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This is the Building Blocks of Success with Glenn Mattson.
Glenn Mattson:
Hey, everybody. Helping over 200,000 people transform themselves into what they consider a version of their best self, I want to share with you a path today and throughout the series of episodes in this group that we have. And what does make the difference, what is some of the tips and tricks that you can use to help yourself become the best version of yourself, whatever that may look like. I want you to share with you that 90% of people walking planet earth really choose to stay within their comfort zone, stay within what they see in the mirror when they wake up.
Yet 10% choose to actually do something about it. They choose to start to take a look at themselves and start to better themselves. And I want to share with you as we go through this season, the roadmap, the Sherpa on how we can help you get there. I want to share with you my insane passion of helping individuals who make a decision that I don't want to be where I am. I don't like what I'm doing right now. I don't like how I'm feeling. I don't like the income I'm making. I want to make a change. I just don't know how to.
I'm going to share with you a path, tips, things that we've done over 30 years of helping well over 200,000 people transform themselves into a better version of themselves. You have to realize that at the end of the day, being successful, whatever that may mean to you, and that could be lots of different things for lots of different people. For some, it could be business. For some, it could be health. For some, it's how they feel. For some, it's relationships.
I want you to realize achieving your goals is a choice. It's a choice. You choose to stay where you are or you choose to become and change yourself to have a different outcome. So when we look at achieving these objectives, there are three critical things we have to make sure that we're all on the same page about. And it doesn't make a difference who you are, where you come from, what your parents gave you, luck or not luck. The three things is time, energy, and effort.
Now, some, it may take more time than others. For some, it may take a lot more energy than others. And by all means, I know it to be true for me, it takes a lot more effort to reach your goals than sometimes someone else. Some do have it easier. Some do have it harder. But everyone has to pay the ferryman. Everyone has to put in the time. They have to put in the energy and they have to put in the effort. And I want to share with you that when we do start this path, when we hit roadblocks, when we hit obstacles, when we hit conflict, it's about choices. Do we continue to spend the time? Do we continue to double down on our energy? Do we continue to choose where our energy goes and who we spend our energy with and what we do with our energy? Those choices is what makes success happens. And again, success is different for everybody.
So I'm not going to sit here and tell you that success is just financial, business. It's many different things for many different people. When you look yourself in the mirror at night, done brushing your teeth and getting yourself ready for bed, are you actually looking at yourself saying, I'm happy with what I'm looking at? Are you content with what you have? Are the things that you want to get better at, are the things that maybe you want to get rid of, are the things you want to potentially start doing that you haven't been doing? It's about having ownership.
And I want to share with everyone it's not supposed to be an easy path. If it was, my gosh, everyone would be reaching their goals. It's supposed to be hard. There is difficulty in it. There will be times you're going to be challenging yourself saying, why am I doing this? It just doesn't seem like this is going to happen. And I want you to realize setbacks, obstacles, being knocked down, truly is just a test to your commitment on how bad you want to have that outcome. So, I want to give you some tips or tricks, roadmaps, insights and how to have that path look. And again, I want to make sure we're on the same page. Your mindset is what's going to help you get there or it's going to help you be a trap. If you expect others to give you things, you expect things to be easily, for instance, you owe me. I have resentment because you have it and I don't. That mindset is what's going to hold you back from getting there. You have to ask yourself, what did they have to do to get to where they want to go?
I well helped well over 10,000 family run businesses where mom and dad had a succession plan to either their own children or to others. And I always find it interesting that someone will say, well, of course they had an easier path. Look - their mom or dad gave them the business. It is not that easy. Biggest fear in the world of a parent is developing a business, having a successful business and knowing deep down inside that your children or your nieces or nephews don't have what it takes to actually take that business over and or grow it. Don't automatically assume that just because someone has privilege or someone has something that has been easier for them. Sometimes it may take them less time, but they still have to pay the ferryman.
There's very few people that no matter where you put them in life, you can put them in any state at any time and they will figure out how to be successful. But that's a very, very, very small percentage. The majority of the people have to go through the process of change. And for today, we're going to lay the foundation of what that looks like. And the rest of our episodes are going to take deep dives in each of the areas to give you insights on how to deal with the three things I'm going to share with you right now.
You've heard me in the past talk about a filter and the filter is something called the success triangle. So if you can imagine in your head, a simple triangle and smack dab in the middle of that triangle is whatever objective goal.
The thing you're trying to accomplish could be something as easy as not being as angry. It could be something as easy as losing weight, earning more money, or being more effective when I communicate with people. Whatever you see yourself wanting to work on, whatever you see yourself as the objective in which you want to accomplish, I want you to share with you the three-legged stool, the triangle, and each of the corners and what they represent. You may have heard me talk about the success triangle in the past, and good, you should.
You should remember it. You should have it written on your blotter. You should have it inside your mirror, have it inside your car, because you have to have equally balanced the things I'm going to walk you through to achieve success. You just can't have one without the other. Let me explain what I mean.
The success triangle has three equal parts, tactics and strategies, behavior, and then mindset, which is attitude. Hence the word BAT, B-A-T, behavior, attitude, technique. So when you take a look at whatever you want as success, and as you're listening to this, just have something pop in your head. What is something that's an objective for this year that you're trying to accomplish? When you look at that objective, the bottom right has to do with technique. Technique is education. Technique is knowledge. Technique is learning. Technique is understanding strategies, tactics, etc.
And by the way, just learning more doesn't mean you're going to be more successful. It's more than that. So you have to have a really critical black and white way of looking at what do I need to know? What do I need to be aware of? What do I need to read up on so I can gain the knowledge I need to gain to achieve those objectives? You want to lose weight? You're going to have to understand about sugar and calorie intake and sleeping and recovery. So you want to have the ability to be better at your job. Maybe you have to learn how to communicate more effectively, how to ask better questions.
There's things that we have to learn, but I want you to realize that learning it isn't the magic dust. It's having the ability to apply what you've learned. If not, go read 600 books and think you're going to be great at it. It doesn't make any sense. So learning builds confidence for sure. But you have to learn how to apply what you're learning, which means you have to practice it. And this is critically important for us moving forward. I don't mean you read one or two articles. If you really want to understand human nature, you have to engulf yourself in articles, engulf yourself in magazines, engulf yourself in books. Start to know it, but not to the point where you just know it.
The key to the bottom right of the triangle is ownership. Ownership. Make sure you write this down someplace or keep a little memory stick in the back of your head. Ownership means that you practice it not until you get it right. You practice it until you never get it wrong. Ownership, again, is you don't practice to get it right. You practice until you never get it wrong.
Look, I can read up on how to hit a golf ball straight. It'll tell me a lot of stuff. And I go to the driving range and start hitting the ball. If I just hit one drive, one drive straight, I can't drop the club and walk off my hands in the air saying, look at me, look at me. I have to keep doing it until I never, ever fade or do a draw or tough it or miss it. You have to own it. So you have to take a look at yourself and say, what are some of the knowledge that's missing? What is some of the understanding that I need that's missing? The processes are systems.
For instance, I knew when I first got started, I need to understand more about humans. I need to understand more about personalities. I need to start understanding about birth order and how people would listen and how they act or react because there's a science behind it. And I would say they are 100% right now, but there's a lot of data out there about how humans interact with other humans. I remember when I first bought my business, CRMs were not that big back then. I knew how to do certain things because of the success I had as a salesperson inside of another franchise, but running my own gig for the very first time, I had to understand about QuickBooks and invoicing and sending out money, budgeting. You just don't sit there and wing it. You have to engulf yourself into information, engulf yourself into what's out there.
In today's day and world with AI and these other transformation tools that we have, it's so much easier. But remember, that just makes it easier to learn it. But you have to learn how to apply it. You have to apply it correctly. Perfect practice makes perfect. Practice doesn't make perfect. Heck, if that was the case, I only knew maybe one or two bucket of balls to figure out how to hit, but still looking for it. So ask yourself, as you start to get bigger, more successful, as you're looking at what goals you want, what you want to accomplish, what's some of the things that you think you may need to know to do that?
If you're trying to figure out how to lose weight, you need to know an awful lot about nutrition. You need to understand about calorie intake, working out and exercising, sleeping, etc. How does it all impact you? So the first piece or area of development is going to be the tactics or strategies, which means what do you need to know and what do you need to own to achieve your objectives? Truly, truly important.
And by the way, you're not going to eat it all at once. You're not going to learn it all at once. So do some breakdown bite-sized pieces. I remember, for instance, I had to, when I was younger in the business, I would read books just to learn how to tell stories. I would read books of storytellers and how they would put together a story and lead in and then come back and then end up with a phenomenal conclusion. Well, to apply it, I actually went to a library in our town.
I asked if I could do story time with the kids on Saturday morning. Talk about a melee. You got five, six, seven, eight kids in a room, eight by twelve. And if you're not interesting, if you're not keeping their attention, man, they are just going at it by themselves or entertaining themselves or hitting each other. They're wrestling. They're playing with something else. So it wasn't just about storytelling. It's about the delivery of the story. So as you're sitting there taking a look at what you think are some gaps, we all got them. Information is power only if you apply it.
Heck, one of the things I learned from someone years and years ago when I was on main stage doing a keynote, he was on right before me and we were chatting about a book that I had in my bag. And he noticed that I was going through the entire book start to finish. He said, how do you read your book? I thought that was kind of a trick question. I don't know, like on one foot. What do you mean? How do I read my book? I read the book. He goes, oh, you're reading it to read it, not to actually learn or apply it.
What made you think that? It had a great clue that I've used forever and I've given it to everyone we coach when the situation calls for it. You can actually read six or seven books exactly at the same time. What you do is you read a book until you say to yourself, that was pretty good. I mean, that was good. Whatever it may be. And you could get the very first paragraph or the very first page. That's fine. You could be on page 17 and finally say it. But the second you say, wow, that's pretty good. You got to highlight it.
After you highlight it, again, I'm older, so bear with me if you don't even know what a three by five card is, but you transfer it to what we call a three by five card. It's a hard stock paper, three inches by five inches. We write down whatever the quote was. We'd write down whatever the lesson was that we learned. We'd write down what was in the book and then you close the book. You take that three by five card and you stay in your pocket until you've applied it at least three times.
After you apply it three times, you start to have ownership. You start to learn. Then you're allowed to go back to the book, open it up, and start reading again. So if you have an amazing book, you could be putting that thing down every other paragraph. But the key is not learning the book. The key is applying what you've learned in the book. So techniques, strategies, all important. The next piece of the success triangle is a behavior. Behavior is about action.
To have action, we need to have an understanding of what you're aiming for. So inside of behavior is goals and then a plan and then your daily action steps. A goal for many people can be long-term, short-term, or daily. The best goals are all three, i.e. where do you want to be at the end of the year? Perfect.
To get there, where do you have to be nine months from now, six months now, three months from now? To get there in the next three months, what are the things that you have to do today and by the end of the week and by the end of the month to get there? Remember, your goals are always long-term, short-term, and daily. Everyone needs a scorecard. A scorecard isn't micromanaging. It's not great oversight. I mean, come on. If you really want to change, you've got to have a scorecard.
The scorecard is how did I do today against what I was supposed to do? How did I do against what I was supposed to do? So if you don't have a path to go on, how do you know if you're on the right track? I mean, my gosh, some of us plan our vacations more than we even plan our lives. So you need to have goals. And remember, these goals are probably the center of what we talked about last time with the success triangle, your objectives.
The goals you have have to drive you enough to get through the mud, the quagmire, the doubt. That's why we have goals. But you also need to know when your feet get out of bed, hit the floor, and your feet get off the floor and back into the bed, how did I do today in comparison to my goals? It's really hard to have a good month if you miss a week or two. It's really hard to have a good quarter if you don't hit one of your months. Super hard to have a good year if you missed one or two quarters. So remember, just like you've heard in the past, anything that's big needs to be broken down to bite-sized pieces. So your goals are no different. Long-term goals, short-term goals, and then daily goals. Now with a goal, it doesn't do you any good unless you have a plan. Because a goal is, yeah, I want that. Okay, well, I want that. If you want to turn it into a goal, that means you got to have a plan. If not, you have what's called hope. Hope is just saying I want. Plan is, this is how I'm going to get it.
So when you have a plan, it means that you have to review it, it has to be written, and it has to be edited. If you have a plan and it calls for certain things to be done, you have to review your daily basis to see if they're getting done. That means you have to track it. Most people don't like tracking. Well, if you're truly trying to achieve your goal, you want tracking because it's going to help you get there faster, easier, with less pain. But it also means you have to be held accountable to something.
So for instance, if you want to lose weight or feel better or have a different type of body shape, you're going to have to track sleeping, track calorie intake, track what kind of food you eat, track when you go to sleep. There's things that you have to track to help you figure out, is there a better, more efficient way of getting to the grocery store? And with that tracking, you also have to make sure that you can adjust. And adjust means that you're putting a lot of time and energy into something, but you're not getting the results that you're expecting. And it's that this is over time. The tracking allows us to adjust. The adjustments are what keeps us on track. Heck, we all have MapQuest, etc. How many times you've been coming home someplace and it pops up saying, oh, there's a traffic accident ahead. Take this exit, go down this street, go down this street. Next thing you go back on the highway again. So tracking is really important.
Part of the behavior side is goals planning, but you also have to do something about it, which is action. And action is about what you need to do on a daily basis and a weekly basis to hit your objectives by the end of the month or end of the quarter. So don't talk a good game, show me a good game. So when we look at really down in the action area, it's about three things. Your personal guts and guts is doing something when you don't want to do it, you feel uncomfortable with it, be like, all right, I'm going to do it. And then you just run out and you get going. Problem is guts by itself is short-lived because the second you start to get some level of success, you don't turn into such a gutsy person. So action is the third area, goals, plans, and action, GPA. But to follow through your actions, you have these subsets, and that's vitality. It's really hard to be good at what you do if you drag it. It's really hard to be good when you can't stop yawning. It's really good, right? Not going to help you out if by three o'clock you're exhausted.
I know what you're all talking about. How many of you have been out with your friends and they have a different type of job than you? They get home on 11 o'clock and you're like, man, if I go out, it's going to crush me for the next day. I don't have any energy. Choices. You got to have vitality. The next is discipline. Discipline to do what you're supposed to do regardless if you want to do it.
Discipline. So guts, discipline, and vitality, really important stuff. Got to have the energy. Got to have the courage but you got to be consistent. So discipline and vitality is not bad at all. You're just growing at a rate that you can just putting a lid in yourself. So just remember the discipline is absolutely critical. Discipline is about doing things regardless of how you feel, doing things regardless of the environment you're in, right? Your plan calls for A, you're going to do A... really important with your behavior. So we have an idea of what we want. We understand what the behavior that we have to do to get there. With that, we're also working on some techniques to help us really get to there and stay there from a knowledge standpoint.
The next area I want to share with you on this three-legged stool, remember it's technique and behavior. And I want you to realize under behavior too, this is where a lot of stuff starts to happen. It's negative belief systems in your head, where it's time to do the behavior and you're nervous, you're scared, you're uncomfortable. So part of your psyche says, we're not really doing that bad where we are. Why are you pushing yourself? Doesn't make any sense. When your brain tells you to stay the way you were, y'all better realize it's self-sabotage.
The next one I want to share with you is at the top part of the spectrum, which is attitude. See, because you have a plan. You have these behaviors that you're supposed to do on a daily basis, weekly basis. That comes from your actions, your guts, your discipline. It says a roadmap. But the reality is, is that you choose to follow that roadmap or not. You're the one that chooses to have the head, heart, and gut follow it. You're the one that chooses when you have challenges to stick it out. You're the one that chooses when you have failure and hurts, pick yourself back up and get back to work. You're the one that chooses embarrassment. What does that mean? How does it hurt you? Or roadblocks. Everyone has roadblocks. What's your perception of roadblocks?
So attitude is about your head, your heart and your gut. Resiliency is really, really important. Your self-esteem is really, really important, which we're going to get into. Courage, confidence, it's all the words that you want to hear. But most of that stuff is learned behavior. You've learned how to deal with challenges. You learn how to deal with failure. So when we look at attitude, we have to have the component of it's time for us to believe in ourselves.
If you don't believe in you, who's going to believe in you? If you don't think you can do it, who's going to say that, hey, I believe in you, even though you don't believe in yourself? So we look at the BAT technique. You look at the attitudes, the behaviors, and the techniques. Realize they all go hand in hand. You can't have great behavior and poor technique. You can't have great technique and okay behavior with a lousy attitude. So there are connectors and ownerships to this. Yet I want to share with you, for instance, the average person chooses not to be successful due to fear. Fear embarrassing themselves. Fear if it doesn't work out. Fear. You know, it's actually the number one reason people get outside their comfort zone.
Everyone thinks it's money. It's not. It's a psychological trigger in your head that says, I am done with this feeling and I want more control over my feelings or outputs. What I'm referring to is, for many, having that ability where when you look yourself in the mirror, you say to yourself, I can do this. And that's believing in yourself. See, success doesn't happen when it's easy. No one wants to play a game that was easy. No one wants to win an easy game. No one wants free money. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get the lotteries. I get that. But who you are has more to do with how you handled yourself during your growth periods. What happened when you got knocked down? You stood back up. How come? We start believing and understanding about ourselves as we start to go this transformation and realize that.
What you learn today makes tomorrow's growth easier. I call it WIMP junctions. A WIMP junction is a choice you have to make that you can go one way, which is sticking to your goals, sticking to your plan, or you can go in a different direction. A different direction is staying the same. Different direction is looking for comfort because your brain and your body is literally designed to keep you comfortable. It's not about getting you in the stretch zone or having you feel uncomfortable at something.
But to realize that if you want to grow just because you learn something and your goals say you have to do this, this, and this, well, if you don't want to do those activities, that's called courage. That's called discipline. So one of the things I want to share with you as you do your goal setting, one of the most important things, I think, in your ability to be the best version of yourself is having a healthy self-concept. It's really believing in who you are. Believing that if you get knocked down, it's not the end of the world. You can stand back up again. Believing that if there's failure, that's okay. You shouldn't be embarrassed by it. You shouldn't be embarrassed by trying. How are you ever going to be good at anything? The second someone says, let's role play, you would rather get up and leave the room. You should raise your hand and say, me, me, me. Everybody in that room is thinking about, thank goodness they're like me.
As we start to take a look at this, I want to be, again, a sherpa to help. Help because I've helped so many other people, but also I've been through that path. I've had to make the choices. I had really hard decisions to make, and it's not easy. But the path to where you want to be and the path to become the person you want does take time, energy, and effort. Part of it you're going to learn is changing the way you think about things.
Some of it's going to be having a plan that you stick with. It may be learning new things that you have to learn how to apply. But I want everyone to realize there is no magic dust. Very few people came out of the womb of life, right? Johnny Bench catches, puts it up and says, here's your little baby girl, little baby boy. And they're instantaneously, easily successful. Heck, I even have a brother in my own business. My brother is the CEO for years of Sandler.
You know how many people thought that the production I was doing, the success I had was because of him? It's a double standard. It was way different. I had to work twice as hard to get to where I was big. I had to make sure that I did it on my own so no one could ever look at either of us and said, he made it because of you. Good to have someone on your team. It's good to have the right people supporting you. But you don't necessarily have to rely on other people to achieve the goals that you want in your own life. And don't be resentful for those who have achieved it.
So as we go through the next handful of episodes, I want to share with you how to choose to be extraordinary, how to choose to have the path of the things that you want to accomplish. It is not easy. I want to be upfront with you on this. Your brain screams with everything inside of it to stay where you are. It'll even justify why you're doing okay. Yeah, you can be better, but we're not that bad. There's lots of these little tricks and pitfalls and lures that happen that will try to convince us to stay with who we've been. You want to change. You want to become something different. You want to become something better. Maybe you want to let some things go. Maybe you want to have new things added. But as you take a look at how to shape yourselves, time, energy and effort has to be put into it. And we're going to spend our time talking about the tactics, the behaviors, and most importantly, the attitudes that will give you the ability to do that. Because even if you have a plan, you still have to make the choice to do what the plan calls for.
I remember last year, I had a friend of mine who is learning how or was preparing to do a triathlon. Personally, I think that's crazy, right? I think they have to bike 100 and something miles, they have to run 26 miles, and they have to swim a certain amount of miles. It's 15 hours of just grueling, grueling work. And one of my buddies, Stephen, was practicing for his first triathlon, which takes a very long time to do. And I remember him telling me just recently, they went to the ocean to go for a swim. The pool was closed. As he was sitting there, staring at his dashboard, trying to put on his wetsuit to go swim. He's like, what am I doing? This is going to freeze out there. This is insane. He gets a knock on the window, which is Paul. Paul is his swimming partner. Paul has done eight or nine triathlons. Paul stares at Steven and goes, what are you doing? Now, Paul's already in the parking lot, already walking towards the beach. And Steven goes, it's really cold. Paul goes, so what does that have to do with getting ready for your triathlon? And he walked right onto the beach, walked right into the water.
Realize your mindset is going to dictate an awful lot of the choices that you make. Steven in six seconds would have preferred to go home, had a cup of coffee, some tea, turned to his wife and said, it was way too cold out there. Couldn't go in the water. And he would have been guilt free on making an excuse for a reason and why. But Paul didn't even think, didn't even hesitate. He got out. Sure, there was snow on the ground. Sure, the water was freezing. But you're going to be cold for about five minutes and then the wetsuit will do its job. But you have to go into the water and practice. You have to go into the water and get your body and your mind set for the race that you're about to have. So there's choices that we make throughout our entire lives that dictate who we are.
And in this season, I want to share with you the behaviors, the tactics, and the mindset to help you become the best version of yourself.
Come join us in Building Blocks of Success in Season 7. This is the Building Blocks of Success with Glenn Mattson.
