By Jake Nicolle
The podcast currently has 71 episodes available.
I believe something that will offend many people. If you're reading this, you are likely the exception. Either way, this idea will challenge your perspective. Everyday, I catch myself wanting to allow this trap to consume me. But you and I must resist.
Most people look for good excuses. Good excuses for delaying important decisions. Good excuses for why their business is failing. Good excuses for why now isn't the best time. Good excuses in their marriage, relationships, friendships, and family. Good excuses surround many good people.
Then there are great excuses. Great excuses are reasonable to nearly everyone — The death of a loved one, sickness, poverty, oppression, malice, betrayal, disasters, and pandemics. We would all agree, if any one of those things were to happen to you or me, that we would have a great excuse for playing it safe, pressing pause, stopping, not starting, or even quitting that thing.
But people dedicated to living out their greatness hate excuses of any and every kind.
Excuses with the word good or great in front of them are oxymoron's to those pursuing their God-given genius. World-class people do not see excuses, they only see opportunities to grow. Every unexpected situation in life has an invitation deep within it to become either an excuse, or an opportunity. The only thing that changes whether it is an excuse or opportunity is in the the mind that conceives it. It is perspective. "Jake, are you saying there is no such thing as an excuse?" Absolutely not. There are excuses everywhere, held by everyone, all the time. That includes me. We all have excuses we believe are justified. But excuses achieve nothing other than sympathy or pity. They don't pay the bills, keep the lights on, or feed mouths. You cannot take excuses to the bank or receive praise and admiration for excuses. You cannot have excuses and world-class at the same time. For that reason, excuses are in direct opposition to everything truly desirable in life. And if we are being completely honest, every single on of our excuses faced with a "do or die" situation, could almost certainly be overcome.
What if, rather than feel the need to find the excuse for your current situation, you could uncover an opportunity? What if the situations where others complain and justify their behaviour due to external, uncontrollable circumstances, you could find a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? What if this moment was the greatest opportunity of your lifetime? What if...
Just remember, in almost every circumstance you can conceive in your mind where someone has had the opportunity to form an excuse, someone else has had a relentless belief they could find or create a solution — and found one! The people we admire most in life are not those who create reasonable excuses. The people we admire are always those who overcome adversity. The underdogs. The misfits. The rebels. The oppressed. The misunderstood. The heroes. The ones who found a way when everyone else said, "impossible."
Trade your best excuses for belief that this is your moment.
I promise, this will change your life.
To a world-class life,
Jake Nicolle
Today's episode is about Worry. I believe worry is the debt of disorganized thinking. In other words, failing to think and plan costs us a heavy price, and that price is worry.
I want to start though with this Chinese proverb called, 3 Men Make a Tiger: It goes like this: People will believe anything if enough people tell them it’s true. It comes from a Chinese proverb that if one person tells you there’s a tiger roaming around your neighborhood, you can assume they’re lying. If two people tell you, you begin to wonder. If three say it’s true, you’re convinced there’s a tiger in your neighborhood and you panic.
Why do we worry? We worry because we have not set aside time for thinking or research, and as a result we have not made a plan.
Planning and worrying are in direct contrast. When you plan you see a picture of the future that is to be desired. You set a date for achieving that goal. Then you reverse engineer which actions are the most likely to help you arrive at your target. You consider how long those will take you and whether or not you can shorten or extend your target based on the likelihood of achieving the necessary steps. You even consider who can help you get it done, which tasks you can leave out to better focus, and what you may need to sacrifice in order to increase the likelihood that you are going to succeed.
Worry is the exact opposite of planning. When you worry you paint a picture of a future that is to be feared, dare I say dreaded. You do not set a date for when your world may crumble. And because you don't know exactly when everything may crash in on you, it increases your fear. You consider all the things that could go wrong, and you reflect on all the things you've done in the past that are exactly like the things that could go wrong in the future. You focus in on your worst moments and project them into your vision for the future. You see only obstacles and problems, not challenges and situations that you are capable of finding solutions to. You feel entirely alone and isolated, scared that you do not have what it takes and, as a result, you magnify the sacrifices required to get free from the situation. Success is the last thing on your mind.
Looking at these two scenarios, I can see that I have done both in my life. If I'm being totally honest, I naturally want to worry all the time and have to fight the urge. That's because worry is nothing more than an urge at first. It prompts you to think right now, in your head, without sitting down and planning. It doesn't want you to see all the options and ways you can combat a bad situation, it simply wants you to imagine. Worry tells you not to write anything down, not to consider the potential outcomes of various actions, not to think about who can help you. Worry is set on simply letting your mind stir on all the things that can go wrong.
Now that we've broken down how worry works and it's strategy to paralyze you, you know exactly how to go from worrying to planning. When you feel the urge to worry, pause. Write down what is troubling you. Look at it on paper. Ask yourself, what are a few ways I can ensure my future situation looks the opposite of the fears and concerns that are worrying me? How can I make sure my finances are in order? How can I prevent this deal or situation from blowing up on me? Who can help me? What is something I fear I am doing right now, or going to do, that is making things worse? How can I change my course right now?
Often times we avoid looking at things that we believe will expose areas of weakness or potential disaster in our lives. This creates more harm than good. The best way to protect yourself against worry (and catastrophes) is to simply get comfortable with being uncomfortable. When you allow yourself to face the demons and skeletons in your closet, you will realize worrying about them required more energy and pain than simply looking at them and solving them in the first place. A great motto to filter your actions through is this one: Hard decisions, easy life. Easy decisions, hard life. When you do what is hard, you condition yourself to DO IT NOW and tackle the things which you fear. Then, you fear things less, you trust yourself more, you spend less time worrying that something is unresolved and more time simply resolving things. You will also notice that more opportunity comes your way because we live in a world where people mostly worry. And when they see other people who worry very little, they are gravitated to those people. The world either seeks people who will worry with them, or seeks people who will ease their worry. Be someone who attracts the latter by learning to remove your own worry entirely by facing head on that which scares you, even if you don't have all the answers up front. The very act of planning will reduce and then begin to entirely remove your worry! You will know for certain, whether or not there is truly a tiger to be concerned about.
Do Not WorryMatthew 6:25 — “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
28 “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labour or spin. 29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendour was dressed like one of these. 30 If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31 So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
The reason you are not experiencing your greatness and genius in life is simple...
You trade great things for good things.
At any given moment, there is a multitude of things you could be doing. Many of which, good things. Seeing your family, calling a friend, enjoying a book, watching a show, talking to your spouse, going for a walk, dreaming up your future, eating a meal, listening to a song... The list goes on and on.
But the obstacle that prevents us from getting what we desire most in life, to achieve our own God designed version of greatness, is not doing bad things when we could be doing good things, it's doing good things when we could be doing great things.
The principle of true success is that one must sacrifice. You cannot do every good thing at once. You cannot do great things if you are busy doing good things. Should you never spend time with family, friends, or loved ones? Of course, you should spend time with them. But you cannot have everything all at once. You have to decide when you will sacrifice moments that are good moments in order to invest that time and energy into the genius you hope to bring into this world.
There is this myth out there that you should have a really well-balanced life. Here's the truth, you can have a balanced life and it will be perfectly plain. You can strive so hard to make everything balanced that you make your own desire completely imbalanced. The fastest way to lose your joy in life is to pursue total balance. What you should desire, rather than balance, is an edge. You should desire that your life rides the line where you are maximizing yourself and resting a day a week, rather than resting 3 days a week and struggling to get things done with a "busy schedule" of watching movies, seeing friends, and noodling around.
Instead, immerse yourself in greatness. Pursue what matters. Sacrifice what is good in pursuit of what is great. It will be different for every one of us and only you can truly know what sacrifices are required. But all you need to remember is that bad things are not what robs you of greatness, it's getting very busy doing good things.
In life, there are people who think things they have not yet earned belong to them. Do not be one of these people. Do not be someone who believes you deserve that for which you have not valiantly fought for, struggled to obtain, and with sweat, blood, and tears, won. Be someone who recognizes that everyone does not get a ribbon. And if there's some type of contest where everyone gets a ribbon, you're not interested in participating. True success in life is not about material things, monetary gain, or acclaim. Those things are the common, but not guaranteed, add-ons of true success. True success is acknowledging that you and you alone are responsible for achieving what you have set out to achieve. If something in your life is not where you want it to be and you blame anyone, or anything, for your lack of success, you will never be truly successful until this changes.
I want to show you today why mastery is monumentally under-priced. And I am going to share why I believe, with complete confidence, that playing "average" in your life will cost you far more than playing at the level of a true master ever could.
Most people are lukewarm. They live life with one foot in the door, one foot on the porch. They live each day second-guessing themselves. They spend most of their energy battling the internal voice that tells them what they know they ought to do with the voice that tells them it's OK to take it easy, and they shouldn't have to try too hard. These same people never fully decide, are always in internal conflict, and have big dreams that they steadily lose hope on, or subtly minimize their dream each day, week, month and year. Eventually, opportunity passes them by. They never experience the deep joy of tasting the sweetness of their ultimate potential because they're too busy defending the weakness of their current actions. What I'm getting at today is this — you have to be ALL IN, or ALL OUT. You cannot be 80% of something that you say you truly believe in. I've been talking with a lot of leaders lately. People who are business owners, managers, entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs... And you know what they all say to me? "Jake, why do I feel like I'm not living up to my potential as a leader?" The answer is one of two things. If you don't know what you believe, you need to get out of your own head by picking up an inspiring book, listening to people with vision, getting away from the distractions of the digital age for an afternoon or get behind another person's vision for a while. Then, when you find what you believe in, meaning, what you believe is worth dedicating your mastery, genius, energy, and time to... you must guard it with your life, set actions that you do not compromise, and take daily action toward it.
If you do not do what you say you believe, you are not guarding what you believe in with your life, setting actions that you will not compromise under any circumstance and taking daily action toward what you believe is worth dedicating your mastery, genius, energy and time to.
We can summarize this point in a single question: Do your actions reflect your beliefs?
In other words, do you BACK the things in life that you say matter? If you DO NOT back what you believe... You are in a constant state of conflict. You say exercise matters, but you're overweight and unhappy with your body, never having enough energy. You say eating healthy is a good idea but you claim you have no time to plan out meals and make them. You say having more money would change your life but you never set a budget, invest monthly, prioritize paying off debt, and then get clear on a strategy to make more money, or get a coach or mentor. You say you want to become a writer but you don't write... EVERY single day. You say you want to help other people get results but you haven't figured out how to get yourself results.
Listen... There's a simple solution to all this.
How do you do that? Ask yourself what TRULY matters to you. If you died in 5 years, what would you want to be in the middle of doing or at the end of having achieved? In 10 years if you were to die, what would you hope people would say at your funeral? The goal with this exercise is to look inside at what excites you, inspires you, and motivates you. If nothing comes to mind, get busy studying others, reading autobiographies or working from someone else. Get a coach or a mentor. Be unafraid to pay big money to have someone save you time and increase your capacity to add value and generate true wealth in the world.
2. Create a strategy.
Create a one-quarter plan, broken into months and then conduct a weekly review of what your big 2-3 things you must achieve in order to move you toward your goal. Then each day, plan out what your tasks should look like and review these daily.
That's it... I said it's simple, and I meant it. You have 2 things you need to focus on for now.
So I leave you with this...
Be so busy experiencing the deep joy of living out your genius each day — that you have no time left for a single excuse.
"Value."
Something we hear tossed around a lot.
"Just add value." People all seem to echo.
But no one every actually tells us:
What is value?
And how do you "add it", exactly?
In order to understand value...
you must make this transition:
———
From thinking
like an employee,
To acting
like an entrepreneur.
———
Here's how you know if you have the employees or entrepreneurs thinking.
And it's easy to tell...
When you offer your services, do you base your value around time?
Said differently;
Do you price your services by time?
If so... you are thinking exactly like employees.
Employees are paid a steady hourly [time-based] wage.
Entrepreneurs are not paid by the hour.
Now while that just clicked for some of you and you saw the light.
Others reading this thought, "well what's the alternative?"
Let's now discuss the entrepreneurs mind...
Being paid hourly is literally trading your time for dollars.
That is a services business and it does not scale.
Alternatively...
A business that gives you time and financial freedom looks like this:
People give you money to help solve a specific problem.
The moment your business is focused on doing this, everything changes.
The moment you help solve a specific problem, people stop looking for more time from you.
Instead, they start wondering how quickly they can get out of the "hell" that they are living in.
If you're interested in understanding how we go about accomplishing this:
Don't just watch this training - study it and pay close attention to the 2:30 mark.
Warmly,
Jake
P.S. If you are looking for a longer training that dives deep into premium pricing - we have an in-depth and highly valuable training you can attend for free by clicking here.
How can you reliably predict if a business is going to fail?
It is actually far easier than most people realize.
All you have to do is look at two key ingredients.
If these ingredients are missing, the business will almost certainly fail.
The #1 reason why businesses fail:Not testing ideas in the marketplace.
This is not just a good idea.
It's vital to your success.
Instead, most coaches spend the majority of their time:
And they spend no time learning how to validating.
Validating is when you seek the input of the market to gain crucial insights...
And it works.
If you do it the other way around - building something based on your assumptions of what people want - you end up with a site no one visits, posts no one cares about, and prices that are irrelevant because you no one ever asks to work with you.
This is a fatal mistake and it leads us to...
The #2 reason why businesses fail
You must sell before you build.
Once you have receive feedback from what people are look for...
You actually need to sell your program before it's built.
That's so important, I'm going to type it again.
Sell
It
Before
You
Build
It.
"That sounds great, Jake. How can I believe that actually works?"
Because it's not my advice.
It's what all great businesses do when getting started.
It's also the reason kickstarter is such a massive success.
Selling before you build the whole program allows you to validate that people will pay for the thing you are about to build and it gives you the added excitement and initiative to get an early version of your offer out sooner rather than later (but with customers ready)!
Selling it before you've designed a program entirely also creates raving fans.
Interested in seeing how this works?
This video shows how you should design your entire coaching program...
Click here for a step-by-step walkthrough of a process we call the Coaching Fast-Track™.
Warmly,
Jake
P.S. If you love having quick 6 minute ideas like this one but prefer video or podcasts, check out my podcast, The Jake Nicolle Podcast, here on itunes where I talk about subjects like this one every day. I also share how you can build a bulletproof coaching business that will stand the test of time.
Is your goal to grow your business?
You shouldn't read another book.
I'm going to try and convince you why.
Because reading is actually working against you.
95% of books are spent trying to convince you:
Why you should believe the author's insights.
The other 5%?
The actual insights.
All that time spent for some insights.
Do you even need more insights right now?
Or would you prefer a proven step-by-step system you can follow to grow?
If your goal is to gain insights alone...
Then, read on.
If your goal is to win your ideal clients and build a business...
Do not read another page.
Get a mentor with a system.
So you can begin to apply the insights you already have to a business that works.
Now, don't get me wrong here...
I love books.
As a matter of fact, I'm reading Mastery by Robert Greene right now.
But...
I am only reading because I already have a system in place to apply insights.
My strategy is helping me bring value into the world through leadership training.
And I'm winning clients as a result.
I am reading with a very specific goal in mind.
I'm specifically looking for insights on mastery that I can apply to my business right now.
I am not reading about something I might be able to apply in the future.*
And that is a remarkably important difference.
You cannot become a masterful coach:
You only master coaching through working with clients.
If you are interested how to:
Then I have a special offer for you:
I am booking calls today for free 1-on-1's this week.*
My schedule fills up quick when I have done this in the past so I will accept the first 30 appointments for this week at no cost.
Register now.
Warmly,
Jake
*P.S. Use Code: FREE40 - for the question "What makes you different from the other applicants..." in your application. I will also share my top 2 strategies for winning clients on the private calls.
“Perfect is the enemy of the good.” – Voltaire
Perfect is also the enemy of you making a profit.
How do I know?
I have personally spoken with just shy of 200 coaches this year.
Can you guess why 95% of them are making less than $8k/month?
Perfection.
In business, making an impact is my number 1 goal.
That is why our 40 minute training is called The 6-Impact Steps.
Business should make an impact.
But...
I can NOT make an impact without making a profit.
And I can't make a profit chasing perfect.
And you know what?
Neither can you.
If you are ready to put systems in place to combat this perfection plague, then...
I want to have a call with you personally, 1-on-1.
But first → I want you to watch this short video I filmed on perfection.
Only reach out if I resonate with you.
It's time to remove perfection, make a profit, and leave your impact.
Warmly,
Jake
P.S. After you have watched the video, you will see a link below inviting you to a 1-on-1 call.
P.P.S. Only serious applications are accepted for 1-on-1's.
The podcast currently has 71 episodes available.