It’s Sunday. I hung up my Sunday Rants call 90 minutes ago. I spent these 90 minutes watching marketing sales videos… as I would like to get better at marketing.
And it suddenly hit me… It hit me why no course, no program, no video course, audio course or group coaching can get much result, my program or others’.
I remember a few years ago when famed marketers, like Frank Kern, approached Tony Robbins to get some coaching on how to make people actually achieve the results they promised them in their sales letters. The meager results were bothering them. No matter how good, how detailed the course was, how much handholding they gave, only a fragment of the participants produced results.
I had the same experience with people, students, clients of mine… and I was also clueless.
Moreover, I had the same experience with myself: I would buy a program, but my results would not be even similar, even in the ballpark of what others achieved with the same knowledge.
This whole conundrum opened up for me this past week, and I stumbled onto the answer today, during my Sunday Rants call.
If you combine T. Harv Eker’s famous principle: how you do anything is how you do everything with what I learned from a book I got as a birthday present from one of my students: Practice makes permanent, you see why people get different results, or no results from what is given to them.
Let me explain:
How you do anything is how you do everything… and that how is what got you where you are today… good, bad, indifferent, you are where you are, and it is the result of that “how”. How you do the things you do.
And then add to it the other quote, the other principle:
Practice makes permanent.
What does this quote mean? It means that the way you do things, the how, gets practiced over and over, and the way you do things is invisible to you, because it is muscle memory, it is how you do things…
Now, this is probably going to offend you, but…
How you do things is not working… or not working for 98% of you 98% of the time.
In the Starting Point Measurements I go into detail, I go into the components of the “how”, looking through different filters… the how you do the things you do, with what mindset, what attitude. I elude with this to the fact that you could change your how… so you could get more of what you want, and less of what you don’t want.
The problem I see is that even with the Starting Point Measurements, you look the same way at them as you look at everything: with the attitude and mindset that the Starting Point Measurements expresses… So you can’t see… You are deluded.
This is the perfect case of not being able to jump over your shadow.
If we look at a third principle, the Anna Karenina Principle, that says “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
If it is a principle, it will apply here too. And it does.
All unsuccessful students of any good program are unsuccessful their own way, but all successful students are alike. They all do the same things the exact same way.
And no unsuccessful students really know what they do “wrong”, because practice makes permanent, and how you do what you do is largely invisible to you.
And this is the reason, this invisibility, that all successful people have always had coaches, mentors that coached them… because you need someone you trust who sees you doing the wrong thing and tells you it is wrong. And if they are a good coach, they can show you how to do it right.
Just pointing out that what you are doing is wrong is not useful…
That book I am studying is opening up a whole new world for me.
I can now isolate the fundamental issues in the “how” of “how you do anything is how you do everything” and correct them. Through re-training. Through making you do practice that makes the right way permanent.
Now, if I were a highly paid basketball coach, I would be able to spend a lot of time with you… and catch you doing things the wrong way all the time. I would be able to do drills with you to retrain you and watch you like a hawk so you don’t slip back.
But I am not a highly paid basketball coach, I am a poorly paid “personal” coach. In my coaching program I ask to be paid for 6 minutes of my time a week… and even the most demanding of you will only get ten minutes of my time a week…
And from time to time you get to book a whole one-on-one session with me, but who can afford it more than from time to time… It would be worth it… but you are not here because you are making money hand over fist, are you?
So what is the solution? How can I help you change how you do things?
The errors you make, your own way of being unsuccessful are quite repetitive, and therefore standardizable. I can create workshops on it, workshop meaning: interactive. Drills.
One of the first issues I have identified is the many different ways someone isn’t listening, or isn’t hearing really.
The behaviors I have, so far, seen among my students are
- 1. arguing, disagreeing… and missing the whole thing. Resistance.
- 2. commenting, editorializing… like a sports commentator… and missing the whole thing
- 3. incessantly talking while the other is talking… and missing the whole thing.
- 4. wondering attention… attention hijacked
There may be other ways you miss hearing what is being taught, but so far these seem to be the four ways you make it impossible for yourself to get any real value out of what you are listening to.
And before i go on, consider that reading is also a listening exercise.
No symbol, no visual clue is perceived by the conscious mind, unless it has words attached to it, audible words.
So speed reading, PhotoReading aren’t really reading, they are photography techniques: preserving images for later reading.
So I am talking about the same behaviors during reading…
I’d love to create some listening training, listening workshops… but I am not ready yet.
Training practices hasn’t been my forte… And I haven’t, myself, participated in too many training exercises either. Have been in some, but not many. Most of them from the “old” Landmark Education… when Werner was still around.
A good training exercise is drilling. Repeat things the right way until they become the permanent way…
A whole different way from training with words, telling people what to do and how to do it.
Now, if you are one of the rare people who are able and willing to do some work, sit and do some thinking, ask yourself the question: what is guaranteed to make one unsuccessful at following a method that is taught in a program?
This method is called inversion. Inversion brings up the many different ways that you are doing things that guarantee to no get what you want.
Remember, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Like in gardening, it is not enough to know what you want, or what are the good habits of happy families. It is a lot more important to weed out the unproductive, failure producing habits.
Inversion is a great way to see what are your unproductive habits, at least the ones that you can see.
A coach’s job is to see more than you can see. And another job of a coach is to evaluate which are the 20% habits, that when you change them, you have eliminated 80% of the reasons you are not succeeding at achieving what you set out to achieve.
This is why it is mandatory for anyone who wants success to have a coach… because it is nearly impossible to see everything yourself.
Want me to invite you to a webinar where I explain how the Starting Point Measurements make it hard or impossible for you to learn anything?
Get your own Starting Point Measurements.
