Breaking Bad Habits
Here’s what changing your habits and routines REALLY looks like. Is it hard? Sure. But you have to decide which is stronger… your vision or your comfort zone.
So today I’m going to show you what it takes to become elite.
To become a champion.
What Caused Our Success?
This morning I was talking with my wife about the video that I was planning on recording, while I was working on putting together the slides. We got into this long discussion about how we figured out a thing that was really bugging us for a while.
I had gotten really lean, and then I started playing around with keto and intermittent fasting and different things, and then my body crashed and it was a really weird phenomenon for me.
We had worked through a lot of things already. We had gone through vegetarian, we’d gone through supplements obviously, and super foods. In weight and the strength training and the various different exercises, we did 5×5, which is a strength program, and muscle mass, and cardio long duration, low intensity, and HIT training, which is high intensity interval training, and periodization.
How does this relate to goals? In every goal that you’re after, there’s always going to be a keystone activity, or four or five keystone activities. That’s where you really settle in and perfect those things. It doesn’t matter if it’s karate, or jujitsu, or even parenting. I’m finding those keystones in everything I do.
This is a picture of my wife in a mermaid costume. I just really loved the photo. Anyway, she said it wasn’t until we figured out protein, that we turned the corner.
Then I started thinking about it and I said, “You know what? That was a keystone, but it wasn’t why.”
That’s what I want to talk about today. I’m talking about breaking bad habits piece by piece, and what changing habits and routines really looks like. I’m also doing this in retort of those people who say, “People don’t change. They are who they are.”
What Change Really Looks Like
In this series, I’m talking about carving out the space in your life in order to reap the harvest, or the reward, of doing the Pipeline. This is step by step how to go about doing the pipeline. Sometimes people can just jump in here and start doing the pipeline, but some people want to do some little extra steps at the onset, in order to get it right.
In the last video that I did, I asked everyone to do a seven-day reveal. It was basically asking you to take every 30 minutes for seven days that you’re awake. What did you get done? What was the done? I gave an example of when I woke up I had tea and planned the day, worked out, showered, cleared my email, watched a video, and then watched a related video. And then I started searching crockpots and then I read reviews on crockpots.
If that was my life, I would be a guy who works out and shops. Because the very best prediction of what your year is going to look like is what you get done on a daily basis – the actions that you take.
This shows who you (or I) really are.
These activities equal what? A guy who works out and shops.
Do you need to change any habits and routines to attain your goal?
That’s really what this whole part is about: finding out who you really are, what your “dones” are, and then if you need to change any.
This training is leading into how to do that change.
Focusing on 1 Good Habit
I’m going to go back to that discussion that my wife and I had. The keystones of protein and periodization training ended up being a part of a solution.
What I was worried about was that just about every time I would try to do a high intensity workout on keto or intermittent fasting or something like that, then I couldn’t sleep, and I would need three or four days of recovery, so I was losing four days or so. It was just a train wreck.
This graph shows my muscle mass, and you can see it going down when I begin to start the high intensity workouts on keto or intermittent fasting. It was painful to see myself withering away. I was losing this muscle mass that I’ve been tracking for probably 20 years. It’s the same scale, everything.
Once I figured it out, I gained about 25 pounds of muscle mass since about 2020. That dip was the bug.
Periodization is where you don’t do the same thing every week. In one week I might do very heavy, and then in the next week I would do heavy, and then in the next week, medium, and then light in the fourth week, with more reps in the light weeks.
I’m going to be getting a lot more into this later when I’m laying out exactly how to build your business, but you can use this same pattern in executing the Pipeline. You could focus in week one on generating leads, and in week two on contacts, then work a week on leads, then work another week on contacts. Then maybe in the next month you would focus on appointments and presentations, and then the next month on closing and follow up.
You’re spending a little bit more time in the repetition of one thing, instead of trying to do the whole Pipeline at once.
This is very much what I did. It took me a longer time to figure out leads.
What Change Really Looks Like
I’m just going to tell you a story as I walk through it, and I want you to look back in your life and find how you yourself have experienced change. Sometimes change can come about by getting accepted to a college and leaving to go there, and everything changes.
Other times it is where you get in a rut. Maybe you pick up a habit while you’re at college and then you think, “Wait a minute. Why do I always do this?” You want to change it, but it becomes a habitual thing that’s very difficult to change.
I want to walk you through what that experience looks like:
- The transitions of change
- Why you will change
- Why you won’t change
Because You Can’t… or Because You Won’t?
I was going to the US Navy Dive School, in Corona, California. This picture isn’t of the particular man who spoke to my class, but it shows what I was looking at, and the importance of what this man was having to say.
I don’t remember everything that he said, but there was a phrase that he said that I’ll never forget:
“Most of you will not successfully navigate this course, not because you can’t, but because you won’t.”
I remember that thing ringing in my ears and I thought, “Man, everybody just heard that.” And they’re normally going to cut probably, 50-60% of the class, maybe even more.
This is similar to what people say about network marketing. “Oh, people don’t succeed in those things. Most people fail,” etc.
That Time the Navy Tried to Drown Me…
This is San Diego, California, and this is the San Diego Bay and the Naval Amphibious Base in Coronado. The little dot off the end of the pier is a buoy, and it played a very significant part in my life.
On day one, we were told to jump off the pier in our clothes and boots, and swim to the buoy and back. If you’ve ever tried to swim in wet clothes, you’ll know it adds weight and resistance. You’re not real slick, literally. Boots are not fins. I had probably swum about five times in my life at that point. This was going to be a challenging moment for me.
I remember thinking as I was swimming, heading out to that buoy, “Gosh, that’s far, I’ve never swum that far.” That’s the noise. That’s what’s going on in my head.
And then after just a little bit, I saw two guys coming back to the pier and I thought, “Are they quitting?”
A little bit later that night I ran into one of those guys in the barracks, and I asked him, “What happened, man?”
He said, “Man, it’s just too cold.”
I thought, “Yeah, it was cold for me, too.”
But it hit me just like that, that some people just quit. I always wondered why, and you’re going to get the answer to this in a little bit.
Mental Noise and Your Comfort Zone
What was going on in Tim’s head here? Mental noise, no skills, no efficiency, nothing but grit. I flopped to the buoy and back. I wasn’t last, but I was very close to last. It was a brutal swim.
As we continued to train, they kept increasing the distance. I remember being way behind some other guys. I thought, “How are those guys swimming so fast? I need to ask them how they do it.”
What was going on in Tim’s head? I was starting to think how to get better, but while I was doing it.
A lot of people want to try to solve everything first. I don’t and you can’t. You have to jump in the water.
It’s the same thing in network marketing: you have to begin the process because the more and more that you study and study, you’re not actually applying what you know. You will begin to forget the nuances that you’re learning.
If you run through something and then you begin to do it, then run through the same training again, you will notice a lot more nuances that you didn’t notice before.
Focus on Technique and Reward
I learned a technique of swimming from the faster guys, and then I got to this stage: “Reach out, grab an apple, scissor, then throw it behind me.”
That’s all that was in my head. I wasn’t worried about the cold. I wasn’t worried about anything. I was just focused on technique. I’m now in the moment.
Earlier, I was not in the moment at all. I had noise in the head. But here, I started doing it.
Cold, tired, wet, and hungry was the normal. Now I accepted and embraced it.
They liked to mess with us a lot. They would pour water on us and all kinds of crazy stuff.
For me, at that point, I adopted the attitude of, “I’m just going to endure this until I can go take a warm shower.” That became the way I thought about it.
I didn’t think, “Why are they picking on me?” They picked on everybody eventually, so I just thought, “Eh, it’s just part of the game.”
One time the instructor lined us up and said, “We’re staying here until three people quit.”
“It’s going to be a long night,” was the way that I was thinking about it. “I can do this all day, all night, then I’ll have a warm shower.”
That was the whole process. Now I was playing the game. I wasn’t resisting the game.
I was saying, “Oh, great, awesome. Whatever comes my way.”
What does this have to do with network marketing?
Maybe you get a prospect who’s playing with you, or maybe a whole bunch of people quit your team or something like that. You just have the attitude of, “I’m playing the game,” and don’t worry about it. You don’t get upset about it.
You’re smiling and laughing with no resistance.
Drown-Proofing and Embracing Change
The next evolution that we went through was something called drown-proofing. This is a picture of a scuba diver (this would be me in this situation) and an instructor above him. They’re trying to simulate having some sort of an upset happen while you’re underwater and you have to figure out how to solve it. They give examples such as getting caught in kelp beds, or rubbing up against a rock and it released your tanks, or something like that.
These guys come down (the most ferocious kelp you’ve ever seen seen in your life), and rip your mask off, rip your fins off, undo the tanks, or maybe twist the regulator to where it doesn’t work, or take the regulator completely off the manifold that puts the two jugs together, and then they go back up to the surface. My job was to put myself back together.
The process is to restore my air first, then assist my buddy. That’s all I thought about. While they were beating me up, I just sat there and took it, just sitting there waiting and thinking, “Restore my air, assist my buddy to get air.”
After that, I could put on my fins and all that stuff. That’s easy.
I was 100% focused on technique.
My teeth were chattering. I’d been in the water so long that I was shivering.
It was a no factor. It didn’t bother me at all, because I was in it 100%.
Embrace Change, but Don’t Be Obsessed with Changing
While I’m talking about change, I wanted to also add in that some people are just obsessed with changing.
Let’s say that they’ve got a lead generation process that they’ve put out, and maybe they haven’t gotten any leads yet and they say, “Oh, I have to change it. I have to change it. I have to change it.”
If they have a presentation, and send two people to the presentation, they say, “The presentation doesn’t work.”
No, you’re going to have to get a much higher survey of people. You’re going to have to put 100 people, or 1000 people through these things before you can ever even begin to compare it to something else.
Embrace change, but don’t be obsessed with changing things too soon.
The ONE Thing that Will Get You Through the Hard Times…
There is only ONE thing that will get a person through challenges and changes in habits and routines.
Your vision
This is really the big reveal of today’s presentation, because some people won’t confront it. The only thing that will get you through challenges and changes in habits and routines is your vision. If a person wants to break a bad habit, then it’s lack of vision that’s going to prevent that.
It is enough to cause you to change, or it is not. If not, go back to your vision, add more excitement, more challenge, or more real.
More excitement: “Well, I want to get a 15% pay raise.” Not really that challenging to me. 100% — double my money. That would challenge me.
More challenge or more real: “I want to make $1,000,000 a month.” But it’s really not real. I would have to hit $500,000 a month first.
People think that goals are fluff and they’re not fluff.
I’ll be giving you the activities and training, very specifically, as you’ve seen me do over the last several videos. But you’re going to have to change. When I say, “Hey, you know what? You’re going to have to set out blocks of time in order to do the pipeline,” then you need to set those aside.
It may be giving something up, something that you really enjoyed, but you have to decide whether or not your vision is what you really want, or do you want to stay with your comfort?
A lot of times I see people say things like, “Well, we always do this on Friday night.”
Okay. Then rearrange your schedule for Thursday, and get more production done. It’s really based on a weekly basis.
Vision is not fluff. It is the fuel that drives action and willingness to change.
Strong (and Long) Intention Toward Your Goal
I did a video earlier in this series that talked about when you set a vision, or an intention (intention means your aim), you want to make that thing like a big thick zip line and a long way out there – at least a 10-year vision or so, and then you want to just zip down that line and stay completely on target all the time.
In essence, the decision you already made that’s down at the end of the zip line is pulling you. That’s the way I envision it. I already put that out there and I’m being tugged towards it. It’s grabbing my tie and pulling me forward. That’s the way I like to envision this.
Going back to the conversation that my wife and I were having, I’m heading towards a goal. These are some keystones that have to do with my body. My wife was saying that the protein and periodization were the reason for our success.
And then I smiled after I thought about it, and I said, “What really caused our success is our vision that we would remain healthy and fit as we aged.”
Do you see the difference there? These are keystones, no doubt. But it is this vision line that she and I put together that we didn’t want to fall apart as we aged. I felt that way when I saw all my stats diving, and people would say, “Well, you know, a 60-year-old man can’t build muscle mass.”
I said, “That’s got to be proven first by me. I don’t care what anybody says, I’m going to figure this out.”
Once we had the vision, we relentlessly evaluated the variables (these are all variables that have to do with the body) that influence the goal, and then fully implemented and tracked our foods and training.
It’s not enough to evaluate them. You have to then put out all the variables and implement them and track them, and measure whether they do it or not.
That’s the only way.
We’re going to be doing that as I go forward.
I just wanted you to really get a grip around what change is all about and how it’s experienced, because I think probably you’ve had an experience much like what I had when I was going through dive school. (By the way, I took a 40-degree shower in memorial of that. I was kind of perky when I came out of that shower.)
How Do You See This Playing Out?
How do you see value of a vision as it relates to change? I want to know from your side, if you feel as though what I’ve just described here is something that you’ve already experienced.
I also want to know how your experience of change was. Whether it’s the same as mine, or if it was different, let me know how the experience was.
And the third thing I want to know is, was this valuable or helpful for you? If so, how? Need help with your message? Here’s my training for what to say and how to say it. If you don’t have a team or haven’t recruited anyone (or less than 10 people), this is THE course you should get – Network Marketing Training Course
