The Icing On The Cake (Creates More Cake)!

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Summary:

• Whatever you focus on, you create. Focus on surviving and that's all you'll ever get. 
• Most business owners forget to celebrate how far they've come and only look at what's next. This is a recipe for disaster. 
• This episode shows you how to be proud of yourself for what you have accomplished instead of only feeling accomplished when you achieve the next goal.
• Watch the video for the full training! 
• If you always feel like you're behind, never doing enough, and can't seem to smile and smell the roses, this is a must-watch! 

Inspirational Quotes From The Episode:

Transcript:

Welcome to The Path To Mindset Mastery! My name is Brad Bizjack! I’m a mindset strategist and coach, inspirational speaker, and creator of Appreciation Academy and I help online business owners breakthrough all the negative self-talk holding you back from your dreams so you can finally see the success you deserve!

And today's episode is all about the icing on the cake…

In fact, today is about raising your standards!

When I was starting off on my journey and I'm curious if you've ever struggled with this where it just seems like everything you do is just trying to get back to homeostasis, right?! Trying to get back to feeling okay again…trying to survive.

And this was what I did for a really long time. I just wanted to make sure that my business was just surviving.  I never gave myself the gift of these positive emotions of celebration and excitement and passion because I wasn't where I wanted to be yet… because I was so attached to the result coming true that ever got to enjoy my life along the way.

And I'm curious if you've ever struggled with that?  If you’ve ever forgotten to enjoy your life along the way to success?! That's what this is all about. The icing on the cake!

Do you ever struggle with that?  This is for both types of people. This is for the person that's really struggling, hasn't gotten back to it, hasn't gotten to a place where they're having success yet and this is the person that's having success and it feels like something's missing. Whichever situation you're in, if you're doing the things and you're getting the results or if you're not getting any results yet, either way, here's where most people make the mistake…They forget to take time to celebrate.

If you've ever read the book, The Slight Edge (I highly recommend it), but the author talks about how most people go from failure up to survival and then once they get to survival, they stop doing the things that got them to survival and they go back down to failure and then they hit this pain threshold where they need to change and then they get back up to a place of survival.

And it's just up and down and up and down.

It's failures…survival…failures…survival.

So, we're conditioned to think that that's how it goes, but that's not how it goes!

Most people just have their setting wrong. Most people have an ambition of focusing on getting back to just “Okay” just making sure “I survive” making sure that “my business does okay” making sure that “I'm actually just getting the bare minimum done” and then they think because “I haven't been able to do it before, why would I even be able to do the bare minimum?”… And they just stay stuck.

But the reason this is happening is because they're objective (And ask yourself, is this you?) …Their objective is set to survive instead of to thrive. Most people, when they start off their goals, they set their objective to survive not thrive because that's all they know.

That's all they've gone back to!

But until that goes to, “You know what…I am on a mission to thrive in this business!” Whatever your business is, until that goal is to THRIVE…you're going to find yourself stuck going up and down and up and down.

Getting super excited one day sitting on the couch…the next day wishing things were different.

That's what I did for a really long time because if your objective is to thrive (not just survive) and you're at a failure state right now, you pass the survival threshold along the way?!

Absolutely you do!

But most people don't realize that they are qualified to have a big goal even if they haven't hit it yet!

In fact, if you aren't where you want to be, check your goals.

If your goals are safe goals…mediocre goals…just goals that you can achieve because it's safe and something that you might have done before, you're never going to get to where you want to go.

So, if our objective is to thrive, who would you be in that process?!

Would you be someone that only is happy when they get to a goal? Or if you're someone that has the objective to thrive, what would thrive mean? Isn't thrive something that you can have on a day-to-day basis. Isn't that something that you can have now instead of just at the destination or the ultimate destiny?! Absolutely!

This is where celebration comes into play!

Most people don't thrive because they forget to celebrate.

They forget to take it all in.

They forget to reflect and love themselves.

In the process of creating the dreams, ask yourself this… When is the last time you truly celebrated the action, you took towards your dream?!

When's the last time you truly celebrated it?!

And if you don't do it regularly, you now know why you're not getting to where you want to go...

Because whatever you focus on, you create more of.

So, are you going to focus more on what you DID accomplish and why you're proud of the fact that you accomplished that? Or has your focus been going to how you still haven't done enough yet…to how you’re still not where you want to be yet? Chances are it's the latter.

Wherever focus goes, energy flows. So, if your focus is on how you're not where you want to be yet and you won't be happy until you do. That's what you create more of. So, you literally go up and down and up and down and up and down.

BUT if you celebrate!  If you're excited…if you're passionate…if you're thrilled on the way and you're pumped up about the things that you're doing along the way to your dreams and you're saying, you know what?!

Great job me for doing those big things!!

Then where's your focus go?

Your focus goes on what you did do. Your focus goes to what you HAVE accomplished. Your focus goes to the lives you HAVE changed and when you focus on that, what do you create more of?! You create more of that!

(This even applies by the way to someone that has success) What typically happens as business owners, what happens is we get so caught up in “What's next?!” We get so caught up in what's the next project, the next goal or the next thing that we want to accomplish. That's what people focus on and we forget about loving right now.

On one of my client’s one-on-one calls a few months back and we were talking about that. She's like, “You know what?!”

“I'm doing the things.  I'm moving forward in my business. What's next?! What do I do to take my business to the next level?!”

And I'm not going to say her name, but I was like… “You celebrate!!”

“You celebrate where you are!  Because if you're always focused on what's next, then you can't be happy until ‘what's next’ happens.  Is there ever a place where you can actually be happy?! No, you can't!”

Let me give you an example from my own life (and it doesn't have to do with business, but it has to do with my own personal life).  In terms of finances and paying off debt…when we started this journey of paying off debt, we had $92,000 of student loan debt and it was really, really tough to even fathom how that we were going to do it. How were we going to break through that?!

How are we going to be the few people that actually take their control of their finances? And I remember thinking, “Oh my gosh, that's such a huge mountain to climb!” And I was so stressed out about it.  I was like, “I can't wait until that's paid off and I can finally just relax and celebrate the fact that we did it.” But when I started paying off the debt, I realized that it didn't matter how much I paid towards it…I still felt miserable because I wasn't at the ultimate goal yet.

I wasn't at ‘what's next’ yet. So what my wife and I did was we started focusing on celebrating every payment intentionally. (And by the way, you have to do this intentionally!) This is not something that's going to happen and just randomly occur and randomly make you feel good. It's not randomly gonna happen like that!

You need to focus on it now and intentionally do it!

So, what my wife and I did was we started focusing on every payment…celebrating every payment!  Changing the amount on our whiteboard that we had left and celebrate the fact that you know what?! We paid $100 here today!!

Or you know what?! We made a $500 payment today!! 

Instead of… “Oh my gosh, we still have $87,000 left!”

We started focusing on the little wins along the way instead of only rewarding ourselves when we were done with the final goal, and that alone made getting to the goal so much faster because (same reason) wherever focus goes energy flows.  We focused on the progress we were making! What we did accomplish and how it felt along the way to do that and guess what happened?!

We created more opportunities to pay off debt faster and we ended up getting out of $92,000 of student loan debt in a year and nine months!!

It was incredible, and you can do that too!

I'm not sharing that to impress you. I'm sharing that to impress upon you the power of what happens when you celebrate the little actions along the way. When you invite one person to your business today, celebrate it!  Give yourself a pat on the back, right?!

Celebrate the fact that you're doing it! When you hit that monthly benchmark, celebrate the fact that you did that when you make a sale, celebrate it!  Right?!

My wife and I have a joke that every time I make a new Appreciation Academy sale, I do a little dance! We call it the Chandler dance. Like in friends. When he jumps up on the table and starts moving his arms around…it's celebrating the progress towards a dream!

And one of the best ways that you can do this is to create what's called a “book-of-proof”.  A book-of-proof that you are enough…a book-of-proof that you are successful, book-of-proof that you can do this before success ever happens!

Most people will say, “Once I'm successful…then I can act successful.”  

That's not how it goes.

You have to BE successful now and then you will HAVE.  The success ‘BE’ comes first.

So, it's so important that we understand that what we're doing is already enough.  I work with a lot of parents, right? And I'll chat with them on the phone and they're like, I just don't know if I'm doing enough for my kids. And I ask them, “Well, what do you do?”  

“Well, I make their lunches every day. I get them out of bed. I make sure they stay safe. I play with them. I make sure and bathed them. I make sure they get to school on time….”

And they go through this list of 20304050 things that they've accomplished and have done for their kids.

And I'm sitting there and I say to them, I'm like, “So that's not enough?!” And they have this ‘Aha’ moment! Like, “Oh my gosh…I'm already doing enough!!” But because they're not focusing on what they're doing, instead they're focusing on what they haven't done yet. They don't feel it.

So, what a ‘book-of-proof’ does is it allows you to feel what you have accomplished every day. And then when you're in those moments where you don't feel really, really good, when you're in a downstate, you can go reference that book.

Here's what you do every night before you go to bed.  You jot down three things that you did accomplish that day. Three things that made you feel successful that day. Three ways that you changed your state or something to show you that you are making progress along the way to a dream. And I'm telling you right now that if you don't celebrate until you get to that big goal and if you don't make it a habit of celebrating along the way to that goal, you're never getting to that goal!

Cause there's always gonna be a ‘what's next’. So, create that book-of-proof!

Have it sitting there on your nightstand and fill it out with just three things each night before you go to bed. Three things that show that you are doing enough…that you already are enough.

Remember when you celebrate the little things, now you'll be so excited when the big things happen, right?!

For example, let's use when I backpacked the Grand Canyon back in 2015.  One of the things that I noticed was that when I was hiking the Grand Canyon, one of the people with us was saying, ‘Oh my gosh!  This f***** sucks!” Right?! And they're focusing on how, I can't wait to get to the top of it…I can't wait to get to the top…I can't wait to get to the top! And when they got to the top, they were like, “oh my gosh…that was horrible!”

“That was horrible!”

And they didn't even feel the excitement of what they just accomplished. One of the things that I did when I hiked the Grand Canyon was I was appreciating all the things that we're doing along the way.

I was thinking “How cool was it that we got to hike 26 miles Rim-to-Rim?!”

“How cool is it that we get to swim in Bright Angel Creek and freeze our asses off?!”

“How cool is it that we get to have a beer at the Phantom Ranch at the bottom of the Grand Canyon?!

That we’re in one of the most magnificent places in the world and how each step, we're getting closer to our end goal of completing the Rim-to-Rim hike. And when I did that, when we got to the top of that second Rim.  The last part, I felt such a feeling of excitement that I never had before. Such a feeling of accomplishment that wouldn't have been there if I didn't celebrate each step.

I took in all the things that I did along the way to the top!  One person miserable and just in pain and agonizing…One person super excited about what they accomplished.

Which are you in your life??  In your business?? And your finances??

Are you the person that says, “I'll only be happy when” OR are you that person that CELEBRATES every invite! Every message! Every dollar earned! Every action step along the way to your dreams!!

And you collect that book-of-proof to show you that you are enough. Whatever you focus on, you will create more of.

So, start focusing on celebrating the wins along the way to your dreams!  And all of a sudden you'll have your dreams and you'll be so happy that you did. So hope you found value in this podcast episode today. I hope this gave you a little bit of an ‘Aha’ moment!

If you're attached to the dreams or if you're super pumped up along the way to your dreams. And if you're not pumped up, pumped up along the way and your dreams, I'm telling you right now the dream, if you happen to get there, which is unlikely, it won't be fulfilling.

Thank you so much for tuning into the Path to Mindset Mastery!

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Go out there today and every day and live your life with a genuine smile on your face and celebrate every time that you do! 

I'll see you next week.