The Three Month Vacation Podcast

It's super-easy to tell stories of success and how everything went from good to great. But what about the events when you had to eat humble pie? Or the times when you were scared out of your mind? Here are three stories which by some coincidence involve presentations. Nonetheless, there's a solid lesson behind each story and it's well learning from. ------------------------------------------ Imagine your website has just gone live and the next thing you know, you’re on a radio show. That’s exactly what happened to me one week in June 2001. After weeks of hard work and lots of back and forth, my website had gone live. By today’s standards it wasn’t a very flashy website. It had tiny fonts and was extremely spartan, but finally it was up and running. That very afternoon, I was at a store when I ran into the presenters of a popular radio show. They asked me a few questions and then asked me what I did. At the end of the question set they announced my website on air. I was excited beyond belief I called my webmaster, Chris Parkinson, and told him to expect loads of traffic. You know what happened next, right? Yes, nothing. No one showed up to the site despite the popularity of the show. My excitement turned to disappointment as the hours ticked by. But what was I expecting? I’ll tell you what I was expecting. I was expecting a “miracle moment”. And I learned that events don’t always roll out the way you’ve planned. Which is why this series is about the startup stories we’ve experienced at Psychotactics. They’re a series that give you an understanding of how we went about our early days. How we didn’t just sit behind our computer and hope that clients would sign up. It wasn’t just about starting a blog or putting a website. There are stories that I haven’t quite told before. These are three of the stories: Three startup stories from the early days at Psychotactics. Story No.1: The One Person “Australian” Workshop In 2004, we did something quite bold. We’d been in business for just a year and eight months when we decided to have a workshop in Los Angeles. That workshop, priced at $1500 per person sold out. Which prompted us to have our second workshop closer to home. When a client suggested we have a workshop in Australia, we jumped at the opportunity and the deal for this workshop seemed almost too good to be true. This client wasn’t asking us to do all the promotion. Instead he was going to get over 60 people to attend our two-day event and all we needed to do was show up. Workshops are notoriously hard to fill at any point in time When you start marketing a workshop you get a few early sign-ups and then it gets deathly quiet for a long time. Finally, as the final date approaches, you get another spurt of sign-up activity which usually fills the remaining seats. For this particular workshop, we hadn’t got any early sign-ups, and even though that was a worry, we weren’t terribly concerned. After all, the client was going to get those 60 people to attend. Even if just half of them showed up, we’d still have a sizeable number of attendees. Even so a uneasy calm set in The e-mails from the client weren’t encouraging. He kept bringing up stories of local disasters. There was a drought in the area, a big fire in the city—things that seemingly had no bearing on the workshop. When we didn’t react to the doom and gloom, he sent us more e-mails. The numbers receded from 60 to 30, then from 30 to 10. It was too late for us to change our minds We’d already committed to the workshop and we decided to go ahead anyway. When the client knew we were determined to go ahead, he decided to book a venue and some accommodation nearby. And here’s the interesting bit: We just knew the workshop was in Victoria somewhere and assumed it would be in a big city like Melbourne. Imagine our horror when we were driven over 116 km to a little town called Hepburn Springs We must have been naïve at the time anyway, because it never occurred to use to ask where the workshop was being held. Our workshop at Los Angeles had been so successful that it didn’t cross our minds that anything could go wrong. Yet here were with no clue as to who was going to turn up to the event and not even a faint idea about the venue. Which is when we got our next shock The venue was a bed and breakfast with what seemed to be a billiards room. There in the middle of the room was—as you’d expect—a billiards table and I was somehow supposed to present with that monstrosity right in the room. I asked if the table could be moved. The owner grinned and said, “That table hasn’t moved in a hundred years, and it’s not going to move now”. The only option we had was to put a big sheet over the table and chairs around it as it if were a conference table of some kind. But the surprises didn’t stop at the venue and the table On the day of the event, two people turned up: the client and his non-paying friend, called Margaret. Nonetheless, we were there to do a workshop and if one person turned up, the workshop would go ahead. As we always do, we started on time at 8:32 am. Then, at 8:45 the doors burst open and another participant showed up. Yup, it was our first paid participant and one who’d seen the announcement of the workshop on our e-mail newsletter and decided to come to the workshop. We were going to recover some of our costs after all. However, this paying participant was no ordinary participant She happened to be the General Manager of a $500 million company that was located in Melbourne. In the break she spoke to me and expressed her surprise at the lack of attendees, but also expressed her admiration. “I was amazed that with just two people in the room, you started right on time”. Over the next two days we went through the elements of The Brain Audit workshop and by the end of the workshop we had a bit of a reward. The GM wanted us to come and present to her company while we were still in Victoria and she was willing to pay us for the trouble. And so, we broke even We could have given up at the stage when the client was sending his depressing e-mail reports. Instead we decided to persevere and yes we had a happy ending, but what are the lessons? Three lessons here: Lesson 1: Duds are part of the game The reason I’m relating this story to you is because I see so many people today who want to start a business, but they want to be successful in a very short time—and preferably with no downsides. If you’re starting up a business today, how many duds are you willing to embrace? The biggest reason why I see businesses failing is because they don’t want to fail. They play safe. They want clients to come to them via a blog or website. They don’t want to go out on a limb and fail a bit. Failing isn’t a nice feeling but it teaches you a great lesson. And sometimes, like we did, you get lucky. Lesson 2: Cover your costs We bought our plane tickets and paid for the venue before we had enough information. We trusted that things would work out in the end and it didn’t. Since then if we’ve had a workshop that involves costs (and they all do), we make a temporary booking of the venue. Until we sign up at least a few clients, we don’t book or buy anything. We’ve never made a loss on an event, but we came terribly close with this Hepburn workshop. It taught us to pre-sell and then commit to an event. We use the same concept for our product launches. We pre-sell and only once we have sign-ups do we create the product. Lesson 3: Work your own contacts When we started out, we didn’t have much of a list. We built that list though writing really good articles. Not just your run of the mill articles, but insightful, funny articles. Despite the presence of a list, we didn’t have many names from Australia. And we decided to work with the client who’d promised to get 60 participants. That was obviously a mistake. When you give away that much amount of control, you don’t know for sure how things are going to work out. In the end we had no control of the venue, the participants and were stuck with a billiards table in the middle of the room. But that trip to Australia was only one of our early adventures. The second scary one was definitely the insurance company speech.   Story 2: The Insurance Company Speech I don’t remember how I got some of the early speaking assignments—or maybe I’m just trying to forget. This early assignment was in Wellington where I was supposed to speak to a large group of insurance agents. The presentation was about The Brain Audit, but I tried valiantly to get case studies about the insurance business. I met with the client many times at their local office, I did my research and found many examples about the insurance industry. And that’s where I made my first mistake. Well, anyway, I flew to Wellington and started my presentation As I got through the first 15 minutes or so, I realised the audience was not reacting the way I expected them to do so. Instead of being interested in the case studies, they seemed to be bringing up objections and interrupting my presentation. And rightly so. I was the outsider in the room. I didn’t know squat about insurance and the insurance industry and there I was giving them case studies that left me open to attack. That’s when my second mistake became apparent I was still very much a rookie at presenting so I took whatever advice I could get in that field. And one presenter told me never to use slides. He suggested that slides were like the kiss of death. As it turned out, slides would have saved me from going to pieces on that particular day. As the audience grew restless, I got extremely nervous on stage. And then someone walked out Who knows why they walked out. Maybe it was just to go to the toilet or to get a drink. But as my eye moved towards the exit, I could see the entire audience walking out in droves. And though no one else was walking out at that point, I couldn’t focus and forgot what I had to say next. If I had slides, I could have used them as a guide and moved along. Maybe the presentation would have still been a disaster, but it would have been a lot better than a professional presenter standing on stage with his mouth open and his mind blank. I still had twenty minutes to go and nothing came to mind, so I fled. I left the stage, went down the corridor and locked myself in the room until the taxi came to pick me up to the airport, later. But that’s not the end of the story Three years later I was asked to speak at quite a different event, but at the very same venue, on the very same stage. To say I was mortified was putting it lightly. I could see myself forgetting what I had to say, and fleeing for the second time in a row. You know how it is when you’re all wound up, don’t you? You don’t sleep very much at night and I counted every ambulance and police siren that roared by on the street as I lay high up in my hotel room. Except I’d learned from my mistakes The first mistake was trying to appeal to the audience. That wasn’t a mistake I was going to make ever again. When you try to appeal to an audience of people in your industry, you have at least some authority to do so. But when you’re facing an audience from another industry, it’s like walking into the jaws of a steel trap and I’d had one experience and it was enough. I presented my information as is, and the audience drew their own conclusion. The second mistake I’d made was to speak without slides It may sound like a good idea, but if you’ve spent the previous night counting sirens, you’re likely to be tired and prone to mistakes. That one event made sure I never left home without my slides. I’d even take a backup on an external drive and print out a sheet of the main points—just in case technology failed at the last minute. But easily the biggest experience to draw upon was walking back on that stage. It was scary but I realised if I backed out I’d always fear that venue and stage. The venue wasn’t the problem, it was the way I handled my presentation that caused all the trouble. Going back into that seeming danger zone made me more resilient than ever before. Which takes us to the third story: the boat cruise.   Story 3: The Bouncy Boat Cruise I’m not a big fan of “believing in the universe”. I believe you need to put in the effort and you get the result. And yet I couldn’t explain how I ended up on this cruise from New Zealand to Australia. At the start of the year I’d written my goals and one of the goals was to get on a cruise ship. But as I ploughed through the year no cruise ship had my name on it. Then in May I had a meeting with a CEO of a bed franchise “I’d like you to make a presentation at our annual event”, he said when I met him at his office. You know what’s coming next, right? Yes, the annual event was on a cruise ship. As excited as I was about the “universe pitching in”, I still had a job to do. And the presentation wasn’t bothering me too much because I’d just made many similar presentations in the months running up to the cruise. The first night, as we sailed away, there were incredibly calm seas But calm seas and the Tasman don’t go together, especially in June. June is the start of winter in this part of the world and winter brings stormy seas. Added to that, the Tasman Sea is considered to be one of the roughest stretches of water. But we were in a good mood and we had bacon and eggs for breakfast. Oily bacon and buttery-eggs. And then all hell broke loose. The ship started bouncing about like crazy The bacon and eggs—well, let’s just say you shouldn’t eat oily stuff under normal conditions—but on this rough sea it was pure hara kiri. Renuka and I were not only sea sick, we were throwing up for a solid hour. And later that morning, I had to make my presentation. Somehow, Renuka staggered to the medical centre to buy some overpriced pills to quell the seasickness. And then it was show time Luckily the presentation was in the lower part of the liner which happened to be the most stable. But I was feeling terrible and had a hard time standing up, so I didn’t get on stage. Instead I made the presentation from the bottom of the stage (at seat level) and held the stage for support. 45 minutes later I was done, and the CEO came up to continue the proceedings. “You didn’t look too well,” he said to me as we passed. “Did you drink a little too much last night?” “No I didn’t”, I informed him. I never drink the night before I have to make a presentation. What he didn’t know of course, was that Renuka was responsible for that advice. She warned me to stay away from any alcohol the previous night, no matter how many free drinks were being offered. And so I stayed sober, which was a very good lesson in itself. Often you’re judged not by what you can do, but other people’s perception of you. If I had been drinking the pervious night, it wouldn’t have mattered that I was sea-sick. My pale demeanour would have been attributed to the fact that I wasn’t a professional. I’ve found this to be true with not just speaking engagements but in every area of my life. When there’s a course on, I don’t tell clients what’s happening in the background. If I have a workshop, I focus on the slides and not about any other issues. When you let your audience know that you have other issues, they automatically attribute some slip up to that issue, even though that issue may not be connected. Oh, and that universe thing. I still don’t believe too much in it, but I write things down anyway. I put in the effort and then it comes true. Funny that!   Epilogue Often in life we’re waiting for that miracle moment. We are sure that if we simply put up the website, or start writing that blog, things will happen. What I’ve found is a bit different. With the Australia one person workshop we found that persistence paid off, but it was less a story of persistence and more about learning how groundwork and preparation avoids failure. We still need to get out from our office. We still need to push ourselves into the unknown, but we can do so without taking nutty risks. The Wellington presentation story was also one of willing to go beyond the computer screen. But it was also one of facing your demons and conquering them. Once I found that I could win that battle against fear, I feel comfortable taking on a scary situation time and time again. Finally the boat cruise could have gone horribly wrong if Renuka wasn’t around to give me advice. Her advice kept me in the good standing of the CEO. Perception is far greater than reality. And I’ve learned over the years to manage perception, because what people believe is what they feel to be true. No one is saying you need to be fake or feed your audience what you think they should hear. I openly share what we do, where we’ve succeeded and where we’ve failed. But in the middle of an assignment, you need to focus on the assignment and keep any additional stories for later, much later. That’s it. Stories from the Psychotactics vault. Don’t forget to listen to or read: #50: The Early Years-Psychotactics-Moving to New Zealand

17 questions? Why have 17 questions in a testimonial? And what if the client won’t answer the questions? The reason for the 17 question testimonial is simple. It’s not a testimonial any more, it’s a experience on paper. When other clients read it, they can sense the ups and downs. They can see the final result. It makes your testimonial stand out. In order to get this 17 question testimonial going, you have to have a strategy in place. This podcast shows you exactly what you need to do so that you can get the answers your business deserves. --------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Why you need to send instructions before asking the questions Part 2: Creating compartmentalisation: Bento Box Style Part 3: Why it’s a mistake not to send examples Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer. ------------------ A few billion years ago something quite amazing—and destructive—occurred on Earth. Oxygen was produced for the first time. If you were to go back into Earth’s history, you’d choke and die quickly And that’s because the Earth’s atmosphere mostly consisted of Nitrogen, water vapor, carbon dioxide—plenty of carbon dioxide from all those erupting volcanoes—and methane. And then between 2.3-2.4 billion years ago, life began to undergo an amazing transformation on the ocean floor. A bunch of photosynthetic microbes called cyanobacteria started harnessing the Sun’s energy and converted the carbon dioxide and water into food. And what was the waste product of these cyanobacteria? Yes, it was oxygen. Life-harnessing bacteria began to spread to any surface in the sea and  creating huge amounts of oxygen. But this oxygen didn’t go very far. The oceans were packed with dissolved iron, and you know what happens when iron mixes with oxygen? Sure you do. You get rust. The oceans literally rusted and for hundreds of millions the iron in the ocean sucked up the available oxygen. For about 700 million years of rusting, the oceans ran out of iron. There was just one minor issue: the cyanobacteria were still producing immense amounts of oxygen. Where would all this oxygen go? Into the atmosphere, that’s where it all went The oxygen had to escape and it made its way into the Earth’s atmosphere. In the billion years that were to follow the Earth began to change from a place where you could hardly breathe, to one that had a bounty of oxygen. Something similar applies you’re dealing with testimonials for your business At first the testimonials you get are weak, almost impossible to use. Then as time passes, and if you use the six-questions from The Brain Audit, you’ll get testimonials that are more oxygenated. But for you to create a great oxidation event, you need the power of the 17-Question testimonial. And the reason why you need this 17-Question testimonial is because it catapults your testimonials into an experience. Instead of just reading yet another testimonial, the prospect feels the ups, down, twists, turns and final result. Let’s go into the land of the 17-Question testimonial and explore three elements: 1) Why you need to send instructions before asking the questions 2)  Creating compartmentalisation: Bento box style 3) Why it’s a mistake not to send examples First, what are the seventeen questions? We’d want to get that out of the way, so here goes: 1) What was your primary reason for taking this course? 2) Describe how you used to approach writing before this course began 3) Describe how things changed about mid-way into the course 4) Describe how you feel now, towards the end of this course 5) Can you tell us about your experience with the group and the difference it made? 6) Can you tell us why the forum helped? And where it helped? 7) Can you describe to a newcomer how this course is taught? ( teaching methodology) 8- Describe Sean as a teacher 9) Did you have any personal experience (e.g. The moment I understood the one-word, it was a special moment because in the past….etc). 10) What would you say are the big benefits of this course? 11) How did the extra classes? Audio on Mistakes etc. help? 12) Why would you recommend it? 13) The course is called the toughest in the world. Can you describe how tough it was, and what sacrifices you had to make to keep going? 14) What was your toughest moment? How did you overcome it? 14) Have you done other courses with Psychotactics? OR have you signed up or considered signing up for another course? Why? 15) What advice would you give to future participants? 16) How did the course personally help you? 17) Anything else you’d like to add? Part 1: Why you need to send instructions before asking the questions Yesterday my wife Renuka was filling in a form for an online visa. She’d fill in a page of details only to be confronted with yet another. Then she’d fill a second page and the third would show up. Mother’s name, father’s name, previous visa number—details after details popped up to the point of frustration. When you’re asking clients for testimonials it hard enough when you ask a few questions, but a seventeen question form can be quite tiresome. Which is why you need to prepare the client in advance. This preparation calls for instructions. When we ask clients for testimonials, we forget one important fact We forget that for many, if not most of clients, giving testimonials is not a common activity. Even if they’ve agreed to give you a testimonial, the sight of seventeen questions may appear a little over the top. Yet, without that voluminous amount of detail you’re unlikely to draw out the entire experience. To make sure the testimonial plan goes well you have to prepare the client. It’s important to send them information in advance Whether the testimonial is done via the phone, in person or via the Internet, you need to make sure the client knows they’re going to go through a 17-question testimonial. And if you suspect the client is going to be reluctant to write, you should immediately reach for the phone or in person. There’s a big advantage to getting a testimonial over the phone When we write, we tend to edit. And if a client is sitting down to write answers to a bunch of questions, you’re asking him to invest a lot of not just writing time, but editing time as well. On the phone or in person, you have no such problem. The client is merely answering a bunch of questions and is likely to be happy to speak for between 10-12 minutes. In comparison, a written testimonial may take well over 45 minutes to an hour. Which is why you need to let the client know you’d like to speak to them, and that you’ll be recording the session. This is the first level of preparation involved. The second level seems minor but it’s just as important When clients agree to giving a testimonial, I also send them this information: This isn’t just a client testimonial. It’s more of a case study describing your ups and downs and final result. The experience is what counts and so I would really like you to answer these questions in as much detail as possible. Short, one-line answers become pretty useless as they lack detail. They also can’t really be used, so I’d prefer you put in as much detail as possible in your answers. This detail helps me understand your journey better and is also a really ego booster. So I would appreciate the maximum amount of detail in the answers. There’s really no reason to have a twiggy, anaemic testimonial You want one that’s well rounded, full of juicy experiences and stories. And when you put the client in a situation where they can quickly give you the information (via phone or in person) you’ve made the first and most important move. When you clearly bring up the issue of detail, you’re priming them to be effusive—and yes, it does make for some pretty cool testimonials. If the testimonial isn’t via the phone or in person, things get a little dicier Well, not quite. It really depends on what you’ve delivered in terms of product or services. If a client buys a product like “Chaos Planning” which is a short, yet intense book, there’s really no point in sending the client a seventeen question questionnaire. However, if there’s a lot of involvement and a slightly long drawn process, you’re more than likely to get a far better response. Let’s say you’re a web designer. You’ve just spent two months of back and forth movement building a client’s website. Now there’s been a bit of a relationship and it’s far more likely that an e-mail based set of questions will work. We tend to use the 17-Questions only for courses We conduct courses such as the cartooning course, the Article Writing Course, copywriting, First Fifty Words etc. These aren’t courses where you sign up and then the teacher disappears. They’re pretty hands on courses and with just a few clients a ton of back and forth is involved. To give you an example, in the 2016 Article Writing Course we have our normal limit of 25 participants. And we’re now in Week 8 of the course and so far 9,374 posts have been generated. Yes, it’s impressive at over 1000 posts per week, but what’s important to note here is the involvement. If the client is fully involved, then it’s more than likely that either a phone call or an online questionnaire will get an equally powerful response. Of course if you have 25 clients, it’s better to have them answer via an online medium because the exercise gets very complicated. You have to figure out available timings and time zones and anyway the exercise may take several days. But if you have just a few clients, it’s a better idea to use the phone or record via Skype. We started this journey to get our 17-Question testimonial but realised there’s a lot more to consider. We realised that planning the strategy and choosing whether to use the phone or an online questionnaire is important. And that while the online questionnaire is definitely less time consuming, it depends a lot on the involvement of the clients. The more involved, the more likely you are to get great testimonials for such a lengthy questionnaire. This takes us to our second part: The logic of the questions. Do we really need 17 questions? Would 13 be just fine? Or could we go up to 19? The answer lies in the logic. What are you trying to achieve? That’s what we’ll have a look at next. Part 2: Creating compartmentalisation If you were to head back in time to Japan—no, not 2.4 billion years but closer—around the 12th century, you’d have run into quite a different sort of evolution: the start of the Bento box. During the Kamakura period, dried meals or hoshi-ii was introduced and bento was nothing more than a small bag to store dried rice. But if we speed up through the Azuchi Momoya Period, in the 17th century, we find bento boxes everywhere. Wooden, lacquered boxes that consisted of rice, chestnut, seafood, mushroom, pickles and yes, bamboo shoot. And that’s what a bento box does best With all those tastes and textures and different types of food, it’s critical to compartmentalise the food. Similarly, if you want to get results with your 17-Questions, you have to compartmentalise the questions so that each set tackles different issues. Bento at one of my favourite Japanese restaurant in Auckland Let’s take a look at the compartments for one of our courses, for starters. They’re split into: – The experience: Before, during, on completion of course – The elements of the course: the group, the forum, the notes, the audio. – The teaching system: How it’s taught, the responsiveness of the teacher etc. – Comparison: How they’re compare with other courses – Advice/Recommendations: Would they recommend the course to others? Why? – Any other comments And while we ask 17-Questions, what’s really vital is the creation of the bento box. You need to create the compartments for your own product or service first, before considering what to put in the individual boxes. Let’s go back to the web designer: What would the compartments look like? – The experience: Before, during, on completion of website – The elements of the website: the layout, functionality, ease of use etc. – Dealing with the developers: The responsiveness, ease of instructions etc. – Comparison: How they’re compare with other website developers or even other similar service providers – Advice/Recommendations: Would they recommend the service to others? Why? – Any other comments While most of the compartments of the bento box has already been created for you, you may still need to work on a compartment of your own. Or, you may need to add, subtract or change some of the questions. This compartmentalisation allows us to get the information we need and it allows the client to see at a glance what they’re expected to answer. We started out this journey by sending the instructions in advance. We then moved into compartmentalisation. And if you stopped right at this point, you are likely to get an outstanding testimonial. But why stop here? Why take the chance that something might still go wrong? The way to ensure a mind-blowing testimonial is to something so simple, it’s easy to miss. It’s called: sending an example. Part 3: Why it’s a mistake not to send examples Let’s say I step into a bar. I have no intention of drinking that cold glass of beer. But there in front of me is someone drinking a cold glass of beer. Guess what happens next? The reason why I’m sipping a beer is because of a mirror effect. This mirror effect also plays out to your advantage when you’re getting a client to give you a 17-Question testimonial. To understand why the mirror effect is so important, we simply have to take away the example. Now the client has no benchmark and their testimonial can be similar to what you’re expecting or wildly off course. A simple way to solve this problem is to send an example As you’d expect the example will be long and detailed. And the moment you send it to the client, they realise what’s expected of them. Despite this example, some clients will still give you terse testimonials. There’s really not much of a point in running such testimonials. However, most clients have a look at the example and proceed to give one just as good. But what if you don’t have an example in place? Well, it’s a good question but the answer is more than obvious. Be persistent and go in search of a client who’s willing to give you a longer testimonial. Just throwing your hands up in the air isn’t going to get you the testimonial you seek. If you need to do an assignment free of cost just for the sake of the testimonial, then make sure you get it done. Without that example testimonial in place, you can still get good 17-Question testimonials, but an example almost always guarantees great results. And once we’ve covered that last bit, it’s time for the summary. Ok let’s summarise The first point was one of instructions When you give clients instructions well in advance. Letting them know that they need to give lots of detail is very important. Without the detail you may have a testimonial but not a complete experience. The whole purpose of the 17-Question testimonial is for it to be like an oxygenation event. It needs to bring life to a testimonial in a dramatic manner. The issue of phone vs. online questionnaire is also something that needs to be tackled. Using the phone is far superior if you have fewer clients. If you have a large number, then you have to make sure it’s all online or it  may take too much time and never get done. The second point was one of compartmentalisation You need to split the main facets into something resembling a bento box. For us, we break up things into the experience, the teaching system, comparison, advice etc. And your compartments may be slightly different but still remarkably similar. All you need to do is sit down and create the compartments before putting in the questions in each bit. You can have fewer than 17 questions and possibly more. But you should get tons of material with 17. We’ve filled up entire booklets (just the Article Writing Course prospectus has over 80 pages of testimonials). The final point is one of beer—sorry, examples Send an example to a client. When she can see the example it’s a form of instruction. She knows what’s expected of her and will deliver accordingly. Without an example a client may meet your expectations, but equally they may go wildly off in some weird direction or not meet your quota. The example needs a mirror effect and it’s your job to provide the mirror. Start with the bento box. Create the compartments Fill it with questions. An example of the questions and answers Example: Alison’s answer 1)What was your primary reason for taking this course? I wanted to write in a much more engaging way. And to write faster. And I wanted to know when I had succeeded and failed in my attempt – to have some way of assessing for myself the quality of my output. 2) Describe how you used to approach writing before this course began I had the Psychotactics Outline stuck to my wall behind my computer screen. And I had tried like heck to implement it but I was trying to do it all at once. So it was hard and I knew I was failing or making such slow progress. And I did not really know how to get better on my own. I tried to outline and write in the same session. And I did not plan ahead, I just tried to write. And it took a long time, but I just thought, “hey, that’s life.” 3) Describe how things changed about mid-way into the course Mid way through the course we were doing disconnectors and the first 50 words. And man, that was hard. Trying to figure the right way to disconnect, trying to reconnect smoothly, trying to ‘bottle’ the drama and tip it onto the page at just the right point. It was hard, hard work. 4) Describe how you feel now, towards the end of this course Now I’m feeling confident. I can get a sense of my ‘One Word’ quite easily and once I have it, it’s pretty simple to come up with a disconnect. And I have a more trained eye, so I can quickly goback and ‘audit’ my work to make sure I have put in all the elements I need. It’s much, much easier. 5) Can you tell us about your experience with the group and the difference it made? I was the only girl in my small group, so sometimes I would ‘sneak out’ and read what was going on in the other groups, with people I knew from the Cartoon Course. But my small group was fine, and we kept nudging each other along and the accountability to do the work was excellent. We didn’t lose anyone!. Now that the forum has opened up to Group 2 I really appreciate being in a smaller group most of the time – sheesh, having all of us buzzing around would have been overwhelming. 6) Can you tell us why the forum helped? And where it helped? I love working in the forum because it’s so flexible. And you get almost instant feedback because of the different time zones. Instant feedback is so motivating. And you could get so many different comments on your work. And go back and correct it to make it better. And read other peoples work to learn from their mistakes 7) Can you describe to a newcomer how this course is taught? ( teaching methodology) It’s like working with a gemstone – you are polishing a single facet of the gem before you worry about any other facet. And you just trusting the process that when you finish, the gem will look magnificent. That’s where you have to trust Sean (and I did, because I had seen great results cartooning!) Describe Sean as a teacher (yes, even the irritating part). I did not find Sean irritating at all. I found him to be unfailingly (and surprisingly) patient and prepared to revisit things and help even further (like the extra calls, the Mistakes audios etc) and explain again and differently. He was very insightful and excellent at deconstructing errors and showing how to vapourise them. I also noticed on other threads that he is very robust and unprovokable. A very mature teacher who does not take complaints personally. And overall, he was just everywhere. Don’t ask me when he sleeps or how he keeps up with everything. I’m just grateful he does. And inspired to push my own envelope more to achieve what I want to. 9) What was your toughest moment? How did you overcome it? I did not have a particularly low point. I knew it was going to be hard, I had been warned, I expected it to be hard and it was! But I made a pact with myself that I would show up every day and post an article. So in my mind I was never going to miss a day, even if I wrote a crappy piece that I was not happy with and just could not stay up any later. 10) Did you have any personal experience (e.g. The moment I understood the one-word, it was a special moment because in the past….etc). ‘One word’ was certainly my biggest breakthrough because a break through there flows into everything else. I have been reading Sean’s stuff for a couple of years now and struggling to pin down this One Word thing. But it suddenly clicked and I don’t know why. It’s not that I hadn’t seen its prominence on the first chapter of notes and audio – I just could not wrestle it into submission. And with writing mostly travel stuff, different angles etc felt elusive. So the breakthrough came when I was outlining about different towns . And each place had a very particular character. So I realized that what I wanted the reader to take away was what the feeling or vibe of that place was. And that was my one word. So one place was ‘party place’ and another was ‘tranquil’ and so on. I have now managed to capture that for other types of topics the baby stuff and the finance stuff. It’s a really powerful feeling. 10) What would you say are the big benefits of this course? Being able to assess my own stuff better, to know where I am most likely to fall short and hone in on that. Outlining so fast! And seeing the outlines more clearly and easier. I think the most unexpected learning was the work process/ work flow. Of choosing a series, and outlining it, and then writing. That is of immense help to me, I struggle with strategic planning. 11) How did the extra classes? Audio on Mistakes etc. help? The Audios on mistakes were invaluable. And having the calls recorded. The extra calls, these last 2 Thursdays, were very valuable too. Surprisingly so, who would believe so much benefit could come from recapping stuff this late?! 12) Why would you recommend it? It works. If you are prepared to follow the process through, Sean gets you to the other side. 13) Can you describe why you (personally) find it unique? I love the ‘Psycho’ approach Sean uses to punch you through the Bully Brain zone. I love working with people from all over the world. And I love working hard with others who are determined to work hard and succeed too. 14) Have you done other courses with Psychotactics? OR have you signed up or considered signing up for another course? Why? Cartooning – for fun and to get my creative brain working and to challenge myself to do something I had never thought I could do. I would consider doing the Info products and the Copywriting and Pre-selling course once my bank balance has recovered from AWC. 15) What advice would you give to future participants? Decide beforehand that you will not quit. Clear your decks if you can, and expect it to be hard 16) How did the course personally help you? It gave me a good realization of how often we make excuses. So I started asking myself in other areas of my life “Do I want to do this? Yes? Then how will I make it happen?” instead of putting things off and being passive. Getting an insight on Sean’s personal program has encouraged me to push my own personal envelope to achieve what I want to. 17) Anything else you’d like to add? Thanks. A huge whole lot. It’s been great and I would do it again in a heartbeat. Useful Resources 1) Do you know why some businesses get wonderful clients, while others seem to get clients that are a pain in the neck? Find out more here. 2)  Find out: Why Clients Don’t Buy (Understanding The Elements of Risk) 3) About 5000bc: How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems  

Whenever you run into tips on productivity it’s always this earth shaking advice You’re advised to make these monumental changes to improve your business or life. In reality all you need are tiny little tweaks. Important tweaks, but tiny ones. And some of these tweaks are slightly irreverent. Which is what makes these productivity tips even more interesting. You’ll enjoy this episode on productivity—gentle productivity—and here’s a tip. You may end up sleeping a lot more as well! --------------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: How to work with a timer Part 2: The power of sleepPart 3: Why you need to focus on the road, not the destination. Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer. --------------------- I’ve always assumed you needed a nut cracker to open a walnut. Then I learned you could easily use the rear end of a screwdriver. A couple of hard whacks along the ridge, and the nut cracks open easily. To prove the point, I gave my niece Marsha to crack open the nut. She’s just 12 and her gentle taps were driving me crazy until I realised that once again I was assuming erroneously. I found out you don’t need to whack the nut at all. A few Marsha-taps and it opens just as effectively—and without any splatter. We assume we have to do something great and wonderful to get productive. In reality, the changes needed are Marsha-taps. They’re gentle, almost negligible changes that enable us to get a lot done with little or no effort. In fact, one of the biggest productivity tools is to do nothing. Intrigued? Well, follow along. The three points of gentle productivity are: 1) Working with a timer 2) Sleep 3) Focus on the road, not the destination. Part 1: Working with a timer The Psychotactics Article Writing Course is billed as the toughest writing course in the world. And rightly so. In fewer than 12 weeks a participant has to go from a “frozen state” to being able to write an article exceedingly well. When you look at all the components involved in article writing, you run into a mountain of elements to master. A single course covers “topics, sub-topics, outlines, how to start an article, different types of formulas of writing, subheads, objections, examples, summary, sandwiching and yes, the incredibly important task of starting an article.” And in the process of juggling all these components, the participants do something that jeopardises the entire learning process. They will try to write an article that seems to meet their own standard Participants complain about the quality of their article. After they write their articles, they somehow feel something’s missing. So they go back to write and rewrite until they reach some sort of “quality standard. No one starts off wanting to spend three or four hours on an article, but invariably that’s how we go about trying to get our work to a higher “quality”. In reality, all that’s happening is the build up of exhaustion If you spend four hours writing an article today, and four hours writing an article tomorrow, will you be awake on the day after? The chances are you’re just going through the motions as the tiredness seeps into your bones. When you’re tired, you’re not only robotic, but you miss out on very important learning cues. It seems very much like a Catch 22 situation. You can’t create a “great” article unless you work hard at it. And yet, working hard leads to so much exhaustion that the rest of your work suffers. Is there really a way out of this mess? The answer lies in a timer The Article Writing Course runs to a timer. You have a fixed time to do the outlines; a fixed time to do your assignment; and yes, a fixed time to spend your time on the forum looking at the work of others in your group. When your time is up, you’re done. But does this make any sense at all? With a fixed time would the quality not get a lot worse? After all, when you labour over your work, you get time to fix the glitches, tidy the work and make it better. A student that is given just 90 minutes to write an article may well be dissatisfied with their work, but give them 180 minutes and they don’t turn out 200% better work. Their work is probably improved by a mere 5-10%. But their exhaustion level goes sky high when they take more time to do the task. Tasks that have fixed deadlines may not be the best in the world but they’re the key to productivity I draw a daily diary of cartoons in watercolour. I’m fastidious about doing one watercolour every day. Then a big project comes along and I’m suddenly lost. I skip a day, which turns out to be a week. Soon a month has slipped by without any work being completed. What’s worse is that I ache to do that watercolour every day, but hey, a watercolour takes me anywhere between 45 minutes to an hour. Which is why I can’t handle the watercolour when that project rolls along. But what if I only painted for 15 minutes in the day? Instantly I feel the need to rebel. I know it takes 45 minutes so how on earth can I achieve something in 15 minutes? Anyway, I made the rule, so may as well use it, right? And so I did. I did what I could in 15 minutes. Was it as good as the 45 minutes painting. Probably not, but that’s what we found on the Article Writing Course as well. At first, there’s this intense sense of rebellion coursing through the logical part of our brains. Yet, the moment we realise there’s no way out, the creative side seems to take over and we work out how we can achieve the task in a shorter duration. Will it be as awesome as the 45 minute watercolour? Let me be very clear with you. I’ve slaved over a watercolour for 5 hours and it’s not like additional time makes a better painting. Granted there are going to be deficiencies in the final product, but if you keep up the speed every single day, something interesting happens. You manage to put out not average, but some really good work in a fraction of the time. And most importantly, where there was a blank canvas, there’s work. Not only did I do my painting, but I’m proud to have something, instead of nothing. Instead of giving up, I’m moving ahead by putting a restriction on how much time I can allocate to the project. Amazingly this has reflected in the dropout rate of the Article Writing Course When you call a course the “toughest writing course in the world”, it usually lives up to its billing. And at least 20% of the students drop out (most other courses online have a drop out rate of 80-95%). Yet, once we put the timer system in place, we are in Week 7 of the course, and only one student seems to be teetering. Will that student come back? We don’t know for sure, but a lack of exhaustion is the key to productivity. It seems ridiculous to let a timer dictate your output Yet, the timer system works for our courses, for workshops, for our personal productivity and even when Marsha’s doing her school assignments. Given endless time, she fills in the time in some magical way. Put her on a timer and she astounds everyone, including herself. In trying to get more productive we’re looking for that super-big tool that will change our lives. Instead the first of those tools is the humble timer You may go overtime—but you’ll finish your work quickly enough. Will it be amazingly good? No it won’t. But if you don’t use the timer, nothing gets done, which is a lot worse. And that’s the first gentle tool of productivity. So what’s the second tool? You know this one well. It’s called sleep. Sleep? How are you productive when you sleep? Part 2: Sleep enhances productivity—but how? Sleep helps us in many different ways, but we don’t relate garbage disposal to sleep, do we? Lack of sleep affects brain function, reduces learning and impairs performance It also seems to prevent us from transferring short term memory to long term memory. However, researcher, Dr. Maiken Nedergaard has a mind-blowing theory (he submitted a paper to the prestigious journal called Science). His research shows that the brain apparently goes through a garbage clearance when we’re asleep. Nedergaard’s team showed brain cells shrink during sleep. This shrinking of the brain cells opens up the gaps between neurons, which in turn allow fluids to wash the brain clean. The research also suggests that failing to clear away some toxic proteins may play a role in brain disorders like dementia. But let’s put brain disorders aside for a moment, and focus only on the and think of what happens when you don’t sleep. With every sleep deprived hour, more toxins keep building up in our brain, impairing our productivity. We’re more sleep-deprived than ever, and we have the idiots to prove it Everywhere you look, you’ll have the so-called gurus berating you for dreaming about the weekend. Very few people seem to take breaks, let alone weekends. Sleep is associated with laziness, and there’s utter disdain for the afternoon siesta. In many countries, they derogatorily call it the “nana nap”. Yet Nedergaard is pretty clear about the value of sleep and how it affects the clearing of junk from your brain. “You can think of it like having a house party. You can either entertain the guests or clean up the house, but you can’t really do both at the same time.” Productivity is the house party! The more productive we are, the harder we work, the greater the amount of “garbage” we seem to accumulate. And boasting about little sleep is hardly the way to go about getting rid of the garbage. I know this seems ironic seeing that I’m the 4 am guy, but I’m well into counting sheep by 10 pm or earlier. Then there’s a solid hour or even two hours of sleep in the afternoon. This regime of getting more sleep, rather than less is what counts towards productivity. But what if you feel groggy after an afternoon sleep? Many people do. And it’s good to measure how much sleep is restorative and how much makes you groggy. Some people nap in sleep cycles. I’ve found I can sleep in 45 minutes or 90-minute cycles. If I’m woken up in between, I feel groggy. But here’s the really interesting bit. I sleep longer when I’m more rested. On workdays, I’ll sleep for about 45-90 minutes, but on vacation that sleep gets extended to an enormous 3 hours. While no one is asking you to sleep three hours or even 45 minutes, you should try a 20-minute nap at the very least. Instead of trying to create yet another to-do list, your biggest item should be garbage clearance Lauren Hale is an associate professor of preventive medicine at Stony Brook University. She reckons screens of any kind inhibit our sleep. Whether it’s a phone, tablet, computer or TV, it affects our sleep. Getting rid of all those devices at least 30 minutes before you sleep is one way of getting a sounder sleep. Anyway, it stops us from checking e-mail or looking at Facebook, which only increases the churn in our brain instead of letting us sleep well. Sleep may be on everyone’s to-do list and no one’s productivity list We don’t see sleep as important, and yet it’s been amazingly useful when training clients in courses. In the 2008 version of the Article Writing Course, for instance, clients needed to write five articles a week, with no limits on time. And they all turned out decent articles. In the 2016 version of the Article Writing Course, clients are required to write 2-3 articles a week, and there are limits on time. In every instance, the 2016 batch is writing far superior articles in smaller portions of time. And how do I know this to be true? A skill like writing can never be treated like an objective science and it’s always going to be subjective. Yet, I think I could easily slide into a bit of a judging role as I’ve written between 3000-4000 articles in the past 16 years. It includes 52 articles for the Psychotactics Newsletter and between 3-5 articles for 5000bc per week. It doesn’t include several books or reports. And every Article Writing Course generates between 800-1000 articles. Seeing I’ve conducted over ten consecutive courses, that’s about 10,000 articles read over the past ten years. Add it all up and we’re looking at least 14,000 articles over the past 16 years. I know it still makes the skill subjective, but I’d say I have a pretty good handle on good vs. not so great article writing. And the more rested the student, the better the articles. I’d like to say writing more articles per week would make the client a better writer, but it doesn’t. Not in the early stages, at least. Once they’ve got a good handle on the elements of article writing, they write quickly, create less garbage, and they’re able to write every day, if necessary. And yes, without too much of a strain. Even so, sleep helps tremendously which is why weekends and breaks are crucial. This improvement in productivity doesn’t need a team of researchers does it? It’s not just a finding when it comes to article writing. You know from your experience how much you stagger about like a drunk when you’re sleep deprived. You don’t need to get into a lab coat to figure out that sleep does beautiful things for your productivity. Knowing that it helps with removing all that garbage, helps, doesn’t it? Now you can sleep a lot more and contribute to your productivity. This, of course, takes us to our third element: staggering the task. Part 3: Most of us are told to start with the end in mind. The goal. The destination. The dream. And it’s that end point that more often than not, unravels our entire sequence of productivity The end point is why we get involved with any undertaking. We join a cartoon course to learn to draw cartoons. We get into karate class so we can protect ourselves should we find ourselves in a bit of a bother. And yet for most of us, the end point is fuzzy. What would the cartoon you draw in six months from now look like? What kind of moves would you make in karate a year from now? No one can answer that question, no matter how prescient we happen to be. So the end point is important, but in reality it’s just a point in the road. A better way to see an end point is to visualise the drive to your weekend picnic spot. You clearly know your destination, but as you get in the car and get going, what are you looking at? Yes, it’s the road right in front of you. Every turn of the wheels forces you focus not on the endpoint, but the process instead. Michael Phelps is the most decorated Olympian of all time Behind Phelps’ amazing track record is his coach, Bob Bowman. And here’s what Bowman has to say about process. “Champions value the process more than any outcome. Because that’s what controllable and within our ability to deal with”. What he saying is that the journey itself is the benchmark—not the destination or outcome. For example, if we were learning how to write a sales page, we shouldn’t be focused on the end point. We should be more aware of managing the process. On a sales page there are so many elements: headlines, bullets, features and benefits etc. If you’re learning to write headlines, you should be  focusing on the headlines. If you’re writing bullets, they should be your benchmark. You shouldn’t be asking: How is my sales letter doing? That’s the wrong question to ask. Instead, you should say: Am I benchmarking what I learned today? Or this week? The moment we shift our focus on the end point, we’re easily frustrated That’s because every journey has diversions or speed bumps. And if we haven’t accounted for those diversions, we get upset and start to wander away from our destination. And rightly so, because the destination is still a zillion miles away. However, if we focus on the immediate road, things change. Even if you hit diversions, that’s part of the journey. Productivity is often measured by what you do Instead, we also need to measure it by what gets in the way. The moment we’re focused on the end point, we come up with rather silly statements like, “My work isn’t up to the quality I expected”. The reason for this seeming failure is you’re evaluating the entire project, and we’re not there yet. Frustration sets in, and you end up berating yourself, thinking everyone else is better than you. And can you believe being productive when your mental state is in a shambles? The way to approach productivity is to break up your journey into smaller bits When clients write an article, I advise them to first do the outline. Then do nothing for hours on end. After those hours have ticked away, write the First Fifty Words. Again, you can walk away from the article. Bit by bit, mile by mile that article gets built until a day, even two days have passed. But how much time has the client spent on the article? Often it’s just a little less than two hours in all. Yet, how do many writers attack an article? They sit down and try to do what I used to do. I’d be adamant that I wanted to get to the end point, so I’d spend all day on the article. As the hours ticked away, I’d get so lost that many articles never made it to the finish line. Instead, I’d throw yet another article in my article writing graveyard. What seemed like a good idea—the finish line—was, in reality, a terrible mistake. I lost energy, didn’t work with a timer, didn’t have the nerve to take a nap to replenish that energy. And so that article never did make it to the finish line. I was trying to be productive but ended up doing quite the opposite. The end point is just a point. There are points all along the road. No one point is more important than the next. If you managed to get 70% to the end point, it’s better than dropping out. And since productivity is about getting things done, 70% is a lot better than nothing. Next Step: Read or listen to How To Beat Inertia And Why Logic Doesn’t Work http://www.psychotactics.com/beat-inertia/   .

There seem to be two sets of clients: really painful ones and amazing It’s the painful ones that seem to drain an enormous amount of energy and time. They’re the ones that you constantly have to battle with. But how do you know in advance how to avoid these clients? There are red flags in place. In this episode you’ll learn  how at Psychotactics (for the most part) we avoid painful clients. ---------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Why and how to add  barriers Part 2: How to filter through testimonials Part 3: How to spot ‘Red Flags’ Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer. ---------------- How We Avoid Energy-Sapping Clients at Psychotactics Which ants have more offspring? The ants that forage more and hence have more food supplies? Or the ants that are do less foraging and hence have less food? Incredible as it may seem it’s the ants that restrain their foraging that fare better Biological studies have almost always believed that species that have the greatest food supply tend to do better. A Stanford study by Deborah M. Gordon demonstrates how harvester ants experience greater success when they’re picky. This picky, picky, picky habit applies quite neatly to client acquisition When you first start out in business, it seems like a good idea to go out and forage for new clients all the time. Over time, you’ll learn that there are good clients and energy-sapping clients. And that by appealing to everyone you may get success, but at Psychotactics, we’ve found that seemingly counterintuitive behaviour seems to work a lot better. That instead of trying to increase our reach, we’ve narrowed it down In the ant world, success is measured by a greater number of offspring. In our world at Psychotactics, success is measured by the amount of control we have over our lives. The ability to work with the clients we want, earn a profit that’s sizeable, yet within a pre-defined limit. Most importantly, it has allowed us to take three months off and travel the world on vacation. In a world that’s increasingly driving itself crazy, we live with an island mentality. And a significant part of this success lies in the fact that we have great clients. But no one just has great clients. You have to pick great clients. So how do we pick our clients? Over the past 16 years, we’ve used three core methods. And these methods have worked amazingly well for us. They are: – Adding barriers – Filtering through testimonials. – Red flags Part 1—Barriers: The First Step To Avoid Energy-Sapping Clients at Psychotactics Let’s say you tried to buy the copywriting course off our site. You randomly go to the sales page, plop down a couple of thousand of dollars and then wait for your download. The download might never show up. Instead there’d be a back check on your record Yup, just like an employer does a check on your past before hiring you, a check is done on your history with Psychotactics as well. Have you been a subscriber? For how long? Have you bought The Brain Audit yet? When did you do that? Have you bought other smaller products? If the answer is no, it’s likely that you’ll get your couple of thousand dollars right back in your bank account. So why is the case? It’s a barrier in place. And we have rules. And the rules are simple. You need to have subscribed. You need to have read The Brain Audit. Without jumping over those barriers, you’re not truly qualified to be part of our system. So yes, we may check if you’ve bought and consumed the products with another email address, but if the answer is no, then the money goes bouncing right back to your account. I remember an event in Chicago quite clearly I’d just spoken at the System Seminar. I’d just given a presentation, and a member of the audience approached me to buy our info-products course. Was he a subscriber? Did he have The Brain Audit? Would he buy The Brain Audit? His said he wasn’t planning to buy The Brain Audit. He just wanted the info-products course. And he was willing to spend his couple of thousand dollars if I just swiped his credit card. You can tell how this story goes, right? To this day, customers can’t understand why we’d walk away from thousands of dollars over a measly subscription and a copy of The Brain Audit. But think about it for a second. Would you marry someone who you’d never had a first date with? Would you even consider marrying them without engaging with them at least a couple of times? And if you’re not the marrying kind, it doesn’t matter. We still understand the concept of testing the waters, putting up the barriers just to see how the other person reacts. At Psychotactics, we know how the other person reacts The greater the barriers the client has to climb, the more they stick around. The more they stick around, the more we get to know each other and help each other move forward. And that is why we have a 3% or less refund rate on bigger products. It’s because the client has qualified themselves repeatedly. It’s not like there’s a zero-refund rate. Sometimes, despite all the due diligence between the client and us, there’s still a mismatch of the product. A client may expect the product to do one thing, and it may do another. That’s fine in our books. We know the client has gone through the steps and one rainy day doesn’t make a monsoon. The opposite is true as well The refund rate climbs to about 98% if the client is not a subscriber. Yes, read that again. A whopping 98% of those who easy come, also easy go. If the client hasn’t subscribed or bought The Brain Audit, they still can’t buy our bigger products. They can buy the smaller, specific products like Website components or ‘Black Belt Presentations’, and they do. The moment we see that order come through with no history of client/Psychotactics interaction, we can be almost sure that a refund will follow. It gets worse… Some of those folk won’t just ask for a refund. They simply ask for a chargeback. It means we get a black mark against our name (Too many chargebacks and your merchant account can be closed down). Plus there’s a $20 penalty that we have to pay. That’s not nice at all, is it? This punk, whoever he is (and it’s usually a “he”) is running rampant picking up stuff only to refund it or ask for a chargeback. Even if the person simply asks for a refund, that’s another 10 minutes of your life down the drain as you go through the process of refunding the amount and responding to the “customer”. So why not put the barrier in place for the smaller products as well? Remember that you’re running a small business. And so are we. Some things can be monitored and others can’t. A stream of small products go out of the door every single day, but less so with the bigger products. So while we push hard for clients to have a relationship, some of them are just walk in with every intention of sneaking away in the morning. Everything can’t be monitored, but as the products and services get bigger, the barriers can indeed be put in place. Having barriers in place is a good thing The moment someone puts a few thousand dollars in your bank account, you feel pretty entitled to it. And some folks have put in $10,000 into our account (when we used to do the Protégé sessions) and yes, you feel entitled to that as well. But don’t cozy up to the dollars just yet. You need to do the background check. Find out if the person is a good match. Do your due diligence. A little due diligence goes a long way Clients that jump over the barriers stick around for years to come. You don’t have to be like all those marketers out there chasing endlessly after new clients. Instead, you can have a group of clients that trust you and will be more than happy to buy your products or services in future. And yes, there will be the occasional refund, but nothing very dramatic. And that’s what barriers will do for your business. Yes, it’s scary Yes, it’s necessary. Do the background check. Put up the barriers. It makes good business sense. But barriers are only one way to avoid energy-sapping clients. Most trouble shows up well in advance, and we just ignore the red flags. So how do you learn to work with red flags? Let’s find out in this second part. Part 2—Red Flags: How We Avoid Energy-Sapping Clients at Psychotactics Do you know where the word “vaccination” comes from? It’s derived from the Latin word for “cow” (which is “vacca”). And there’s a strong connection between cows and viruses. For 3000 years, smallpox was wantonly killing people. In the 18th century alone, over 400,000 people died of smallpox. But in 1796, a British doctor named Edward Jenner noticed that dairymaid got cow pox Cowpox was a less dangerous virus but still related to smallpox. Once they contracted cowpox, the dairymaids were completely immune to smallpox. So Jenner injected a young boy with the cowpox virus and then later inoculated him with smallpox. And the boy didn’t get sick because the body has an immune system. And that immune system was able to figure out the virus with the lowly cowpox. When smallpox came knocking, the body had the red flags in place. It was able to identify and destroy the virus before it was able to do any more damage. At Psychotactics we’ve learned to look for red flags when dealing with clients -Not showing up on time -Not doing what they said they’d do -Not returning calls or emails -Clients that want quick results or to bypass the usual barriers. These are all red flags for us at Psychotactics And sometimes you get caught unaware by a situation. Just like an unknown virus that may attack your system, it’s possible for clients to make seemingly mundane requests. Like the one that a client made at one of our workshops. “Can I bring my teenage daughter along to the workshop?” he asked. He promised she wouldn’t be a problem, and since he was going to be in the workshop for three days, he asked if she could sit at the back of the room. She wasn’t going to participate, just quietly sit and watch the presentation. Can you see a problem in that request? Well, neither could we. That seemingly simple request caused an enormous amount of grief. Instead of simply sticking to the back of the room, she went along with her father for the group sessions and began to participate. Not only was the group unhappy with the introduction of the daughter, but the father started to get aggressive. He’d defend whatever the girl said, much to the frustration of the group. Most red flags are consistent in a business You’ve experienced the issues before, and you can see the problem approaching at a great distance, yet sometimes we lower our guard and let the virus in. And this creates great havoc and sucks up a lot of energy. I had to tell the client that his daughter could no longer sit in the workshop or participate in any way. This got him all upset and both he and his daughter left. Now, if a client asks for exceptions, we walk through what can go wrong and make a decision accordingly. However, the least energy-sapping plan of action is to have everything down on paper You need to let the client know what they can do, and what they can’t do. Writing down what they can’t do allows you to anticipate the issues before they pop up. It’s like a form of cow pox injected into the system, so that if a problem should arise, you’re ready with your paperwork. Incredible as it may sound, the moment something is down on paper, clients tend to play along. When we choose clients, we make sure we put barriers in their way, but paying attention to the red flags makes sure that once we avoid disruptive clients. However, these are only two of the methods to getting good clients. The third one does all the grunt work without us lifting a finger. Incredibly, this system of choosing clients comes from the usage of testimonials. Testimonials? That doesn’t make sense. How is a testimonial a filtration system? You’ll be surprised at what a photo and text can do. Let’s find out in this third part where we take a deep dive into testimonials. Part 3—Testimonials: How We Avoid Energy-Sapping Clients at Psychotactics If you ever had the need to go to a dating site, you wouldn’t start reading the information, would you? You’d first look at the photos We instinctively look at photos because we recognise ourselves in the photos. A photo tends to reflect who you are. And you get a live demonstration of this phenomenon when you go to a marketing site where they have exaggerated promises. They may promise you’ll make a lot of money, or get results quickly. But don’t read the information, just gaze at the photos You’ll find to your amazement that you don’t like the look of many of the people in the testimonials. You don’t know those people, yet there’s something about them that sets off tiny alarm bells. Yet, there are others who want a quick result. They want to become millionaires overnight. They are desperate, and unlike you, they find the photos very appealing. Photos send out a powerful message to potential clients If you put photos of clients that are reliable, ethical, clients that you like and want to work with in future, that’s what you’ll get. Which is why we have photos of people that we like, clients that we’ve worked with, clients that we’ve gone out with, clients that we would love to have all the time. And what’s the result of this photo strategy? If you’re a client or have been on our courses, membership site or workshops, you know what’s coming next. The clients on our courses are easily the most helpful and the kindest people you’re likely to find on any course. Clients often ask: “How do you get such great people in your courses?” What kind of filtration system do you have in place?” The answer lies in the photographs In the past, we’ve made the mistake of putting a photo of a client who didn’t meet with our picky nature. Almost immediately, we’d get other painful clients. If you’d like to try this experiment for yourself, put photos of painful clients on your site and you’ll start to attract similarly migraine-inducing clients. If you put in the photos of clients you like to work with, you’ll attract great clients too. It’s a simple filtration system, and it works amazingly well. But photos alone will not do the job You will also need testimonials that read like an experience. When you look at the testimonials of our membership site at 5000bc, you’ll see they don’t just say “wow”. They read as if someone were talking to you. When it comes to more expensive products or services, the testimonials are sometimes 500-1500 words long. And the entire testimonial is about the user experience. A testimonial that says, “that was the hardest course in my life” gets attention But it also attracts the right kind of audience. It drives away those wimpy people who don’t want to put in the effort and think that business is just some magic trick. It drives those people to the “gurus” of the Internet. When those “get rich quick” crowd clear, what we have are kind, friendly, hard working people. People who have similar goals, similar ethics, and behaviour. And most of all, we at Psychotactics have no trouble. We get to do the things we love. Clients admire that we work hard and that we take our three months off as well. They cheer us on because that’s their goal as well. And that’s pretty much how the Psychotactics strategy for getting great clients. Time to summarise, eh? Summary We started with barriers Barriers may seem counter-productive and yet they’re a filtration system. The biggest reason why you have to wait to join 5000bc, or pay to be on a waiting list or can’t do a workshop until you’ve read The Brain Audit, is because we’ve put a barrier in place. And the bigger the price of the product or service, the bigger the wall. If clients don’t get over that barrier, they’re not serious about succeeding. That speed bump drives out the “quick and easy” crowd and leaves us with clients that appreciate steady progress and hard work. The red flags that show up are the next factor to consider When you’re in business, you get taken aback by client requests. And at first, you want to make the client happy. But you’ll find some situations are consistent red flags. It’s not like we don’t ignore the red flags. We do, and when we do, we pay the price. But by and large, when a red flag goes up, we pull up our rules and regulations and stick firmly what’s written on paper. Putting down what we will do and won’t do enables us to predict the future a bit. So yes, we get out that paper and write down what we will not do. Putting down our red flags on paper, ensures we get clients that stick to our guidelines and not spoiled brats who want to make their own rules. Finally it’s the role of testimonials Testimonials have many aspects to them, but the main aspects are the photos and the experience. We pick and choose photos of clients who we adore. We put their testimonials on our site, and not surprisingly we get similar clients (Note: If your photo is not on our website, it’s not because we don’t adore you. It’s just a space issue). We also don’t just put testimonials, but put in experiences instead. An experience is a before and after scenario. And it may go on for a few sentences but often for over 1000 words. And this again filters out clients. Those who are in a hurry don’t read the experiences and just leave in the hope of amazing riches. And we’re happy to see them leave because our goal is to create clients who value not just information, but skill. It’s the skill of writing, of creating your sales page—it’s these skills that matter in business. There’s no easy way and when our clients describe the effort they need to put in, it drives away those who want shortcuts. Ants that succeed forage less often We at Psychotactics have grown our list very slowly over the years. We’ve done almost no affiliate-sales, no advertising, don’t have Google AdWords and joint ventures. And yet, we’ve had a lifestyle that most others only dream off. We take weekends off; we take three months off, and we have clients that keep coming back to do our courses, workshops and buy products and services. Like the ants we’re picky Which is why we’ve had a blast. Over the past few years, we’ve had lunches, dinners and had wine and beer, individually, with over 1000 clients. We’ve gone on vacations with clients too. They’ve been invited to our home and in turn have made us comfortable in theirs. Being picky has its rewards. You get the cream of the crop. And you get to lead a satisfying life on your own terms. What else could you want? Next Step: Read or listen to—The Meaning Of Life? Or A Life of Meaning? How To Solve This Eternal Problem http://www.psychotactics.com/meaning-of-life/   P.S. Do you sometimes wonder if planning books are written just for the ‘organised’ people? So year after year you sit down and create a list of things you want to achieve. Then suddenly it’s April, and you’ve not really moved ahead as you’d expected.And hey, this phenomenon isn’t new. It’s not like you’re not trying to achieve stuff, but something always seems to derail your goals. How do you stop it from happening yet again? Find out if Chaos Planning is for you. http://www.psychotactics.com/products/chaos-planning-forget-business-planning-and-goal-setting-start-with-chaos-planning/

In an interview with Tim Ferris, marketer, Seth Godin says that 97% clients drop out from his online courses. And under good conditions, 80% drop out. Yet there's are three core reasons why clients drop out and unless you tackle those issues, it's impossible to stop the dropout rate from spiralling. At Psychotactics, our dropout rate is a measly 10%. Which means that 90% of the clients finish the course. How is that possible? How come there's such a massive difference? This episode shows you what you can do to achieve far superior goals than many, if not most trainers online. ------------------------------------ In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The power of energy management Part 2: Why the Safe Zone is important Part 3: Why you need group filtration and how to design it ------------------------------------ The Dropout Factor 97% of client drop out in most online courses. 80% of clients drop out from my courses. – Seth Godin The responsibility of the learning depends on the teacher. – Michel Thomas When you think about dropouts, you almost always think about the student. Yet, the responsibility lies with the teacher. It’s this seismic shift that rattles most trainers because in their mind it’s clear that they’ve done the best they could. Despite their best efforts, students still drop out. So why does this dropout occur? And what could you do as a teacher to avoid this dropout? There are three core areas which cause a dropout 1) Energy management 2) Safe zone (or the lack of it) 3) Group filtration and design Dropout Factor 1: Let’s start with energy management Back when I was about 12, my uncle gave me a Nintendo video game called Snoopy Tennis. The game was pretty simple. Snoopy, the dog, had to bat off the tennis balls being hit at him by Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown had this languid, easy-going serve that was easy to handle. And then Lucy would show up and hit the tennis balls at high speed. If you survived the Lucy barrage, she’d go away, and it would be back to the nice and easy Charlie Brown serves. So what’s Snoopy Tennis got to do with energy management? Energy management involves designing your training module. Does it just have modules that jostle each other for prominence or is it designed like Snoopy Tennis? A training module that has Snoopy Tennis in mind will have modules that are easy, slightly difficult and then screamingly tough. But you can’t sustain the screamingly tough part for too long. You have to go back to easy once again. If you don’t, you get dropouts When the going gets too hard for too long, your clients are going to have an enormous amount of energy depletion. Handling Lucy in that video game is fine for a while, but if the intensity isn’t reduced, the client gets tired. Tiredness, not your course, is the biggest reason for dropouts. Once the fuel needle goes consistently down to zero, dropouts are guaranteed. To avoid this situation from ever occurring, you’ve got to sit down and design your course. But design is often not enough because you’ve also got to consider flexibility in your agenda Take for example the Article Writing Course that’s in progress right now. The entire course has been designed to be like a Snoopy Tennis game. From Week 1 to Week 4 there’s a gentle progression. Week 5 is a bit of a jolt. After spending the first four weeks building up topics, outlining and working on the start of their article, the writers now have to turn out a chunky part of the complete article. Almost immediately the “truancy” rate spikes The writers are frozen because the jump is so great. And yet there are times when you can’t help but bring on Lucy into the game. In the past, I’d make sure Lucy stayed on for a long time, and it would cause an enormous amount of exhaustion. Exhaustion is one thing, but I noticed that if I reduced the intensity shortly after, the work would get better. So once the intensity is turned on, you keep it on, but then you get Charlie back into the mix. Which means that one week will involve writing 3-4 articles, but the following week will slide down to just two. What you’re working on all the time as a teacher is managing energy You’re making sure you keep designing and re-designing the assignments, so that it’s not too easy, or too challenging. And that you have to keep your teaching agenda flexible if you see a considerable spike in “truancy.” This energy management doesn’t apply solely to online courses or training It applies to workshops as well. If you get to a Psychotactics workshop, you’ll find we have lots of breaks. There are a ton of tea breaks, group breaks, walking assignment breaks. All of them are designed to lower the Lucy factor and let the brain absorb what it’s just learned. We also have a scavenger hunt and depending on the type of workshop, we may have a day-long break. For instance, for the New Zealand workshop in Queenstown, we have a four-day workshop, but we work for two days, then go off to eat, drink and be merry. It’s only then that we return to our work. All these breaks may seem frivolous to the untrained mind Why bother with breaks when you have so much content to cover? It’s because of how your brain functions. As you spend time thinking and learning, your brain starts to accumulate a ton of waste product. The more waste product you have, the harder it is to function. You’re now in Lucy mode all the time. But the moment you get a break, the brain is back in Charlie mode and absorbing the information. This brings us to the end of the first reason why we have dropouts It’s a lack of course design. A lack of the trainer to watch what’s happening and to mindlessly plough ahead. When trainers blame the student, they’re going against the Michel Thomas principle: The responsibility of the learning depends on the teacher. And energy management is just one of the issues. The second issue is the safe zone—or rather the lack of it. P.S. We have about 2-3 clients drop out from every course. To me, that’s high. That’s a whole 10-12%. I take responsibility for that. Dropout Factor 2: The Safe Zone (Or The Lack of It) Ask a seven-year-old to learn Photoshop, and they’ll happily play along. Ask an adult to do the same and they hesitate. So what’s changed between the adult and the seven-year-old? The answer is time. A seven-year-old has little or responsibility and therefore endless time. If they get the instructions wrong, they can keep at the learning until they get it right—if they get it right. Adults don’t have such luxury at their disposal. And so we learn to fear mistakes As we grow up, we realise that mistakes not only rattle us but cost us an enormous amount of time and energy. Having to learn new skills seem essential, but all of it is at the expense of precious time and energy. Which causes every zone we enter,  to theoretically,  become an unsafe zone. Step into a new forum, that’s unsafe Learn a new software; that’s unsafe too. Any new venture of any kind is paradoxically exciting and frustrating at the same time. Which is why you have to create a safe zone The first step towards safety is understanding that everything is intimidating—especially when you’re learning a skill. If you’re just a passive learner in a course, there’s no need to apply anything you’ve learned. The moment you have to apply the skill, intimidation is all pervasive. And the only way—yes the only way—to reduce intimidation is to break down everything into smaller bits. Let’s take the cartooning course, for example Even in a seemingly fun-filled course like cartooning (that’s the DaVinci cartooning course), you have almost instant intimidation. There’s nothing to look over and learn, but there are intimidation factors aplenty. The first week isn’t about learning to draw cartoons Instead, a student gets to know their groups, is guided on how to post in the forum and is given instructions on how to link their cartoons to the forum. The entire week is about settling in and getting comfortable. Then, once the course begins, no one goes about drawing Donald Duck. Instead, you have a series of tiny increments that start with drawing circly circles. For many, a cartooning course is far more intimidating than any other course Think of how you feel when you draw something. You feel like you’re a seven-year-old again. Your artwork seems almost Neanderthal—and yet the goal is to become a highly accomplished cartoonist by the end of the course. And hundreds of students have done just that. They’ve done the course, and gone from Cave painting to polished artworks. A lot of this progress is achieved through precise instructions, but the biggest factor of all is the creation of the safe zone. The way to go about the creation of the safe zone is to ask yourself three questions: 1) Is the course being conducted with tiny increments or big jumps? How do you know? 2) Do the clients have time to settle in before the class as well as during the course? 3) Is there a constant feedback mechanism in place? And there’s a benchmark to know if your course is safe Do clients come back to do another course, another training? At Psychotactics, most—yes, most—end up doing two and three courses. Some do as many as five online courses as well as attend live workshops. At the point of writing this article, we’ve announced a live workshop in New Zealand. With no sales page, no real details about the course, six clients have already paid for the workshop. Why would they make such a seemingly irrational move? Why sign up for workshops with no sales pages, attend so many back to back workshops, do so many online courses? There are many cheaper courses both online and offline. So, why bother? A big chunk of the answer lies in the safe zone Unless a client feels safe, they’re unlikely to learn. And your job as a trainer is to create that safe zone through tiny increments, through getting clients to settle in and most importantly to allow them to reach out to you. When they reach out to you through a feedback mechanism, and you make changes, they know they’re being listened to. They know they’re not just a cog in the wheel, but an integral part of the course. The fear goes down The safety goes up. Now there’s less of a reason to drop out, isn’t there? And yet the dropout factor looms large So what keeps the client coming back? The answer lies in the power of the group and how you as a trainer filter the group. What’s this filtration all about? Dropout Factor 3: Group Filtration and Design Back in 2010, we conducted a workshop around Washington D.C and we did something we’d never done before. We decided not to have any filters when letting clients sign up for the event. How wrong could things go, we thought to ourselves? As you can guess, things went terribly wrong Only one person at the event hadn’t read The Brain Audit. That one person happened to cause an enormous amount of confusion, not only during the workshop proceedings but also in the group. And it was all because we didn’t do our usually “pedantic” system of filtration. When you don’t filter the group, you create a wild card, and that can disrupt the entire learning experience. Which is why you need group filtration When you put specific barriers in place, the group members have to qualify themselves to be part of the group. This changes the parameters considerably. In most of the courses and workshops at Psychotactics, all you have to do is read The Brain Audit. Even so, it’s a barrier and attracts people who are united in purpose. It seems bizarre that just a book should make such a difference, but a book often expresses more than just information. It can express your philosophy, method and attracts clients who have a similar ethical standard. However, group filtration doesn’t stop there Whether you’re looking at live onsite workshops or online courses, people aren’t thrown willy nilly into a group. Every group is segregated by: – Existing members alongside non-members – A balance of women and men – Those who we know well vs. those we don’t know as well. In every situation the groups are chosen, which is why there’s so much activity in every group Groups only work together if they feel safe, enjoy each other’s company and then it seems like a party, rather than intense work. In such a case, dropout rates plunge. Clients show up every day, several times a day, helping and spurring each other on. At the end of Week 5, a group of 25 clients generated an average of 1200 posts a week. Of course, I’ve contributed to at least half of those posts, but even so, it’s quite an achievement in group dynamics, don’t you think? The size of the group also matters The group size is ideally between 5-7 members. If you have fewer and just a couple of clients from that group dropout, the entire group can go into a spiral. If you have more than 7, it’s hard to keep up with what everyone’s up to, and the group soon loses the tight-knit feeling. That feeling of knowing each other well is what causes the group to edge forward together as they take on the tiny increments. And when faced with a tough assignment, they all hunker down and boost each other’s spirits. Leaders emerge within every group, as is the case anywhere, but these leaders are kind and helpful. Why would you want to drop out of such a group? Your goal isn’t to be part of the group. You don’t even know how the group is put together, and yet when you discover the group dynamic working for you, you realise that it’s the group that will get you to your destination. When someone has helped you, your human nature kicks in and you want to give that help back in any way possible. As a teacher, your job is to filter the group Your job is to design the group. And most of all, it’s to get the group to know each other very, very well. The more they interact with each other, the more they bond and the further they’ll go. Not surprisingly, the drop out almost ceases to exist. You’ll still get dropouts But if you look closely at the those that dropout, you’ll see a very clear pattern. They didn’t stay around long enough to bond with the group. In our courses, at least, the maximum number of dropouts (online) occur within the first or second week. If the members haven’t show up consistently within the first two weeks, they’re the most likely to drop out. Which is why, as a trainer, working on the group is almost as important as energy management and creating the safe zone. These three elements become so vital that to ignore any one of these three is like begging for trouble. This brings us to our summary: – Design your training with energy in mind. Let clients have a mix of Charlie Brown weeks before giving them Lucy weeks. And always go back to Charlie Brown. – The safe zone is critical to avoiding dropouts. Tiny increments, feedback loops, getting client to settle in are all very crucial. You know you’ve created a safe zone when you get lots and lots of questions; when clients e-mail you as well as ask questions on the forum; when they bring up issues that might be even slightly confrontational. That’s when you realise you’ve created a safe space. Your final benchmark is the repeat client. If they come back repeatedly, that is the one factor that tells you you’ve made them a lot safer than your competition. – Finally, it’s the group that matters. A teacher can only do so much. The group feels a great warmth towards their members, but only if the members are equally kind and helpful. If you notice a group member not interacting with the group, there’s a very high chance of that member dropping out. And you, as the teacher have to design and filter the group so that they’re a good mix. The dropout rate on Internet based sites is phenomenally high It’s as high as 97% in some cases. But Michel Thomas (if he were alive) would say something quite different. He’d say: The responsibility of the learning is with the teacher. And he’d be right. When you take the responsibility on yourself, you stop blaming the student and redesign your teaching in a way that suits them, not yourself. And that’s when you have almost no drop out rate! P.S. Read or listen to—How To Avoid Blindspots In Your Business: The Rip Van Winkle Effect http://www.psychotactics.com/how-success-causes-blind-spot/    

Should you lower your prices? In Part 1 of Persistent Myths of Pricing (And How To Overcome Them), we looked at Myth 1: Ending prices with 7 or 9 (e.g. $97 or $99 instead of $100) Now, let’s look at Myth 2: The Fear of Pricing—You can feel the “right price” in your gut. Should you lower your prices to get greater sales? Listen to this podcast as we explore the second part on the myths of pricing. ================= Imagine you’re in New Zealand right now. And you’re about to jump off a bridge—with a bungee cord, of course. What can you feel in your gut? Yup, fear. But how do you know it’s fear? And more importantly what would you need to do to get rid of the fear? Remember the fear you had when you first rode a bicycle? You probably don’t, but the fear existed. It exists when you’re learning to drive a car, going for a first date, and there’s even a trace of that fear when you first land a new job or show up on vacation in a city you’ve never visited before. The moment you are dealing with the unknown, the fear surges to the surface. And yet you’re on auto pilot if you’re visiting that city for the twentieth time Bicycles don’t scare you as much as they should. And driving to the supermarket while juggling a mobile phone isn’t something you do, but you’ll sneak in a call or text anyway. Pricing brings the same sense of queasiness to our systems And the way we justify it, it by burying the fear. We bring our “woo-woo” systems to the surface and say we’ll know the price is right based on our “gut instinct”. But what if your gut is just good ol’ fear? Because you know it is, don’t you? And the only way we can prove this point is to take something that you own and try to sell it. What’s the gut instinct for selling your house? There’s zero gut instinct in play the moment you have to sell something that is already known. If all the houses in your area are selling at $500,000, would you listen to your gut instinct and sell at $300,000? Never mind that three years ago, you bought the house at a lower price. You still want to sell at $500,000, don’t you? And if you can, you’ll happily accept $550,000 or $600,000. A client of mine used this gut instinct in his business He works hard—much too hard to earn what he’s worth. And the reason why he’s struggling so much, is because his pricing is based on gut instinct. He has to put those products and services on sale, on his website. And when he puts those prices up, he feels like he’s in the middle of New Dehli, and needs to find his hotel. He can’t speak the language and though there are helpful folks around, he’s not quite sure. His brain is racing for a situation that’s a lot less stressful. A vacation closer to home, perhaps. There’s no such thing as “gut instinct” in pricing We’ve used a dartboard to price our products and services for well over 12 years. It’s a method where you put your prices on a dartboard, and you find some darts. Then you throw them on the board. And you have your pricing. If that sounds flippant, well, yes, it is. But it’s a lot less flippant than using your “gut instinct”. ” Take for instance, the cartooning course. We started the course at no charge (if you felt like it, you gift an Amazon voucher). That course was $500 the next year, and today it’s priced at almost $1000 (for about 20 weeks). The Photoshop course (to help you colour your artwork) is just 4 weeks and costs $500. The article writing course goes for 12 weeks and hovers at $3000. The headlines course goes for 10 weeks and costs $800. Want more? “The Brain Audit” has 185 pages and costs $139. The book on “Testimonial Secrets” has 125 pages and costs $45. The same applies for any course, product or service. No matter where you look, there’s no logic to the pricing at all. And yet there’s fear. Every time we’ve raised the prices there’s enormous fear When we raised the price of the Article Writing Course, we moved it from $1,500—to where it is today at $3,000. How do you know how much is too much? When we sold the Protégé course at $10,000, how would we know if it was overpriced or if we were underselling ourselves? The answer lies in fear. You make these price decisions in a vacuum—dart-board style. And this is scary. Even if you’re comparing yourself with the marketplace, the client is not doing the same tour of the marketplace before settling on your product. The only way out of this fear is to keep pushing yourself out of the comfort zone You read about the cartooning course we conducted, right? Why offer it free? My clients already know that I’m a good teacher. They already know I’m a good cartoonist. They also know that they should be paying a substantial fee for something that’s going to take them on a six-month journey. And yet, I was unsure—fearful, even. So yes, you can let the fear get a hold of you. And yes, you can price as low as your “gut” will tell you. But remember, your “gut instinct” is your comfort zone It’s the lowest possible price you can afford to charge. Once you’ve listened to your gut, it’s time to move upwards. Raise your prices bit by bit, or in large chunks. As you get amazing testimonials, get more confident about your ability to deliver, you need to stop looking towards the “gut” and start looking up at the dart board. And yes, this brings us full circle to our summary Myth 1: Ending prices with 7 or 9 (e.g. $97 or $99 instead of $100). There’s no basis for this crazy figures. Use whatever you like. Myth 2: You can feel the “right price” in your gut. Nope. You never could. That’s just fear talking. And once you’ve sold a product or service at a higher price, you’ll feel the price is just right—until you have to raise the prices again. Raise it anyway. You know how you had to suffer wearing those coats because your parents thought you’d get a cold? Well, the same suffering can bring you down with myths in pricing. Stay clear of the myths, and you’ll find that you can get better prices for your products and services every single time. And here is part one if you missed it—Persistent Myths of Pricing (And How To Overcome Them): Part 1. Top Selling Products Under $50 Dart Board Pricing: How To Increase Prices (Without Losing Customers) The Brain Audit: Why Clients Buy And Why They Don’t Chaos Planning: How ‘Irregular’ Folks Get Things Done  

When you’re giving away bonuses, it’s easy to believe you don’t need to give away your best product or service. The best information always needs to be sold—so you can earn a decent living. And yet, this podcast episode takes an opposite stance. You need to put your best stuff out in front—free. Yes, give away the goodies, no matter whether you’re in info-products or content marketing; services or running a workshop. Giving away outstanding content is the magic behind what attracts—and keeps clients. Read: ww.psychotactics.com/myth-pricing-overcome/ Tell a friend: http://www.psychotactics.com/tellall ------------- “Don’t go out in cold without your coat—or you’ll get sick”. Which one of us haven’t heard our parents insisting on us wearing a coat? Almost every parent on the planet firmly believes that a cold is sure to descend upon you, if you don’t have that coat on. And yet, you don’t get colds because of the temperature outside. You get a cold from viruses—and guess what? Those viruses are more likely be indoors than anywhere else. So yeah, getting that jacket or coat on, is just a myth, but it sure keeps you warm. In pricing we also have myths that keep us warm And two myths prevail, causing us to lose out on charging higher prices over time. They force us to put on a coat, when it’s perfectly good to go outside without one. Let’s take a look and find out what these myths are, and how to overcome them. Myth 1: Ending prices with 7 or 9 (e.g. $97 or $99 instead of $100) Myth 2: You can feel the “right price” in your gut Let’s start with Myth 1: Prices ending in 7 (E.g. $97 or $99 instead of $100) Back in the 70’s or 80’s, a marketer called Ted Nicholas is said to have suggested that prices ending with the number 7, do better than other ending digits. This means that, theoretically speaking, you’d sell more at $9.97 than $9.99. Sure, it’s only two cents, but does it actually sell more product or services? The answer is that price rarely if ever depends on your magic figure. So we decided to test the pricing on our site at Psychotactics When we started out, way back in 2002, our prices all hovered around the $7 ending. But then we decided to test if the ending prices made any difference whatsoever. And you know where this is going, right? Yup, we ended prices with 8, or 2, or just any old figure that came to our heads. And we waited with bated breath. And nothing happened. The sales didn’t go up, and they didn’t go down So we started putting any price endings that came to our head. One of our best-selling books (it’s sold over $500,000 worth of copies) sold for $109.22. Our courses and workshops had all sorts of odd price endings and it didn’t make one whit of a difference. Yet what would you notice if you go to our website today? If you were to do a systematic sweep, you’d find to your surprise that most of the price endings are 7, 9 or 5. So how on earth did that happen? If the price endings don’t matter at all, how did we end up with such oft-repeated figures? It’s a factor of laziness, really. When creating a price point, it’s easy to just not have to think about the price too much at all. And so we revert back to our 7 and 9, without much thought. So how do we overcome this first myth? First, recognise that it’s a myth. That if you’re spending time wondering if you should price your product with a 5, 7 or 9, you can go right ahead. In all pricing experiments online and offline, you’ll find that a mere ending rarely has any bearing on sales. Some sites like Target will hover madly around the 7 or 9, but then slip in an 8 here and there. On equally large sites such as Expedia, the prices for an airline ticket can be $1331 or $791—or even $798 or $644. If you head to buy houses, say in Washington DC, you’ll find that houses sell at round figures of 4,500,000 or 2,750,000. If you buy movie tickets, you’ll find routinely that the prices may be $12.50, $14 or some round figure with not a 9 or 7 in sight. In fact, the closer you look around at different products and services, the more you find there’s no logic for a 7 or 9 to exist. In fact, despite the widespread use of 7 or 9, scientific studies (and these are mostly retail examples) have shown the following: – At least among US retailers (where the study was done), there is no evidence of their effectiveness. – While the use of 9 as an ending increased demand, it was only for new items than any items sold in previous years (this suggests a novelty effect). – That in some situations where there is a “sale” cue, the 9 ending becomes less effective. – In cases where the retailer wants to create an impression of a sale, they price at the 7 or 9 price ending. When they sell “regular merchandise”, the prices are always rounded prices, so that customers see the products as valuable and not underpriced. So with all this conflicting information, in which direction do we go? Most of us in either selling a product, service or training of some kind. Training or services are bought one at a time, and after considerable evaluation of the the consultant or trainer. If you’re having a workshop, no one is jumping up and down simply because you decide to put in a magical number. In fact, we have conducted The Brain Audit workshops over several years, pricing the very same workshop at $USD 1500, $NZ 1500, NZ$1499, $800, $500—and because we do workshops worldwide— € 879 or £835. And the very same workshop, with the same content and the same speaker sells out because of the content, and not the price. If it were the price, and especially the “so-called” magical 9 price ending, the lower prices might have triggered quicker sales (since the workshop sells out anyway). And granted it’s not industrial scale testing of the pricing, but that’s how most of us are—we’re selling small programs, workshops, training and services. And the customer has made up their mind whether to go ahead—or not—long before they see the price, let alone the magical 7 or 9 price ending. So what are you to do?: What’s your action plan Try it out for yourself by pushing your price up from say, $29 to $32. And all you’ll be is $3 richer, every time you sell that particular product. It may sound like it’s just $3, but it’s a whopping 10% increase—and your customer won’t even notice it. So the sooner you get off the myth of 7 or 9 pricing, the better. And if you’re still fussed about sticking to 9, well, sell it as $32.99. That way you can have your 9 and your increased profit as well. How do you systematically raise prices without losing customers? Is it possible to raise prices and still keep customers? And how do you keep those prices going up, up and away—and still keep customers coming back? Click to find out more. http://www.psychotactics.com/products/trust-the-chef/

It might seem like perseverance is a good thing. We’ve been told to persist in the face of odds. Yet, there are times when you should stop. How do you know when to stop? And why bother to persevere when failure is waiting around the corner? Find out why perseverance can be a real pain, and when it can be a blessing. Enjoy this episode on perseverance and yes, enjoy the music. In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The link between failure and perseverance Part 2: Is there a way to know when to stop? Part 3: Why perseverance could do with a coach To read this online:  http://www.psychotactics.com/why-persevere-fails/ To tell a friend: http://www.psychotactics.com/general/podcast-friend/ ===================== Should You Give Up? Or Should You Persist? When you get to your office and want to print some material, what do you do? You’re likely to turn on your computer, hit the print button and then voilà, out come a crisp, laser-printed copy of whatever was on your computer screen. Back in 1969, an optical engineer called Gary Starkweather thought the same way. “One morning I woke up and I thought, why don’t we just print something out directly?” Starkweather said. “But when I flew that past my boss he thought it was the most brain-dead idea he had ever heard. He basically told me to find something else to do. The feeling was that lasers were too expensive. They didn’t work that well. Nobody wants to do this, computers aren’t powerful enough. And I guess, in my naïveté, I kept thinking, He’s just not right—there’s something about this I really like. It got to be a frustrating situation. He and I came to loggerheads over the thing, about late 1969, early 1970. I was running my experiments in the back room behind a black curtain. I played with them when I could. He threatened to lay off my people if I didn’t stop. I was having to make a decision: do I abandon this, or do I try and go up the ladder with it?” A Starkweather kind of decision is the kind of decision we have to make, when facing our lives, but also our business How do we know whether we should persist or give up? Will we meet with success or failure? And is failure one of the goals? Should we really accept failure as a benchmark that we’re moving ahead? In this series we’re going to take a hard-nosed look at three areas of perseverance. We’ll examine 1) The link between failure and perseverance 2) Is there a way to know when to stop? 3) Why perseverance could do with a coach 1) Let’s start with the link between failure and perseverance Imagine you were a company that failed repeatedly. You create a tablet device that was at best, disappointing. You try your hand at a peer-to-peer payment system like Paypal, and it fails. You start up an auction site similar to eBay, and that too needs to be shut down. You then get into the phone business but lose over $170 million in a single year. And ten solid years after you’ve run the business, your net profit is barely 2.8%. Should you give up? Well, this company chose to soldier on despite the odds Almost all of us are likely to have used the services of this company at one time or another. We’re not talking about some unknown, nondescript company. We’re talking about Amazon.com, the retailing giant. The reality is that Amazon’s profit margin is wafer thin and has continued to be that way for an agonisingly long time. In early 2016, CEO Jeff Bezos announced that his gamble had paid off. He spoke excitedly about Amazon Web Services (AWS) which had reached $10 billion in sales and was now generating 52% of Amazon’s total profit for that quarter. What this meant was that a single arm of Amazon, no, not the retail arm, but the cloud hosting section was the real winner. In short what Bezos was mildly gloating about was the fact that his perseverance had paid off. A similar perseverance experiment paid off in Cupertino, California In 1993, Apple Inc. launched the Newton MessagePad. The MessagePad, the first series of personal digital assistant devices, developed by Apple Computer and was a reasonably spectacular failure. Sales of the original MessagePad were weak, with Apple moving a mere 50,000 units in the product’s first four months on the market. On June 29, 2007, the first iPhone was launched. Despite failing miserably on the NewtonPad front, Apple decided to go ahead with the production of a phone. And so far they’ve sold 821 million phones. The iPhone is now slightly over 68% of the entire Apple revenues while the Mac is just 8.89% And while it’s easy to see these cases as big companies with deep pockets, history is full of artists, inventors, musicians, athletes—in fact, all kinds of people in all sorts of professions—who never gave up despite the odds. And there’s one crucial reason why we should persevere even when there’s no guarantee of success. The reason? What fails right away might work on an unrelated project In April 2105, Lynda.com was sold for $1.5 billion to LinkedIn When we look at that price tag, we tend to see enormous success. Lynda and her husband, Bruce Heavin came incredibly close to the precipice of failure. Lynda.com wasn’t the online training giant that it is today. Instead, it was an offline training company with week-long workshops. They did well over the years building their business to 35 employees and $3.5 million in revenue. Then came 9/11 and the dot-com crash Almost overnight they had to lay off 75% of their staff. According to a report in Fast Company, they had to downsize their home and give up classroom leases. Which is when they decided to go online. “Right now with broadband, it’s easy to run online video courses,” Lynda told me when we met for dinner. “Back in the early days, it was hard going. Internet bandwidth was extremely narrow, and it was hard to see how we’d keep the business going.” And yet, the perseverance paid off. But what do we learn from this story? Lynda and Bruce weren’t looking to have an online training business, at that point in time The only reason they were forced to move in a bigger way online was because of massive and instant failure. That seeming failure in the offline classroom-based training business led to the creation and growth of Lynda.com. Lynda and Bruce persevered, taking the lessons of their failure into another domain before the business took off. While these success stories are powerful motivators, perseverance works on unrelated project in day to day life as well Around 2010, we were having real problems with our membership site at 5000bc.com. We’d moved from a hosted membership site to Joomla! (A content management system), and had some software put in that would make it a lot easier to create “magazines”. The software was meant to enable the site owner could create content that would allow clients to read the content. The only problem was that the software we were using was super-klutzy. It would take me about 3 hours or so to write the articles and then over 3 hours just to get them posted. I know it sounds terribly bizarre to all of us spoiled by the ease of WordPress, but back then this software was the option presented to me—and I took it. Week after week, I’d do battle with this frustrating content management system, and there seemed to be no solution on the horizon. In effect, what was supposed to save me time and effort was turning out to be a complete and utter failure. Failure can teach you to move to an unrelated project I persisted for a while but was forced to move to an unrelated way of presenting the information. I started posting all the articles in the forum. The forum helped tremendously because clients could ask questions, get clarifications and do things they just couldn’t do before. Instead of a top-down, “here’s the article series”, they got a chance to interact on the forum. But not everyone likes chatter on the forum, and in a way, the forum experiment became a sort of “failure”, when I considered those clients who were not happy with forums. And so we created reports and called them Vanishing Reports. The Vanishing Reports were a result of seeming failure after failure. And yet with persistence, we got a product that to this day is among the top three most-loved benefits of being a member of 5000bc (the other two are almost instant replies from me, and the first priority to courses and workshops). Perseverance in the face of failure may often lead to unrelated projects. The Post-It you use today was never supposed to be invented. Arthur Fry and 3M were supposedly working on a project of super-strong adhesives. And yet, as they met with failure on one front, they inadvertently discovered an adhesive that could be peeled off easily without damaging the paper. And the Post-It was born. At first, it seems like the original project is a very good idea Then it’s possible that failure comes along. But failure forces you to be persistent. Which is when you’re more likely to get to a different level—often one that’s far superior to the existing level. This is the core lesson of failure. It’s there to teach us a lesson of how to improve our products and services. If we persist, we get to a whole new level. Just like Apple. Or Lynda.com. Or 3M. It’s doable. You just have to be persistent. But wait, there are just as many examples of persistence leading to ruin. How do you avoid being so blind-sided by your project that you avoid falling into a black hole of perseverance? 2) The black hole of perseverance: Can we avoid it? When we first moved to New Zealand, I had a job in a web design company. I fancied myself as a web designer because I knew the program, Dreamweaver, quite well. Plus I had been studying another hot program at the time called Flash. I was hired in July, made redundant by October. There I was, not even a year in New Zealand, and things weren’t going so well. To make matters slightly worse, we’d just bought a house and had a $180,000 mortgage (which was a lot back in the year 2000). It’s at this point I realised that there was no way out of the mess but forward. Since I knew few people in New Zealand, I called dozens of ad agencies and walked in with my cartooning portfolio. In most cases, I returned home empty handed. Until one day, an agency gave me an assignment, which turned out to be a full-blown campaign. So what’s the point of this story? The point is that around mid-December, New Zealand tends to shut shop. Almost the entire country decides to go en masse on vacation, and it seems that no one seems gets back to work until mid-January, even early February. Which means as a cartoonist you have no work for all those months. It’s a bit of a forced hibernation period, and you need to get used to it. I refused to accept that I couldn’t get work I tried to call. No one answered. I showed up. No one was around. And so it became a bit of a black hole of frustration. Perseverance can have its downsides You can easily keep at something in the hope that things will get better, and you fail to notice that the rules of engagement have changed. To give up would be madness, yet to stay at the task would be just as bad, if not worse. It’s at this point that you have to learn to change your strategy. It wasn’t that the agencies weren’t hiring cartoonists anymore. They just weren’t around to meet anyone. What I was doing with my dogged behaviour wasn’t perseverance at all. Strategy is when you lie low and prepare for the moment that is to come As I kept running into closed doors, I decided to change my strategy. Instead of trying to get work, we decided to cut down on our spending. Instead of going out more often, we kept ourselves tied to a limited budget. And on the work front, I enjoyed the rest period and also spent time doodling, learning Photoshop a lot better. Gary Starkweather ran into endless trouble at Xerox Parc He knew he was onto a good thing, but the odds were against him. His boss was threatening to fire him and his entire staff. So he changed his strategy. He heard that Xerox was opening a research centre in Palo Alto, which was pretty much right across the country from where he lived in New York. So he threatened to leave for IBM if he didn’t get a transfer. He moved in January 1971, and the first prototype of the laser printer was up and running. In many cases, we have the opportunity to move to Plan B Yet we continue to be like the fly that keeps hitting itself against the closed window pane when the next window is wide open. The reason why we keep digger a deep hole and not getting results is partly because a lack of perseverance is seen as weakness. We somehow need to battle on, or we will fail, or so we think. The solution has often been right in front of me, and I’ve often kept doggedly ahead getting more frustrated all the time. This is why we need more than just perseverance. We need a friend, or better still, a coach. 3) Why perseverance could do with a coach When you look back at the period between the 14th and 17th century, you have an incredible flowering of art, architecture, politics, science and literature. Some of the finest work found in museums today are from that period. Two centers stood out in Western art for the enormous number of artist and innovation of their work: The Renaissance in Italy and the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century. But how did all of this astounding work seem to appear all at once? The answer lies in the gradual reform of the political structure and the patronage of the time. The cities were also the most urbanized culture of their time. To nail down the magnificence of the Renaissance to one factor would be churlish, and yet there was one element that stood out. It was the factor of guilds and apprenticeship that came into their own. In short, artists had coaches. Granted that the apprenticeship was often long and arduous, but it meant that there was a constant sense of guidance. This system of coaching is considered to be one of the primary factors why such amazing results were obtained. In Holland alone, it has been estimated that about five to ten million works of art were produced during the century of the Golden Age of Dutch art. That’s not counting the work that poured out from Italy. And yet it wasn’t just artists toiling by themselves. They had a coaching system in place. Perseverance is often seen as a solo skill, but it’s also the reason why we get so exhausted in our efforts Take for instance the problem that I had with formatting in the forum. All our courses are conducted via the medium of notes, audio but live courses have one more component—a forum. This online forum is where clients do their daily, yes daily, assignments and they’re reviewed by me on a regular basis. A small group of 25 clients can generate as many as 1,000 posts a week (no, that’s not an exaggeration). Hence, it’s not unusual for a course to produce between 10,000-15,000 posts. The problem is that posts need formatting You need to make a title look like a title. And yes, there’s forum formatting but what if you want to do three things all in one second? Let’s take for instance the fact that I want to make the title bold, 18 points and in maroon. Those are three steps, and when you assume that I’ll be posting on at least a third of those posts, you suddenly have triple the work. Every time you’re moving through bold, 18 points and maroon. But hey, I was going to persevere. I wasn’t going to have shoddy formatting and so I’d go through the three actions. But a coach or outsider can see things in a different way One day while I was mumbling about this tedious method, a client told me how I could fix the problem. Using Text Expander, a software I already owned, I could format a title, a sub-head or any text in a matter of seconds. My perseverance wasn’t helping at all. All I needed was a different set of eyes. What seems like talent is a coach catching unforced errors while they’re occurring The coach realises you’re like the fly on the window. He or she knows that there’s another window open. And that’s what they do. They gently advise you to move one step back or one step to the left or right. And instead of digging yourself into a hole, you’ve changed your strategy. When I look at clients in 5000bc or in courses such as the cartooning course or Article Writing Course, they’re working very, very hard. But working hard is not enough. You need someone else. Back when I was trying to call those ad agencies, and not getting results, I didn’t have a coach. But I did have a friend, Wayne Logue. And Wayne advised me to wait until February or even March. He informed me that I wasn’t really persevering, but just driving myself crazy. And luckily I listened. Albert Einstein is reported to have said: We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. To me that sounds like it’s time to get advice, to get a group that I trust or a coach. And then I can persevere and reach my goals faster and better than ever before. So let’s summarise. What we learned was: 1) The link between failure and perseverance 2) Is there a way to know when to stop? 3) Why perseverance could do with a coach Next Step:  Why Inspiration Can Be The Key To Winning The Resistance Game http://www.psychotactics.com/key-resistance-game/

Where do we draw inspiration from? When we try to beat resistance, we tend to look at what wehaven’t done and what needs doing. Yet sometimes resistance can bepushed over with a simple concept of inspiration. Where do we draw that inspiration from? And how do we keep theinspiration constant? In this episode we look at inspiration, but also at the “lousycarpenter” and “trigger” concept. =============== It’s said that a bad carpenter blames his tools But what’s not said is what makes a good carpenter. A good carpenter isn’t always the one who has the bestequipment. But a good carpenter makes sure he learns how to usethat equipment fluently. And there’s a reason why you need to spendtime learning how to use the equipment. It’s called tiredness. Let’s take my early battles with InDesign, for instance InDesign is a layout program with which I do all my e-books andreports. I learned InDesign, but not quite well enough. So if I hadto do a simple task like updating the Contents Page, I had tomanually update it every time. If I added more pages to mydocument, I’d have to go back, and re-assign all the pagenumbers. And even if you haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about, youget this feeling of stupidity coming through. Stupidity and hardwork. And all because I refused to learn how to maximise theprogram’s capability. But forget maximisation, let’s just talk about fixing theimmediate problem No matter what you do right now, there’s a better way to do it.And there’s someone out there on the Internet who can help you finda better way. For all you know there are probably ten thousandtutorials and fifty videos on solving your exact problem. But guess what? You’re doing the same old stuff in the same oldway. And resistance loves you for it. It loves that you have great tools and lousy habits Because if you did what I did with InDesign, it would take youthrice as much time to do the same job. Maybe even ten times asmuch. Well, guess what? If it takes you five minutes to do a jobvs. fifty minutes, which job is going to tire you out? No prizesfor guessing, but you’ve just opened the door for exhaustion tocome rushing through. And it’s not just exhaustion but frustration as well. If you didtwo jobs side by side, and finished a ton of stuff vs. finishingjust one measly contents page, there’s no doubt which one bringsmore satisfaction. The more dissatisfied and tired you are, the better resistancefeels It doesn’t have to do any work at all. You’ve been a completenincompoop and done all the work yourself. You are the badcarpenter. You blame your tools when you should be working veryhard to maximise the power of the equipment you have. And let’s face it, you need better tools as well If you’re running outdated tools, it doesn’t help. But we’reoften just glitzy-eyed for the best tools without ever puttingaside time to learn them well. But the question does arise: Mosttools are so complex. How do you get the time to learn them well? The answer lies in doing continuous sweeps, kinda like aradar If you try and learn something the first time, you only pick upso much. So you come back again for the second sweep, then thethird, then the fourth and so on. I spent a lot of time (about aweek) first trying to work out how to use InDesign. Now I know it well, but I still spend a good hour or two everymonth to learn tiny bits of stuff. And it helps me improve myproductivity. Of course, InDesign keeps getting better, so now notonly am I faster, but I’m equipped with superior equipment. And resistance doesn’t like that one tiny bit It would prefer to see me swearing. It would love to see me frustrated with just doing a simplecontents page. But nope, I won’t let it win. And neither should you. If you’re a good carpenter you’ll learn how to maximise yourtools Then you’ll earn more, because you’ll be in demand. And thatwill help you get the fanciest, most sophisticated tools that willput you head and shoulders above everyone else. And mostimportantly it keeps resistance away from your door. Next: How John Forde (and Sean D’Souza) Got Me To WriteArticles (http://www.psychotactics.com/john-forde-write-articles/) P.S. Do you sometimes wonder if planning books are written just forthe ‘organised’ people? So year after year you sit down and create a list of thingsyou want to achieve. Then suddenly it’s April, and you’venot really moved ahead as you’d expected.And hey, thisphenomenon isn’t new. It’s not like you’re not trying toachieve stuff, but something always seems to derail yourgoals. How do you stop it from happening yet again? Find out if Chaos Planning is for you. (http://www.psychotactics.com/products/chaos-planning-forget-business-planning-and-goal-setting-start-with-chaos-planning/(

Is resistance a game? It can feel a bit like that when you're almost always on the losing team. But often the reason why we lose to resistance is because we don't realise how the brain works. And this brain stuff was studied by researchers at the University of Cincinnati. What they found was astounding. In just over 10 minutes, our brains start to waver and we lose focus. So how can we make sure we don't give in to resistance? Find out in Part 2 of the Resistance game. ============== Imagine you had two loans to pay back Loan A was $100,000 at 19% interest per annum. Loan B was $200 at 1% interest. Which loan would you pay back first? Loan A or Loan B? If you chose Loan A, then almost every financial consultant on the planet would agree with you. Except Dave Ramsey To everyone, but Dave, the logic is clear. Loan A has a much higher rate of interest. Logically you should pay back the higher rate of interest first. But as you’d expect, Dave disagrees. That’s because Dave understands inertia better than most other financial consultants So what is inertia? I learned a funny definition in physics class at school. It went like this: A body in the state of rest or motion is inertia. Hah, that made me laugh. How can you be stuck and moving, and still be in the same state? But apparently that’s how inertia works. And this is Dave’s advice to people who are struggling with debt. First list all the debts on a piece of paper All debts need to go down. Student loans, credit card, mortgage, blah, blah. Then you need to rearrange the loans based on the size of the loan. So the smallest loan goes right at the top and the biggest one right at the bottom. And everything else in between (depending on the size of the loan). And then he instructs you to pay only the minimum payment on every debt–with one exception. After the minimum payments were made, every available dollar needs to be put towards the first debt on the list. Incredible as it may sound, Dave is telling you to wipe out that tiny, itty-bitty $200 debt with the pathetic interest, instead of taking on the painful big amount/big interest debt. Logically it makes no sense But your brain doesn’t always work logically when it comes to inertia. While you’re lounging on the sofa, watching endless and pointless political debates on TV, your logic is telling to get off your butt. It’s telling you that the debates are endless (and did we say, pointless?). Your logic is also telling you that you should be doing some work or exercise instead of engaging in mindless drivel. So logic doesn’t work. And the same applies to the debt. When Dave’s clients wipe out the first debt it’s not necessarily logical, but it creates a factor of momentum. First the $200 is wiped out. Then the $350. Then the $800. And so on, right up to the ‘monsta’ $100,000. The motion is what matters A body in a state of rest or motion is inertia. And going from rest to a state of motion is impossible if you decide to take on the biggest task first. Logic tells you that you should fix your website right now. Logic tells you that you should write that 300 page book. But Dave would say, “Go brush your teeth first.” That simple act of doing something–anything at all–gets you off your caboose and into another state of inertia: a state of motion. So if you need to get something done, fool yourself -Don’t go for a 60 minute walk. Instead put on your shoes and decide to walk for just 7 minutes. -Don’t try to write a complete article. Just write for 14 minutes. Then stop. -Avoid trying to clean the entire bathroom. Just attack the sink. These tiny bits help you get to the bigger bits. Because even as you go for the 7 minute walk, you know very well that you’re not going to turn around in 7 minutes. You’ll go longer and further. But the goal always needs to be 7 minutes or 14 minutes or the $200 debt. The itty-bitty bits are important, more important in fact, than the bigger goals. When people say they feel inertia, they mostly refer to a state of laziness Of not wanting to do anything at all. But as my physics teacher would tell you: “There’s inertia and there’s inertia.” And to get from one stage to another, you need to make the list in descending order of importance. Then attack the list. And as Dave would say: Start small. Acknowledgements Dave Ramsey’s ‘Snowball Debt’ and ‘Switch’ by Chip and Dan Heath. P.S. Yes I know. You’re headed to Google these names, aren’t you? You think you’ll find out more about this book and this method of reducing debt, aren’t you? But you already have the tools. You have a piece of paper. You have a pencil or pen. And you have the methodology. So don’t muck around. Get to work. You need to change that state of inertia right now. Next Step: Listen to or read Part 1: Can Resistance be Beaten? http://www.psychotactics.com/resistance-detests-groups/ ================================= 5000bc: How to get answers and move ahead in your business. http://www.5000bc.com/ Why Do Most Plans Fails? Find Out The Critical Importance of Chaos in Planning. http://www.psychotactics.com/products/chaos-planning-forget-business-planning-and-goal-setting-start-with-chaos-planning/ The Brain Audit: Why Clients Buy And Why They Don't http://www.psychotactics.com/products/the-brain-audit-32-marketing-strategy-and-structure/