Student Of Life Podcast

In today's podcast we look at doubt and confidence, how to build confidence and overcome doubt.   We review the five strategies for overcoming doubt:   Revisit Past Successes Stop Worrying about what other people think Talk to some Encouraging Load up on Inspiration Don't do Nothing   Thank you for listening to Student of Life. If you enjoyed it, please review us at iTunes and Stitcher. It makes a difference and encourages others to check out the show.   Also, Joe's new novel, Rooster's Leap, is now available on Amazon. Please check it out here.

What you believe about yourself is just as important to your success as your skills and talents.  Are you overvaluing or undervaluing your abilities?   In today's podcast we look at the Dunning-Kruger Effect and how having Superiority Illusion can hurt you.   We review the seven behaviors which help you to discover your Purpose:   Quiet Time Step outside your comfort zone every day Surround yourself with people you admire Weed negative people and negative thoughts out of your life Stop lying to yourself - No more excuses Never stop learning Become an aggressive goal setter   We examine how to study yourself to discover where you might be over or under valuing your abilities and talents.  Finally, we lay out a plan for how to apply metrics to your core competencies, which allows you to gather data to demonstrate where you measure up or fall short.   Thank you for listening to Student of Life. If you enjoyed it, please review us at iTunes and Stitcher. It makes a difference and encourages others to check out the show.   Also, Joe's new novel, Rooster's Leap, is now available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle versions. Please check it out.

Everyone has goals and dreams they hope to achieve.  What's keeping you from going after yours? Are you willing to do what it takes to accomplish something significant? It all starts with discipline and sacrifice. "Flipping the Switch" allows you to create great momentum by implementing positive behaviors that move you toward your goals.   In today's podcast we cover the four steps that allow you to Flip the Switch...   The Trigger - The event or thought that gets you started The Path - The clear goal and defined plan for reaching your goal The Mindset - Understanding your own psychology to create an All In mentality The Grind - Building your sacrifice muscles so you can accomplish the little things that make a big difference.   Thank you for listening to Student of Life. If you enjoyed it, please review us at iTunes and Stitcher. It makes a difference and encourages others to check out the show.

Fear keeps many people from being everything they created to be, from achieving their potential, from realizing their vision for themselves, and being able to spend more time working in their purpose. For many, fear is the biggest impediment to fulfilment in their lives.   What’s the definition of fear? Fear is an unpleasant emotion cause by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain or a threat.   The key part of that definition is two words: the belief.   Some fears do have to do with something really causing pain or being a threat, but many of our fears are simply the belief that there will be pain or a threat. It’s not real, but we allow those beliefs to get in the way of us being able to do the things that we want to do.   So, if this belief can stop us from achieving our goals, why we were created with fear as one of our emotions?   If you’re walking through the woods and all of a sudden you see a mama grizzly bear and two cubs, if you’re smart you’re probably fearful and wanting to get away from that. Likewise, if you come across of burning forest fire, you probably will be at least a little scared of that.   When it’s not just the belief, but there really is something that’s a threat to you, fear is a good emotion to have because it will keep you alive. It’s a healthy emotion. It’s helpful in that case. That’s good fear.   But the bad kind of fear is when there’s not actually any danger and the fear keeps us from realizing our potential. Those kind of fears—the ones about things that won’t really harm us—they’re a barrier to us reaching our goals. It’s the belief that there is danger that keeps us from moving forward. Those are the fears that we generally need to overcome to be able to have fulfilment in our lives and achieve the things we want.   Where does fear come from? Danger. As we just discussed, these are the real situations where it’s justified to be fearful. For example, if the captain of your airplane announces that the plane is going down. That’s a situation of real danger.   Facing uncertainty or the unknown. When you don’t know what’s coming, your mind can play games that make it seem worse. That’s a belief that makes you fearful rather than reality, because the reality is unknown.   A prior bad experience. This can be your bad experience or someone else’s bad experience that you’ve witnessed. For example, a person who has been through a horrible divorce is so scarred (and scared) by it that they won’t date again.   Ignorance and lack of understanding. This is where your belief is built on a lack of understanding and causes fear, like when the people in Columbus’s crew believed the earth was flat so they were afraid of sailing off the edge of the world.   Allowing fear—or indeed any negative emotions—to stop us from doing things we want to do in our lives is being a slave to that emotion. When you allow fear to grow up like a weed, that fear is really your master. A slave is completely submissive to the master and has no free will. Fears make you a slave because they diminish your freedom.   Fear and The Four Freedoms Dan Sullivan talks about four freedoms: freedom of money, freedom of time, freedom of relationship and freedom of purpose.   Joe worked in Real Estate and one of the biggest problems agents have is the fear of making prospecting calls. This is called, "call reluctance". How does this fear impact the four freedoms for an agent?   Freedom of money: if you’re afraid to get on the phone and make your prospecting calls, you’re not going to do as many deals and you’re not going to have as much money. That’s going to stop you from having the freedom of having the money to do what you want to do.   Freedom of time: often people have a big plan but because of the fear they spend two hours on Facebook instead of prospecting. Fear leads to procrastination and if you’re procrastinating you’re losing your freedom of time because your time is being diminished.   Freedom of relationships: if you’re afraid to do your prospecting, that’s fewer people you will interact with. In turn, that’s reducing your sphere of influence, and shrinking your comfort zone, and ultimately reducing your freedom of relationships.   Freedom of purpose: if you're doing all of those other things—you don’t have money because you’re not making calls, you don’t have time because you’re procrastinating and you don’t have the relationships that could be built by going out and prospecting—that’s going reduce your ability to work in your purpose. Fear has limited your freedom in those situations.   The biggest problems many people have with their fears is they avoid them or they won’t even admit that they have fear.   Lying to your self only makes it worse. Admit your fear—there is no shame in being afraid. Every one is afraid at some point. In fact, there is great strength in admitting you have a fear. Hiding it, avoiding it, ignoring it, pretending it doesn’t exist? That’s a sign of weakness. If you try to hide from it or pretend it doesn’t exist, it causes you to have less freedom and it keeps you from achieving your goals and your dreams.   Courage is not the absence of fear, courage is being afraid, but doing it anyway.   There is nothing to be ashamed of in being afraid. What you should be ashamed of is if you’re afraid and you don’t face it or you won’t even admitting you’re afraid. When you refuse to deal with that fear it rents space in the back of your head and becomes a stronghold in your life to keep you from doing what you want to do.   It’s time to figure out how to get past your fears. Joe has six strategies to help you overcome the fears.   Strategy One: Reframing Physiologically, your body reacts exactly the same to fear as it does to excitement. All of those extreme sports people doing all kinds of crazy stuff don’t realize they are physiologically terrified because they’re so excited.   One way to reframe is to just say, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m so excited I get to do this,’ instead of saying ‘I’m so scared I have to do this.’ You trick your mind into being excited instead of scared.   Another way to reframe is to use the Fear vs. Danger scale. Take whatever you’re afraid of, admit to yourself you’re afraid, admit your level of fear and fill in on the left side of the scale between 0 and 10 what you’re fear level is. Then go to the right side, which is the danger level, and be honest about what the danger level really is. When you look at it and say, “well, there is no danger, there is no reason to be fearful,” that allows you to have the courage you need to attack whatever that fear is.   So reframing is taking your mind and shifting it from fear to excitement and or taking what you think your fear level is and comparing it to the danger levels, so that you can reframe what it looks like to you and make it something easier for you to attack.   Strategy Two: Strength in Numbers If you’re afraid of something and you can find someone else to do it with you, that’s always a way that can help you to take that leap of faith instead of sitting there scared by yourself. And if you can find someone who’s not afraid of it to deal with it with you, that’s great. Or if you have someone else who you know is not going to chicken out at the last second, who is afraid of it as well and the two of you do it together, that is just a great way to overcome the fear. It will help you to push through it by having that buddy to do it with you.   Strategy Three: Find a Mentor Whatever you’re afraid of, there is a good chance somebody else has already confronted that fear and lived to tell about it. If you can find somebody else who’s already succeeded in what you’re afraid of, you can learn from them how to do it and use that as your springboard to being able to face the fear yourself. That’s exactly what Joe did in starting this podcast—he learned from podcast guru Paul Colligan, whose book gave Joe what he needed to push through and start doing the podcast. When you find that mentor it doesn’t have to be someone you know. It can be someone who has written a book, who’s got a blog, who has a podcast or videos on YouTube. Or it can be someone you know who had success tackling whatever fear is in front of you.   One key thing: all you perfectionists out there, don’t get caught in paralysis by analysis. Don’t be studying so long that you never do anything. Lots of people spend so long studying their fear, they never actually attack it, so find the minimum you need to do and then dive in and do it.   Strategy Four: Develop a Powerful WHY A WHY in your life, a reason why you need to get through that fear that is so powerful the prize for achieving your WHY makes the fear pale by comparison. You just say, “I’m going through that fear because this is so important.” What is your WHY? What are your reasons and purpose? Achieving that and living out that potential God has placed in you can help you push through whatever fear you’re facing.   Strategy Five: Lower Your Expectations There are many people who allow their pride or perfectionism to keep them from doing things they fear. They have this misplaced notion they should be great at whatever they try the first time they try it. So until they know they can be great, they don't do something and they let fear of it not going well, or the fear of not being perfect, to stop them from facing that fear. When you do that, you diminish your life. You can get so much joy and satisfaction from trying new things. You need to be more childlike where you know you’re not going to do well the first time you do something.   If you’re facing a fear and you’re afraid you’ll fall on your face the first time you try it, just get it over with.  Then you get the bad one over with to start getting better. Lower your expectations and quit expecting to be perfect.   Strategy Six: Do It Scared Whatever it is, just resolve you’re going to jump in and do it. What’s the worst that can happen? Check out Tim Ferris’s TED talk on YouTube about Fear Setting. He says, I’ve got this fear. What are the worst things that can happen if I do it? And then you look at that list and make another list of how to mitigate those things so they won't be as damaging if they do happen. That allows you to get to a point where you're able to go ahead and push through the fear, do it scared and realize that it’s not as bad as you thought it would be.   The Benefits of Stepping Out If you follow one of these six strategies and face your fear, there are two main benefits. Firstly, it’s rarely as bad as you think it will be! Secondly, that sense of accomplishment you get from pushing through a fear creates great momentum in your life. When you do something and bust through a fear, do it again as soon as you can because it creates muscle memory which means the fear will never have power over you again. Attack the fear, face it, defeat it and get that muscle memory.   Sometimes, we have fears we can’t handle by ourselves, that we need help with. A good sign you’re in a place where you might need help beyond just these strategies is when you feel like there’s no way out, or you feel like there is no hope.   To get past all of that, be humble, turn to God, turn to others, admit it and ask for help. When you have that kind of fear, where you feel like there is no way out, where you feel you have no hope, that is when you have to see your pastor, a psychologist or a psychiatrist, or a professional counselor. That is where you have to humble yourself and get the help you need to get past those things. If you’re having trouble determining where you are at, Joe recommends the Hamilton Rating Scale for Anxiety, which professional counselors use to determine the anxiety level of their patients.   If you go through that with whatever fear you’re dealing with, you can see whether you have moderate anxiety or severe anxiety. If you are in moderate to severe, you know that probably you need more help than just your friends can give you or you can find on your own. It’s a great tool.   If you’ve got fears like tall weeds in your life, you need to do whatever it takes to chop them down and get them out of the way because they are limiting your fulfilment in life. They are limiting your success, and they are diminishing your freedom. So do not let fear stop you from being the best you can be.   Links mentioned: The Fear vs. Danger Scale The Hamilton Rating Scale for Anxiety

Are you allowing ‘defensive thinking’ to negatively impact your life? Today, we examine two kinds of defensive thinking, Brain Spin and Piñata Mind.   Brain Spin Brain Spin is when you are fixated on just one thought and your brain spins in circles over and over again. What makes Brain Spin defensive thinking is your thoughts are just spinning around and your brain is not working out solutions. Your brain is going too fast, creating anxiety and stress, as well as the inability to think clearly. It’s defensive because you are allowing your brain to happen to you. You are allowing outside influences and problems to have an impact on your ability to function because you are allowing that spin to happen.   Overcoming Brain Spin How do you stop yourself from falling into the Brain Spin trap?   S-P-I-N   When you have Brain Spin, go on offense. It’s a simple process: just remember the word “spin.” There’s a little exercise you can do to stop the spin and get yourself back on even footing, where you can take control of your thoughts, go on offense, and come up with solutions instead of staying on defense with stress, anxiety and worry.   The “S” stands for “Stop.” “Stop” means you stop, acknowledge the Brain Spin is happening. Actively engage your brain in something, instead of allowing it to passively spin.   The “P” stands for “Process”. “Process” means you’re going to think about whatever  it is your brain is spinning about, and you’re going to dissect a little bit and ask yourself the question, “Is this something I have any control over? Is this something where I might be able to step in and make some changes or take some action to alleviate whatever is causing this stress?” You process it and figure out what the problem is.   Then you have “I”, which stands for “Intervene.” If it is a legitimate problem and you have legitimate options to go on offense and solve it, then you can intervene. Take steps to put on paper what you’re solutions are going to be. How are you going to attack this problem? Decide what you are going to do instead of just letting that thought spin in your head. Start working on a productive solution.   On the other side of the same coin, if you determine that either, you have no control over it, or it’s not a legitimate problem, then you can say, “This is not something I have any power or control over and I just need to understand that so I don’t allow my mind to keep spinning in search of solutions that aren’t there.”   Finally, the “N” stands for “Next.” The next time this happens, you need to know what you will do. Either you will start implementing your solution or do the steps to intervene and go on offense. Alternatively, if it’s a problem or a worry you have no control over—for example something that happened already and you can’t go back and adjust—the "Next" there is to let it go. And if you can’t let it go, come up with something you will switch your thoughts to instead. Maybe you think about something to do with your business or a sports team or how you could show some love to your spouse. Come up with something else productive with which you can replace the other thought.   So the S-P-I-N steps are how you end brain spin.   Piñata Mind Piñata Mind is the opposite of the Brain Spin. Brain Spin is when you’re fixated on one thought. Piñata mind is when your brain is so distracted there are hundreds of thoughts going on and you can’t think of anything. There is a reason Joe calls it “piñata mind”. It came from a day he spent the whole day working really hard, and was really busy, but when he looked back he was interrupted and distracted a lot and didn’t accomplish anything. You are probably familiar with that feeling of working hard, doing lots of stuff but getting nothing done. At the end of the day you’re exhausted but you have nothing to show for it. You didn’t move any big rocks forward.   Picture a kid’s birthday party. They blindfold the child,  spin him around, and hand him stick. Then they point toward a piñata. An adult is holding a rope and moving the piñata around while that kid is swinging wildly with that stick. He can’t hit the piñata, because the adult moves it every time the kid gets close. So “Piñata” Mind is when your mind is just like that kid swinging wildly all over the place and never hitting anything.   Piñata Mind is a negative, defensive brain posture. It’s defensive because once again, you’re not taking charge of the situation. You are allowing circumstances to eat up your energy and your confidence. Unable to focus, all those thoughts to come in, mess with your mind and get you going a hundred directions at once. You are so diverted, distracted, and all over the place, you lose all of your energy very quickly, just like a cell phone with too many apps open at once. You just don’t accomplish anything because you’re not putting any filters in place to stop everything from coming at you.   Overcoming Piñata Mind There are four steps to overcoming it.   Start with a brain dump. Get a sheet of paper, write down everything you’re thinking about in your brain. Write down everything. It might be several pages of information, but writing it down empties it from your brain. You don’t have to eat up space in your brain holding onto that information anymore. Go through the list and decide what is urgent and what is important. Remember, things that are on fire are urgent but not necessarily important. Sometimes things that are urgent you can delegate to somebody else to handle. Sometimes, with things that are urgent but not important, you can just let go and not worry about them. It doesn’t matter, it’s not important. Find the things that are urgent and important. They’re high value activities and you should be doing those first. When your brain gets to that point where your list is out of control, and you're totally playing defense, take steps build incredible momentum going in the opposite direction. The only way you can do that is to have great focus. You can accomplish two or three times the amount you normally do if you’re able to focus without distraction. Close the door, go to a place where you won’t be bothered, turn off your phone, close all the windows on your computer, close down everything except the resources you need to accomplish those tasks. Remember, we’re trying to go from a defensive posture to being totally on offense and building momentum in our favor. So, no phone, no email, none of that turned on. So you choose one to three items on your priority list you will focus on. Attack those items! Stay on them for at least two hours. It takes a good twenty or thirty minutes to get into focus where you are really honed in and able to work well. When you get in to the zone, you don’t want to leave so quickly. If you can do three, four hours, it’s amazing how much momentum you can gain and how much you can get done. So, to conquer your Piñata Mind, you want to organize, prioritize, focus, and attack.   To have fulfillment in your life, you need to be doing things where you spend time in your purpose. You also want to do things that move you closer to the vision you’ve laid out for your life and business.   Sometimes the only way to move towards that vision is to get a little selfish and shut out everybody else, so you can focus on the things that are important to you to move them forward.   Frequently, as leaders, the last person we take care of is ourselves because we’re giving to everybody else and we’re the go-to person. But you sometimes have to be selfish, focus on yourself and work on yourself so you can develop momentum, stop playing defense, and go on offense when it comes to your mind and the way you think.   Take these strategies and use them. Everyone has experienced Brain Spin and Piñata Mind at times. Having some tools in your tool belt will help you overcome them, gain momentum and move toward the vision for your life.

Your mindset is the biggest tool that determines whether or not you’re successful or have fulfillment in your life? It’s how you think and the filters you perceive the world through.   There are some people who naturally take in what the world throws at them and see all the possibilities. There are other people who only see limitations.   Which one are you? Do you see unlimited possibilities or do you think about all the things that could stop you?   The space between your ears is the biggest determiner of whether or not you’re going to have what you want in life, and whether or not you’re going to achieve fulfillment and success.   Pie People and River People For Pie People, there is a finite amount of all the success, fulfillment and abundance in the world. To them, there is a limited amount, like pie. If one person is successful, it means there is a little bit less of the success pie for the next person. If you are a pie person, and you see other people doing well and having success, you percieve that as leaving less success available for you.   You know those people who never seem happy when someone else does well, or never share in someone else’s good fortune? Probably, that’s a pie person. It’s typically a subconscious thinking pattern and most people who are pie people don’t realize they are pie people: it’s just the way they live. It was probably the way they were brought up. They believe their ability to succeed is limited by other people’s ability to succeed.   Then, there are River People, who believe success, fulfillment, abundance and all the things life has to offer are a flowing river. They believe anybody can step up and dip their cup into that river and have as much of that success as they want because there is a never-ending supply of it. When you are a river person, you tend to share in other people’s excitement when they do well. You don’t think their success means you have less chance of doing well. You say, “they did well, that shows I can succeed too.”   If you pay attention, the pie people and river people become very easy to spot. You want to be a river person, not a pie person. You also want to hang out with river people and avoid hanging out with pie people.   The truth is there is not a set amount of success, wealth, prosperity or fulfillment in the world. There is a constantly growing and expanding amount, for you to grab hold of. People with an abundance mentality—river people—believe the world is open to them and because they walk through life with their eyes wide open, they see opportunities everywhere.   People with a scarcity mindset—pie people—tend to look at the world as if it’s against them. They have blinders on and look straight ahead. The opportunities that may be coming are flying by them unnoticed because they believe the world has a limited amount of success, and they have been locked out.   Gary Keller, the founder of Keller Williams Realty International, said, ‘There is not enough business for everyone but there is enough for anyone.’ Although he was talking about business and real estate, this statement really applies to any endeavor you choose to pursue. If everybody in the world was fully engaged at one time to achieve something, we probably would run out of resources and there wouldn’t be enough for everybody. But the truth is only a very, very small percentage of people actually pursue those things.   There will be more than enough for anybody who is willing to pay the price to achieve success and fulfillment, because most refuse to go after it. If you want to be a person who has a fulfilled life, choose to be someone who goes after it. Choose to be someone who has an abundance mentality versus the scarcity mentality.   Characteristics of Abundance and Scarcity Mindsets What are the characteristics of a person with an abundance mindset versus a scarcity mindset? It is really difficult to have an abundance mindset if you don’t believe there is a higher power helping to create big things for us. There probably are people who don’t believe in God who have an abundance mindset, but it is much more difficult if you think everything is on you.   Trust in God (or the higher power you believe in) to provide. When you see people who go through life with that attitude, that’s usually a sign they have an abundance mind set. Meanwhile, the people who believe everything is up to them; if they don’t do it, it's not going to happen, are typically the people with a scarcity mindset because they don’t trust the world and they don’t trust God. They don’t trust others are there to help them achieve and succeed.   Have faith in God and faith in the process. This goes right along with trust. Believe if you work hard, the abundance will come to you. Those who are scarcity thinkers only go by “what they see is what they believe” and think they are responsible for everything. Scarcity thinkers are trying to adjust the process, so they can make it more their own. They don't trust hard work will ultimately allow them to succeed and have their abundance.   Be hopeful and optimistic. That comes from the belief that you are moving forward and you are going to have all you need. That kind of belief—the river person thinking—naturally leads to hope and optimism. Scarcity thinkers are full of fear and doubt. They are afraid the world is really built against them, afraid someone else has succeeded before them and now that success is gone, not to be enjoyed by them.   Be generous, sharing and giving. The most generous people are those who think they are always going to be successful. Have you ever noticed people who may not have anything but are still very generous? They give their time and money because they believe in the abundance of the world. They believe it will come back to them. The scarcity thinkers hold onto what they have because they believe they will never get back what they let go of. They can’t give to other people because they might need it for themselves down the road.   Extremely generous people are river people. The people who are really stingy and have every nickel they ever earned inside their one-way pockets—where it goes in and never comes out!—are scarcity thinkers.   Have contentment and satisfaction. It’s the people who are stingy and afraid of losing what they have, who are pie people with a scarcity mindset. That kind of person is always discontented, feeling they never achieve, do or have enough. Being satisfied and content with where you’re at doesn’t mean you don’t want more, or you’re not striving for more. Being content is knowing you’ve given your best effort, and you are trusting God to deliver. You know you’ve done everything to a point of being content with where you’re at because you’ve done what you can and know that more is coming.   Have a steward mentality. Joe believes everything he owns was given to him by God, and it’s his job to manage what he’s been given to the best of his ability. That doesn’t just include money. It includes his intellect, education, knowledge, work and all resources. Managing and using those resources for the betterment of the world is part of being a river person. Meanwhile, somebody with a scarcity mindset will have an ownership mentality. They have the idea of limited resources so anything they have is theirs and they won’t share it. Instead, pie people tend to hoard their resources.   Work on helping and completing others. When you have the attitude of abundance, you look to help other people. It comes back to the generosity, and being willing to share what you have because you believe there is more than enough. River people believe in abundance and want other people to find abundance as well. Whereas, people with the scarcity mindset also tend to be hyper-competitive. They try to beat you to something instead of helping you get there. They’re afraid if you get there first there may be less for them.   Change your mindset It’s not that pie people are bad people. They have fear because of wrong thinking. They often believe they have a certain level they can get to it and that’s it. When you realize how the two minds work, you can have the compassion for people with the scarcity mindset instead of wondering why they are like that.   When you change your mindset, you change the outcome. When you have an abundance mentality, it’s amazing how the world seems to be a different place and you see opportunities that you never saw before.   If you have noticed some pie person tendencies in yourself, how do you go about changing them?   Watch who you hang out with. Firstly, look at the people surrounding you. We are the average of the 5 people we spend most of our time with. If you are hanging out with a bunch of people who always moan and groan about the world and their lives, you will probably become a pie person. But if you hang out with people who live in abundance, expect the world to work out well for them, and they step out of their comfort zone on a daily basis and work to grab the abundance they believe is out there, then you’re more likely to be a river person. Hang out with abundance people.   Let go of the outcome. Secondly, do everything in your power to achieve success and fulfillment and let go of the outcome. Trust that the work will deliver the reward, that God has your back. If you've done everything possible, you don't have any more control over the outcome anyway, so you might as well stop worrying about it.   Be content where you are, but always strive for more. Thirdly, learn to be content with where you are, but strive for more success, more fulfillment and to be a better person. If you've done all you can, good things are coming.   Never allow fear or other people to put caps on your dreams. Finally—and this is the most important one—if you want to be a river person, never allow fear or other people put caps on your dreams in life. If you have big dreams, go after them. Stay true with yourself, keep your dream alive, and surround yourself with people who encourage you instead of discourage you.   If you have a tendency to be a pie person, take a look at these four steps of becoming a river person. There is enough success, prosperity and fulfillment in the world. So if you are willing to change your mindset, and do the things that you need to take a leap of faith, you can have great abundance and great satisfaction in your life!   Go for the abundance!

Everyone has greatness within them. God has put potential in everybody, but are you playing your part to achieve that potential?   To Joe, potential is the maximum level of success or fulfillment you could possibility reach. If you squeezed out every ounce of that special something in you, to do what you were created to do, and you overcame every obstacle and you shed off all the negatives that come at you, what you will achieve then would be your full potential.   Another great definition of potential is “the best version of yourself.” If you take all the skills, experiences, qualities that you’ve got and you distill it down to the best you can possibly be, that’s achieving your potential.   Every one should strive to achieve their potential but too many people don’t work hard to achieve it. It’s also really easy to get caught up in things that get you off track, and cause you to lose focus. As a result, very few people achieve their full potential.   There are three things that have a direct impact on whether your potential is maximized or falling backwards: aptitude, environment and desires.   Aptitude Everybody has some natural abilities. That goes back to your purpose, your areas of greatest strength and what some people call your ‘super powers’. Additionally, what determines your aptitude, is the level of schooling or education you get. It’s your character and your integrity, your core values and what you believe.   If you believe things that are negative or destructive, you’re not going to move towards your potential. If you believe in things like integrity, honesty, and serving other people, those types of things will move you towards your potential. So your core values play an important role with your aptitude.   Environment The easiest definition of environment is your physical location. If you have two people and one is born in poverty and lives in a mud hut in the third world, their potential is limited compared to someone born in a Western society who has access to school, access to the internet, access to food. Those aspects of environment play a huge role in whether or not you’re going to have the opportunity to achieve your potential.   Another area of your environment is your culture. Culture is the environment of a group of people, which Joe covered in a previous episode. It can be the culture of a nation, the culture of a church, the culture of an organization, the culture of a company and/or the culture of you and your friends. The culture is going to play a huge role in whether you’re going to achieve your potential or whether you’ll allow yourself to be pulled away from it. The culture of the groups you spend the most time with, and your personal culture, plays a huge role in the achievement of your potential.   Another part of your environment is your mentors or your role models, the people you learned from, the people who showed you the way and went before you.   Desire Desire to Joe, is directly related to your purpose in life. Why did God create you? If you have a purpose and a vision of what you want to be that is so strong it propels you toward it, that desire is going to carry you toward your potential. If you are not protecting your confidence, will-power, or energy and they are being depleted before your day even gets going, that will pull you backwards. So desire is going to play a huge role in whether you are moving forward with the potential God put in you or whether you are being pulled away from it.   Attitude, environment and desire; take a look at those things. Which of them are working in your favor? Which of them are working against you? Which of them can you change so they’re working you in favor?   In America, there is an epidemic of lost potential. When you look at sports, it’s easy to tell whether someone is achieving their potential, because it’s all about performance on the field. You’re either winning or you’re not. You’re breaking records or you’re not.  When you’re dealing with life or business, there are gray areas. You can’t quite tell whether someone is achieving their potential in the way you can with sports.   Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry had both the aptitude and the desire to be among the best baseball players in history and help the Mets achieve a 10-15 year dynasty after they won the World Series in 1986. However, they didn’t have the right environment. They were surrounded by a party culture. Drugs, women, drinking and they got caught up in the addictions. And because of that, although they were great for a couple of years, their true potential was squandered.   In your life, when you look at your potential and the areas where you want to be great, what areas are cheating you out of your greatness? Where are you lying to yourself or engaging in an activity or behavior that doesn’t line up with where your potential should be taking you? What are you doing to correct those things? There are really five different areas that stop people from achieving their potential.   Laziness The first thing that holds people back from achieving their potential is laziness. They’re complacent, self-satisfied, and don’t have any goals or vision. They’ve just settled into a comfort zone and basically given up the desire to be anything more.   If you’re in that lazy zone but you have a glimmer of desire to be more, what can you do to break the cycle?   It comes down to your WHY. Why do you not want to be lazy anymore? What is your purpose? You such a powerful WHY that you will do it even when you don’t feel like doing it. Lazy is hard to overcome without goals or vision or values.   By the way, quiet time is not lazy time because quiet time is the time that gives your brain a little oxygen and that oxygen allows the fire to light that gets things going. Quiet time is a great way for someone who is complacent and satisfied with mediocrity to start. Think about what you’d like to be great at and what your purpose is. Spend time imagining what life would be like if you really got good at that and honed your skills there. If you’re lazy, you need to find a WHY that’s going to stop you from being lazy.   Fear The second reason people fall short of their potential, is they’re scared. It’s not a terrified, trembling-in-your-boots scared, but having no confidence. You never want to leave your comfort zone because you don’t know what’s out there. Or maybe you failed in the past and you’re afraid you’re going to fail again. Maybe you didn’t quite measure up one time and you were humiliated or made fun of and you don’t want to experience that again.   Everybody is scared, at times. It all comes back to your comfort zone. Stepping out of your comfort zone is scary.   Figure out, what it is you’re scared about, and do it scared!. That’s the best way. Expand that comfort zone because if you are not stretching your comfort zone everyday, it is shrinking. Every day you can move forward, every day you can expand your comfort zone, and every day you can experience what it's like to step out. If you try something new, you’re not going to be good at it the first time you try it. You need to take the attitude of a learner and not be afraid to look silly or goofy. Just do it and then laugh about it when it’s tough and try again to get better at it. That’s how you learn, so if you’re scared, expand your comfort zone and do it scared.   Lack of discipline The third thing that stops people is they are undisciplined. They’re distracted. They don’t know how to prioritize. They don’t know how to grind. They’re not able to focus for a long period of time to move the ball forward on a project. Lack of discipline comes from a short attention span, or when people multitask five things at once but actually are doing five things badly. Undisciplined comes from stretching too thin and trying to do too much.   If you get to the end of a day, exhausted because you’ve been so busy, but haven’t actually accomplished anything important, then you may have a problem with discipline. You need to learn how to focus, and a great place to start is to read Gary Keller’s book The One Thing and set aside an hour to work on your purpose.   It’s important to understand, what got you to your current level of success, is not going get you to the next level of success. You have to change things.   Are you doing things now, just like you’ve always done them and expecting a different result? If you are, you may have something you need to deconstruct, take up a step back and reconstruct better before you move forward. A lot of times, getting disciplined and focused is one of those things.   Deceived The fourth reason people fall short of their potential is they’re deceived. They’re lying to themselves, saying they’re doing fine when they’re not. Or pretending that there’s not a problem when there is. They’ve convinced themselves everything will go great, when it really won’t. Most of all, they’re not willing to admit they have a problem they need to address or an issue they need to solve.   Another way people lie to themselves is they expect it to be easy. They expect the things worth having in life to be easy to achieve. And typically, the best things in life are very difficult to achieve.   Also, people make excuses. They act like the world is against them. They're victims. Those people are deceived. The day you become an adult, your problems are on you. It’s not always fair but the truth is the world doesn’t care. The day you become an adult, it is your job to overcome whatever challenges are in front of you. Are you going to be an overcomer? Or are you going to wallow in self-pity and pretend the world owes you something?   It’s not to minimize problems, but it’s about making a decision to be an overcomer. Don’t deceive yourself into thinking the world owes you anything because you were dealt a bad hand. Face your problems and your issues head on, and figure out a way to overcome them.   Arrogance The fifth reason why people fall short of their potential is arrogance. These are the people who won’t ask for help, who lack humility, or who have no commitment to personal growth because they think they know everything they need to know. They have no mentors, no examples, and no ongoing education.   Howard Brinton always said, "Get out of judgment and get into curiosity." We can learn something from anybody we meet. If you sit down and ask those people, everybody has wisdom they can share. And if you take the attitude of a student in life, you’re going to learn things from everybody.   If you walk through life with arrogance, like you know everything, you’re missing out on all kinds of stuff that can help you, make your life richer, and help you reach your potential. So get out of judgment, get into curiosity and be a student of life.   Out of those five reasons why people fall short of their potential—laziness, fear, lack of discipline, being deceived and arrogance—which of them is holding you back?   Are you really doing everything you can to achieve your potential?   Everybody has something getting in their way. Whatever it is, you need to address it. Spend the time to find solutions and get inspiration. Allow your brain the space to think about your potential and what’s keeping you from doing that.   What kind of person are you? What are you going to be? Are you going to go after your potential? Or are you going to let the world beat it out of you?   If you’ve enjoyed the podcast today, Joe would love to hear from you. Email him at joe@studentoflifepodcast.com   Hit subscribe and share the podcast with your friends. Have a great week!

Do you start your day with a win every day? Are you on offense or do you start your day playing defense?   A morning routine is hugely important because it protects your energy and confidence. When you start the day with a routine where you know exactly what you’re going to do, it’s kind of like starting an engine. You get that thing rolling because you just go through the same process every day. There is no decision to make. There is no problem to solve. You just do the same thing on a regular basis to get the day going.   Remember the biggest drains of energy and confidence are problem solving and decision-making. Morning rituals and routines take all of that out of the equation.   Mark Twain said, ‘Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.’   You want to use the morning, when you have the most energy and the most confidence, to get the big things done in your day.   Are you operating each day in your purpose, the reason God created you? Are you doing things every day to move closer to making your vision for your life and business reality?   Put a positive spin on your day. Start by instead of saying “I have to do this,” say “I get to do this.” This is one of the best times in the history of the world. In terms of technology, peace, abundance, the ability to succeed and opportunities to thrive. We get to do amazing things, things that move us toward our vision, toward our purpose. And if you’re starting your day with those sorts of things and thinking about them, it is going to help you move forward.   Every successful person has some sort of morning routine or ritual. Margaret Thatcher, one of the greatest leaders in the history of the western world, used to get up every day at 5 AM so she could listen to Farming Today on the BBC. David Karp, the founder of Tumblr, never looks at any of his emails until he arrives at work. So he starts the day on offense.   If you get up and the first thing you do is grab your device and start looking at your texts and emails and responding to what the world has thrown at you, you’re immediately on defense. You need to get your mind right, you need to get your body right, you need to get your spirit right before you start your day.   Jim Kwik just did a great podcast all about his morning rituals. His morning routine is very involved. Check out Kwik Brain, Episode 16 http://jimkwik.com/kwik-brain-016/ He goes into his nutrition. He even talks about the type of shower he takes. He gets very detailed about how he starts his day.   Ben Franklin—one of the smartest people in the history of our country, a true entrepreneur, a true thinker and philosopher—has a very famous outline of what his typical day looked like. He had a 3-hour morning ritual he did every day. He always started his day with the question, “What good shall I do this day?” So if you read from what he has on his morning routine, it says, “Rinse, wash, and address powerful goodness.” He was a pretty successful guy who accomplished many great things.   What are you doing every morning? Do you have a ritual you follow? Do you have a routine you follow? Do you have a certain time you get up every day? What do you do to give yourself a win first thing in the morning? What do you do to set up your day where you will have a great success?   Joe’s Morning Routine Joe has different morning routines for different days of the week. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday, he will get up and go to the gym in the morning.   Last week (StudentOfLifePodcast.com/7) we talked about flipping the switch, making blanket decisions you make once, forever. So on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday nights, Joe has already made that blanket decision he will be getting up to go to the gym next morning. The alarm clock goes off at 4:21, which is precise and intentional because it plants a seed in the brain about beginning the day intentionally and with purpose.   As he gets up, he is saying a little prayer, “God let me be awesome today.” He gets ready easily because the night before he already prepared a gym bag, clothes for the day at work, a pre-work out shake and a protein shake. He gets a big drink of water, gathers his things and gets in the car. Joe has his phone with him but hasn’t looked at it yet. Six months ago he made the decision not to look at his phone anymore until after he’s done some things to get on offense for the day. In the car, the seat heater goes on to loosen Joe’s back before he gets to the gym. He turns on the app on the phone that does a daily reading from the bible and listens to that on the way into town. That gives his brain a chance to start easing into the day. Also, Joe knows spending time with God to start his day means he will have a better day.   At the gym, Joe walks on the treadmill for 30 minutes to loosen up his body, drink his pre-workout shake and give him time to work through his mind. It’s important to give your brain free space to breath and a chance to work on problems without lots of clutter. So whatever the brain has been mulling over at night, Joe will think about during that 30 minutes on the treadmill. Otherwise he will turn on a podcast and pour some wisdom into his head.   Then he meets up with a group and does a boot camp style work out. This is great for accountability, but also because having a trainer who is leading the boot camp means Joe doesn’t have to think or make decisions. All he has to do is show up and do what the trainer says. After the workout, Joe has his protein shake, takes a shower and get dressed.   By this time it’s 7.30am, and having been up since 4.21am, Joe is fully awake and full of energy. It’s a big win to start the day and he feels good about himself. It recharges his battery and protects his energy and confidence for the day. Next it’s off to the coffee shop to do morning planning. Typically this involves spending 10 minutes reading scripture or a devotional, and then journaling thoughts. After that, he tackles any problems that need to be solved, such as presentations to prepare. And finally, the last thing is writing out a task list for the day. The task list always includes Joe’s Big 3: At least one item each working ON his business, working IN his business, and personal development. These are the key things that help move him forward in all three areas.   Starting the day on offense like this means Joe knows whatever happens the rest of the day, he is following the agenda he set for the day, rather than just responding to other people and other stimulus. It gets things off on the right foot.   The morning ritual starter kit Feed 3 Feed your spirit. Schedule quiet time. Pray. Be somewhere inspiring. Feed your mind. Spend some time studying, getting education, or gaining knowledge. Feed your body. It's not just food, it's taking care of your body by working out and getting moving. It doesn’t have to be a hard workout; start the day getting the blood flowing.   Protect 3 Protect your energy. Make sure you’ve gotten sleep, don’t look at emails or texts. Be on offense not defense. Protect your will power. Do this by making blanket decisions, and when you do your planning, make sure you figure out the most energy draining thing, and tackle it first. Protect your confidence. Plan, focus your day and have a block of time where you’re working in your purpose.   Work 3 This is the Big Three Work ON your business. Work IN your business. Work on yourself.   Feed Three, Protect Three, and Work Three. That’s a great framework on which to build a Morning Ritual. If you don't already have one, make it your starting point. Study yourself and figure out what works for you. Try things and get on a schedule where every day you go through a routine that gives you energy and gets you fired up for the day. You continue to do it and it becomes muscle memory.   Remember, the first step to success is learning how to win the morning. If you win the morning that gives you a chance of winning the day. When you win enough days in a row them you have success and fulfillment.   If you haven’t already, hit the subscribe button on iTunes or Stitcher. And if you’ve enjoyed it, tell your friends about the podcast!

Energy and confidence are the fuel for your vision. How do you protect them?   By the term energy, Joe means your actual physical energy. It’s the physical stamina you have to get things done that need to be done. Confidence is your emotional and mental energy. It’s having the resolve to deal with problems as they arise.   Confidence and energy are very much like a battery. Picture the battery on your cell phone. There are some days you are dealing with all kinds of phone calls, working with apps and all kinds of things are going on. Before the end of the day, the battery is completely drained and the phone is worthless unless you recharge it. Then, there's other days where that phone is barely used. You might make a couple of calls here and there but you’re not really using it. At the end of the day, it’s got 70 or 80 percent of the battery charge still remaining.   That's like your confidence and energy in real life. Some days it's drained down, other days you've got unlimited amounts of it. If you have 27 apps open on the phone, the energy is draining even when you’re not using those apps. If you've got your focus divided on 27 different things, even though you're doing one thing, the other stuff is occupying space in the back of your mind and you're draining down even though you're not working on those things.   How are your energy and confidence created? Physical energy comes from taking care of your body. Your diet or eating properly, getting enough sleep and exercise or working your body to keep it moving. Jim Kwik, who does the podcast Kwik Brain, says that doing things physically helps your brain work more effectively. So if you are not properly taking care of your body, your brain suffers. Your ability to think and function suffers.   Your physical energy affects your emotional and mental energy. Mental energy comes from getting rest, removing your mind from the daily grind of what you do every day. Do you have hobbies or distractions to get you away from those things? People who work seven days a week, eight or 10 hours a day, are not as productive as people who are working five or six days a week and taking that day to let their mind be renewed, recharged and refreshed. It's counterintuitive to a lot of hard driven people who are trying to make things happen. They believe they can't afford to take a day off because something will slip through the cracks. But when you don't take a day off, more things slip through the cracks because you're not as mentally sharp.   The two biggest drains of your confidence and your energy are problem solving and decision making. Decision making can be painful when it's a decision you haven't been planning for. You get a group of people going to lunch and nobody can make up their mind where to go. Nobody wants to think about it because it's out of the ordinary. It's an exhausting process to make a decision. Now, imagine that multiplied by 20 with the big decisions with your company or with your life. When you haven't prepared to make those decisions and you haven't protected your energy, you're making those decisions in a depleted state. The odds are high that you will make a poorer decision when you're low on energy and confidence, than you will when you are charged up and ready to go.   Three strategies to protect your energy and confidence. Strategy 1: Routine A routine is a process that allows you to develop a system where you're doing something the same way all the time until it becomes it becomes a habit. You begin doing it without thinking, which frees your brain to be working on other things while you're managing that routine.   Imagine if your daily life and business were loaded with those kinds of routines. You get things done in such a systematic method and process that by the time you're finished you haven't expended any energy or confidence on them. All that is going to help you have more energy for the important things, for the unexpected problems that pop up. It brings freedom in your life.   A lot of people who don't practice this kind of discipline look at these routines and these habits as something that takes away their freedom, that keeps them from being able to do what they want to do. They want to have an artistic life where they just kind of flow through life and do whatever feels like the right thing to do. Well if you do that, the odds are you will be a starving artist your whole life. If you want to have success and fulfillment and go toward a vision you've created for yourself, you have to have discipline and routines.   Routines are important because they allow you to play offense. They allow you to attack the day instead of letting the day attack you. One of the best examples of a routine you need is a morning routine. Every successful person Joe has ever met or read about has some sort of morning routine to get their day off on the right foot. It's something that really gets your battery charged up.   Strategy 2: Focus Look at two of the richest, most successful people on the planet: Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Both of them have been quoted as saying the biggest reason for their success is their focus.   Are you focusing with such intensity that you can cut through the problems and the decisions in your day? Or is your focus divided and scattered, trying to focus on 100 things at once and really not accomplishing anything?   One of the biggest myths in the business world is the idea of multitasking. There have been studies done that show that while a person is trying to do two or three things at one time, their IQ actually goes down and they're not doing any of them with any kind of excellence. When you're multitasking, what you're actually doing is constantly interrupting yourself and going from one task back to the other. You’re dividing your focus and not really accomplishing anything, doing both tasks much slower than if you did one at a time.   It is just impossible for the human brain to focus its energy, power, and thinking on two different tasks at the same time. You can only focus on one thing at a time. If you're a multitasker, it's time to reconsider that and think about having focus time.   People call it different things, e.g. being in the zone or being in flow. You need at least an hour or more regularly of focus time where you're focusing on the biggest issues you need to solve in your business. The biggest rocks you need to move in order to move towards your vision. Joe encourages you to have a routine that creates focus time for you.   Focus creates incredible momentum. When you're focused for an extended period of time, you can get to three, four, or five times as much done as when you're trying to do it amidst interruptions and distractions. So if you are in an office environment where it's impossible for you to avoid distractions, you need to find a place you can go to have your focus. Or if you're in an environment where you encourage distractions from the people around you, you need to change that. Let them know you’re going to be in the zone and not to bother or interrupt you for X-number of hours.   Our society has developed in us such a short attention span, people can't stay focused. It's a skill you have to rebuild. Turn off your phone. Turn off your computer. Put your office phone on ‘Do Not Disturb’ and take away all of the distractions.   If that focus time is spent in your purpose, the thing that you were created to do, it can actually be an energizing thing. That's what happens when you're protecting your energy and your confidence. Energy feeds confidence, confidence feeds energy, and when you're doing things to protect them, build them, and feed them, they just keep building on each other and feeding on each other.   Strategy 3: Blanket Decisions A blanket decision is when you make a decision once and it’s done. This is for when you have a certain activity you do on a regular basis that is difficult for you, or something you don't want to do, or something you hesitate to do. You make that decision one time and that's it, it's done. There's no more thinking about it, you just go do it because the decision has already been made.   For example, many people who are successful with working out on a regular basis start their day with their work out. When Joe wanted to make his workout something that started each day with a big win, he made a blanket decision and flipped the switch, saying “I'm not deciding whether or not I work out when the alarm goes off in the morning. When the alarm goes off in the morning, the decision has already been made. I'm getting up and I'm heading to the gym.” Joe does everything the night before to make it really easy to get up and go. His gym bag is ready to go. His clothes for the day are already set out. To make it even easier, he has a trainer at the gym and a boot camp group to work out with so he’s got accountability from the people who are there and accountability from the trainer who's creating the workout. He doesn’t have to think about the work, just go there and do it.   Flipping the switch and making a blanket decision allows you to put your brain power and energy towards other things, because that decision has already been made.   Where in your life do you have regular things you do where you could flip the switch so that you can get better? Where can you create a process to take away the decision making and the problem solving that go with it?   When you do these kinds of things—flipping the switch, having focus time, being in the zone, building routines throughout your day—it helps you to be more successful. These things create momentum in your life. They allow you to protect energy and confidence so that when the big problem or the big decision does show up, you're not already depleted through things you had control over.   Start paying attention to your energy and confidence levels and when are they at their peak during the day. Study yourself. Get to know how you work, how your body works. how your mind works. And when you see patterns, adjust your work day and your life accordingly.   Do an autopsy of the day Even if you're planning everything out and being very intentional about everything in your life, you're still going to have days where things don’t go to plan. The world beats up on you and you come home feeling tired and defeated. When you such a day, it's important thing to take steps that evening to get yourself ready to have your energy back at a high level the next day.   Do what Joe calls an autopsy of the day. Stop and look at it. Ask yourself, “what could I have done differently to avoid whatever happened? How could I have managed everything better so it would have been a different outcome? What do I have to deal with tomorrow that's lingering from today?”   Take a little extra time that evening, and with your morning routine, to set up a plan so that when you're freshest you can deal everything. Go on offense the next day, instead of starting the day on defense, attacking those problems, issues, and decisions that beat you up that day. Start the next day with a fully charged battery of energy and confidence and push through those things.   Remember, confidence and energy are the fuel that drive you towards your vision. If you want your vision to become reality, you need to protect that energy and confidence. Take care of getting those decision-making and problem solving issues out of the way when you're at your highest energy level. If you do this, you will operate at peak efficiency.   Don’t forget to leave a rating and review in iTunes, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you’ve enjoyed it, share it with your friends!

It’s a force that drives you towards success or failure, and most people don’t pay it much attention: culture. Most people think about culture in terms of a business culture. But if you’re the leader of a team, you need your personal culture in line for your business culture to fall into place.   Joe’s definition of culture is your environment. When done intentionally, it's a philosophy about life and business that you play out, that's played out by your team and those around you. At its worst it's a demoralizing and destructive force. At its best, it’s an uplifting, motivating force that gives you momentum. It's a rising tide that lifts all boats, carries your team forward, and gives you and your team the ability to keep pushing.   Culture is one of those things that even if you don't pay attention to it, will still come to be. If you have a team and you don't create a culture intentionally, it's going to grow organically and it's probably not going to be what you want it to be. It's no fun to fight a bad culture.   Intentional Culture versus Organic Culture Right now organic is really big. Everybody wants organic food; organic is seen as a good thing. But when you're talking about culture, organic is a bad thing. Organic is the kind of culture most people and businesses have. There's no one thinking about it. There's no one putting any guardrails in place. Meanwhile, an intentional culture is where you think through the building blocks that create culture and you put them into place so you have the kind of environment and the kind of motivation and momentum you want in your life.   Culture is driven by your beliefs and the beliefs of those around you. If you have positive, empowering beliefs and that's your dominant focus, then you're going to have a positive, empowering culture. But if the dominant focus is negative or limiting beliefs, then that's going to create a negative or limiting culture.   Have you ever seen people who just have a dark cloud over them? They're always negative. Everything that could go wrong does go wrong. That's someone who has a very bad personal culture. They’re usually speaking negative things into the world and living those negative things out. Someone who has that kind of demeanor and life almost always has automatic negative thoughts. Or as Jim Kwik calls them: ANTS, automatic negative thoughts. That's where when something happens you immediately think negatively about it.   So many people allow those kinds of thoughts to dominate their mind. What you feed into your mind and what you say out into the world eventually becomes your reality. Because, if that's what you're always saying and always thinking, your life is naturally going to follow that progression.   Some people live such negative lives they don't even see the positive opportunities that come their way. They are ruled by their emotions instead of by their thoughts and they're lying to themselves all the time. So, what are you saying to yourself? What are the thoughts that pop into your head when things come up? What are the things you say to the world about yourself?   You're creating your personal culture with that.   Another way to look at it is with an organic culture you allow life to happen to you and then you react to what happens to you. You're always playing defense.   With an intentional culture, you happen to life! You play offense and you set the agenda for what your life's going to look like. When bad things happen, you find the positive in it. You study it to find out what went wrong and you fix it and move on instead of just staying in a negative place.   Personal culture You have to know and intentionally live out your core values. What do you believe? You also have to know your vision very clearly. Who and what do you want to become? You have to know your purpose and you have to seek out opportunities to be working in the purpose God created you for. You have to cultivate an attitude of abundance as opposed to an attitude of scarcity and that comes from knowing what you believe.   A culture is naturally going to grow around you based on those things, rather than on what you would become if you were just living life haphazardly.   Who you associate with is going to shape your personal culture. If you're hanging around a bunch of people who are negative, always talking about how they're failing and say they're not good enough, then that's your sphere of influence. Guess what you're going to end up being like?   Instead, surround yourself with people who are positive. Be around people who are seeking fulfillment in their life, who are working towards being better people and towards their own vision. Are you developing and building positive and empowering relationships?   What do you spend your discretionary time doing? Are you sitting on the sofa with a bag of chips instead of doing something productive? That's fine once in a while, but you should be spending most of your discretionary time reading and learning and trying to better yourself. Are you moving towards your vision and figuring out what you need to learn to achieve it?   How do you behave in your moments of crisis? What happens when you're faced with a moral dilemma? How do you treat other people?   If you’re a leader, what do you encourage in yourself and in others? How do you carry yourself in front of them? And what do you tolerate from people and from yourself?   Are you content with your life right now? Even if you're not satisfied, are you learning to be content with where you are? There are a lot of people who spend their whole life dissatisfied. It's ok to not be completely satisfied with where you're at, but if you've got core values and a purpose and a vision and you're going after those, you can be content where you are while still having a clear idea of where you're going and what you want to accomplish.   All those things come together to create your personal culture. So whatever you create, however your life looks, because of that, know you're going to attract more of what you created. If you're someone who's always negative, positive people will not want to interact with you. If you're someone who's always positive, negative people won't want to interact with you. It's your choice which group you want to be a part of. It's up to you who you want to be, who you want to attract and how you want that all to play out.   Joe’s personal culture Joe strives to be a person who is a thinker, contemplator and someone who ponders the big questions in life. He always wants to be learning. He is always listening to podcasts, trying to read as many books as possible, looking for people to learn from. He is always striving for achievement and fulfillment.   He is really trying in life to live out his purpose and the reason that God created him. He spends time focused on and working on those things. He strives to stay true to his core values to use them as a tool to filter life decisions through.   Additionally Joe wants to spend his discretionary time wisely. He doesn’t want to waste time or hang out with people he doesn’t enjoy being around. He has a small group of people he spends discretionary time with, who he enjoys being around. They’re people he brings value to and who bring value into his life. They’re people he can learn from and who can learn from him as well. Joe wants to spend his time in general serving people and helping them get better.   He also wants to always be content with where he is in life, knowing he’s done all he can to get where he is, but never satisfied. He strives for healthy dissatisfaction, which drives him to do better and reach more of the potential God has placed in him.   All these things create Joe’s personal culture.   Business culture Your business culture flows directly from your personal culture. If you're doing things in your personal life that you shouldn't be doing, or that you don't want other people to know about, it's going to show up in your business culture. You want to be the best person you can be so that people will respect you because they know you're a person who walks the talk.   Most businesses have an organic culture, which rarely results in a culture that's pleasing to the leader. It’s common to hear the statement, if you just get great people the culture will take care of itself. Joe couldn't disagree with that more.   Great people could be very talented, but they could have different core values than you. They could have their own agenda coming into your organization. They could have different goals than you and be working towards their goals while they're in your business, leading other people in a different direction than where you want them to go.   You need great people, but you need great people who are like-minded to you and who are sold out to going after your vision. Otherwise, you're going to develop a culture that's geared toward the vision of your people. That’s probably not your vision.   Have you ever had one of those situations where you just can't drag yourself out of bed in the morning to go into the office? You just can't bear the people there, you can't bear the environment there and you can't bear what's going on. Working in a bad culture is just miserable.   Characteristics of a bad culture Everyone does their own thing Office cancers actively working against your vision Infighting and office politics People protect their turf and refuse to share or help other team members Team members sabotaging one another Poor client experience because your team is working against one another at the expense of your clients Good people leaving your team out of frustration The wrong people sticking around too long A toxic atmosphere / office gossip Staff always arriving the moment the work day starts and leaving the moment the work day ends Salespeople find excuses to stay away from the office as often as possible     Do you have any of those things going on with your team or in your office? If you do, it’s a big red flag. You need to take a look at this and see if you've got things rolling the way you want them to.   If you are the leader and you've got a bad culture in your office, it's your fault. It is nobody else's fault. As the leader you are 100 percent responsible for your culture. You set the tone for it. You allowed it to flourish. Think of yourself like a gardener. You've got this garden to tend, you're trying to grow flowers, and when weeds are popping up you're just sitting back and letting them grow. Do you blame the weeds for being there? Or do you blame yourself for letting them grow?   It's the same thing in your culture. If you've got a bad business culture, it doesn't matter if someone on your team is causing it. You're the one who sets the tone, so you're responsible for it.   Building an intentional culture within your organization It's a very simple process. It's not easy but it's very simple. It starts with very clearly defined core values and a very clearly defined vision. These fundamental principles are foundational to building a great culture.   What do you believe for your business? Do you have this written out so you can recite it? How does your purpose create this vision of who you want to be and what you want to become?   Your next job is to give them away to your team, and to do it with conviction. You stand behind them and say, “these are things that we're not going to compromise on.” And then you personally live them out. You're the example everyone else is going to follow. So you need to truly believe them, and you need to hold your team and yourself accountable for living them out.   One of the beautiful things about having a great vision and culture is that you don't have to make all the decisions yourself. You can create an environment where everybody's running forward together instead of you out in front dragging them along behind you. You, as the leader, are the keeper of the culture in the beginning, especially if you've had a team that's been together for a while and you've been really lax. They're going to test you and make it difficult on you at first. You have to keep that culture, and encourage and correct the people who aren't living it out, to get it established. And then when you bring new people on to your team you have to filter them through your core values and your vision to make sure they're buying into those things before they ever join your team. Check out Episode 3 for more on that.   Over time, the culture takes over and starts to correct itself. You'll have the people on the team who are sold out to your culture, core values and vision. They're going hold people in line or make sure  someone who's not operating within the core values knows it. Your time to step in and deal with those things is going to be relatively minimal because the culture will protect itself. But that takes some time to get into place.   Culture is an incredible force. It’s probably the most important thing in business that nobody thinks about. Are you letting it be momentum against you instead of momentum for you?     If you enjoy the podcast, Joe would be greatly honored if you would give it a review on iTunes. Also, if you haven't already, please go to iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts, and hit the subscribe button.

Fulfillment is when your purpose and core values are in full alignment with each other. Naturally, core values and purpose are two of the first things Joe covered, in episodes 3 and 4. You need to spend the time figuring those two things out.   When you take the two together and ask yourself, ‘What do I believe? Why was I born?’ the next logical question is ‘Who or what do I want to be?’ That is vision, and that’s the topic for today’s episode.   It’s really important that you know what your core values and purpose are when working on your vision. If you’re filtering your vision through your core values and your purpose, you’re much more likely to come up with a vision that will bring you fulfillment.   If you’re just coming up with a vision without thinking those other things through, you might be running 100 miles an hour in the complete wrong direction. So if you haven’t yet, go back and listen to episode 3 about core values and episode 4 on purpose before you listen to this one.   Doing the hard work of figuring out your core values and purpose, allows you to create a much more vibrant, satisfying and fulfilling vision.     Creating the vision for your life and business Joe subscribes to the idea you need a vision that’s so clear and detailed you can close your eyes and picture what it looks like.   What are your dreams? What are your highest aspirations?   Don’t think small here. There are people who are not putting in the work to do this, but you don’t need to be around those people when you’re coming up with your vision because a lot of them get satisfaction from tearing other people’s dreams down. But don’t worry: if your vision doesn’t make a few haters laugh, then your vision isn’t big enough or bold enough.     How do you go about creating your vision for yourself? Joe has seven steps for how to do this. If fulfillment was easy, everybody would be contented, satisfied and fulfilled. But it’s not easy. It takes the best you’ve got to go through the steps to figure it out.  It’s worth the effort. If you follow this plan, you can create an incredible vibrant vision for yourself.     Step 1: Quiet time Quiet time is one of the most valuable tools that we have. Joe is always amazed how many successful people who have risen to a certain level spend all their time in noise and distraction. They don’t have time to stop and think, and they have that brain spin going on all the time where problems are going through their heads and they can’t think about anything else.   Sound familiar?   You can gut it out and play defense, using force of will and extra hours to push your way through it and still be successful. But when you stop and slow down, you get the chance to study yourself and your situation, think about how you’re going to grow personally and in your business. When you stop and do those things, you get a chance to play offense.   Joe’s business is in real estate, and from the moment he walks in the door as the Managing Broker of a company, he has problems to solve, people who need help and questions to answer. If he didn’t spend time in the morning working ON the business so that he could go into the day with a plan to be on offense, to push the big rocks forward, he would spend the entire day in reaction mode. He would put all his time and energy on defense, responding to what’s on fire instead of what’s important.   Quiet time gives you a chance to set your own agenda for your own success. It gives you an opportunity to work ON your business or ON your life and be on offense even when everything’s going crazy all around you. Quiet time is hugely important in all of the things that you do in your life.   Step 2: Think about what you want your life and business to look like In order to create to your vision, some of the things you need to be thinking about during that quiet time are: What do you want to accomplish? What are your greatest goals in life? What do you want your life to stand for when it’s all over? When you look back, what do you want people to say about you? Who you were, what you did, what you accomplished, and the people whose lives you touched? Who do you want to serve with your life? Yourself, others, the betterment of the world, a group of people? How do you want to serve those people? How do you apply your skills, talents and purpose towards serving people? What do you want your day to look like? What problems do you want to solve? What people do you want working for you and with you?   These are important questions because when you get to the end of your life, if you spent your whole life serving yourself, you’re going to feel pretty empty inside. We’re built to work with other people and to help other people. Working that into your vision—how you help other people and how you serve them—will make that a much more fulfilling process than not thinking about it and just seeing whatever comes your way.   One way to really get a feel for who you are and what you believe is to look at what Dan Sullivan calls the four freedoms. These are the areas where we’re all seeking freedom in our lives: time, money, relationships and purpose.   Ask yourself: if I had unlimited time and I could do anything in the world I wanted to, what would that be? If you’re feeling particularly overwhelmed with the noise and distraction of life, your first reaction might be that you just want to play golf all day or go on vacation. But when you think it through and really drill down, you’ll find that if you had unlimited time you’d be spending it in your purpose, doing something you believe God created you to do.   What about if you had freedom of money, unlimited resources? What would you do with them?   Joe’s wife, one of the most generous people he knows, would be giving a lot of it away, helping people with it. Is that something you’d do? Or perhaps, like Peter Diamandis, you would be pursuing some big idea, like Space X, the passenger service into space.   What’s the big idea that you would go after if you had unlimited resources?   Then there’s freedom of relationships. If you were free to associate with anybody, who would those people be? Where would those relationships go? This is not just about your relationship with a spouse or family, but also about business relationships. What type of people would you want to surround yourself with? Freedom of relationship is choosing who you want to associate with and who you don’t.   Freedom of purpose is created by freedom of time, money and relationships. It opens the door to live out your purpose and then your vision comes into play.   If you look at all those things and spend your quiet time working on them, you’ll discover what that vision needs to look like.     Step 3: Get everything down on paper in great detail Some people are not writers, they don’t think this way, but you need to break your vision down into smaller chunks and work on it a little bit at a time.   In your vision of what you want your life to be, what does your typical morning look like? Write down in detail your typical morning, typical afternoon, evening, relationships, vacation time and work time. Don’t just think in terms of what you see, think of what you hear, smell, and touch. Use all your senses to make it come alive. Break it down in all the different ways you can think of, get it all out on paper. Put it aside for a little while, then come back to it, add more detail. It’s not something you do in an afternoon.   Over the course of months and even a year or two, you create a vivid vision of what you want your life to be. Write it in the present tense as if it’s already happened because if you’re reviewing it on a regular basis, you need to make sure that it’s real to you as you’re doing it. This is the thing that’s going to drive you. When you create your goals to achieve this, believing you’re on your way to this vision is what’s going to push you and drive you when you don’t feel like doing things.     Step 4: Go to your core values and filter the vision through them Is your vision consistent with what you believe and what your core values look like? Another term for vision is 'core values realization' because you’re actually living out your core values. Are you able to achieve this vision by living them, or are there values you don’t have listed you need to add?   Some people, early on in their lives, are not hard workers. They’re not grinders, they don’t have discipline. It’s something they have to learn how to do. If you have a fantastic vivid vision of what you want your life to be, it can give you the drive you need and provide the motivation that gets you to go after it when you don’t feel like it. That drive and work ethic is something you can develop even though it’s difficult. That’s where your core values come into play.   If it’s not, you need to adjust your core values or your vision. Are you living out something in your vision that is in opposition to your core values? Or is there something missing from your core values, like hard work, that is a key component of achieving the vision? You need to add it and make sure you are actively trying to live it out so you can achieve the vision you’re going after. That’s why you need to do the core values first, before the vision, because you use them to help shape that vision.     Step 5: Your ‘why’ or purpose Now that you have your detailed vision, why do you want it? How is your purpose going to get you to that?   In the previous episode Joe talked about the utilitarian vs. artistic approach to purpose. The utilitarian approach is when you’re living out your purpose every day, and your vocation is your purpose. The artistic approach is when you’re working hard so you can create the time, space and resources to do your purpose separately from your work. Which one are you doing and how does that match your vision?   If your vision does not give you the ability to live out your purpose, it’s going to be unfulfilling when you get to it. You really need to think about that WHY. Why do you want this vision? Why are you going after this? What is the reason that you’re doing this?   All of that comes together to help you come up with those reasons why you’re going to push when you’re exhausted. You know your vision is vivid enough when, if someone where to wake you up out of a dead sleep at 3am and said ‘it’s time to do something that’s going to move you closer to your vision,’ you would jump up and say ‘yeah, let’s go do that right now.’ Then you know your vision is driving you. If you would rather go back to sleep, your vision still needs work!     Step 6: Turn your vision from a dream into a goal Create an action plan for yourself to start moving forward. Start at the end and work your way backward, thinking about what you would need to do to get to that end goal from where you are right now.   They say the first million dollars is the hardest to make. Once you have resources like that, opportunities become a lot easier to come across and act on, but when you’re struggling trying to get to it and don’t have the resources, you have to do everything yourself. If you’re at a point where there are lots of things you need to do yourself, you need to have the steps in place to work backwards from there. You eat an elephant one bite at a time. There’s a whole set of steps to get you to your goal, but you have to take the time to think about what those steps are. Figure out how to each day take a step towards making that vision a reality. That’s what the action plan needs to be. Sometimes when you create the action plan, you see there’s a big gap you don’t know how to get past. Work towards getting to the edge of the gap. When you get to the edge, you figure out at that point how to get over it. Or you enlist other people to help. You have to believe that as you’re working towards it, the doors are going to open to help you when the time is right for that next step.   The action plan is hugely important and you need to be relentless in moving forward on it every day to make your vision more and more of a reality.     Step 7: Periodically, adjust the vision Often, when you’re pursuing something, detours happen and take you in a totally new direction. In life, the best-laid plans go awry and you end up going in a new direction.   Back in the recession, Joe had a plan. But things didn’t go to plan and he ended up going in a much better direction instead. Things change as we have new experiences, challenges and disappointments. They strip things from us and give us new goals in life. That’s where you have to go back to your vision and ask if it’s still in line with what that will bring you fulfillment. Have you discovered a new offshoot of your purpose that takes you in a different direction?   Go back to podcast number 2 if you haven’t heard Joe’s story about the recession. In it, you’ll hear how his goals changed, and the materialism of his 20s was stripped out of him. Joe realized doing big things that change the world and having an impact on other people is more important than material things. He had to rethink his vision because his core values changed and he gained a new understanding of his purpose.   Periodically looking at that vision and adjusting it will help you make sure it remains in line with your core values and purpose. It also ensures your vision becomes that fulfilling part of your life. Take the time if you haven’t already to sit down and figure out your core values and purpose. Then take those two things together and come up with your vision.   So many people are aimless and rudderless, and their comfort zone shrinks to the size of the chair they sit in watching in TV. Take the time to build this foundation because it’s going to give you a path to a much richer and more fulfilling future.   If you’ve been enjoying this podcast and it has been helpful, head on over to iTunes and give it a rating and a review. Then share it with someone you think it could help. Joe would love to hear from you at joe@studentoflifepodcast.com.  

Do you believe God created you for a reason? Every one of us has a reason to be on this earth and it’s up to each individual to go through the exercise of figuring it out so that we can live up to the potential that’s been placed in us, serving people and world in the way that we were created to do.   If you are not sure what your purpose is, there are some questions you might ask yourself to help you figure it out. You want to look at things that give you hints as to why you were created. Your answers to the following questions will give you a good idea of what your purpose might be.   What brings you joy? What do you lose yourself in doing? What are the activities you do that are so engrossing you lose track of time? All of a sudden it’s 6 hours later and you’re looking at the clock wondering how the time passed so fast. Where in your life are you of the most value to other people? When you are solving some sort of problem for other people, what problem are you solving? In which area are your friends always asking for your help? What are you truly great at doing? There are some things either you do better than anybody you know, or with practice you could do better than anybody you know. Where in your life, business, or the work you produce, do you have unrelenting standards? If there is an area where you feel that strongly, it’s a good indicator that’s tied to your purpose. Imagine you were told that going forward in your life you were only going to be allowed to do one specific activity all day every day. What would you choose to do?   If you don’t know what you’re born to do, spend some time thinking about these questions. In your quiet time, study these questions and your answers: they will give you clues to your purpose. Everybody has a superpower they do better than anybody else, or they have the potential to do better than anybody else with practice and refinement.  In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell states that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to be world class at something. When you discover what your purpose is, you want to spend those 10,000 hours to become world class. Figure out what your super power is, then work on it and continually refine it.   Do you know what your purpose is, the reason you were put on this planet? Joe believes there are four things God put him on this earth to do: write, teach, solve problems and lead people. When he works in those four areas, that’s where he excels in life and gets the most satisfaction out of what he’s doing. When he applies himself in those four areas, that’s where he’s most effective.   If you can discover those areas that are your purpose, it will make all the difference to you in being able to live a life with more fulfillment. Spend some time thinking about what those areas are for you.  If you already know, spend time pursuing them and practicing them.   Joe is constantly trying to learn new things and build himself in those four areas. When you discover your purpose you should orient your life to relentlessly pursue those things.   There are two schools of thought when it comes to figuring out your purpose and how you’re going to pursue it in your life.   The Utilitarian Approach - This is where you figure out how to monetize your purpose and make a living doing it. The Artistic Approach - This is where you make money doing something else so you are able to fund your purpose because either you can't or decide not to monetize your purpose   You have to decide which way you want to go. Monetizing your purpose is a common goal, but some people look at their purpose and don’t want to monetize it. It might be because they’ll have to reduce their standards or commercialize it and they don’t want to do that. Or, because it’s going to be tough to make money doing it, and they know they can make more money doing something else, which can fund their purpose.   You may be asking, how can I find fulfillment if I’m not able to work in my purpose every day?     Remember, fulfillment and financial success do not necessarily go together. You can have financial success and no fulfillment, or fulfillment without financial success. You hear about people all the time that leave their high-paying corporate jobs to go pursue something that brings them joy or that’s their purpose. Perhaps they decide to open a surf shop, or travel the world, or become naturalists who live off the land and off the grid. If you choose to do that, the odds are high that you’ll have fulfillment even though you don’t necessarily have financial success.   There are lots of women and men who feel that raising their children is their highest calling. They might even choose to live off one salary so one parent can home school the kids. They move forward, preparing their children for the world, and they feel incredibly fulfilled even though maybe they struggle financially.   If you’re called to be a writer or an artist, there’s no guarantee that you can make a living doing those things. You need to have a great product, great marketing and you also need luck. There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who have written novels or like to paint or are amazing singers, but few of them are making a living doing it. Yet those people are likely to have very deep fulfillment despite potentially limited financial success.   Look at Vincent Van Gogh or Edgar Allan Poe. Both are considered geniuses of their art, and it’s hard to argue either one of them wasn’t living out their purpose. However, both of them died broke.   It’s something to keep in mind. Understand the difference between the utilitarian approach and the artistic approach, and decide which way you’re going to go. Only you can decide whether you will build a career in your purpose, or work a career that allows you to pursue your purpose.   What about someone who is making a living in their purpose?   Take Tony Robbins, the personal development coach and speaker. He has built a lucrative career in that area and if you’ve ever watched him or seen interviews with him, there’s little doubt that he gets great fulfillment from helping to grow people. It’s probably safe to say he’s figured out how to monetize his purpose.   But sometimes people choose the opposite way. Joe has a friend who is an amazing woodworker. He could have made a living doing that, but he gets great joy doing those things for his friends and family and giving them away to people who are close to him. He was a real estate agent for his career, he got fulfillment from serving people that way as well, and did an outstanding job. He made a good living in real estate, was able to put money aside, and now he can spend more time in his woodshop than working with buyers and sellers. The woodshop likely brings him a very deep sense of fulfillment and he’s living out a purpose creating heirlooms for his family and friends.     So which way will you go: the utilitarian approach or artistic approach? Before you decide, you need to get absolute clarity on your purpose. Start by using the questions listed above. But the questions alone are not enough.   If you want to discover these things about yourself—your purpose, core values, fulfillment, and answers to other deep thinking questions—you need to create the right environment for yourself.  Here are the six steps to creating a fertile environment for self-discovery, personal development, and gaining clarity on your purpose.     Step One: Quiet Time. This is a recurring theme on the Student of Life podcast. There aren’t many things more important in your life than quiet time. You must set aside time for working on yourself, learning how your brain works, learning how you’re wired, contemplating the big questions in your life, coming up with plans for work, doing devotionals and spending time with God.  The world is full of noise and distraction and too many people are so consumed with being busy that they do not stop to study themselves. Make an effort to stop the spinning, the noise, the craziness and just be quiet and see what your mind  brings up.   Joe uses two different types of quiet time. The first kind is a daily planning and devotional time in the morning. This helps Joe protect his energy, willpower and confidence, and be prepared for the day ahead. The other kind is typically on the weekends or in an evening, in a place that Joe finds inspiring, like nature. While sitting quietly with a journal, a good cigar and bourbon, Joe uses this time to think about life, problem solve and marinate ideas.   Quiet time is essential for finding your purpose. Go through the questions from earlier, sit and contemplate them. Keep a thought or idea journal where you write down what you discover about yourself: how you think, where you struggle, your triggers, your good and bad habits, what emotions come up. You’re more likely to be more creative when you have that time away from noise and distractions. When you know yourself intimately, you make better decisions, and you're more likely to create conditions where you will have success.     Step Two: Step outside of your comfort zone on a daily basis. Develop a sense of adventure, try new things and do things that scare you. When you’re not doing that, your comfort zone is shrinking, and as your comfort zone shrinks you become less adventurous and more sedentary. You learn things about yourself that you didn’t know when you’re facing a fear. Discovering new things about yourself is part of the process for finding your purpose.   Did you know that your body reacts exactly the same way physiologically when you have fear and when you have excitement? The only difference is the way your brain frames it. When you're doing something scary, help your body trick your mind by reframing it as exciting! All those extreme sports people, they don’t realize they’re terrified because they’re so excited. If you do the things that scare you and step out of your comfort zone, the world opens up to you and you learn new things about yourself that bring you closer to your purpose. If you discover something that resonates with you or brings you joy, you’ve got to keep exploring that because you don’t know where it will lead.     Step Three: Surround yourself with people you admire, who are actively living out their purpose. These are people that you aspire to be like. Ask yourself these questions:   What traits do you admire in others and who do you know who has those traits? Who is great at something you want to do? Who is someone great at something they chose to go after?   Find these people and spend time with them so you can learn from them. Joe’s grandma always advised, “you have two ears and one mouth, use them in that proportion.” When you’re meeting with these people and allowing them to mentor you, don’t worry about trying to impress them with what you know and can do. Ask them questions, step back and let them teach you. When you’re around people who are living out their purpose, you will see clues as to how you can live out your own purpose. When you’re around people who have traits that you admire, you’re going to see how you can make those admirable traits a part of who you are. You can see how these other folks treat people and you can learn how to treat people better yourself.   When you’re serving people and playing out your purpose in a way that serves people, down the road you’ll have an opportunity to be a mentor to somebody else and help them move along the road like these folks will help you.     Step Four: Aggressively weed negative people and negative thoughts out of your life. Don’t listen to the naysayers. Most people stop dreaming by the time they reach 30 years old. They get through at school, get into a career and maybe have a family. Then they shut off their dreams and spend their life living for the weekend, waiting for their next vacation, waiting for their retirement. Don’t be one of those people. Those folks are more likely to tear down other people. When you're on the sidelines, afraid to get into the game, it’s much easier to tear somebody else down than reignite your own dreams and have the courage to go after them. Remember, courage is not the absence of fear, courage is admitting there’s fear and going forward and doing it anyway.   When the haters hate, don’t let them cap your dreams or dissuade you from going after it with all that you’ve got. Remember, the only person who can put limits on you is you. Get rid of that negativity from other people. Choose to be an optimist. Get the words ‘I can't’ out of your vocabulary and don’t let anybody else tell you that you can’t.   We live in some of the most amazing times ever in the history of the world. There’s nothing that can’t be done. Miracles happen every day and people are accomplishing the impossible every day. Peter Diamandis calls it going after your moonshot. In the early 1960s, President John Kennedy said ‘we’re going to go to the moon by the end of the decade.’ Nobody knew how they were going to do it, but they still accomplished it.   If people can do that with the technology way inferior to what we have today, there’s nothing you can’t do now. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do it.     Step Five: Stop lying to yourself. Life is full of challenges and when you acknowledge what you’re up against you will be able to come up with a realistic plan to overcome it. If you pretend the challenges don’t exist, they’re going to defeat you. Some people have a PhD in making excuses; it’s never their fault, fate has conspired against them. If you make excuses when you’re going after your purpose it will eat away at that purpose. If you don’t accomplish something you set out to do because you just didn’t do it, admit it to yourself. Even if you don’t admit it to other people, admit to yourself that you didn’t do it because you didn’t want it enough, or you were lazy in that moment, or you wanted to watch TV instead of doing what you could have done to improve yourself. Admit it to yourself, don’t tolerate excuses and don’t hang around excuse-makers.   Failure is a step on the road to success. When you fail, do an autopsy, figure out what you will do differently next time, and get moving in a positive direction. If you don’t study your failures, you’ll never achieve what you want to achieve. As Edison said of the journey to inventing the incandescent light bulb: he didn’t fail 1000 times, it just took 1000 steps to create it! Have that kind of attitude when you fail.   When you realize you’re going the wrong way, don’t make excuses or lie to yourself. Admit it, change direction and do it immediately. It’s never too late to change your direction. If you’re going in the wrong direction, every step you go takes you further and further away from the right direction. Don’t lie to yourself, don’t make excuses, pursue your purpose, and don’t sabotage yourself by lying to yourself or making excuses.     Step Six: Never stop learning. Learning is the fountain of youth for your brain. If you stop using your brain you’re going to lose it. What inspires you? Seek out more information on that. Read, listen to podcasts, ask questions of the people that you meet with, learn from them. If you don’t expand your horizons and learn new things, there may be a purpose for you out there you won’t figure out because you’re not learning. Develop your curiosity and try to learn something from everybody you meet.   “The only difference from us years from now is going to be in the books we read and the people we meet.” ~ Charles “Tremendous” Jones     Follow these steps and you will create a fertile environment for achievement and self-discovery.  And if you’re working at discovering your purpose, it will be an environment where your purpose will become apparent over time. When you discover it, relentlessly pursue it.  Make it become who you are.   All these things we’re talking about—purpose, core values, fulfillment—they’re things that don’t happen overnight. You need to work at it, think about it, study it, and spend time living with what you’ve come up with for a while before you move on and study it some more. Take the purposes you discover, filter them through your core values, and get the two areas into alignment so you can start moving towards fulfillment.   Stay tuned for the next episode of Student of Life, where Joe discusses Vision.

What do you believe? You can never truly know yourself if you don’t take time to figure out the answer to this question. As Joe discussed in Episode 1, you can’t achieve fulfillment without knowing your core values and aligning them with your purpose. Core values and beliefs also build your personal and business culture. If you don’t know what you believe, how can you attract other people that believe the same things you do? Clearly defined core values allow you to attract the kind of people you want around you, and they repel the kind of people you don’t want around you. That’s the beauty of it.   The journey of self-knowledge begins with a single list Back in 2008, Joe had one of the greatest honors of his career. One of his mentors was Howard Brinton, a fantastic sales trainer, well known in real estate, whose company called Star Power Systems inspired thousands of real estate agents to get better at what they do. He invited people at the top of their business to be the ‘Star of the Month’, where they would share what they were doing that was successful in a recorded interview for others to learn from their story. In May 2008, Joe had the honor of being chosen as a Star Power Star. On the way to the interview, Joe realized that as well as real estate wisdom, he wanted to share other things he knew to be true. He knew this information about life and leadership could be helpful to others, because it was part of what had made him a success.   Joe’s 18 rules of life and leadership. Always remember that one day you will stand before God and answer for all you’ve done and all you’ve failed to do. At the end of the day, all you really have is your integrity and your good name; compromise either one and you have nothing. Your true character is revealed by how you treat people who can do nothing for you—when no one is watching. There is no such thing as menial labor; there is honor and dignity in any task done with excellence and a good attitude. Greatness is impossible without discipline and sacrifice. Talk less; listen more. Respect and popularity do not always go hand-in-hand; if you seek both, you will ultimately have neither. You can treat people differently and still treat them fairly; treating everyone exactly the same is not necessarily fair. Expect to learn something new from each person with whom you come in contact. Being able to gracefully admit you are wrong is a sign of strength. Ultimately, people appreciate the truth delivered with love even when it upsets them. One of the most valuable team members is someone to whom you can assign a task, and then remove that task from your mind, sure in the knowledge that it will get done. Demonstrate you are willing to do yourself any job you assign to them and people will do anything for you. The best way to teach is by personal testimony: if you share how you successfully persevered through a difficult situation or dealt with a problem, it gives others hope they can do the same. Take advantage of teachable moments—especially when they are inconvenient to you. When people understand how their job fits into the big picture and affects the success or failure of the whole team, they are much more likely to do their job with pride, passion and excellence. In a successful sales-driven business, there will always be a certain amount of chaos; if you want order, become an accountant. The very qualities that make someone a great salesperson also makes him or her difficult to manage. When Joe returned from his Star Power trip, he spent some of his quiet time thinking about the list and boiling it down into something he could share with people more widely. Eventually, the list of 18 was distilled down to 5 core values. To this day, Joe carries this list with him and looks at it on a daily basis. It’s his personal constitution, a list of values he holds dear, who he is and wants to be.   Joe’s core values: I always do the right thing. If things aren’t right at home, you can’t be awesome at work. Family comes first whenever it needs to come first. Everyone is fighting an epic battle you can’t see. I treat everyone with kindness and compassion. Making a difference. I always seek to have a positive impact on the world and the people I serve. The best. I do whatever it takes to be the best in whatever endeavor I choose to pursue.   Living by core values Sometimes God has a plan for your life that you don’t realize. Joe began working on this list in 2008, which was the year the market crashed and the recession began. You can hear more about his story during the recession and how it shaped his character in episode 2. During this time, Joe made the decision he was going to build his business and filter his decisions according to that list of core values. He wanted to make who he was in business the same as who he was personally, and wanted to share that with others so they knew who he was and what he was doing. It made a huge difference to his life, and had a bigger impact than he ever dreamed possible. In choosing to live by his core values, Joe had a road map to filter all of his decisions through some very difficult recession years.   Using core values in business When he became a listing agent for HUD in 2011, Joe knew his core value of ‘the best’ had played a part. His small team had a near perfect scorecard for HUD, which wouldn’t have happened if they weren’t all applying things through the core beliefs and values. Having his team on board with the core values from the beginning helped them know how to filter decisions and allowed everyone to go full steam ahead in the same direction. The core values provided clarity about who they were and what they believed as a team. It also meant Joe didn’t have to be involved in every single decision, and become a bottle-neck in the business, because his team knew his beliefs, and could make decisions on their own. Articulating his core values to other people had immense value.  Ultimately, this led to the best production years of Joe’s career occurring during the recession.   When Joe moved to his current company, Elam Real Estate, having those core values again played a huge role. When he met with the man starting the firm, articulating his values meant they were both able to determine quickly they had similar values and beliefs about how to operate in business. This made it easier to move forward with him and help him build his company. Joe knew that sharing his core values had worked to build an incredible culture with his little team of 3 people, and soon learned it could work the same way when building a company. The team at Elam Real Estate spent several months coming up with a constitution of core values for the company.   The Elam Real Estate Non-Negotiables We have the right people, who do it the right way, in the right culture. We do the right thing for our clients. Right now. Right people: our passionate real estate experts relentlessly pursue self-improvement and system refinement. Right way: we aggressively protect our clients’ interests so they save money or make more of it. Right culture: faith, family, fun and financial independence and words are describe our family and our people. Right thing: we do the right thing, especially when the right thing is hard to do. Right now: we attack problems. They are one of the few things in life you can attack with impunity.   Shared values build a strong culture Spending time to put that in place and filter all the staff and decisions through those core values gave Elam Real Estate an advantage over a lot of firms. When hiring, the people who had similar values got excited to work there. Even better, those who didn’t have the same belief system removed themselves from consideration. A really strong culture began to develop, centered around shared values and beliefs. Most cultures occur organically and nobody ever gives much thought to whether or not they’re building the culture the way they want to. Many people think that if you hire great people, you’ll automatically have a great culture but this is not always true. If you have core values, your culture will grow purposefully, not accidentally. The next step was sharing the core values with clients. Every client meeting begins with explaining who Elam Real Estate is and what the team believes. This had had a 100% positive response from clients and has also generated a reputation that brings clients in through word-of-mouth. The benefits of having these core values in place have been numerous for Elam Real Estate. As the culture gets stronger and stronger, it starts to police itself and team members correct each other. It’s amazing because the culture holds people in line. It begins to feed itself, which eliminates a lot of problems that can show up in your team and client relationships. There are fewer conflicts because having core values gives you permission to call people out when they’re acting contrary to your company’s core values. Or, you can gently tell your clients that you won’t do things because it’s not in concert with what you believe.   How to do it for yourself Not only has Joe seen all of this work in his small team of 3 people and the bigger team of Elam Real Estate, but he has also seen it work in larger companies and helped both real-estate and non real-estate entrepreneurs implement it into their businesses. This stuff works, and if you do it, you will have positive results. The actions steps you need to take are: Understand that building out your core values is a process, and you can’t fast track it. You have to slow down, think it through and allow time for reflection and development. You need quiet time, fully unplugged, with no interruptions of any knd. If you aren’t having quiet time on a regular basis to think and reflect, you’re really cheating yourself out of opportunities to be successful. Start by writing a list of what you believe about life and business. Think about what the fundamental truths are upon which you’ve built your life and business. Live with that list for a while. Go back with your quiet time, add to the list, read it, reflect on it and edit it. Rank the list in order of priority and whittle it down until you get to the essence of who you are and what you believe. Keep repeating step three until you believe you have a strong list you can own and be proud to share with the world. - Boil it down to 3 – 5 overriding principles and make sure you have complete clarity on those, so you can talk about them backwards and forwards. Know exactly what you mean by them and have a single word or phrase that you can repeat and verbalize easily. - Do you really believe them? Is the proof evident in your life that you’re living them out. When people will look at your life, if it doesn’t match up to what you say your core values are, they’re not going to believe a word you say. Create a final core values document. Articulate everything very clearly in writing. Create a single word or statement you and your business can operate by and easily explain to others. Start giving your core values away to other people. Don’t compromise what you believe.   Important points Sometimes the people you’re closest to are going to be the ones who push back on you the hardest. That’s why you have to spend quiet time and make sure you really believe, so when you do get push back, you can stand strong against it. If you have a team and you give this away, you’re probably going to lose people, even key people. In the long run, if you lose people because their values and beliefs are not in alignment with yours, you will have a stronger team. As you go forward, you use your core values to filter new team members and clients, and in everything you do. It’s all about the power of why, just like Simon Sinek outlines in his book. People don’t do business with you because of what you do, they do business with you because of why you do it. People do business with people they have commonality and connection with. Knowing why you do what you do and being able to articulate it—that’s when you can really build a business and customer base that stays with you.   Share the core values with your team, your clients, and everyone you meet, and make sure you’re actually living them out.   Resources mentioned in this episode: Episode 2 where Joe shares his story Joe’s Facebook show: Short Attention Span Wisdom Start with Why by Simon Sinek.

Welcome back to the Student of Life podcast with your host Joe Hafner. In last week’s episode, Joe looked at fulfillment and what that means. Today's question: are success and fulfillment the same thing? It’s great to have both but you can have one without the other, which Joe has experienced. As discussed in the last episode, fulfillment is when your purpose is in full alignment with your core values. But what is success? To show the difference between success with fulfillment and success without fulfillment, Joe explains some of his story. Early financial success By time Joe reached his early 30s, he had achieved a fair amount of success. He had learned real estate from one of the top real estate agents in America, was responsible for getting him featured in Time Magazine, had been his primary editor on two books published by Harper Collins, co-authored with him a pair of real estate books, and had bought and flipped close to 200 single family residences. Back in the early 2000s, Joe was buying property on an almost weekly basis and had a $2 million line of credit to buy property at foreclosure sales. He also coached and consulted with top real estate teams across North America. In 2008, Joe was about to become the Managing broker of a new real estate firm, had a couple of novels yet to be published and by all accounts, had more success than the average person in their mid 30s. However, what he didn’t have was fulfillment. Joe didn’t know what his purpose was, what he wanted, or what he was chasing. By his own admission, he thought too highly of himself and had grown cocky, which kept him from digging into what fulfillment would look like for him. He believed he didn’t need to learn anything new. The biggest problem, though, is that Joe neither liked nor saw value in people. Facing reality Everything in Joe’s life changed on October 1, 2008. That was the date the new company he was hired to lead opened its doors. It was also the date of the TARP bail out when the whole economy tanked. In the following months, everything came crashing down. It was the beginning of the recession. Until then, Joe had been on top of the world and thought he could do anything. For the first several months, while the market crashed and burned around him, he was in denial. Eventually, though, he had to face reality: he was facing bankruptcy and complete financial ruin. He remembers sitting down with his wife and discussing the possibility of losing everything. Joe says this was a very humbling experience, and a turning point in his life. When you go through trials, you have two choices: you can give up and quit, or you can fight to try to make it through. Although Joe never wants to go through something like that again, he wouldn’t change anything about how it happened. What he did, what he learned, how he fought, and how God built him back up is the worst but also the best thing that every happened to him. Pain or Potential There are two reasons people change: pain or potential. For most people, it takes pain for them to change. The pain of this experience caused Joe to grow his character and get rid of the stuff that had defined him before. God stripped him bare, and Joe began to realize his purpose was to help people and coach them through their struggles. You have an opportunity where that pain can help you turn into something better, find your purpose and get rid of all the stuff that blocks your vision. Don’t waste the opportunity and go through that pain for nothing. Digging deep for reinvention Joe was forced to completely reinvent himself. By the time the recession was over, he was middle Tennessee’s distressed property expert and bulk of his business was referral-based. He saw an opportunity and figured out how to make the most of the market at the time. It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you have no choice but to dig deep down inside yourself and figure out if you have what it takes to make things happen. Joe worked 10-12 hours a day, 7 days a week because he had no choice. When the chips are down, you do what you have to do. Even though Joe was making a lot of money at this time, he wasn’t keeping it, and couldn’t see the end in sight. Because of this struggle, though, when people came in who were facing foreclosure and needed a short sale, he was able to sympathize with them. Often Joe’s clients had lost a job or been through a divorce, health problem, or death in the family and couldn’t afford to make their payments. He began to have compassion for people because he truly understood what they were going through. He did everything he could think of to get short sales done because he knew how important it was to people. That attitude got a lot of houses sold that otherwise would have been foreclosed, and even though Joe sometimes lost money, he gained fulfillment from helping people who otherwise wouldn’t have been helped. Becoming a student of life Joe says now that those experiences made him a better man. Going through those kinds of situations with people and seeing the impact he could have on the lives of others changed and humbled him. As he was working around the clock with no relief in sight, there was one scripture that he kept coming back to multiple times a day, every day for nearly 8 months: “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” James 1:2-4. Joe kept asking God to show him what he was supposed to learn so he could pass it on to someone else. The recession shaped him, refined him and caused him to start looking to grow. The things that are important started to change, as Joe realized the things that fulfill you and bring contentment and satisfaction in life are the things you can have regardless of money or resources. Materialism was stripped away as "stuff" stopped being important. Learning timeless truths During the recession, Joe started to learn the timeless truths he discussed in episode 1 of this podcast. He developed his core values because he had to figure out what he believed and valued so he knew where to focus and what to do.  He also had a newfound passion to help people, and could see people needed his assistance. It took a great amount of compassion and hours, research and training, discipline and learning how to grind, but by the time the real estate market started turning around again, Joe had learned how to operate in business in order to make things happen. He learned strategies for how to protect his energy and confidence, because with all that was going on he couldn’t afford to be drained. Developing morning rituals where he planned his day and made decisions early in the day became a crucial practice. He also made gym a non-negotiable because he knew the importance of building his body in order to be able to physically do the things that needed to be done. The most important timeless thing Joe learned during that recession is that life is all about people. People can be demanding, disruptive and disagreeable, but Joe’s learned to love and serve them because that’s what God created him to do. That’s what God created us all to do: to love and to serve. Fulfillment and success Back to the topic of fulfillment and success, Joe suggests that if you implement these unchanging things into your life and your business, your chances for success greatly increase. And if you apply them towards getting clarity in your core values, discovering your purpose, and making sure those are fully in alignment, you will move towards fulfillment. In the next episode, Joe explores core values more deeply, and how knowing exactly what you believe gives you a significant edge over the vast majority of people in business, in relationships, and in life.

  Welcome to Student of Life Podcast, a podcast for people seeking personal and professional fulfillment, guided by your host Joe Hafner. In this episode, Joe gives an overview of what this podcast series will be covering in the coming weeks and why he’s so excited about it. He wants to help you come up with questions to ponder in your quiet time, figure out what you’re great at doing and create a space where you know you’re listening to a kindred spirit. Your mind is a ‘use it or lose it’ organ. The goal of this podcast is to always give you reason to be using it, because the learning doesn’t have to end when you finish your education. Remember, fulfillment is not a destination, it’s a way of life. You never really gain full fulfillment, it’s something to always seek. Fulfillment is achieved when the purpose you were created for is fully aligned with your personal core values. A Student of Life A student of life is someone who is seeking personal and professional fulfillment. He or she is a seeker of knowledge, a deep thinker and maybe a bit of a philosopher. Do you have a quiet place where you go and ponder things? Do you come up with tons of ideas and questions? Is your brain always engaged, spinning, thinking? Do you listen to podcasts, read a lot of books, or watch Discovery Channel, History Channel and NatGeo? Are you the type of person who is always learning things and finding out what’s going on in the world? If so, this is the podcast for you. Finding your purpose Do you know your purpose, what God created you for? Seeking fulfillment starts by looking at a few things to figure out what your purpose in life is. There are two ways to figure this out: what you are truly great at, and what brings you joy. Author and founder of Strategic Coach, Inc., Dan Sullivan describes what you’re great at as your unique ability. Everyone has 3 or 4 things they’re truly great at doing. Whatever they are for you, could provide signs about your purpose. Similarly, when you identify the things that bring you joy, it can help you discover your purpose. Think about something you just love to do, that when you’re doing it, you completely lose track of time. How much of your time do you actually spend working in the area that brings you joy, that you’re great at? If you’re not spending 85% or more of your time there, you need to figure out how to increase it because that’s when you will start to have fulfillment. When you’re focused and spending all your time in that area, that’s when you can rise up to your full potential. Core Values and Core Beliefs Renee Descartes, the French philosopher, spent his entire life trying to figure out what he knew for sure. You may have heard of the term ‘cogito ergo sum’ or ‘I think therefore I am’. All he knew for sure was that he existed because he was a thinking being. Core values are not quite that extreme but it’s similar to Descartes’ process in that you look at what you believe and ask yourself, ‘What are the things I believe, that no matter what anybody does, they can’t change my mind?’ You might believe in God, that He is sovereign over the world and your life. You might believe you should have integrity, or honesty, and need to operate that way. If you haven’t thought about that before, start thinking about what your core values and beliefs are. It’s worth the effort to figure these things out. Most people don’t take the time to do it and they just kind of drift along in life without really knowing where they’re going. Your core values are like an anchor that helps you set your path. You can filter life through them to figure out what you believe, where you’re going, and what opportunities you are going to take. There are some people who claim to believe something, but their behavior doesn’t match up with it. If you have a core value or a core belief, you can change your behavior to match what you believe. And if you are struggling with that, then it’s time to think about what’s standing in the way. Limiting factors in your life Most limitations are self-imposed. Most everything that comes in your path that could stop you from achieving your fulfillment can be overcome with the proper amount of time, focus, desire and determination. If you have those four things, you can overcome just about anything. If you’re still reading this, you’re probably willing to make the time to think these things through, and you probably have the desire too. Maybe you need determination or need to learn how to focus. That’s a problem many people have, especially in our sound-bite world. Lack of focus might be limiting you. What about determination and discipline? Are you putting passion and knowledge together to achieve mastery of something? Malcolm Gladwell, in his book The Outliers, talks about the 10,000 hour rule. This rule states that you need 10,000 hours of practice in your area of expertise to really master something, be world class and set you apart from other experts. It’s about learning to grind and doing the little things to make you successful when no one is looking. In Rory Vaden’s book Take The Stairs he says ‘successful people do the things they don’t want to do, even when they don’t feel like doing them.’ Ultimately, that’s the difference between someone who is dissatisfied with their life because nothing ever happens for them, and someone who is a super high achiever, who has everything that they want in life. They take the stairs instead of the escalator. They have time, focus, desire and determination. The timeless, unchanging things in life Many podcasts and thought leaders spend much time talking about how fast our world is changing, about what you should be doing to prepare for those changes, which is definitely important and something that we need to contemplate. However, in this podcast, Joe will spend more time thinking and talking about the stuff that’s unchanging, the timeless things in business and life that prepare us for a fast-changing world. By far, the most important, unchanging truth is that everything in life is about people: family, friends, team-members, customers, vendors, the person in the check-out line, or on the street. One of the things that led Joe to do this podcast is his experiences doing just that on a weekly Facebook video program called Short Attention Span Wisdom. He ends every show by saying, “I believe we can learn something from everyone we meet, all we have to do is ask.” If you pour yourself into people and building them up, you’ll build yourself up at the same time. Some of the things you will learn in future episodes: Core values and how they shape your vision for your life or your business. How filtering things through your core values (decisions, thoughts, people you hire, etc) will help you create a great culture for your family, life and business How focused intensity helps you change your habits and achieve goals The importance of protecting your energy and confidence. How to put passion and knowledge together to achieve mastery of something Tune in for future episodes of Student of Life where Joe will challenge you to think outside the box about things you don’t normally consider to help you on your journey to personal and professional fulfillment. Links mentioned in this episode: Joe’s Short Attention Span Wisdom Facebook Show: https://www.facebook.com/SASWisdom Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers: https://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwell/dp/0316017930/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1495589410&sr=8-1&keywords=outliers Rory Vaden’s book Take The Stairs: https://www.amazon.com/Take-Stairs-Steps-Achieving-Success/dp/0399537767/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1495589458&sr=8-1&keywords=take+the+stairs Dan Sullivan’s books and podcasts: Strategic Coach: https://www.strategiccoach.com/ 10x Talk with Joe Polish: http://10xtalk.com/ The Joy of Procrastination with Dean Jackson: https://www.joyofprocrastination.com/ Exponential Wisdom with Peter Diamandis: http://www.abundance360summit.com/podcast/