operations.
In this regard, my personal story of making money on the Moscow Exchange turned out to be very clear. Although it was very short due to the lack of sufficient financial resources, it still became a good lesson in life.
As is usual in such cases, I found online trading training online, successfully, as it seemed to me at the time, completed it, opened a trading account with a broker, wrote a personal trading strategy and started trading.
Man in a state of nervousness and anxiety
I remember how, during the opening of the first transaction, I performed all the necessary operations to analyze the state of the market for the selected financial instrument, built support and resistance levels and was ready to press the last button to enter the market.
But this operation turned out to be especially difficult for me due to the fact that I clearly felt fear gripping my entire body. The longer I hesitated to press the coveted button in anticipation of the coveted earnings, the more difficult it became to do so.
Subsequently, after I reviewed and better remembered the training lessons and practiced on a demo account, I returned to trading with real money. From that moment on, the feeling of fear became more muted, but did not go away completely.
To bring my story to a logical conclusion, I will say that I was never able to completely get rid of the trembling in my knees and trembling in my chest during stock trading, since there was simply not enough money to eliminate them. My fear left me much slower than the money left my trading account. As a result, Internet trading had to be postponed until better times.
However, the experience gained turned out to be very useful today, including in understanding how to start acting in the chosen business. In my case, entering the first deal to trade on the stock exchange was not the logical end of the theoretical learning process and was not enough to develop a habitual skill.
The water pump pumps water out of the pool
Therefore, I simply did not have enough strength and energy for a successful start, since the incomplete learning process, like a water pump, continued to suck vital resources from me and did not allow me to move on to the beginning of the next practical stage.
This is how it works in principle in any new undertaking: the transition to the starting point occurs only when you feel ready for it. This feeling is most often of an intuitive nature and occurs, in my experience, in the case when all previous processes are completed and internalized at the level of, one might say, unconditioned reflexes.
If the feeling of automaticity and routine does not arise, then the previous phase is not completed and continues to absorb internal energy, thereby activating more and more new fears. Therefore, there is no need to talk about any kind of start or beginning.
Therefore, in order to, in principle, begin to act in a matter of interest, in my opinion, it is necessary to get rid of all unfinished tasks and thereby ensure an influx of new additional energy. In this case, you simply cannot find a better remedy than regular training.
Five Second Rule
One type of such training process for me was the regular use of the five-second rule. This is when, before the start of a planned event, you pause for yourself for five seconds (you pronounce the numbers sequentially to yourself) and immediately begin to implement your plan.
During this time, in principle, you do not have time to get scared and determine the type of fear that arises, since all attention is directed and concentrated directly on the process of performing the action itself. Fear or fright in this case is deprived of the vital force it needs and, essentially without being born, happily disappears.
And since there is no fear, then complete freedom of action arises.
Of course, five seconds is a completely relative value and serves more to demonstrate the process itself than for practical use. Personally, I have long been accustomed to this figure and do not feel any discomfort from using it.
Here, as in any other business, of course, you need “...skill, hardening, training...” (words from a Soviet song about sports), so in different cases it is better to use different time delays, first in the form of several minutes, and then you can get there and to a matter of seconds.
Personal practice in this matter will definitely show which specific periods of time will be acceptable and useful specifically for you. It’s one thing to provide yourself with time to catch up on sleep after the alarm clock rings, and a completely different case, for example, to begin to carry out orders from senior management.
Wall clock shows the exact time
In fairness, I must say that there is another principle for training the ability to act at the right time. To do this, for example, for five minutes they engage in the planned activity, and after the time has elapsed, they stop the initial actions.
I personally have not used this practice, since it is much more convenient for me to regulate the start of my work and the breaks between them than to limit the time of execution of these works. But since it works for someone, then this method has the right to exist.
Do it, because practice is the criterion of truth, not thought.
No matter how carefully and in detail we study the project, we will not be able to completely simulate the surrounding reality. Therefore, everything that is in our heads is just a hypothesis. There is only one way to check whether they work - start implementing them.
At our “I+Money” training, where we teach how to break through the glass ceiling of large sums, we have an exercise called “finding money.” Participants write the desired amount on a piece of paper. They are blindfolded, a piece of paper with the amount is hidden in the same room and they are asked to find this piece of paper blindly. Everyone has a partner who protects the person with his eyes closed so that he does not hit or stumble while looking for the treasured leaf.
It is noteworthy that those who achieve results the fastest are not those who stand, think, listen to themselves, then slowly walk to the desired point, and then still stand there and wait for a new revelation to come over them, where to look.
They are found by those who begin to quickly move in different directions, moving their hands around everything. They pat and feel as many objects as possible, finding what they are looking for much faster than those who think. Although often the former go in the right direction, and the latter are wrong.
Stage 2. Editing
In the land of study, you were looking for a suitable granite block for a statue. During the Editing process, you will have to take a tool and cut off everything unnecessary from it so that it acquires the outlines of a human figure.
What makes you most happy?
Usually people, when choosing their path in life, ask themselves many questions. Starting from “What will others say to this?” to “How can I make money from this?” Meanwhile, there are a million ways to please people and earn a lot of money, but still remain boring mediocrity. Ask yourself one question: “What brings me the most joy?”
Don't focus on external results
Let's say your talent lies in singing. Do you need to win a Grammy Award? I'm afraid that if you set yourself such a goal at the very beginning, your life will become a chain of disappointments and failures. Even if you get your way in the end. What if you receive some other award? Or will you not get it at all, and your talent will only be appreciated by a small crowd of street listeners? In any case, all this is only an external result, while originality is rather an internal state. And then recognition and money will not keep you waiting either. But they will only be a pleasant addition.
Start with simple steps - once you gain momentum, it will be easier to move on
Among my students there are married couples where the husband and wife are involved in business. One of these couples, having received homework from me to test drive their dreams (this is a mandatory exercise in the Big Plans training course), went to look at 3-room apartments.
Having learned the cost of the objects they liked, they were at first saddened. According to the most optimistic estimates, it would take approximately 3 years to collect the required budget. The deadline did not suit them, but the idea of their own home captivated them.
They began to sort through the options and came to a brilliant solution: buy land and build a house. After thinking a little more, they came up with a 2-step scheme. Buy land, put up a temporary building on it (they have already found a contractor who is ready to build it in a month), move in there and calmly build a permanent house. The time frame was reduced by 3 times. The couple is now encouraged and the business has seen sharp growth.
We recognize the need for action
Start without fear, but how? Realize that the current state of affairs does not suit you at all. Think about how many times a week you put things off until tomorrow. You need to gather your strength and start.
People are not aware that they create obstacles for themselves.
A person is torn into pieces, but does nothing, remains inactive and continues to endure a financial crisis, boring work and failures in his personal life. Free your mind from the shackles of doubt, start your journey, let your dreams come true. Move from talk to action!
Measure your results
You can only manage what you can measure.
I teach my students to monitor their movement weekly and monthly. There is a special accounting table that records the achievement of planned indicators (usually personal income, turnover, number of contracts), what was achieved and what could have been done better. As soon as a student has statistics on his movement, his results begin to grow.
Keep a chart of your results and take regular measurements of your movement.
Nike
Don't be surprised, this is exactly the same Nike - a manufacturer of sporting goods. This company has the famous slogan “Just do it” - “Just do it!” In other words, don't take too long to swing - just do it!
It seems too simple, but it works flawlessly. There is a wise saying: “The expectation of punishment is much worse than the punishment itself.” While we are thinking about what difficult, tedious or unpleasant task we have ahead of us, we are wasting our energy, and much more than would be needed to complete the task itself. We live through a situation dozens of times that we could have forgotten about long ago. At the same time, negative emotions literally stick to us, turning into an impenetrable pillow that prevents us from acting and moving forward.
Instead of letting our imaginations paint pictures of each other worse than the other, let's focus on action. Most of the tension will be spent on action, and there will simply be no energy or time left for distracted emotions. On the contrary, you can often even experience pleasure from the process of work itself and from the consciousness that the process has begun. Thus, immediate action will relieve stress and bring results and satisfaction.
Charge yourself with positive energy
Be sure to include regular sports in your schedule - running, swimming, rocking, cycling, skiing... It is important to get enough sleep regularly. Review your diet and remove everything that makes you weaker. At a minimum, cigarettes and large doses of alcohol. Take time to “sharpen the axe” - that is, to analyze what you have done and improve your personal effectiveness. Get out into nature regularly. Travel. More impressions and emotions - films, theaters, photography. Learn to think positively, perceiving all obstacles along the way as areas of growth (according to my observations, believers are much more positive than non-believers. In their picture of the world, if God gives trials, he always gives resources to overcome them).
Icebreaker
The essence of this method is to associate yourself with a person or object that personifies purposeful and unstoppable action.
Imagine that you are a powerful icebreaker. You calmly and confidently move where you need to go, and problems, hesitations and doubts split and evaporate under the pressure of your energy. Wherever you go, you make your own way, nothing can stop you or lead you astray.
Another version of the same method is to remember a person emitting energy. “Put on” this image for yourself. Imagine how this person would act in your place and imitate his behavior.
For many successful businessmen, this image is Donald Trump. He is certainly energetic, and simply revels in the struggle and victories. He tirelessly implements new projects, earning new millions of dollars.
Donald Trump is just an example, you can choose anyone, a famous person or someone you know who is energetic and purposeful.
✔️ Take a walk in the fresh air every day
Firstly, walking in the fresh air helps with bad mood, stress and fatigue. And this is so important for modern man. Clean air promotes relaxation, improves mood, and reduces fatigue and stress.
Secondly, walking outside fills you with energy. If you often spend time in the fresh air, then your energy, in the conditions of the clean pleasant smell of nature and a beautiful view, will increase several times.
Thirdly, most people even know about the importance of fresh air for quality of sleep. Those who spend most of their time outside sleep much better. With frequent walks, your sleep becomes much stronger, and when you wake up, you can feel much happier and more active.
Do you need any more arguments?
Manifesto
Announce the start date and duration of your manifest. From the date you announced to yourself until the end of the manifesto, your task is to fulfill your obligations.
For example, you set yourself a day of action for tomorrow. From the very morning, instead of rocking and thinking about how to get down to business, you begin to act. Without thoughts or emotions. As soon as you notice the first signs of shirking, remind yourself – take action today!
Almost everyone finds it easier to stay focused and productive if there is confidence that after a certain time the pace can be slowed down. Then the effectiveness of actions during the “active” period reaches unprecedented levels. You will understand what we are talking about if you remember a pleasant evening after spring cleaning.
Start with short periods, you can start with one day and, if necessary, increase the duration of the “active phase”. Sometimes circumstances are such that it is necessary to declare a year of action.
✔️ Cleanse and moisturize your skin daily
You may ask: why so often? I answer. Even indoors, the skin of your face is exposed to particles of dust, dirt and bacteria flying in the air. Can you imagine what happens on the street then? Among other things, the skin itself produces sweat and sebum all the time. All this is mixed with dust and dirt on the face, which contributes to the active proliferation of bacteria. As a result, we get rashes. In addition, if you often forget to cleanse your skin, the hated blackheads will appear again. this list to your shopping list or add it to your shopping cart .