Peak Performance Coach Susanne King talked to the super six about how we need to expand ourselves to get greater results, why we need to change how we view ourselves to go beyond “the comfort zone” and how we should react to our circumstances when something goes wrong. She did this all with some great practical tips designed to strengthen the super sixes beliefs in themselves, including how turn that change into a tangible result.
Thank you our Week 9 sponsor:
Vision Personal Training. Click here for more information.
Coaches:
Susanne King will be speaking at AREC 16 this year, to book your tickets visit arecconference.com.
Chris Foy and Emily Schofield from Vision Personal Training
Coaching Links:
- Hear a Podcast from Susie on “Your message is your mission”. Click here
Video Notes/Transcript
00:00 Introduction and Session Overview: Samantha McLean
01:08 Reaching far and beyond, despite the obstacles
Really, success comes down to having and holding a really great standard in yourself. That’s what we’re going to talk about. I want you just to take a minute and think about some of the greatest entrepreneurs you know, or think about people who inspire you. I want to ask you this question, “What is it about them that inspires you?” I’ve got Richard Branson, Kate Hudson, she’s a really interesting new entrepreneur, Steve Jobs, Lorna Jane, obviously John McGrath, Oprah and Elon Musk, they’re just some of my favorite ones. You can think outside the box. They’ve all got something in common, they’ve all faced major obstacles, they’ve all been told, “You know what, no.” Whether that’s somebody else telling them no, whether that’s the market telling them no, whether that’s circumstance telling them no, but they rose to the occasion.
Now, a lot of the time, people will talk about mindset a lot. What the heck actually is mindset? How do you actually build a mindset? I want to give you guys really actionable things. When you leave the room today, you can put these into place. Now, I’m a big fan of doing stuff that’s fast and effective, that’s not going to take a lot of your time. Are you guys cool with that? We’re going to get stuff that gets really good results. Cool.
Really, the thing that they had in common is they weren’t afraid to go after what they want. More importantly, when the challenge came, it forced them to grow. I think Richard Branson says it the best. He says when you are facing an obstacle, most people shrink back. That’s what unsuccessful people do, he said. That’s an opportunity for you to expand.
I want you to start thinking about how do you expand yourself so that you get greater results. Now, there’s something that I always coach on. I say, “You don’t get what you do. You get who you are.” Because, I bet I could ask all of you guys, write a list of the things that you could implement, especially from these sessions that you’ve had, all the things you could implement that would change your business. I bet you could come up with really great strategies. The question is why are you not doing it?
03:03 What we make things mean
Now, like Chris was talking about before, there’s above the line and below the line. He mentioned that briefly. When you’re below the line, that’s when you say, “Well, I didn’t do it because I don’t have the time”, or “I don’t have the energy”, or “I don’t have this.” Like Sam said, it’s never a case of not being able to do it. You know, there’s a joke I play with some of my agents when they go, “I can’t do the calls.” I say, “Really? You called me. Tell me, can you pick up a phone?” “Yes.” “Can you dial a number?” “Yes.” I’m like, “OK, so what’s really going on?” It’s what’s happening internally that’s going on. It’s what we make things mean. We’re ultimately, and this is something you might want to write down, you are meaning making machines.
What are you making the things that will lead you to success? The activities, what are you making them mean? The best way you can overcome that is first by understanding what you’re making things mean? We want to get super clear on what we make things mean. Ultimately, it’s about you setting a new standard for yourself. The guys that get great results, you know, I was really fortunate last week, I’ve got to catch up with John. We’re having a chat. He said to me, “What’s the difference between those that are successful and those that aren’t?” Ultimately, I said, “The ones that are successful, they hold a higher standard in themselves, in the sense that they’re going to hold themselves to a higher responsibility in terms of their emotions, and what they believe about themselves.” It’s those 2 key areas. We’re going to look at how do we create that and cultivate that so we strengthen you. A bit like doing physical exercise. How do we strengthen your psychology?
04:30 A sense of entitlement is an enemy to success
If we have a look, there’s 3 key enemies to standards. It’s really good to get to know these, because these are the ones that sneak in and get in the way. Number one is this, the sense of entitlement. Entitlement shows up in a number of ways. If you hear yourself blaming, if you hear yourself saying, “Well, that shouldn’t have happened. I deserve this. This is mine,” or if you hear yourself saying, “They should give me that. They should do that for me.” That’s a sense of entitlement. Here’s the reason why entitlement is such an enemy to success, I would, is because what happens is when you have entitlement, basically you’ve handed over your control. You’ve handed over all your power. Plus, if you get into too much entitlement, you get on sort of a roll with entitlement. What happens is it changes your emotions. You’re more likely to be going to the levels of depression. You’re more likely to have poor attitude towards work, and it creates laziness.
It’s really interesting, I had a session with one of my top agents. He was going really well. Then, some stuff happened in the market. Everyone was stalling a bit. He gets on the phone and he’s like, “That’s not fair. I’ve been doing my marketing. I’ve been doing this, this and this,” complain, complain, complain. I’ve been with him for a number of years, I was like, “Are you serious? Is this really what you’re going to share with me on this call?” Because my job is to say, “Come on. Let’s change this.”
I said to him, “You know, what could be a better perspective?” I said, “You know, you talk about being the best. The best doesn’t just show up when it’s easy. The best shows up when things are challenging.” I said, “What if we were to overcome this? What if we were to find another way? What if we were to look at new ways of doing things and expanding ourselves?” By the end of the call, the thing that I loved most about what he said was, he goes, “You know what, every other agent is going to be complaining and bitching about the market, but I’m going to be focused on exactly where I need to go and what I need to do.”
06:25 ‘Take’ responsibility, instead of ‘talk’ responsibility
That’s when we move from entitlement to taking responsibility. People talk a lot. This leads us nicely into the next one of not taking responsibility. People talk a lot about responsibility. Even Chris mentioned it before when he was talking about fitness and health. There’s a thing that I want you to be really careful of doing. Sometimes, we can say take responsibility and we almost blame ourselves. It’s not your fault that things are changing. There are things that are going to be outside of your control, that you can’t control, but you’ve got to be able to influence. This is where taking responsibility is saying, “How am I going to respond to this?”
Listen to what normally happens. We normally go into defeat mode: What have I done wrong? Why did this happen to me? Usually, it comes up with answers that aren’t that great. What we want to do is the first thing you want to do, this is going to sound totally counter-intuitive, is when things don’t go to plan, I want you to jump up and celebrate like crazy. Why am I asking you to do this?
Jamie: Incantation?
Susanne: It’s partly incantation, yes. Why else?
Melinda: I think just to get you out of that mindset.
Susanne: That’s exactly right. It’s all about changing your state. It feels stupid when you do it. I literally want you to jump and yell out, “Woohoo!” Like really celebrate, because what that does is it breaks the mindset pattern that you’ve got. Now, this is a hack. This is one of the fastest ways to do it. You can sit down there and do incantations and affirmations. I had a friend of mine, she’s like, “I’m happy. I’m happy. I’m happy.” I’m like, “Do you want to let your face know you’re happy?” Like, are we going to pick up?
It’s not about that. We want to change your emotional state, because all emotions drive behaviour. Taking responsibility is taking responsibility for your emotions. Do something that makes you feel great, and then come and assess it from fresh eyes. Come and say, “Okay. What could I have done differently? What can I celebrate from this? Then, what’s going to be my improvement?” Those 3 questions are really great. What could I do differently? What can I celebrate about this? How can I improve? What can I learn from this?
If you do this on a daily basis, and we change you by 1% each day, over the course of a year, that’s where you get outstanding results. A 1% change is all it takes each day, and that 1% change is easy. You do that daily, that’s when you get results. That’s taking responsibility.
08:54 Learn to manage your fear
Then, third is not managing your fear. Ultimately, the number one thing that gets in the way of people is fear. You’re either afraid of not being loved, or not being X enough, whether that’s good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, young enough, old enough, give me whatever the enough is, it will come up. It’s actually learning how to manage your fear. The way you manage your fear is first to acknowledge it and feel it. A lot of the time, we try to resist our fears. If you actually sit down and manage it, and feel it, then it no longer has control.
We can logically say, “He knows this. I know this. That’s better.” When you’re feeling fear, who cares, right? It’s like the emotion’s taken over you, been hijacked by your emotions. The reason why I say get up, jump up, scream and celebrate, now obviously you’re not going to do that if you walk into someone’s home. You meet someone. You get scared. You’re not going to be like, “Woohoo!” People will be like, “What’s wrong with this person?” What you want to be doing is you want to be practicing this on your own everyday. When you practice this on your own everyday, then when you come into something like that, you can do things like in your head, “woohoo”, feel that feeling. If you have fun with it, and laugh with it, even better. When you do that, that emotion will take over. It’s about practicing and having really good quality emotional homes.
10:18 The difference
The difference between successful people and those that aren’t is successful people are prepared to do those things. Unsuccessful people will say, “This is all just woo-woo BS. It’s not really great. It doesn’t work.” There’s a really great book called “The Happiness Advantage.” It’s by Shawn Achor. I’m happy to post it up in the Facebook group for you guys. I’d really strongly recommend that you read it. It’s got a lot of the science behind why we do these things. “Awaken the Giant Within” is another really great book that talks about this stuff. You want to start cultivating an emotional resilience so that you can perform no matter what. If fear takes over, you can jump over the top of it.
10:56 List your beliefs, and read them everyday
Let’s get into it. Oprah says, “You become what you believe – not what you wish or want, but what you truly believe. It’s what you believe about yourself.” I’m curious and this is something I want you to do for homework. I’ll get you to write this down, what are the beliefs you hold about you? Write down the top 100 beliefs around why you are the best at what you do. Read that every day. See, we have a voice in our head that’s constantly playing over and over. Usually, it’s being conditioned by society, by experiences that we’ve had, all those sorts of things. We’ve got to start rewriting the story.
I want you to write down the top beliefs, the belief that actually, you can do it, and why you can do it, because the more you condition that, the stronger your belief in yourself will be. There’s a really cool research piece that was done at Stanford University where they got people who … They said to them, “Tell me something that’s not true.” 10 things that are not true, 100 things are true. They locked them in a room. I would love to do this with someone, if anyone wants to do this, give me a week of their life. They locked them in the room, stimulated them like crazy. They ran the beliefs that were true. Then, what they did is they would slip in the ones that weren’t true, just from time to time. By the end of the session, the people believed the things that they said were absolutely not true, they believed to be true.
Now, I’m not saying I want to do that exact exercise with you guys. The difference is if we can get things that you want to become, because remember, who you are now probably isn’t going to be the person you need to be to get that next result. We want to start looking at who is this person that is the next person that you need to be? What do they need to believe to get the result? How do we make that true? If you do this with emotional intensity, and you go over and over, that’s why reading that top 100 everyday is really important. When you do that, that’s when it starts to become true from you, and your beliefs will change, your emotions which change your behaviour.
This is the work we need to do. Now, this takes, literally, to read through the list. You’ve got to feel it. You’ve got to believe it. It should take you approximately 5 minutes. If you did this morning when you first wake up, grab the list, read it, feel it. Set your day up like that. Then go to bed, read it, feel it, and go to sleep on that. Hey, you’ll sleep better, but also, too, it will play in your unconscious while you’re sleeping. Your results will transform because you are transforming. Does this make sense? Are you guys loving this? Is this good?
13:28 Feel yourself already a success
You want to do that exercise that we just did then where you feel yourself already a success. This is how we fast track results, because you can sit and read goals every single day. But if it’s not moving your emotions, it’s not moving anything. Firstly, you want to say, “Right. Who am I? I am a success.” Feel yourself already a success. Go to a point where you’ve already experienced it, then read your goals, because we want to cultivate a discipline of you focusing on what you want, rather than what you don’t want. We’ve got to be in the right state, because if you’re having hell week, and you’re overwhelmed and you’re stressed, and then you read your goals, basically what you’re doing is you’re linking pain to your goals. Then, when you look at your goals, you’re like, “This sucks, I’m out.” Right? That’s what happens. Once you’re feeling really great, then look at your goals. Again, like I said, this should take 5 minutes. 5 minutes a day, morning, night. You do this, it will change your results, guaranteed. You can do it even if you want to prove me wrong and come back to me, but you’ve got to take action, of course.
14:29 Identify your focus and commit to your goals, despite a change in plan
Then, what we want to do is decide what you’ll focus on. One of the differences between my guys that succeed and those that don’t is the ones that succeed are the ones that focus on what they want, rather than what they don’t want. Getting your goals and carrying them around with you and read them at least 3 times a day, so just pull them out, read them, refocus on them, and then start taking action towards them, will change.
Now, here’s the thing, there’s no one set plan that works. A lot of people talk about setting up your ideal week. I do like an ideal week. However, there is an asterisk to an ideal week. Ideal weeks usually are very hard to follow, especially when the chisel hits the fan. Like when things aren’t going to the plan, ideal week goes a bit out the window. What you want to do is come back rather than beat yourself up and say, “I didn’t follow my ideal week.” Come back and say, “Hold on a minute. What’s the result I want to achieve, given this thing has happened?” Again, first, get yourself into state by thinking about success. “What’s the result I want? Given this has happened, what do I have to do now to achieve it?”
If we put those points down, so first: state, get yourself first into peak state, which is what we did when we stood up. Then, focus, what is it that I want? Address what has happened. Then, pull together a plan to do it. “Okay. How am I going to achieve this?” The Oprah Winfrey’s, the Steve Jobs’s, the Richard Branson’s, they were very good at doing this because they didn’t allow a setback or a failure to become the focal point.
A standard of what you focus on is key. You want to spend 5% on the problem, 95% on the solution. Putting your goals up in front of you is a nice way of changing that focus so you can start coming up with solutions. It’s never about sticking to one strategy. I say most people are flexible in the result. They’re committed to the how. We want to be committed to the result, and flexible in the how. If one way fails, cool. Let it go. What’s the next way we can do that?
Questions?
If you have questions for the coaches or for the Super Six tweet us @eliteagentmag #transform
