Bottleneck Breakthrough Audiobook - Chapter 14 - Getting Free | Ep 35

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00:00:01.760 - 00:25:58.720

Lever6mindset Marcus Aurelius said Our life is what our thoughts make it welcome to the most important lever in the Bottleneck Breakthrough method.

I find the ROI from this lever is easily 10 times greater than any of the other levers and also works to compound the ROI of every other lever you work on after you clear bottlenecks here. The only reason it isn't the first section of the book is is that less than half of the business owners I work with are open to tackling it.

Potentially alienating half of the readers of the book right from the start would hurt the impact it could have for so many businesses.

Business owners have a unique mindset as they're the most risk tolerant group in society, shedding the perceived security of a paycheck to pursue some problem or passion they feel they can fulfill.

The saying that entrepreneurs are willing to work 80 hours a week on their own business to avoid working 40 hours a week for someone else demonstrates this well. In spite of being the mavericks of modern society, being a business owner can be an incredibly lonely journey.

You carry the weight of responsibility for everyone's paycheck, along with making sure your clients are thrilled with your solution, not to mention the million other demands on your time and attention every day.

Plus, I find that so many of the drive of business owners originates from a place of inadequacy, a need to prove to the world, and often their fathers that they are capable and worthy of recognition.

This rare combination of bravado, insecurity and massive responsibility creates a unique recipe to reveal many mindset bottlenecks that are getting in the way of success.

If you take this section seriously and start working through your internal bottlenecks, I guarantee that every part of your life will improve, not just your business.

It may seem worse as you stir things up at the start, but in the end you'll have more of peace, joy, fulfillment and vibrant relationships in every area of your life. These have been more valuable than anything to me.

Chapter 14 Getting Free A business will only grow to the skill or belief level of the owner, whichever is lower. Now that's a quote I came up with as I've worked with business owners over the years and I think it's appropriate here as we dive into mindset.

The start of Bill Gates success and world leading fortune is well known. He sold IBM an operating system before he had created it and then bought DOS from a programmer to fulfill the IBM contract.

What is less well known is that Gates originally recommended that IBM work with a company named Digital Research Inc. Since he knew they already had an operating system they could license called Control Program for microcomputers.

IBM tried working out a deal with DRI's founder, Gary Kildall, apparently sending three executives to his office in Pacific Grove, California, a couple hours south of their San Jose headquarters. Kildall blew them off, choosing instead to head out for a recreational flight in his airplane.

Needing an operating system for their new line of microcomputers, IBM turned to Gates and the rest is indeed history. Kildall eventually ended up working out a contract with IBM to use his operating system after he saw what Gates had pulled off.

But he made another critical error there as well. His contract with IBM was more costly than the deal Gates had worked out.

So the IBM microcomputers that came out with Kildall's CP M operating system were more expensive than those with Gates DOS operating system. In the end, consumers preferred the DOS based machines because they were more affordable and Kildall's opportunity with IBM was over.

On the surface, this looks like merely a missed opportunity or bad decision by Kildall, which Gates then took advantage of.

Before we get into what's really going on, let's break down the myths and misinformation spread about business success, which obviously includes Gates. Urban Legends Countless business books try to deconstruct what led to the runaway success of famous businesses.

Whether it's Jim Collins timeless piece in Good to Great or the many books on Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft, they all try to make their success into a formula that anyone can replicate if they just try hard enough. These books produce some of the most bizarre responses from business owners, turning into visionary assholes in an effort to be like Steve Jobs.

And we saw that in Chapter three with Ron Johnson or creating open office floor plans to be like Google. All that mimicry turns the owner into a version of a mockingbird, getting attention through lots of noise, but with no results to show for it.

Really, these are simply urban legends spreading like wildfire because they're easy to pass along and they appeal to our reptilian brains cravings for easy results after working closely with many successful business owners and wealthy ones too, with net worths of over 10 million, I see three fundamental factors over and over that allow the bottleneck breakthrough method to continue accelerating their success. Success Fundamentals the first of the three fundamentals of business success is luck. Commonly masquerading as good timing.

By getting into a business or market at the right time, the market factors act like a rising tide that lifts all businesses. Gates and Kildall experienced this. But instead of adding to the Folklore behind Gates let's dig into an example from the mortgage industry.

When I started in that industry in 2004, I was fortunate to have two mentors who already had experienced tremendous success. They both entered the industry in the late 1980s, right on the heels of the savings and loan crisis.

Prior to this point, savings and loans, which are similar to credit unions today, were the primary lender for home purchases. But in 1979, when the federal Reserve doubled the interest rates on funds they loaned into savings and loans and all banks, it crippled them.

The result was that the mortgage banking and brokerage industry was created. Both of my mentors entered the market at this point, writing a tidal wave of demand as savings and loans continued to disappear.

They both grew their brokerages significantly in the 90s, with one converting to a mortgage bank which is profitably evolving up the food chain, while the other sold as brokerage for millions.

The next fundamental of business success is leadership, because you can't build a company without others wanting to join and support your vision for it. For most business owners, this shows up as charisma, and both my mortgage mentors had this in spades.

So did Gates and Kildall and every other business owner that I've worked with who grew their business beyond the $1 million plateau. Not possessing charisma doesn't doom you to failure in business.

I believe it just puts a ceiling on how far you can lead on your own before you need to bring in someone else to lead further. Also, I've seen many charismatic owners fail to fulfill their leadership potential.

If you're a reluctant leader who others want to follow, then the next fundamental of success is how you overcome your reluctance. The final fundamental to business success is mindset, which is based on your beliefs about yourself and the world around you.

Of the three factors, this is the only one you can control completely, delivering the highest ROI when you invest in it when compared to the other two success fundamentals.

Going back to my mortgage mentors, there were countless other mortgage brokerages created at the same time they started theirs, but less than 1/10 of 1% of them ever grew to the level of success they had achieved.

They all had the luck factor of good timing on their side, and many of the brokers were charismatic enough to get droves of loan officers and staff to work for them.

From my research, the single factor that created massive success for my mentors and prevented their peers from reaching the same level of success was their mindset. They had different approaches.

One had the mindset of a bulldog with singular focus and determination to get through the obstacles, while the other was more of a loving coach, investing in and supporting talented staff to achieve their fullest potential.

Both had an army of employees who loved working for them and would follow them to the ends of the earth, so there wasn't one right mindset that was required Kildall's Bottleneck Looking back at Gary Kildall's missed opportunity with IBM, a few things jump out at me that explain why he failed to capitalize on what might end up being the greatest business opportunity ever. First, Kildall was already fairly successful.

You don't end up with a private airplane without some level of financial success, especially in the late 1970s. His timing was perfect, placing him front and center in the soon to be exploding software and personal computing industry.

As for his initial blow off of IBM, my guess is that he resented them viewing Big Blue as the behemoth he was trying to displace with the personal computing software and hardware he invented at dri. Most likely he wanted a stick at IBM to prevent them from launching their microcomputers, which blinded him to the opportunity in front of him.

Then, when he did work out a deal with IBM for his CPM operating system, he priced it much higher than Gates did for dos. IBM had to have disclosed the license rate Gates agreed to sign, since it would affect their price of the machines, with each operating system.

Sticking with a higher price highlights that Kildall likely felt disrespected by what Gates licensed the inferior operating system for.

Had he not been filled with resentment and a feeling of being disrespected, Kildall would likely have been able to see the opportunity Gates did and to leverage it with even more success since CPM was a better operating system.

Instead, the personal computing world had to suffer a decade of crashes and failures by DOS machines that cost businesses untold millions and delayed the acceleration of computing power because of it.

Belief Bottlenecks if you haven't done some introspection to see how your beliefs and mindset could be holding your business back, there are some effective guidelines you can use to start with, have some of your competitors grown well ahead of you, taking some of your staff with them in the process? Whatever your excuse for their growth over yours, the root is inside your head.

Don't get cute about the differences that you think give them an advantage. Just use it as a motivation to figure out what's holding you back.

Another way to tell if your ultimate bottleneck is internal is if you're continuously frustrated by recurring headaches in your business. If you go through the frustration Fix framework in chapter 13 and develop the systems to eliminate the bottlenecks. But they keep showing up.

Then that's a sign that something in your beliefs is causing them to reappear. You might be sabotaging the systems unconsciously, or you may be unable to see that the solution you've created for them is flawed.

The final way you can assess if your beliefs are a bottleneck is if you're unable to break through a revenue plateau as outlined in chapter 13 that has been surpassed by others in your industry. Or you're unable to get the business to run well without you. If that's your goal.

Yes, each of these guidelines does seem like a catch all to show that nearly all business owners have mental bottlenecks.

They affect everyone and they are the final bottleneck that stops the growth of nearly every business I've ever worked with or studied Beliefs create Reality the first step to resolving any bottleneck is knowing how to identify them. Belief based bottlenecks are some of the hardest to identify on your own simply because they're so deep in our consciousness.

They function like our human operating system, essentially turning us into moist robots as Scott Adams, cartoonist and author of Dilbert, describes it.

My great friend and mindset coach Justin Ferriman introduced me to his BETDAR framework, which is the most reliable tool to identify belief bottlenecks that I found. It reveals the direct relationship between your beliefs and your reality.

In fact, your beliefs create your reality in a predictable sequence of events. Your beliefs affect your thought process which then determines your actions.

This relationship shows up as difficulty or effortlessness in your life and business. The framework shows the interrelationships between your beliefs and your day to day emotional state and the results you experience from them.

BETDAR is the following acronym beliefs for B these are the base operating layer of our programming in our brain. Beliefs tell us how to interpret the world around us and give our experiences meaning.

We get most of these from our parents when we were children and we add to them throughout life as our significant events and people influence them. They are different for everyone based on their life experience and they're the foundation for how successful we are in life and business.

For example, someone who grew up in an upper middle class family where money came easily and business success was consistent might develop the belief that being successful is easy or I am always supported.

Alternatively, a child who grew up in a working class family where their parents worked long hours and had periods of difficulty paying the bills would likely develop the belief that I have to work hard to get by or life is a struggle. Next is emotions.

As the next step up from the foundation of our beliefs, our emotions are directly influenced by them, causing us to feel the meaning we give to experiences. Since we feel emotions so intently, they prevent us from looking at the beliefs that created them.

Returning to the example beliefs above, if you believe being successful is easy, then you will feel more relaxed and at peace, trusting your approach to business.

If you believe life is a struggle, you will feel anxious waiting for things to fall apart and will be stressed from pushing yourself hard to try to avoid failure Thoughts for T this is the chatter going on in our heads 247 and it is the result of our beliefs and emotions reacting to everything around us. This is what Michael Singer refers to as the crazy roommate we live with in his spectacular book the Untethered Soul.

Thoughts are never questioned even when they work against us, causing us to make poor, even life changing decisions like kill dolls. Singer's suggestion to simply start by observing our thoughts is a great first step to unraveling the web created by any limiting beliefs.

Next is decisions. After you process your thoughts about a situation, you come to a decision of some sort.

You may be torn about some of the decisions you've made, but for the most part you accept them as the best option at the time, regardless of how useful or accurate your beliefs and emotions about them are. Next, we move on to actions. Every action is taken after making a decision to do it.

They are the way you turn your beliefs and emotions into your reality.

Whatever is down at the foundation is on full display here, reflecting your beliefs Every time your actions determine the course of your life and the results you experience. Finally results. This is where the rubber meets the road. It started with beliefs and emotions and it ends up with every outcome in your life.

Now if you're thinking now about all the outcomes in your life that were out of your control, that thought was just triggered by the belief I don't have control in my life.

And if you're getting everything you want out of your business and life, then the odds are high that your beliefs and emotions are healthy and serving you. If not, then the best thing to begin working on is updating your beliefs and clearing away any emotions that aren't serving you.

The most powerful part about the BETDAR framework is that you can actually reprogram your beliefs and emotions, upgrading to new ones that serve you better to create positive action and results.

Before we tackle specific steps to uncover and remove any limiting beliefs and emotions, let's dig into some examples of how limiting beliefs and emotions can show up in business. Bad Employees A common trigger of limiting beliefs and fears for many of my clients is their employees.

One memorable example was a client who had a warehouse with staff to ship their products.

As often happens with my clients, their order volume continually increased, placing more demand on the warehouse staff to get orders packed and shipped every day.

As we looked at ways to optimize order processing and shipping to better handle the increased volume, we found a number of simple improvements to make.

A few of the employees resisted the change, claiming that they were already at capacity and that the improvements wouldn't help giving them the benefit of the doubt. We took a look at the workload in a typical day to make sure we weren't missing something.

After the review, the owner and I were certain that complaining employees were not working anywhere near their capacity and in fact were cruising at around 50% capacity. After some coaching from me to get clarity on the issue, the owner confronted the employees.

They resisted initially, but finally conceded to the new volume standard we expected of them.

As you might have experienced with your own staff reacting to changes in just a matter of days, one of the employees started griping again about the workload and became very passive aggressive. His actions affected other staff and orders started piling up again, creating a backlog.

The owner confronted him and asked why he was causing such a commotion. He replied that the new expectations were unfair and that he wouldn't meet them.

Whenever the owner suggested that his job was on the line if he didn't shape up, he replied with some pretty powerful manipulation. He was a recovering drug addict, but he'd been clean for a number of years while working for this company.

He threatened that if he lost his job, he'd relapse and likely kill himself. This was the perfect threat because the owner was very much the epitome of a loving mama bear.

As direct and capable as she was on a day to day basis in the company, she was really a softie on the inside and she cared for every employee as though they were one of her family. She felt paralyzed.

While talking with me about the situation, we walked through the five whys process to uncover what was really going on below the surface and we hoped to find the root belief that was paralyzing her. Her root belief was that she had to save him because he had nobody else in his life that would to remove this belief.

We started looking at the opportunity cost this belief was creating. First, she was subjected to quite a bit of stress by his poor performance.

The company wasn't getting orders out on time and feeling obligated to save this employee was a huge burden. Her family was also affected by this stress since it weighed on her even away from work, making her less cheerful and present with them.

Second, the other employees in the company didn't like working with this bad egg employee. Their job satisfaction was affected as well as their performance.

Finally, I pointed out the obvious fact that her company wasn't a non profit rehab facility and that there were plenty of other places available to this employee if he really wanted help.

We discussed that his threat of self harm was really a psychological attack which leveraged her caring nature and that he knew where to get help if he needed it since he'd gone through rehab before. This helped her obtain the clarity she needed to confront him again and give him the ultimatum that he needed to either get on board or get out.

He saw her resolve in that meeting and agreed to comply instantly. Unfortunately, his compliance only lasted about three days and then he was back to his old passive aggressive ways.

She fired him on the spot and he had quite a tantrum, but she held her ground knowing all the damage he would inflict across the company if she let him stay.

It was a hard process for her to go through because she really did care about his well being, but the improvement in the company from firing him was worth the short term emotional strain. A positive side effect was that other problematic employees shaped up after seeing the owner hold her ground in this process.

The new employee in the warehouse has been a major upgrade, more than doubling his predecessor's daily volume. Bad Clients an even greater challenge than bad employees can be dealing with bad clients.

We've all been in this situation taking on a contract that helps cash flow at the time but grows into a thorn in our side because the client is so difficult to work with.

Whether it is a Fortune 500 company that accounts for 10% of our revenue and is a big credibility builder in the eyes of prospects, or a needy client who is underfunded but endlessly demands scope creeping tasks. Our beliefs and emotions end up keeping us imprisoned by these clients.

Building on the art of confrontation in Chapter 9 to resolve dysfunctional relationships, let's examine the fears that limiting beliefs create when we think about dealing with bad clients. As you have no doubt experienced, the threat of losing the cash flow from the client is the driving fear.

You're afraid that if you confront the client to try to make the relationship healthier, the client will take their ball and leave. If that happens, then you worry about making payroll and covering the rest of your overhead without having to dig into your own pocket to cover it.

This all or nothing scenario you create in your head paralyzes you, keeping you in client hell at the core. Many owners believe they don't deserve great clients and that bad clients are a form of penance to balance things out.

Whatever the root cause, the best place to start is to look at the opportunity costs associated with this fear and to get some perspective on all the options you really have. As I've mentioned before, confronting the dysfunction in the relationship is unlikely to cause the client to cancel the contract.

Unless they're Walmart, you have a lot of leeway on resetting the terms of the agreement to make it less stressful for you and your team.

After removing your all or nothing perspective on the relationship, pay attention to the two major opportunity costs associated with keeping bad clients.

The first is the stress your employees carry when working with these clients, and the second is the inability to pursue better clients because your capacity is tied up with the bad ones.

Whether you have a high tolerance for stress or not, I guarantee that your employees are carrying a mountain of it related to their work with your bad clients. I've seen it firsthand in companies I've worked with, and it's the greatest source of employee burnout, especially for the best employees.

Maintaining relationships with dysfunctional clients increases your risk of losing your best employees, which then increases your risk of losing your best clients who work with these employees. When you're stressed out thinking about how to keep bad clients happy, you're not thinking about how to find and land great clients.

Plus, you know that your staff is so consumed with the bad client's requests that they can't handle any more work, even if it's with a dream client. So you intentionally avoid adding more clients, causing you to remain stuck, making you even more dependent on the cash flow from the bad clients.

Obviously, this creates a vicious, self perpetuating cycle. The biggest surprise that comes from confronting bad clients is that they often respect you for pushing back.

They are rarely challenged, so they may throw a fit to start.

But if you hold your ground and show that you're doing this for the health of your company and to create a sustainable relationship with the client, you'll be pleasantly surprised by their response.

If they do end up terminating their work with you, then you're now free to replace them with a better client and you will no longer be held back by this relationship. Allowing bad clients and employees to remain dysfunctional is a key factor in bringing my work with clients to an end.

Without removing those bottlenecks the business cannot move any further and my hands are effectively tied. As you can see, these bottlenecks stem from the owner's beliefs and act as a significant obstacle to growth in any business.

Eliminating Belief Bottlenecks now that we've covered the betdar framework, as well as a handful of examples showing how it can play out in your business, it's time to find and remove any belief bottlenecks holding your company back. You've probably noticed that your brain applies a filter to what it sees, deleting incoming data that it thinks is irrelevant.

Remember the last car you bought and how many others just like it suddenly have showed up on the road? This is what is known as selective perception.

They were always there, but you weren't seeing them because your brain filtered them out until you were driving one. Your brain does the same thing with results in your life that matches your beliefs.

The brain reduces the amount of data to process, filtering it based on what you believe, thereby perpetuating the beliefs. This is why some people see Donald Trump as a devil in a business suit, while others see him as a messiah.

Everyone is filtering the incoming data to confirm their own belief bias since beliefs create our results, the most direct path to finding limiting beliefs starts with identifying any result in your life that you're unhappy with. Then use the five Whys process introduced in the previous chapter to help get to the root belief creating it.

Just walk backward from the result to the action that triggered it on down to the decision, thoughts and emotions involved and you will uncover the belief at the bottom of the pile. Now this is definitely easier said than done out of the gate. A friend, coach or counselor is usually very helpful to get you past any blind spots.

Once you start digging, you'll begin to see how the belief bias is always operating. The first step in breaking that pattern is to look for evidence of the new reality you want.

In most cases, this is just looking for the opposite of the belief you already have. This trains your brain to focus on what you want more of shifting your beliefs to align with it over time.

An example in business is when owners struggle to find and keep effective employees. They believe employees are unreliable, lazy and stupid and the performance of their business reflects that.

The way to start reprogramming that belief is to look for evidence of employees who have been reliable, hard working and smart.

The business owner can also read books and listen to podcasts about building great teams and look for mentors who have built a great company around the talented staff they've recruited by looking for evidence that is indeed possible to find and keep effective employees, the owner opens his or her mind to the belief that they can actually do it. This exercise starts building new belief structures with an expanded and more accurate view of reality.

Then more evidence will come in to support it, which will only strengthen the belief. A great exercise that goes along with this process is to write down every time new evidence appears to support the new belief that you want.

This allows you to intentionally capture the new evidence and go back and review it, cementing it in your mind. This process has the effect of training you out of the old belief.

In the process, your brain will automatically look for evidence of the new, expansive belief that you want. Advanced Techniques as science and the personal development world have proven over the decades, a lifetime of study can be done on our mindset.

The BETDAR framework and exercises shared here are an effective foundation for you to start unlocking belief bottlenecks that are holding you back.

If you find them as powerful as I have and want to keep improving your ability to replace them with positive beliefs, then I highly recommend Justin Ferriman's work. His deep knowledge of hacking the brain to accelerate results and achieve a state of flow is unmatched.

He's helped me eliminate beliefs, fears and toxic emotions from my life, some almost instantly, and the results have sustained for more than three years as I record this.

If you want more information on how to dig into the more advanced techniques that have benefited me, check out Justin's website at BBG Li Flow Removing bottlenecks based on ineffective beliefs works together with other bottleneck breakthroughs to create a foundation that supports your highest and best results, business and life. The return is like compound interest as every limiting belief that is cleared allows you to operate at greater capacity.

Action Steps Just as you learned from the action steps in chapter nine on confrontation, look for people and situations causing you stress.

You most likely have a root belief that is allowing the dysfunction to exist and once you identify it, you can remove it and solve the issue before you meet with the person to resolve the dysfunction. Go through the five Whys process to uncover what your underlying beliefs or fears are related to the issue.

It will lead to a more productive meeting and a more positive result.

Having a friend, coach or counselor to walk you through this process is very helpful since they can see around your blind spots and ask you questions that will guide you to the deeper issues.

You'll find your mind racing to come up with the excuses to justify any source of stress as normal and reasonable and a partner can help point out these to keep you from getting sidetracked. It can be an emotionally taxing process to examine your limiting beliefs, but it's worth all the gold in the world to be free of them.

In the end, you will be in an ideal position, one that very few people have ever been in. You get to create your own reality as a business owner who is fully in charge of your company.

The life you create is completely up to you, and the effort you take to remove belief bottlenecks is the most rewarding I have found.