298 – Get your head out of your apps: Tom talks Mind Games for Success

Episode 298 – Mind Games For Success
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey, everybody. It's Tom here with episode two hundred ninety eight of Screw the Commute podcast. I want to talk about mind games for success today. All your success really happens in your head, not in your body, not in your muscles, not in your beautifully painted nails, but in your head. And that's we're gonna talk about today some tricks to really increase that success. All right. Hope you didn't miss Episode 297. Joan Kent was here. And just talking about mindset. Well, Joan is a psychoactive nutritionists, right? So she teaches you how you could manipulate your brain chemistry for more success and to be more productive in business. That was Episode two, 97, just this past Friday. Now, how would you like to hear your own voice here on Screw the Commute? Well, if the show has helped you out at all in your business or giving your ideas to help you start a business. We want to hear about it. Visit screwthecommute.com and look for a little blue sidebar that says send a voicemail. Click on it. Talk in your phone or computer and tell me how the shows helped you. Hey, put your website in there, too, and you'll get a big shout out on a future episode of Screw the Commute. Now grab a copy of your free automation e-book. This e-book has all the tips and tricks that I've used over many years to save millions of keystrokes. Take care of customers and lightning, fast fashion and steal business from my competitors are too slow to get to the game. So check that out at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. While you're at it. Pick up a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app where we give you video and screen captures the show you how to use all the fancy features that you can take us with you on the road, on your cell phone and your tablets. How'd you like to give yourself a great big gift or maybe a legacy gift for your children, your grandchildren, your nephews and nieces? Well. Check out my school. It's the only license dedicated Internet marketing school in the country. It's IMTCVA.org, and it's a distance learning school. So you can be anywhere in the world where you can get an Internet connection and learn the techniques that have allowed me to enjoy this beautiful lifestyle business for now going on. Twenty six years, I've screwed the commute. OK, well, I've even screwed the commute for another 20 before that because I never had a job. But this is the best business ever, ever, ever. And it's a highly in demand skill. Your child, yourself. If you have your own business or you want to start your own business can be going literally within a month or two, even before graduation, which takes six months to a year. So we've got people making money already or saving enormous amount of money in their online business. So check it out at IMTCVA.org.

[00:03:44] Let's get to the main event. Mind games for success.

[00:03:47] Now you hear all the time people saying we'll get your head in the game and focus, get your head out of your. Well, you know what? Here's another good one. Give 110 percent. Anyway, if you're performing poorly, you hear those platitudes all the time. Basically, they're saying, pay attention to your business, and I've got this hundred and ten percent joke. I just love. I know you'll want to use it. So I saw this sign and the company said we give 110 percent, 10 percent on Monday, 50 percent off on Tuesday. There you go. Now, you hear lots of these statements in sports. But all of them apply to your business. Now, what these statements all have in common is that they are directed towards your mind, not your physical abilities. I remember way back when I was playing major college football, and that was back before they had face masks and leather helmets and all as the sea. I was not the biggest, strongest and fastest player, but I was able to dominate others who were physically more capable than I was because here we go. My head was in the game. I was focused on success.

[00:05:12] I was thinking all the time, both on the field and off the field of what I had to do, where I had the step to get the edge on a faster, bigger and stronger opponent. Now, during my time as a scholarship athlete, I saw over a hundred people come and go because they just weren't mentally prepared. Heck, in my freshman picture, there were 31 scholarship athletes, and as far as I know, only six of us graduated. Every one of them was a bad ass physical specimen. If any one of those people that didn't make it practice, some of the mind games will discuss today, it could have changed the entire course of their life for the better. Many of them ended up dropping out, flunking out, getting thrown in jail, and I think one died under some kind of suspicious circumstances. So in the world of business, it doesn't matter what kind of physical shape you're in. Although the better shape you're in, the longer you'll be around. And I'm not advocating against being physically capable. What I'm driving at is no matter how great a shape you're in, if you're in. And here we go again. If your head isn't in the game, you will most likely fail in your business.

[00:06:33] Sure, you can limp along in a business with just a little extra effort. But here's what the famous Dr. Stephen Covey said. This is a guy that from the seven habits of highly effective people, he said, for minor improvements, you work on behavior. For quantum leap improvements, you work on paradigms and mindset. And that's we're going to talk about today. So what does having your head in the game or having a great mindset look like?

[00:07:06] It starts out with positivity, even even though I'm well aware of negative things that can happen to my business.

[00:07:13] I focus on the positive. I mean, just last week, I knew there was a possibility I'd have to go to court over a business dispute. And the last thing you want to have to do is go to court and blow tons of money on legal fees and time away from your business. And I was moping around thinking about how I was going to take charge of the case and pretty much skewer and drive the opposing attorneys crazy as I've done before. In the rare instances when I've had to go to court. But in this case, I had to actually stop and talk to myself with my own mind game, I thought I'd been in my own business 43 years. I only deal with people I like. I've only had a few instances where I had to deal with unreasonable a holes and court stuff and. And would I trade this for a nine to five job?

[00:08:06] Not in a million years. So I immediately felt better and went about my business doing positive things for my students and mentees. And I just ignored the A holes.

[00:08:17] And guess what happened? They came around and it looks like no court stuff is going to be needed. So you have to create success in your head first. I'm the last person on Earth to promote the B.S. Law of attraction garbage. But part of it is true. They were they lost me is when they had a kid visualizing a bicycle and it just appeared the part of seeing success in your head first is good. But the part they left out is that you must take action based on the success in your head.

[00:08:53] They they should have showed the kid cutting grass, starting a lemonade stand or shoveling snow or doing something of value to make the visualization of that bicycle actually appear in real life. Maybe if they had, we wouldn't have a generation of little entitled brats coming up to eventually run the country or maybe run it into the ground is more likely.

[00:09:17] Wait a minute. I was supposed to be talking about positivity. You got off track there. OK. I'm positive they'll run it into the ground. People get their head with that visualization plus action.

[00:09:32] That's how you get success, not visualization alone. Now, having a positive outlook and visualizing success and taking action does not guarantee success. But having a negative outlook, visualizing failure and taking no action guarantees failure. Okay.

[00:09:55] So now let's explore some of the mechanisms in mind, games you can use to lead you toward your success. The first is goal setting. Now, you hear about this all the time. It's a mind game, but for maximum effect of physical action to achieve your success goes with it. So goal setting forces you to really think about what you want to happen in your business and really your life in general.

[00:10:23] And there are both short term and long term goals.

[00:10:27] For my school, a short term goal may be today I want to repair some holes in the wall at the school so I don't lose part of my security deposit. When the school moves locations. A medium term goal for the school might be to find a veteran friendly accountant to give me a reduced fee audit so that the school can apply to accept the G.I. Bill. And a long term goal for the school might be to have in-house classes and then up operate satellite locations in different cities. What are your goals for your business? Have you written them down? Remember, I talked about a physical action with regard to goal setting? Well, psychology professor Dr. Gail Mathew's did a study, and that was at the Dominican University in California. On goal setting with and had about two hundred and seventy participants. And what were the results? Well, you you are 42 percent, according to Dr. Matthews, more likely to achieve your goals. If you write them down. So let me take a sidebar on mind games that I play on myself. I stayed out loud when I'm talking about goals that I've never achieved a goal in my entire life.

[00:11:45] I say as soon as I get near it, it disappears and another one appears past it. This keeps me moving forward all the time. Now, you may not be so hard charging, but this one works for me. All right.

[00:11:59] Now, the next topic is visualization. I've always naturally visualized things that I wanted to do. Maybe it's because I was by myself a lot as the baby of six boys living way out in the sticks in no man's land in western Pennsylvania. I had to use my mind because there wasn't big realities in a small town in the middle of nowhere and there was no cell phones and tablets and computers. So you had to use actually use your mind. Is that a concept that you don't hear much out anymore? But even though I visualize all the time, I never really realized the power of it until one day in nineteen eighty four.

[00:12:45] See, I owned a nightclub about a mile from Cheat Lake, which was a resort. I know this is an oxymoron outside Morgantown, West Virginia, the home of West Virginia University. And I was the big nightclub owner and a lot of people would come down from Pittsburgh for the weekends in the summer and being.

[00:13:06] They all got to know me as though they'd buy pizza and then they'd come to the nightclub in the evening. So they're always begging me to go skiing with them and I can't even swim. I mean, I just basic barely can swim now because Dr. Pete Anderson taught me. But in those days, I couldn't swim. And I would actually wear two life jackets in case one malfunctioned. And I was like a buoy out in the lake. And so they got me in his boat and he's trying to pull me up and flop and then and one thing I learned from being a pilot was the only thing difference between water and cement or water is wet.

[00:13:48] So I was bruised up. I was knocked everywhere. I couldn't get me up out of there. And I'm giving myself enemas, dragging my butt through the water. So this went on. And of course, they were having a great time watching all this drinking beer on the boat. It hit me. I was getting beat up pretty bad.

[00:14:07] But the last day of the season, I actually got up on the skis and went a mile down the lake.

[00:14:16] You would have thought that, you know, we just won the Super Bowl, people on the money on the shore have been watching this for all summer, were a cheer and it was crazy. Mary Lou Retton lived in a in a condo above the lake. I know the Olympic athlete. I think she was, you know, cheered for me. Holding up a 10 out her window. I don't know.

[00:14:41] So, anyway, that was the last day of the season. So I go back to the bar. I'm working there all winter. But I'm thinking about this, what it felt like to get up on the skis finally and all the, you know, the muscle memory that go on a mile down the lake. And when I'd see a wave, how I had to handle it and all those things. And I'm seeing in my mind all through the winter. Of course, in the next season comes along, everybody comes down from Pittsburgh and they say, come on, Tom, let's go, let's go skiing.

[00:15:14] So I go, I get my two life jackets on and I get down there and they ready to roll.

[00:15:22] Yep, I'm ready. Put my hand up. I'm ready. They pulled the boat.

[00:15:27] I got up on the first try and went five miles down the lake. Like I said, there was a ticker tape parade in Morgantown. People flying over with airplanes saying, yay, Tom. So so there is no reason on this earth that I should have got up right away and gone five miles down a lake. Impossible. I was terrible. I got up one time and my whole life. Right. But here's the thing. I concentrate on the positive. What did it feel like? I visualized for the whole winter season until I got back down at that lake and boom, it gelled. And there I went five miles down the lake. So that's when I realized the real power of visualization. So think about the positive things, about what you want to succeed in, and you have an infinitely greater chance that it will happen.

[00:16:23] All right. Another one of my personal mind games is what I call an announcement to the world. I've been using this mind trick. Most of my life. It's very simple. All right. When I plan on doing something, I announce it to the world. And once I've done that, I'm too embarrassed not to do what I said I was going to do.

[00:16:47] Now announced to the world might simply be telling your spouse, family or friends. And that's what I did in the old days, but now I've upped my game by announcing things through one hundred thousand people on my email list.

[00:17:00] Ok. Now warning, here's the big warning with this.

[00:17:04] If you announce things and then don't take the steps necessary to implement the idea, you will fail and people will think of you as a dreamer rather than a doer, and you will lose respect. The whole idea of announcing things to the world is to help you keep scratching and crawling to overcome the many obstacles that will most likely appear on any goal worth achieving.

[00:17:33] So announce your intentions to the world and then go do them and just some examples of me doing this. When I was a high school kid, I'm gonna be valedictorian of school.

[00:17:45] You can't do that, dude. You know, you're just the typical dumb hick like the rest of us. So did I do it? Yes. You can't become all state football. You're not big enough and strong enough. And fast enough. That I do it. Yes. You can't win the state championship in wrestling. Did I do it? No.

[00:18:06] I was fourth in the state and heavyweight wrestling in the hotbeds of really high end wrestlers in western Pennsylvania. But guess what? I got fourth in the state. I went, you know, did a lot of things because of this. I got to go to a national tournament in Bakersfield, California, where they mopped the mat up with me because I was 17 and they were twenty five year old, you know, just bad asses. So in the Greco Roman wrestling, it was called I said I was going to start a practical joke company that I do it. Yes. I was going to start a nightclub in a place where you shouldn't. Did I do it. Yes. Now then I almost get killed with bikers trying to kill me. Yes. Again. So does it mean just guys, you achieve your goals? It was always the greatest goal in the first place. OK. How, though, that experience turned into a Web site called brutal self-defense. Now, I mean, anything you do that doesn't kill you, if you keep positive, can can do good for you and help a lot of people. Right. So so, you know, this mentor program, I have this school that I have, everybody said, no, you can't do those things. I was going to buy this big mansion for no money down that I do it. No. Could I have done it? Yes. It was just a better deal. It didn't make sense to take that no money down deal with a higher interest rate. So I took the five percent down, which was still a big bargain in those days. So. So, yes, these thing, you know, I live this all the time. I announced stuff to the world and then I go do it. All right.

[00:19:44] Now, another mind game you can play all by yourself is called self reflection.

[00:19:50] Now, instead of going aimlessly through life, why not evaluate your actions before mindlessly doing them? Here's an example.

[00:19:59] I got a big, beautiful, smart TV. I can see it here from where I'm doing this podcast. And I got the subscription to Netflix, Roku, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Pluto.TV, which my Protos ace started and sold for three hundred forty million dollars. You should read about that in Forbes.

[00:20:19] When someone tells me about a great movie they saw.

[00:20:22] Well, I have to ask myself, is Netflix going to help me toward my goals or working on an e-book or marketing going to move me toward my goals?

[00:20:32] Well, virtually always stopping to think about it means working on my business wins out.

[00:20:39] And I said virtually because I certainly also use mind games to make sure my mind isn't wound up as tight as a sprain, I might take at time sometimes to watch an action movie, but still with my laptop open in case one of my students or customers has a question, I can always pause the movie, take care of them, which spreads my reputation of really being a high end person that takes care of their clients.

[00:21:08] And many people say that Tom you're out of balance. And of course, many people were broke. You're saying? That's right. Which now brings up the topic of balance.

[00:21:19] Now, I'm not sure where I heard or learned this, but you can't let other people's idea of balance rule your way of living or running your business.

[00:21:29] The term I use instead of balance is my winning pace. I have tremendous energy and super high drive to take care of people in my business. That's why I'll take consults on evenings, weekends or holidays. It really doesn't bury me with work anyway because most other peoples winning or losing pace. I don't include those times. So I take care of those that do and the others just fall into a regular nine to five schedule. Also, do you think super high achievers are balanced? Really? Think about it. Do you think people that win Olympic gold are balanced?

[00:22:12] You couldn't possibly win in any of the sports in the Olympics by being bounced. They practice their sport seven days a week for years, and when they aren't practicing their weight training and when they aren't weight changing, they're visualising their performance.

[00:22:28] Is that balanced? Well, loser kind of people would say no. Enlightened people would say that's that person's winning pace. And they probably would be inspired by them and increase their own winning pace when they see these Olympic athletes, how hard they work.

[00:22:48] Another mental aspect of successful mind games that's emerged recently is called a morning routine. In other words, you get up at the same time, you do the same things every day that help you towards your life and business goals.

[00:23:02] I've asked many podcast guests what a typical day looks like for them and many of them now, not all because I really had a successful guy recently. Just say I get up anytime I want. All right. What's funny is that he really didn't think he had a morning routine, but other than the actual time he got up, he did the same thing every day to get his day started. So so there is room for variation in a morning routine, but most successful people have them.

[00:23:33] Now, most people have somewhat of a ritual that could include meditation, prayer, exercise, stretching, deep breathing, reading, writing coffee, water, taking a walk. Checking email, showering. Getting dressed for work, even if they screw the commute. I mean, I can't even remember all the things I've heard. What I do remember is that most of the people I ask could instantly tell me their routine, which got their day off to the start that they wanted. And quite a few have told me they increase their success and productivity when they made changes to their morning routine. And many said their morning routine started the night before when they wrote out their goals for the next day. See, there's a goal setting again.

[00:24:28] Now, maybe they started their day off by eating bagels for breakfast and noticed they wanted to take a nap by 10 a.m., so they quit eating carbs for breakfast and then they had vast energy all day long. I mean, you really could be that simple to make your life in business more productive. And you might say, well, that's just a change in diet. No, it's not. That was a mental attention paid to cause and effect. The cause was eating high carbs in the morning and the effect was a foggy mind and tiredness. It was also the mental decision to change to low carbs with the effect of a much clear mind and a much higher energy load. So it wasn't a change of diet. It was a change of mindset about diet. Now it's a slight nuance, but important to always realize that all change, good or bad, comes from your mind.

[00:25:28] And speaking of mine, this past Friday had Joan Kent on the show who talked about how you can easily change your brain chemistry to give you increased clarity and productivity. That was Episode 297. Any time you want to go directly to an episode it's screwthecommute.com/297.

[00:25:49] Now, I'm including a bunch of links in the show, notes that have great articles and mine hacks. I couldn't use all of them. You can't use all of them, but you pick the ones that make sense for you. There's many more than I've put in this episode. These are the ones that I use and work for me. And I highly encourage you to try. The ones I've talked about here and others you see in the articles working on your mind can overcome perceived limitations you have because of your situation in life. Your time available and maybe even physical limitations. Now, if you get it in your mind, you want to study with someone who's been there and done that when it comes to business. Well, I highly encourage you to check out my unique and powerful mentor program that's helped thousands of people over many years accelerate their success in business. Check out the details at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com and go work on your mind. Catch ya in the next episode.

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