EP193 - Why You Are Holding Yourself Back
with Ian Luckett

INTRO

In this episode of the IT Experts Podcast, we're going to help you to workout how tiny little habits can help you stop getting out of overwhelm, start getting some real results and start getting some absolute traction in not only your business, but also in your personal life. You're going to love this one.

Welcome to the IT Experts Podcast, the only podcast to help MSP scale to 1,000,000, and if already there get to five and go faster at the end of the day, isn't it all about building a business that works for you rather than you for it? I hope you enjoy the show.

IAN

So, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome to the IT Experts podcast. I hope you're all good today. Just me on my own today, talking to you about habits and how habits can help you now. How has this podcast come about? I'm going to run through with you a framework that we went through with one of our client intensives, which is a two day event we held three times a year for the MSP growth help clients and this was a bit of a motivation section at the beginning and a bit of a spoiler alert for Spotify and you and iTunes and all that kind of thing. If you are listening to it on the podcast, then absolutely fantastic. If you want to slide over to YouTube and you'll see the video version of this where I'll actually be sliding through the deck as well myself. So the reason that we did this, I was doing a little bit of personal development myself and thinking that some of the things that I was doing and resonating with some of the clients as well on progress and how far we're getting in life and how far you're getting in your personal life and your business life and what gets in the way.

So I started doing a bit of research about motivation and about habits, and I came across a philosophy, some of you may have heard of from a guy called Dan Sullivan, the gap and the gain, and I put it all together and I thought this would be rather exciting. I was just talking to the team recently they said you have got to do a podcast on the importance of habits, the importance of creating great habits in your world so that we can share it with everybody because the feedback was absolutely incredible, so that was all rather good. So look, let's just get stuck into it right now and see where it kind of goes. So the first thing that we were talking about was you know the intensive session that we have is that go back through your annual plan, go back through to your 16 week plans and start to get some traction from looking at your vision, your North Star, the main point that you've got and then working your way back to the activities and the individual things you're going to do every single day which are these little habits. So I asked everybody who is excited about their annual and some of the guys put the hands out and some of the guys didn't put the hands up and it was one of these things that you set once a year in January, maybe at the end of December and you get all excited about it. But then what happens is Christmas gets in the way and then January gets in the way, you get really busy and then you kind of weigh in, away from your main purpose, your definite purpose, your vision, your mission. Exactly what it is that you want to call it, the main reason why you're doing what you're doing. So we then started talking about motivation, now when you talk about motivation, what pops into your mind, I've put an image on the screen right now, so that's pointless for people who are listening in their cars and out there while they're walking their dogs. But it's of Mr. Motivator, so that goes to show my age. Yes, this wonderful character used to bump around on the screens that we used to have in the 80s and the 90s, trying to get everybody out trying to get fit, I suppose probably a bit of an A-back in the day version of Joe Wicks as it would be, but the greatest thing was, is this guy, come on and give you some motivation. Now the thing about motivation is, is that mission is very short lived because motivation is great for one off tasks, but it's not great for a long time because basically you'll run out of energy. Now you know you think about the time when you come back from the gym, you think about the time you come back from holiday and I'm going to eat really well. You're motivated because you're either not feeling too great or you want to feel better. And then all of a sudden, you're in this place, where a week or two weeks later you've been to three gym sessions, you've stopped eating crisps and you haven't had a drink for five days. But you haven't lost any weight and then you get this heart and then you sort of think, ohh my word. What am I going to do now? How's this going to, how's you know, how am I going to get going and motivation is great for kickstarting, but it's the habits you'll learn. It's the habits that are going to be the things that keep this motivation going. So what we do with the clients at the ground fabric is every 16 weeks. We have a two week period where we come in and we get some real ******** accountability. And in that period then we then have an 8 week alignment session just to make sure that everybody's kind of online and in between that we have you know we refresh your plans, we have Q&A's, we had accountability, pops pods, mender vendor spotlights thing we do on sales and marketing. But what I'm trying to get at is when you come away from that two day centre, when you come away from your peer group, when you've come away from that event, you're motivated, you're bound, you're going to fly forward. It's going to be amazing. The world's going to be great and everything's going to be fantastic, isn't it? And then a bit like the gym a week later. You've gone back to the way you were before, scrambling around the tickets, fighting about projects, trying to work out if you're making any money or not going through your accounts and everything. But then what happens? Life gets in the way as I kind of mentioned. And then you get to our eight week alignment session and guess what Stuart and here are back in the house again, you're getting your, your accountability, you're getting the motivation, you're getting your connection with it. And then after that eight week element session, you've got that momentum again. You can fly forward and you've got the excitement and you're moving things forward and then towards the next 16 week period, which is all very well and good and it's all great. But what happens if you miss one of those sessions? What happens if something happens in your business or your personal life? It kind of knocks you off kilter a little and means that you need to then go and focus on something else, which might mean a bit of a dip in the motivation. So a lot of things around this is around getting out of your comfort zone and helping you learn new, learn, learn new things, learn better things to become, you know, the great people that we are. So when we go through the comfort zone, when you're in your comfort zone, you feel safe and secure.

Right, it's all great, but you get to a point you might hit rock bottom, you might get to a point where you're just frustrated, you're annoyed, you could get angry or stressed or just fed up. And then you get into the fear zone cause you know something needs to change. Something's got to change. But you don't know how to change it. You don't know how to move forward and the lack of confidence to find excuses, you then get a bit more reserved. You'd be affected by other people's opinions and you're in this fear zone and you're looking for the thing, but something's got to change. But then all of a sudden what happens is you then go right. You move into the into the growth zone. Sorry you move into the learning zone and where you start to deal with challenges and problems. You test out new ways of working, you're learning new skills, building better relationships, you're getting more done, and it's actually an extension of your comfort zone. It's quite a nice place to be, but nevertheless, learning to slow down progress and then all of a sudden you get into your growth zone. So you find your feet, life gets easier. It's like driving a car, you can change the gears and accelerate and indicate with no problems whatsoever. You get into flow, you know, your teams start to achieve more. And you know, structured and target support, obviously this is something that we do at the growth hub, but this is something the community, the IT community can give you when you have that structure, when you have your targets that align to your annual plan, your quarterly plan. And you're kept accountable to them and you've got experts helping feed you in on what the things that's going on in your world. It's really important, we understand the journey that we go through on your comfort zone, really important, we understand about this growth zone because when we work out what we are, where we are today, where we want to be. And then what are the things in that gap that need to change then that's when the magic really starts to happen, and we talk about the four futures with the MSP journey that you may have heard from different podcasts that we talked which is the journey that every MSP goes on. Whether you go through survive mode through Drive, thrive or arrive, you get to a point where you can decide where you are going to be.

So there's two things in your brain, there's a positive side or a negative side, and it's up to you, did you know that the human body is the human being is the only person who can control. What they do in their mind, everything else is all about reproduction and just actually meeting eating, anything but we can actually decide what we want to do, we can decide whether we want to stay in our happy place in our positive brain, or we can decide whether we stay in our negative place. So just be a little bit careful who you hang around with and if you don't take any actions, then we'll just survive. If we do a little bit, we'll drive. But the most important thing is we talk about this growth zone, the growth zone with the getting out of your comfort zone and that's the main thing that's going to help you to thrive and arrive in your business because it's going to help strengthen, open salary and stabilize your MSP.

So let's talk about the gap and the gain for the minute and whether you live in the gap in the game and you may have heard of this philosophy before. But it all starts with your brain and it all starts with what's going on. So if you're living in the gap, you'll start off, and what you'll be doing is you'll have that vision for the future, and you'll look at what I want to achieve in the vision and the and the future. And my North star, etcetera. And you look at the ideal. So you start off, you then make some achievements and then you look at the ideal the problem is, is that you measure the gap, which is the difference between where you want to be and what you've and sometimes that's not a very pretty sight, is it? It could lead to failure, frustration, disappointment, low self esteem, some guilt, some depressions, and you might think ohh my word, because you're just looking at what you want to achieve. All those people on Facebook, all those people on LinkedIn at all the events, everything that's going on. Then you look back at what you've actually achieved. And it's not a great place because you measure what you've achieved against the ideal. It's like winning 1,000,000 lbs on the lottery, isn't it? Well, I haven't really haven't earned that much money, but you might have earned a significant amount of money. So if we change our thinking where we then look into the game again, we have our starting point and our achievement and we again we visualize what's going on in the future and what's going on to the ideal and where we want to be. And this big profitable business that's give us time, profits and freedom and all of that kind of great stuff. But what we do is we measure backwards to where we can from. So you might have grown your MSP by 10 or 15 clients in the year. What an achievement. You might have improved your profitability by some amazing account management in the last year and quite easily doubled your profit. What an achievement. But because it's not where you want to go people, a lot of people don't look at it like this. So when you actually measure. The gain, which is the difference between the ideal and the starting point, there's a fantastic explanation slide on this on the video, by the way, if so again Pop to YouTube to check that one out, you get success, satisfaction, confidence, high self esteem, your enjoyment and you get this optimism. So it's really important we look at that and if that's what's happening with you, then what's that also happening with your team. Because as we know, as I mentioned, this, yeah, credits to this to the gap in the game philosophy from Dan Sullivan because life is perfect, isn't it? You know, you see these people here where their kids are taking pictures of their family on the beautiful beach with no sun in the background and the dad's ripped and the mum's beautiful. And there's all this kind of great stuff or you're sitting outside your fantastic new house and look at the amazing place, it looks like this particular pictures in America or you've got your Lamborghini, you've got your super car, whatever makes and floats your boat and you've got all of this great stuff and then you've got reality in the middle, which is a rather funny image that I shall leave just with you there. But do you know what we spend a lot of our time measuring and projecting ourselves against other people. This is what I call the social media effect, the Facebook effects, everybody on Facebook's perfect, everyone on Facebook's beautiful, everyone on Facebook's achieving everything, aren't they? Of course they're not, but they're only sharing with you the things that they are achieving rather than some of the struggles that they may be having in their life. So create your own reality and live in the gain is basically what I'm saying.

So what does that? What would that look like? You know, you could be looking at your balance sheet has decreased. You've got more off grid time more time to spend with your family and your friends away from the, yes, more cash in the bank. You could have automations on some of your billing. You had no calls when you went on holiday. When was the last time you went on holiday and you left your phone on the stairs at home and did that and no one bothered you and no one contacted you because you've got everything in a great place, visualize that one for a minute, and your team's grown as well the team has grown incredibly as well. So what I want you to do quite now is just have a bit of a check up from the neck up, which I think was a comment I was saying from an amazing guy called Zig Ziggler. So I want you to think about, if you ever say the words, I've got to do this, I've got to do that comes from a red place that comes from a negative place. When you say that I need to do this, it's a little bit better, it's still quite desperate. It's still quite, you know, there's still quite a bit of tension in the language there and the tension in the word, it's there but when you say you want to do it because you want to achieve and you can see the success that you've had and you're living in the positive part of your brain, you want to do something. How much motivation does that need, very little. How much energy does it need not a lot. Do you think you could do it? I think you could, so think about I've got to do it. I need to do it or I want to do it. How does that work out?

So let's talk about positive. How do we identify positive habits and build them into momentum? So some little habits that can help keep you on the track that can help keep you moving forward. So it's been more present at home. How do you be more present at home, be consistent with your teams one to ones. Remember that when your teams, you book one to one with your team, your team will be more excited about that one to one than you will be. So if you just say I can't make it that day because I'm too busy, you've got too many stuff on that is going to have two or three times or even 10 times the effect on your team. Then it will be on you so value that time checking in on P2P1 tickets, not checking in on P1 tickets could also be a habit actioning your emails, booking off grid time, keeping yourself accountable to actions dealing with tasks that you've been putting off, if you think about just that little list that I've just read out there right now. How many of those things, if you've got them covered off and if you've got those very, very small habits in place to cover off those items, what sort of impact do you think that would have in your day and the other thing as well to this is when you finally do get round to picking up your To Do List, that's got 100 things on it, and then you finally sit down to eat that frog. As Brian Tracy said, and you start to look at things that that you just got to get to a point where I've just got to go through these tasks, doesn't it always take a lot less time than you actually thought it did, didn't you actually create a great chaos in your brain that actually made you think this is a lot worse than it actually was could also be about booking company meetings as well. Make sure that we've got those booked in the diary as well, really small.

So how do we get started, right? How do we get this thing moving? What do we need to do to get started. So First things first, stop blaming yourself, right. Ohh, I'm rubbish at this. I'm rubbish at that. Stop blaming yourself. Remember, you've got two choices. You either live on the negative side of your brain, you're going to live in the positive side of your brain. It's only a test. I always use this philosophy that when I do something new, it's a test. I guess what, when it doesn't work or something goes wrong with it, it's not negative, just test didn't work, did it? When you've got a proven test, when you've got the proven procedure, you then build it into your process, you build it into what it is that you need to do, and then all of a sudden guess what happens, starts happening and that's the soap. And then that's the thing that you move think further forward, do you think when they built the first airplane they just went great straight across to America? No, of course they didn't. They tested, start off small, small, tiny habits start to build great momentum breakdown into super small chunks. Make sure that they satisfy and make sure that when you've done it, you feel really good about it, okay. I'll share with you in a minute. Just something that happened with me recently. When I was on holiday you must get immediate returns. It must be a quick. I'm going to do something and I'm going to get something back. I'm going to feel good. I'm going to kick off something on my interest. You know, you've got to get that gratification. So you're being good about it must be effortless. It must be easy, you got to commit. You got to take action. And it's all around keeping on track. So how do we keep ourselves on the right track. Surround yourselves with prompts. Right. I've got this little thing in our summer house at home, and this is one more in 2024, which actually came from a book from Ed Marlett that I was reading about, you know, one more. And it's just like, just do one more Rep just do one more day of, you know, exercise. Do one more thing that you're going to do just that one extra thing more makes a really important difference and Spanish self prompts get an accountability buddy, could be someone in the business. Could be one of your peers. Might be someone in the community. Do it now. Do this now. Take action.

Here's the thing. So I don't like reading. I haven't got a great profile for reading. Don't really enjoy it. It takes too long. Get a little bit bored and I am not ashamed to say I probably haven't read more than about 5 books in the whole of my life. I listen to stuff, right. I listen to audio books. I watch videos. But I knew that if I started to read particularly late at night. It's going to help my sleep. And I thought, yeah. How's that going to help? My sleep would be much better to flick on Instagram or YouTube or whatever. So someone said to me when I was going through this. Just read for two minutes, then read for three minutes, then read for 5 minutes, then 10, then 15, then 20 and build it up. And at the time we did this, which was probably about six weeks ago now, likely in you know, quarter two, I'm going to say in in 2024 I went on holiday and I took a book, me and I said, I'm going to read this book. And my wife looked at me like I got rocks in the head. And basically I sat there on the day one and I said I got 223 pages of this book. Great. Oh my God. And then how I can do that? I went right. It's 28 pages a day. Okay. How long it take to read 28 pages. And my wife says means probably about no longer than an hour because it wasn't a great quick, quick reader. I read this whole book. It was incredible. It was unbelievable. It was Napoleon Hill's success habits, actually, by the way, very good. But do you know what? I went from 2 minutes to an hour to read in the whole book and how incredible is that? And my sleep has improved knowing the quality of my sleep has improved no end. And guess what? I'm learning buckets of stuff which is getting me even more motivated and even more excited about what's going on. Keep have it tracking. Really, really simple. Don't use an app, bit of paper, put some crosses on it, some squares on it and just say have you done it? Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. You might want to do a cold shower. You might want to have make sure that you've read your book. Have you had a digital detox, so I've got another little thing going on at the moment when I walk home at night. How easy is it to walk through the door with the phone in your hand and go, yeah, yeah, I won't be minute, won't be a minute. Kiss the kids on the head. Go and sit in the other room and sit on the phone, very, very easy. What's that like for them? They're waiting for you to come home. That's amazing. Ohh, dad's come home. Mum's come home. Oh, we're doing this. It's really great. And you're not doing it.

So now when I get home, I put my phone on the stairs and I put my phone on the stairs for two hours. I pick it up because I'm, you know, I enjoy what I do. I always wanted to keep connected. And that's the way of the world these days. But I focus on that time on the family that two hours on the time with the family when they're having their dinner. I'm having my dinner with my wife and it's super Focus time. It's all about making sure that we have these little habits use habit stacking, so if you're already reading the book. And you want to do something else as well, so you may be a little bit of exercise. So do it at the same time, but start to stack your habits together. At the end of every day. This is really important. So if you're reading a book, here's an example of habit stacking. Note down three wins at the end of every day that you have achieved, and then set three goals for the next day and what you want to achieve in the next day. The reason that this is really powerful is when you get a better night. Guess what happens. All of a sudden, your brain, your subconscious brain's trundling away, working out how we can make these things happen, really, really powerful. Good habits will keep you on your trajectory, so just start to build up all of these small habits. So when we go back now and we look at what's going to happen now with the clients that we spoke to this about and this was incredible feedback, yes, we get momentum at our two day intensive, then we control our lives, we control what gets in the way we build tiny little habits we build all these little things together to keep that arrow on its trajectory. And then when we get to the eight week alignment, guess what happens? We then build that momentum and the momentum gets stronger. The results get faster, you get more time profits and freedom and it works in a really great way to help you this small way to make some massive massive games.

So just coming in to wrap up now, so when performance is measured, performance is improves, but when performance is measured and reported. The rate of performance accelerates and that's person's law. Super, super powerful. So number one, get off the back of this podcast, number one form great positive habits. Number 2 always measure backwards. Live in the gain. Live in the positive part of your brain. And there's no winners and losers in life. There's just winner. And then there's learners.

So look, I hope you enjoyed this short little motivational blast of habit tracking. How can we bring all of these great things together to help you stay on track? We know that the world of running an MSP you can get into overwhelmed super super quick. You can stay in overwhelmed for a very, very long time. But remember, it's your choice. You're the one who's choosing in your brain, deliberately or not, on where you're spending your day, where you're spending your time, where you're spending your hours, who you're spending your time with. And they all say, don't they, whoever they are, you know, you become the five people that you most associate yourself with. So look, I'm going to sign off to say if you ever want to get yourself in one of those intensive rooms with the rest of our clients at the MSP growth, I've just messaged myself or Stuart here on LinkedIn, hit the website, book a call. But in the meantime, whoever you are, wherever you are, go and find some help, go and find some accountability buddies. Go and lean into the community, find some great people to hang yourselves around with build some great habits. Build some amazing opportunities for you to stay on track, keep on track, be super deliberate, be amazing, go have a great day and I look forward to catching up and connecting with you soon.

See you later. Bye for now.

OUTRO

Before you go. And if you're curious about how this episode links with the ability to scale your MSP to a million or if you're already there, accelerate to five and one invite you to come and take the MSD mastery quiz and in just three minutes you're going to get a 300 and seat from if you scan of your business where you can identify the one or two tactics that help you find more time engaging among your people and make rules in your it's really simple. Just click on the links in the show notes and if you have enjoyed this episode, we'd love to get some feedback from you by means of a racing review on Spotify or iTunes or your podcast platform of choice, we really appreciate every single one of them. Now you can go and enjoy the rest of your day and we look forward to catching up and connecting you soon. All the best.