3 Mindset Shifts To Employ NOW

 

Mindset shifts have been proven through time and experience as a good practice that you should employ to achieve your goals. In this episode, Bill Caskey talks about three specific aspects where you should be focusing on your mindset as a high achiever. He shares a tip on what to look for in the services of coaches and mentors to get the value you need. He also talks about our ego and how it relates to building our identity. Finally, Bill puts having expectations in a different light while giving his insight on what it means to have no expectations before a call.

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3 Mindset Shifts To Employ NOW

We’re going to go deep. I had a couple of guests on the last episode. Getting back to the knitting of the inner game, the mental side, the soul of selling and achievement. Is that sound scary? It should because I’m going to go on a little riff or tangent and share with you some things that I’m working on for our clients and myself. I’ve got a handful of things. Are you ready? I’m ready. When someone asks me to help them, I’ve got several coaching clients. I don’t take too many because it’s time-consuming and it’s expensive for them. I also believe that the best work doesn’t come necessarily one-to-one. It comes in a group. All of my small group coaching programs have an element of one-to-one to them so there’s always happening but I’ve got a couple of coaching clients. I asked one of them, “Tell me what coaching is.” She has been a client and she’s doing well. Her income has gone up and things are starting to unfold for her. She asked me, “Why is that? Is it because I have another human being to talk to? Is there something magical, secret or surreptitious?”

Here’s the way I look at coaching. If you hire a coach, he/she should be more interested in dissolution than the solution. Somebody comes to me and says, “I’m not earning enough money.” I say, “My solution is you’ve got to work harder, grind more and make more calls.” That’s a solution. A dissolution is where we say, “Why do we have the problem of not making enough money? Where is the belief inconsistent with what’s true?” Meaning there’s probably some belief that they have or that I have. I have a lot of these beliefs or areas for the potential to be released by dissolving old beliefs.

Our ego is there to protect our identity. Our ego will always be at a preference for being right. Click To Tweet

When I say dissolution, I mean the dissolving of old beliefs. Maybe one of their beliefs says, “I’m not worth $500,000 a year,” or there’s a belief that if I got up to where I was leading the company, I would be asked to take on more responsibilities. I’d be asked to move to London or Munich, or my life would change externally because of my success so I’m going to tamp it down and put the governor on a little bit. It could be all those things or one of them. Dissolution or dissolving the prior beliefs is the best gift a coach can give you, whether it’s me or an inside coach inside your company. If your coach is not working on the dissolution of prior beliefs that are holding you back, do you think you need solutions for? You don’t. You don’t need solutions for that. It’s like, I’ve always believed that we all know exactly what we need. We just don’t do it. The reason we don’t do it is that we experienced resistance. That resistance comes in the form of prior beliefs that get in the way.

Another element that we need to put into our programming and I’m coming a little bit clean here with this because we don’t. It holds my company back in the coaching and the training back from the people that pay us. We’re giving pretty good value. People realize awesome results from the work but it could even be bigger if we worked on this idea of change. You and I have built up an accumulation of beliefs, opinions, practices, education, and knowledge over the years, whether you’re 27 and have been in sales for 5 years or 57 and been for 35 years. We have all built up this identity and this is who we are. I come along and say, “You need to change how you talk to your prospect. Here’s what I want you to do first.” The person says, “That’s all well and sounds good but I can’t use that with my customers.” What they’re saying is, “That’s not me. That’s not who I’ve come to know as me.”

 

This word identity is very confusing. We hear about identity politics. That’s not what this is. The identity is who do we think we are or who has built this structure, this framework around who we are. If I were to say to you, “I’ve got this opportunity to make $1 million.” You say, “It’s great because I’ve wanted to do improve my income in the last couple of years.” I say, “Meet me at the corner of 6th & Vine. There’s a bank there. You and I are going to rob that bank. There’s $2 million they keep. We’ll split it. Ready to go.” If you’re a bank robber, you’d probably say, “Fine, let’s go.” Chances are a person of integrity. If you’re reading this blog and you’re in business, you would say, “No, I’m not going to do that. That’s not me. I want the million dollars but I’m not going to sacrifice my integrity to get there.” That’s a stretch example of that’s not me. I would never say that to a customer or prospect. I never shoot a video. That’s not me. I’m not good in front of the camera or on the mic. All that is the identity that we’ve built up and it could be.

This is where it gets interesting. Our ego is there to protect our identity. It will always be a preference for being right. I may say that I want to double my income, but if I see myself as $100,000 a year person out of $300,000 per year person, and I don’t want what comes along with $300,000, I can say all I want that I want to double or triple my income. It isn’t going to happen because my identity is locked up in my old self. Part of the change if you’re the VP of Sales, you are working with people, you’re a coach, or you’re a performer. If you want to change, there’s plenty of change that should happen. We typically operate at a fraction of what’s possible, but it’s only possible if we’re willing to look at who we are and our identity and allow ourselves to say, “That may have been my behavior for the last many years, but I’m not defined by that. I’m not defined by how I sell, how I ask questions, or how I lead people through the process. That doesn’t define me. It’s behavior and action.”

Change is only possible if we're willing to look at who we are and our identity. Click To Tweet

The closer you can get back to your identity and not let all of these opinions in inform it. You get back to where you’re nimble and you can change. Somebody says, “You should have a YouTube channel, a show every Friday afternoon where you take questions from your audience.” You say, “I don’t know but I give it a go. Let’s try it.” I love that phrase, give it a go, versus the other way, “I don’t have a camera and I don’t have this. What would they think? Who am I going to talk to? What do I know?” You get all that resistance. That’s your identity saying, “That’s not me.”

Number three is the idea of no expectation. I was listening to a podcast by Peter Crone. He was on Aubrey Marcus’s podcast. Peter is British. He coaches sports athletes and pretty high-income people. All he works on is the mindset side. He doesn’t teach people how to have a better stroke. He teaches you how to get out of your own way. One of the things he mentioned, which reminded me of one of our issues that we talk about is having no expectation prior to a call. If you’ve got a meeting set up and it’s the first call with a huge prospect, what do we do? We start getting a little tight, planning, and we over plan. We say, “In the 27th minute of this call, here’s what I’m going to do.” We over scripted, we over-planned, especially if you’ve got a manager who’s saying, “What’s our plan. What are we going to do? We’ve got four people going. We’ve got PowerPoints with 150 slides. How are we going to do it?”

 

I would rather you go into these situations with no expectation. You don’t expect the deal, be awesome or fail. I know this goes against a lot of what you’ve been taught. You maybe even teach your people. When you go with no expectation, you’re free. You’re not encumbered and enslaved by the expectation of, “If I get this life, we’ll be better. If I don’t get this life, we’ll suck.” All that stuff is noise. It gets in the way of you being present with the prospect, which is what I thought we wanted to do in the first place. This idea of having expectation is deceptive. It’s deceptively harmful to us and the prospect. We always say, “We want to serve our customers. That’s what we want to do and bring value to customers.”

We go in with all these expectations and it ruins the present moment. We start to act in a manner that is in line with what we want to happen. What difference does it make in what we want to happen? Isn’t it the prospect’s decision? I thought we were in it for the prospect. Now we’re not. Is that where we made the change. Having no expectation is a way for you to exert your own freedom. I have found and my clients have found the less expectation you have, the better the outcomes because you’re able to be present with the person you’re in front of or the people. You’re able to find out what’s happening in their world, what’s going on, working and what’s not.

Let me share with you how we would look at that. It’s an organic, casual and useful conversation rather than something that’s all scripted out. Have no expectation, try that on. See if it fits and you can tell your manager. If you’re a manager of a team and you’re getting ready to do a presentation or something say, “Let’s try this. In years, is this going to matter? Does any of this stuff matter?” The answer is no. It doesn’t. It matters at the moment. We want to put our best foot out there and we want to do well. Would we rather have the business than not have the business or the prospect say yes than no? Of course, but that’s not going to define us whether we get this deal or not. You can’t let it define you.

Try having no expectations. That doesn’t mean we don’t prepare or have an agenda. It means that psychologically, we don’t want to constrain and enslave ourselves to some expectation. It has nothing to do with what the prospect wants. Try those things out. I welcome you. If you’re a high achiever and you are in that place where you’re saying, “I need to reinvent myself. I’m doing the same thing I’d been doing for the last many years and it’s still working a little bit but I’m on the cusp of some big things. I want to focus on myself, my own growth and mindset.”

I invite you to go to BillCaskey.com. At the very top, there’s a banner there that says, “Waitlists for the High Achiever’s program.” I am strongly considering doing a High Achiever’s program with a handful of people, 1 or 2 groups, but we’re limiting it to the number of per group of 10 or 12. Taking you through a High Achiever’s course, people who earn $200,000-ish a year and have tremendous upside. Go there and get on the waitlist. I make no promises about whether this thing is going to happen or not. I’ve been talking about enough. If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen at the end of the first quarter of 2021. Put your name in. There’s no obligation. It doesn’t cost anything and I’ll send you some thoughts. I’m working on a document that might help you too. I’ll send that to you. See you next time. Bye.

Important Links:

• High Achiever’s Program