Stop Performing. Start Believing: Reclaiming Your Identity in Business

Here's the distinction we have to watch out for is that your value does not come from the approval or the rejection of the market. Your value comes from your approval or rejection of yourself. That moment when you realize that no matter what anyone does to you, they cannot kill you. And when you realize that everything is game over, what if you could build a business in the modern world as big or as small as you want without having to compromise the things that were the most important to you in the very beginning?

This is the Wealthy Consultant Talks podcast with Taylor Welch and Mike Walker as they share with you today, their learning lessons from stories in their experiences over the past 10 to 15 years, and share with you right here. Right now,  let's get into it. So I took the 1st of June to the end of June off.

Um, and this is a time for me to slow down and to kind of peruse and think. And, uh, Jeff Bezos calls this, uh, puttering around. I wake up in the morning, he likes to putter around, grab a cup of coffee, read the news, not really do anything. In fact, interestingly enough, Jeff Bezos, who's the founder of Amazon, if he didn't know actively restricts.

The amount of decisions he's allowed to make every single day. What I found is that entrepreneurs and power players, and, you know, producers, we tend to try to make, uh, we try to cram too much into a week, too much into a day. And because of that, we end up making bad decisions. So what Jeff Bezos says is he says, if I can make three quality decisions, three, three, only, three, three quality decisions, uh, then I have basically won, won the day. 

And one of the things that I've learned to do better at is not make decisions unless I am feeling like I'm rested and I have the energy to make the decisions. So in June, um, I took some time and I, I slowed down and I processed, and I started taking walks and just like doing normal stuff that I should probably do anyways, and I got a list of some lessons that I wanna share with you today.

We're just gonna kind of go off on them, uh, here. And if you have anything you wanna spend more time on. We can, number one, first and foremost, um, it became obvious to me when I took like three days off in a row, it became obvious to me that I care way, way, way too much  what people think about me way too much.

I know you're on this call because you wanna get fired up  and you wanna go attack the weak and dominate your enemies and crush everyone. Ah, but.  Sometimes the most motivating thing that I can share with you is that the things that I experienced and dealt with years ago, before I was successful, before I had money, before I had, I. 

Social media before I had  all of the things I have today. Some of the things that I struggle with when I very, at the very beginning, I still struggle with the day, and there's a level of human nature  that is involved and wrapped up in us is an interesting book called The Status Game. And human beings, by default, tend to crave  acknowledgement for. 

Who we are. I read this the other day and I can't remember 'cause I didn't write it down, but it said that the appetite for applause is one of the most damaging of human desires. The appetite for applause is one of those damaging of human desires. What is it about us that makes us crave what other people?

Uh, can give us rather than really acknowledging and implo applauding ourselves. And so one of the things I, I started thinking about, and if you're anything like me, uh, you crave what other people think about you too. You may just not be self-aware enough to know it, or maybe you are. But when I slowed down, I was like, damn,  I am, I am constantly looking at what. 

People think and how they engage with my content, and I'm like so wrapped up and like, did this perform well and did that perform well? But even though there's a difference between doing that from like a content standpoint, like this went viral and people loved it,  versus  am I valuable because people enjoyed what I just posted.

Here's the distinction we have to watch out for is that your value does not come from the approval or the rejection of the market. Your value comes from your approval or rejection of yourself  and the.  Byproduct of somebody who approves of themself is typically the approval of the market. Notice the spiral here.

So one of the cures that I prescribed for myself over the month of June was less consumption from a social media standpoint. I said, you know what? I'm going to show up on social for the purpose of contribution,  or I'm not gonna show up at all.  And an interesting thing happens. For a good portion of the month, I just didn't show up at all. 

What does this say? What does this teach you? Sometimes you just need a break. Sometimes you gotta reset the dopamine. In fact,  I'm about to go through a caffeine fast because I'm crazy. I.  I have no idea what's gonna happen. Pray for my wife, pray for my family,  uh, pray for my employees.  I mean, we're gonna see what happens.

Uh, but I don't want, I do not wanna have anything that is an addiction or that it makes me vulnerable  in my lives that I am actually. Encouraging. And so when we go through these social media fasts or um, these sabbaticals or things like things like what, what we're talking about, the, the byproduct is that we get to actually meet the.

Who we really are rather than who we have dressed up to be for other people. So I decided for the month of June I was gonna show up as a contributor. And it was profound. Uh, it was profound to me to realize that in my happiest, most default state, I actually don't give a shit what anybody thinks about it.

Or what they think about me. Uh, I'm just content to show up and do my business. Number two, learning lesson number two. Hopefully you're writing these down so you can pond them later. 'cause I want these to actually impact you, uh, rather than just kind of be my learning lessons. Number two, anything is possible.

And when I say anything, I mean anything. Anything,  literally anything.  You have at your disposal  every single thing. You need to be a billionaire, to be a multi-billionaire, to be a deca billionaire. You have everything at your disposal that you need to control. The whims and the, uh, the markets and the influence, the, the, the influential moments of.

Tens and hundreds of millions of people. Anything is possible. If you would like to, to build a business and sell it for a billion dollars, you can do that. If you would like to build a business and sell it for a hundred million dollars, you can do that. If you would like to pay yourself a million dollars a week,  you can do that. 

Anything is possible. And here's the problem. When we hear these things, we're like, oh my God, that seems crazy, right? You might, how many of you would like to pay yourself a million dollars a day?  Just let me see.  Comments, show of hands, however you wanna do it. A million dollars a day. It's three $65 million a year of income.

Look, here's the thing, there are people that pay themselves that. There are people that are, are doing that kind of income. There are people that are doing that kind of revenue and that kind of money. What's the difference? Well, they're thinking differently or they're doing something different. They're, they're either using their time differently or they're believing something different about their time than you are.

That's the only possible. So the solution to this, to this problem, there's a set amount of time in each and every day that we get access to, and we tend, we tend to underestimate.  What we can do over a 10 year, 20 year, 30 year stretch, and we completely overestimate what we can do in five minutes. The reality is that if you ever feel like you cannot do or be anything, it's one because of one of two reasons.

I'm gonna give these two reasons to you right now, and then I wanna circle back to something that I've seen in the comments that I wanna address, which is the idea of false dichotomies.  Anytime I don't believe that anything is possible, it means that either my inputs are off.  So I'm, I don't have enough exposure or proximity, uh, to what's possible. 

I used to have a,  I used to have a friend who would  find out what other people were doing, and this was many years ago, so he wasn't making that much money.  And he would hear something. And I remember, I remember specifically one time he was, he called me and he said, yeah, this person said they're doing a million dollars a month.

I said, that's amazing. He said, I, there's no way.  There's no way.  I don't think that they are. I think they're just marketing.  I was like, wow, that's interesting. And I noticed this in his life. Over and over. It would be like a, it would be a, like a cynical bend, you know what I'm saying? Like people who are always, if some, how many of you know somebody that if, if somebody's doing something.

Better than they are. They just choose not to believe it.  Like, no, but I don't, I don't think so. It's not possible. You're lying.  And what this becomes is it becomes a, a, a layer of cynicism that, that is like a lens, like glasses  that they view the world through. And when you look at this person's life, he's had. 

Ample opportunity to grow, but every single time he just caps himself, caps himself, caps himself, caps himself. So it's, it's not the, it's not just the exposure to what's possible through other people. It's the level of proximity without the judgment. So you have to have the exposure and the proximity to what other people are doing, and you have to ask the question, how can that be possible for me?

Rather than looking at why it's not possible or why they're lying. So when I say, when I say that my inputs are off, know that I also am, am including a caveat in this,  that when you are around other people  who are doing big things, that are doing crazy things that are moving the world forward, you have to be open to the idea that there are not any better than you are.

They're not more special than you are. They're only either thinking differently or believing differently, or they're using their time differently. Got it. Make sense.  Hey, we're still on number two. Anything is possible.  And whenever I feel like I don't believe these things, it either means that my inputs are off.

And so I noticed this heading into the break  because I wasn't necess, I wasn't, I, I wasn't reading the way I was normal. Normal for me. I was kind of in a, in a, just a little bit of a.  I was tired. You know, I was, wasn't really consuming the same information that I was used to. And so when you don't consume the right inputs, and that's why I think arena is such a fanatical, I'm fanatical about this product.

I'm fanatical about what this thing can do for other people is because I am literally helping expose you  to people that are insane on a level that if very few people are, but the second reason that you can find yourself in belief issues is when you are exhausted.  And I don't mean exhausted just physically,  I mean exhausted from an emotional standpoint.

You're emotionally exhausted, you're mentally fatigued.  In fact, uh,  my new book is coming out in a couple of weeks and if you were able to get the pre-release copy, uh, the pre-sale we sold out of it, turned it off,  and uh, we've actually made some.  Adjustments to it since then. So what I'm saying is you should buy it again because it's a little bit different now than it, than it was when you bought it. 

But the core story at the beginning, what you'll notice is I opened the book by sharing one of the most exhausting seasons in my life where I was mentally depleted, emotionally depleted.  Physically fatigued.  I feel like my relationships had been strained on, on every level, on all of the six categories of wealth.

I was scraping the bottom. And then when I talked about, uh, this in the book where I was like, when you are tired, everything is a crisis. You're fatigued out. You can't see opportunity. You can't think straight by the way the people are asking for, um, the link to the book, just go to wealthy consultant.  Com slash party. 

You can register for the pre-release,  but I was so tired in this season, I couldn't see straight. And when you can't see straight, you can't make great decisions. And so it's so important, uh, for you, and this is what I learned through sabbatical, is when I'm exhausted, make no decisions, turn all of the communication things off, and just take a break.

Number three.  You guys ready for number three?  The only way to grow your faith.  Is to use it.  You can substitute faith with whatever you want. Lemme ask you a question. How many of you are, like, how many of you listen to like the, the, the series on Abraham Lincoln? And you go,  dude, that guy has so much resilience,  I would love to be as resilient as Lincoln was.

Or, or, um, how many of you listened to the Churchill series and you're like, dude, the, the ability to just not get tired.  Talk about perseverance through time, trying times. It was,  Churchill had the ability, as, you know, because he went through the series to just make, uh, quality decisions over and over and over.

Or how many of you would like to, um, maybe you battled sickness or you know, somebody in your family's battle sickness like, like Theodore Roosevelt, and would like to just have the ability to just decide now I'm not gonna be sick anymore.  Like Theodore Roosevelt's doctor is like, you should choose a, a chill lifestyle.

And Roosevelt literally goes like, yeah, how about, no, I would never do that. There's the ability to just decide like, I'm not gonna be taken out by this. Surprise, surprise.  The way that you learn to overcome sickness is by being sick, and the way that you learn to develop resilience is through. The near death experience of almost being taken out of the game.

The way that you develop faith is by having situations that are so big, nothing can fix it, except for your faith. You know, my problem is in my life, I've always been such an intellectual  and I look to read and put things together. I can learn anything. I'm getting my insurance license right now because it's fun and uh, I've written two books in the last two months and I am in love with learning.

I just love to learn  and I.  There are situations in my life right now that are beyond my intellect. They're too big for my intellect to solve. I don't know how to deal with them. Math won't fix it. Relationships can't fix it for me, and I've gotta say one of the biggest aha moments of my life is that moment when you realize  this is gonna be, I'm going to go deep for just a second, if that's okay. 

That moment when you realize that no matter what.  Anyone does to you, they cannot kill you.  And when you realize that  everything is game over, everything else is off the table, nothing else matters.  That's when the fight changes.  And I.  The only way you can get there is to get to the place where you are actually near that point where it could go either way.

So the only way to grow your faith, the only way to build your perseverance, the only way to grow your resilience, the only way to get yourself into a position where your muscles are growing and your life is advancing and you are becoming someone bigger than you were, is to have it required.  It's like, uh, Ben Hardy talks about we've done a a series on this in the past.

Here we go. Here's the next one.  The right trajectory, direction. We're talking about direction. The right trajectory with the wrong speed is just as damaging as the right speed, but the wrong trajectory. So here's the thing,  achievement and success is.  Twofold. It's about making sure that you are moving in the right direction and it's making sure that you're moving at an optimal pace. 

How many of you have heard of Culture Index?  Culture Index is a phenomenal, uh, tool. It's like a Myers-Briggs or a DISC or an Enneagram, but it specifically measures people on, on four key areas in as it relates to the workplace.  And one of the ratings is pace.  And so my pace  there are,  and the rating system is a bit subjective, but I'm an extremely fast-paced person. 

And so one of my biggest issues in life in general is that nothing is ever fast enough. It's never moving quick enough, and I'm always disgruntled or dissatisfied with the timelines. You know what I mean?  Everybody on here is probably the same because you're. Driven and entrepreneurial. When, when you get into a situation where you get a vision and you get something that you are excited about and you are getting something that you're motivated by, one of the number one areas you have to make sure you prioritize is the sustainability and the durability of what you are doing.

We're gonna talk about this in just a little bit, uh, because it's part of an another lesson, but I have a question for you to ask yourself in this. Proper moment. It's Monday morning, 10 55 Central Standard Time, July 10th, 2023.  Can you do what you're doing right now in this season of your life? Can you do it forever? 

Yes or no? And this is where it gets real, because the point of life and the point of the game and the point of business is to situate yourself  so that just the passage of time  enriches.  Your life enriches your marriages, enriches your bank accounts, and so  it's important for you to pay attention to your impulses here. 

And if your default response is, no, I cannot do this forever, your not your temptation is gonna be transaction transactional thinking, transactional.  Tactics rather than the ability to say, uh, I am doing this for the love of the game. I can do this forever. The, the point of the game is to self perpetuate the game. 

The point of the game is not to win, it's to keep playing. The point of the game is that 10 years from now, you're playing at a higher level and you are enjoying it more than you were enjoying it in 2023. And if your impulses are to hide or disappear or slow down or kind of go away, you need to listen to that and it would be better for you to go back to the ground floor and re-engineer your vision so that you can do it forever.

Here's the next one. External growth requires internal growth.  Here's the thing. When you grow, when you grow externally, but you don't grow internal when you grow on the outside, but you don't grow on the inside, when your situations are in improving and advancing, but internally  you are not maturing and progressing,  you will without a doubt. 

You will feel insecure or regretful or particularly resentful about the growth, and you will always reset yourself back to what was comfortable for you.  So if you felt yourself advancing and going back and moving forward and moving back and moving forward and moving back, and it's like you're moving forward and you're like touching this place you want to get to and then you like get thrown back and you like rally and then you move forward and you like barely touch it and then you're violating one of the things where it's two fights to a.

Two fights to any taking of land. Number one, you have to fight to take the land. Number two, you have to fight to keep the land. There are two different fights. One is external. The fight to take the land is about strategy and military combat and market positioning and pricing and taking. It's external, but the fight to keep the land is always internal. 

It's supply lines, it's infrastructure, it's culture, it is the, the speed with which information moves through the organization and it's, and it's ultimately, it's a sense of belonging that you are at the place you deserve to be.  So here's the thing that I've noticed, is that when I have.  Rallied to grow externally, but I have not actually grown up internally.

And how do you do this? Maturity is typically through the process of withstanding problems, withstanding pain, R routines, discipline. It's the ability to say no,  it's the ability to. Ignore. It's the ability to focus. All of these things are internal. It has less,  it has less to do with your ability to write A VSL and has more to do with your ability to stay steady  when you have a bad week.

You  know what I'm saying?  Like, look, uh,  I'm a pretty good marketer.  And my team is pretty good at marketing as well. Maybe, maybe some of the best, but if, if we can't keep our shit together on a Wednesday afternoon when something breaks, it does not matter how good our salespeople are. We're going backwards. 

Because we'll make decisions out of fear and out of reactivity and out of, uh, anxiety that end up resetting us back to a place where we feel like we have earned it rather than outgrowing what we know we have not earned. Does this make sense? This is why sometimes I want to visit the false dichotomy.

When I was asking somebody if, uh, if they would like to pay themselves a million dollars a day, and they said, I'm not sure I'm ready for the responsibility that comes with that yet. Well, that you're not ready for that responsibility simply because you don't believe that you're capable of handling it. 

And it doesn't matter if someone gives you a million dollars a day because you don't believe you are worthy of handling it, you'll just give it back or you'll waste it or you'll lose it. That's where false dichotomies come from. So you've gotta pay attention here because when, when you grow to a place that you do not feel like you have earned, that is outside of your scope of, of worthiness, so to speak, your mind will do you a favor and it will push you back to a place where your mind knows that you belong.

And it's called the struggle bus.  Your mind goes, look, it's okay. I'm sorry that you had to experience this abundance.  I'm sorry you had to experience this surplus. Uh, I'm sorry you had to experience this good team that you don't have to babysit  before you were ready. And I know you don't enjoy this. I'm just gonna move the needles here, and you're gonna go back to the struggle bus because that's where you're comfortable. 

How does this show up in real life? Will you explode on a team member at 10 30 at night  for something they didn't even do? You get micromanaging, control everything. You start operating in a way that's powerful leaders don't wanna associate with,  and your mind is just pulling the strings and you're just a little damn puppet  and your mind's going, it is okay.

I'm gonna take care of you. I'm gonna take care of you.  You don't feel like you deserve here, so we're gonna put you back where you deserve.  Alright, here's the next one.  Ready.  Everyone is just as uncomfortable as you are in their growth moments.  Everyone.  I don't give a shit what their Twitter says.  I don't care what they post on Facebook.

I don't care about their videos on Instagram, about how they have so many of this and so many of that, and they bought a farm and they have so many employees. Uh, now, eh, listen, every single person, when they go through their growth moments, they feel the same thing.  And it sounds like this. Well, shit, I'm just gonna have to keep going or die trying.

Oh, we gotta make it out of this alive. Let's go. Oh, well I hope we're ready 'cause here we go. Anybody been on a rollercoaster?  You know when you get to that top  where you're no longer going up, but you're about to start going  down  and you know that feeling where it's like  the decision to get off of this thing  has long since passed me by. 

There's nothing you can do. The decision to exit  is gone, and now I have one way off of this thing and it is through  the ride,  right? There's no way I can reset this clock  back to when it was safe to stop it.  Yeah, everyone feels exactly like that  when their growth moment begins. You can take it through, through my life.

You can go through anybody's life you want to, you can look at all of these people. It's the same over and over and over and over again, where it's like, well, we better get  ready. Be strap in, strap in because, uh, we're about to go and there's no other way around this now at this point than through it. 

Your trophy for making it through  that growth moment. If you've been on a rollercoaster and you get to the top and it starts going down and, oh, here we go, boom. Quick relief,  and then you go right back up to the top and your trophy in life, in business for surviving one growth moment is the next growth moment.

This is the next one.  What do you get  for beating the last. 

The next season,  what do you get for beating the boss at the end of the last level, the next boss. What do you get for surviving Q2?  You get Q3.  What do you get for surviving 2023? Well, you're gonna get 2024.  Here's the reality of, of the situation, is that you should.  You should give yourself a little bit of grace when you're feeling these things  because everyone else is feeling the exact same way and it's, it's never the feeling itself that is terrorizing.

It's the belief that no one else is feeling that way.  I'm gonna say that against you. Don't miss it. It's, it's never, it's, it's never the season itself that's traumatic. It's the belief that.  No one else has gone through what you are going through and no one else feels what you are feeling and no one else.

Uh, w  client a couple of weeks ago said, I,  I think I've won the title for the most,  uh, layoffs in my team. I said, no, you haven't. I have that title.  They had just laid off like three people. There's a why had to lay off like 80 people in 2020, so you got nothing on me. Notice it's never the thing itself, it's the belief that I'm the only one.

It's the belief that I'm the worst. It's the belief that I am the slowest. It's the belief that, well, you see these beliefs stack up, but what, what, what we are struggling with this actually this  improper representation of other people because of social media. Here's the next one. The fastest way to set new records in your life or business is to earn them.

You earn them at the end of a long line of little simple distinguishing choices  made every day  without fail.  How do you earn record months? How do I, how do I study record month in June? I posted this in MDC as one of our wins. We had a record month in June. Just to put it in perspective,  uh, in.  This month we'll do more customers than we did, I think all of q uh, all of Q1. 

And then at the end of this quarter, we'll do more customers in the, in the last quarter of this month than we did all of Q2. And then the customer count in December of this year will be more than Q1 and Q2 combined. That. That sounds like a.  A rocket ship. How? How do we set a record in June for customers?

I'll tell you exactly how, because we were consistent in December and we were consistent in January and we were consistent in February, and we were consistent in March. Then we were consistent in April. We decided to be consistent in May, and then in June we set a record for customers Notice. The way you set a record in your life or business is not through the record setting.

It's through the consistency that stacks up. That's boring as hell  on the months before the record. Well, the opposite is also true, and it's also just as simple. Ernest Demmett said this, that happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things. 

The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things  to win revenue records or business records or life records, you do slowly improving little things to ruin your life or your happiness or your business. You make slowly destructive little changes.

Here's the last one. Happiness doesn't come from achievement. I know we all think that if we hit our revenue targets next month, we're gonna be happy. No, you're not. You're not gonna be happy. Happiness doesn't come from achievement. Happiness comes from advancement, and the way that you rate advancement is by looking backwards.

How are you gonna rate advancement looking forwards? It's not possible.  You can't do it because you can't see the future.  The only way to rate advancement is to look at June of 2022 and compare it to June of 2023.  This is where happiness comes from.  Is this true for me? It's true for you. I'm oftentimes, I'm more happy in the, uh, the,  the chase.

I'm more happy usually in the.  The daily progress of trying to do something than I am at actually hitting the target. Hitting the target is, is an emotional, you know, elation. It's a, it's just, I'm emotionally, I'm happy for like five seconds you can ask my team. It's just like, cool, we did it. What's next?

Let's do something new. Let's do, let's be excited.  I'm, I'm more happy when I'm in the process of moving forward than I am at arriving. Happiness is that deep sense in your gut.  That says, I could do this forever. This is amazing, which is why you usually only get it when looking backwards.