How To Overcome Obstacles With Clarity And Peace Of Mind [PODCAST 174]

Have you found that on the other side of that frustration, that wall, or being stuck, there is a big breakthrough waiting for you?

Whether in peacetime or wartime, CEOs must always know how to overcome obstacles that their company might come across. You come up against overwhelm, burnout or frustration, and you respond.  How you respond says everything about your state.   Is it fight or flight? It’s been documented that our reptilian mind often goes into fight. And if fighting is not an option, then we go into retreat and fly away.

The corporate zone is no different. Being an effective CEO is about embracing challenges and obstacles. One of my first mentors Tom Hopkins taught that one of the best things you can do is to: “…Anticipate the obstacle, anticipate the resistance, and anticipate the objection.” That’s when great things can happen for your business!  In other words, get ahead of the possible conflict with anticipation…

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How To Overcome Obstacles With Clarity And Peace Of Mind [PODCAST 174]

I have a question…Do you ever find yourself in a place where you feel stuck or you’re dealing with overwhelm? You’ve hit a wall and you’ve got all kinds of stuff going and it doesn’t seem to be hitting momentum. The reason I share this is recently I had gone through a case like this personally. I want to give you a couple insights that have helped me and have helped many other people through this process. I certainly didn’t invent it, but here’s the thing. What do you do when you come up against that wall? You come up against overwhelm, you come up across burnout or frustration, what do you do? It’s been documented that our reptilian mind goes into fight. We want to fight or we go into retreat and then we want to fly away. We want to fly.

Which one are you? I’m curious. When you face obstacles, when you face overwhelm, what do you do? Do you go into retreat, or do you go in and do it harder and you want to fight? I will share this. It’s not about fight or flight, but what if you could embrace the obstacle? Ryan Holiday has a great book called The Obstacle Is The Way. It’s about embracing those challenges and those obstacles. Literally, aren’t you only one or two degrees away from that big break? Have you found this too, that on the other side of that frustration, that wall or being stuck, is your big breakthrough?

I know I have so many times over the years. My first business was built out of frustration. I’ve heard Joe Polish say over and over again, “Irritated oysters create what? They create pearls.” I want to give you a way to think about hitting the reset button, to help you get over the wall, under the wall or through that wall, but in an elegant way. We give you an easy way to hit that reset button because what would happen for you if you actually could hit that reset button? Thanks to my buddy Mario who helped me get through a little obstacle. The beauty is that I was running up against an obstacle to start this video and he gave me a couple of little tips to be able to make this happen today.

Let me give you two ways that you can hit the reset button to get over, through, under and around the wall in an elegant way. One is going to be personally, and the other is going to be for your business, getting new clients. We see a lot of businesses that hit the wall trying to get new clients and such. Personally, here’s a good exercise. We call this the Focus Maximizer. All kinds of companies have great tools to help you with this but this is an exercise you can do right now. What’s clarity worth to you? Clarity brings peace of mind. It creates freedom just being able to release the energy in an effective way.

We have a tool in the company we created called the Focus Maximizer, which is great. Whether it’s ours or you’re using something from Genius Network or something from Strategic Coach, there are lots of them out there, EO and many others. I want to give you a couple that have helped serve me. I’m going to be vulnerable here for a second. I have had a tendency in my history, and maybe you can relate, to beat myself up. No matter how great stuff is going, I could find something wrong with what the heck I was doing. That isn’t necessarily the gift of peace of mind. There’s a great book that it talks about. You can either be a peace time CEO or a war time CEO. I don’t know about you but I have found it in my life. Most of my businesses have been built being more of a wartime CEO. There’s a time and a place for both overall. It’s learning how to navigate or integrate between the two to more navigate it. These kinds of tools helped me. I built these for me to begin with to create it. Here’s the first question. What are your wins for the past quarter? Think about it not only for you, but what about if you have a team of virtual assistants may be? You have a team of full time people on your staff and you had the ability to guide them through this exercise. Give them and you give yourself a gift of self-appreciation and self-recognition. What are you most excited about in the next quarter, the next 90 days?

You just released those types of things. This is both personally and professionally. Why are these things important to you? Tony Robbins, I got a chance to meet and hear Tony all the way back in the early ‘90s. It was compelling to hear Tony say, “It’s never how you do it, it’s why you do it. When you have a why big enough, you’ll figure out the how. You’ll figure out the what.” I found that to be true. Why are these important to you? What has to happen to achieve these? You brainstorm a few basic ideas. I can tell you what this does for me and I’ve seen it work for hundreds of people who followed this process. It allows you to get peace and clarity in literally minutes.

If you’re reading this and go, “I’d love to have that guided exercise,” if you want to pop me a PM or post a comment, I’ll send you this tool. This is a tool we use with our clients pretty regularly, but I’ll give this to you and you can use it as a jumping-off point to help you. That’s number one, personally. There are a few other things, like rate your business on a scale of one to ten, ten being highest. It gives you an idea to rate what is working and the areas that are not working.

Next is related to clients. Let’s talk about getting clarity and getting over her through that wall with clients. The number one question that a client may have is, “Who can I trust?” What are you doing to address who can they trust? Being vulnerable here, speaking to the elephant in the room, truth be told, there have been many times in my business career where I’ve overcomplicated this stuff. How about you? It’s about simplicity and clarity. My buddy, Jimmy Harding says, “You’ve got to speak in the language of results,” which is true. There are other versions of that that had been around for decades. I love the simplicity of that. Who can your clients trust? How can you create clarity for them?

Here’s the exercise. I was in a conversation with a new friend, Dov Gordon. He’s got a cool framework about this. I’m going to package some of the other things that we’ve done and give you a simple exercise. We have a tool that we built for this as well. If you post your comments or send me a PM is the best way to do it, send me a PM that you want the Client Campaign Builder. I’ll give it to you. You can use it. Ideally, you’ll find some simplicity and clarity in this. Let me give you a couple of ways to think about it. When you get clear on working with your clients and when you get clear of being a better you, the old Jim Rome quote says, “Your business will only grow to the extent you grow.” In other words, your business will only be as big as you become. It’s about becoming that better person. These types of exercise allow you to work on that in a simple, elegant way.

For your clients, a couple of easy things to be able to do, write off this thing. “What are your clients’ biggest dangers, problems and challenges?” What if you could sit down and brainstorm ten or fifteen or five of the biggest problems, dangers and challenges your clients are facing right now? You get clear on what are those things that you are working with, the problems that you can solve for them. Even deeper than that, what’s the pain that you eliminate or what’s the pain that you reduce drastically when they work with you? If you can think about it in those terms and shape it around that, that becomes a great brainstorming.

The second part of it is, “What are the solutions that you provide to those problems?” When you think of solutions, think of it. What is the breakthrough you provide? What is the outcome that you can provide? What is the transformation you provide? What if you put a list together of all of those things under solutions, the solutions you provide? You start to get clarity on what it is that you do for your clients. You want to narrow it down. What are the three biggest client desires emotionally? What are the emotional reasons that they will look to buy from you? You’re taking big, broad lists and you’re narrowing it down to a little bit. Then you want to think of the fears or the reasons why people don’t buy it from you. I learned this from Tom Hopkins all the way back in the early ‘90s. He was one of my first coaches and mentors. He said, “Anticipate the obstacle, anticipate the resistance, anticipate the objection.” Many times I know I’ve made this mistake too, is I haven’t anticipated the objection and that wall sometimes as far as creating client conversion. If you want more client conversion, you want to step into your client’s shoes. You’ve heard that before. Think about it. Many times you’re only one degree or two degrees off.

When I was a kid, I grew up in a blue-collar family. My dad worked for a big auto manufacturer that you’ve probably heard of and he was like a mechanic. He was a labor worker, candidly. My dad worked his work his butt off. We had a manual transmission. My first car was this ruby red Plymouth Horizon stick shift manual. I remember my first test drive in this car that we had gotten. We were driving it and I got caught up on a hill. If you’ve ever been in a manual transmission, especially when it’s ten years old and rusted out and stuff, the gears don’t work as easily. We got stuck up on a hill and I remember my dad berating me. I remember we finally got the thing home. Sometimes the timing belt on this thing would go off track. If a timing belt is off a couple degrees, what happens to the car? It stalls.

Just like when we are working with our clients, our messaging or communication can stall because we’re not connecting the dots. We’re not landing with them. I’ve made this mistake tons of times building and growing twelve companies. Some have been okay and some haven’t, but the reality is you get clear. Walk in their shoes and it can be that one to two-degree difference. Take the time to anticipate what are the fears. What are the objections? What are the obstacles that your clients have or the fears that they have? What might they run up against? Here’s another deeper one. What are the top three reasons that your clients are not buying from you? That one was so critical when Tom Hopkins shared that, we started planning all these different calls, sessions, and meetings when we would do sales. It was amazing what would happen when you anticipated those, and then we’re proactively addressing them in the communication.

What are the solutions that you provide to those clients? Lastly, who is it for? When you can get clear on who your product is for, who your service is for, and who it’s not for, that’s when great things can happen for your business. As we look at this, you’ve got a single method to be able to focus on getting clarity personally, to hit that reset button in a cool way not only for you but as a gift to your team and walk them through a few basic questions. You’ve got a simple method to be able to get clarity around your potential perfect client and get in their shoes to help you get better. In a future session, we’ll talk about how you translate, transfer this information into creating a compelling message and then ultimately a compelling offer and things like that.

If you want to get access to these two tools, I’m happy to give these to you. Just post a PM and I’d be happy to share those with you. I want to encourage you to take action with what I’ve shared with you for personal clarity, business clarity and getting inside your clients’ mind’s eye. One of our recent clients we took through a more extensive exercise than this. I don’t want to paint it out that this is all we did. There was a little bit more. We did a makeover for this particular client. This client at that time was positioned as a Facebook expert for traffic. We repackaged and repositioned how he was working with his clients and got that clarity. Today, he charges ten times more, he’s got ten times more revenue, and he’s got multiples in profitability. He’s been able to fire or some of the clients that are not his ideal client or perfect client anymore.

When you get this right, not only do you get your own piece as a person with clarity, but you can also create incredible momentum. Let’s face it, running a business is not easy. It’s not as hard as it has been for a lot of us, including myself. It’s a lot easier when you have the right tools and when you have the right resources. What if you could put a couple tools like this in place and you could get the right message, get clarity with the right market, communicate, and convey a compelling message to your end user to your potential perfect client? Many times you’ll see your prices go up, you’re attracting high value, high-end type of clients and you enjoy the experience a whole lot more. Take action with what you’ve got. I look forward to hearing from you and post your questions and comments. I will look forward to seeing you in another segment down the road. Thanks.

That’s our show for now. I want to challenge you to take action with what you’ve been given. Apply the principles of your focus, getting clarity not only for you personally and celebrating your wins, celebrating the quarter, setting the stage for the next quarter, but also getting clarity around your clients, who they are, what are their problems, what are their frustrations, and a whole lot more. If you never want to miss an episode, you can do that at GrowthToFreedom.com/subscribe. If you like what we’ve shared with you, make sure to post your reviews or comments on iTunes as well. Our greatest compliment is if you share this with someone else you care about. If we can help you. Hit us up at [email protected]. Enjoy your week, seize the day and we’ll see you next time on GrowthToFreedom.com.

Resources mentioned on this episode:

• GrowthToFreedom.com/subscribe
• [email protected]
• Growth To Freedom on Facebook
• The Obstacle Is The Way
• Joe Polish
• Tony Robbins
• Jimmy Harding
• Dov Gordon
• Jim Rome