High achievers usually have a slightly different view of what’s possible in the world. In this episode, Bill Caskey talks about the constant need of high achievers to re-envision themselves as they grow and operate on a different plane. Learn the traps that most high achievers fall into that you may be trapped in as well and the things high achievers need access to. Tune in and learn why you may need to rethink your own goals and possibilities.

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Listen to the podcast here:

Attention High Achievers – Part 1

We are going to speak about high-achievers. Those are the people who you might be one and you might not be one. There’s no shame if you aren’t, but this is going to be speaking to those people who are in the $200,000-ish range and above, either an entrepreneur, a business owner, a VP of sales or a sales professional, and primarily someone who has upside potential in that income. We’re speaking to the elitist achievers. If you’re not in that income range, that’s cool. You can still read. I will never ever know, but the topic deals with that group. I might even make this a 2 or 3-part series because I have so much to get to.

Here’s where this topic came from. I have quite a few people in one of my small group coaching programs. We call it The 2X Group, who is in that income range. They’re at higher levels of income. What I have found is that those people have a slightly different view of what’s possible in the world. They have accumulated some assets, have some money to invest in themselves and their business. I was watching a guy named Benjamin Hardy, who’s written several books on Psychology and personality. He said that we have to keep re-envisioning ourselves every few years because we learn things, have experience, get wisdom, and get financial wherewithal. If we say, “I set my vision ten years ago and we haven’t changed it, then the person we are now is capable of so much more or so much different.” By more, I’m not talking about working harder either. I’m talking about reaping the rewards from that knowledge and wisdom.

High Achievers: You have to keep re-envisioning yourself every few years because you learn things, have experience, get wisdom, and get financial wherewithal.

I have found that the highest achievers in the top 2% or 3% range of income earners have different needs of different things they want to work on. If you look at Maslow’s Hierarchy, they’re not looking at shelter as a big foundational need for them. They’ve got that checked off. They’re not looking for belonging. They have that checked off. They’ve got good families, got good works situations, got good clients that they are also friends with. As we get higher in Maslow’s Hierarchy, self-actualization, self-esteem, what’s possible and visioning, all those things they do need help with. That’s the purpose of this episode. It’s to introduce you to some of these things.

You are saying, “Where is this going? I feel like this is going somewhere.” It might be, I don’t know. I am giving some thought to spinning up a group of 8 to 10 high-achievers. I don’t know yet if there’s interest. There might be but I don’t know. Here’s what I would ask you to do. Read this blog in my website, BillCaskey.com. At the top of that, there was an orange bar, click on that, and there will be a waitlist for you. If it opens up how much it is, when it is, how it is, what’s going to be covered, but get on the waitlist. I’ll send you a couple of valuable emails to some other things follow-up to this. You have to earn $200,000-ish a year to get into this program.

If you’re a $30,000 person, it’s not for you. There are several traps that high-achievers fall into. I don’t think this is just high-achievers, but it’s everyone. There’s the ambition trap where it’s never enough. I’ve got an appetite for more. I’ve got to work harder. I’m doing well, but there’s much more I could be doing. That’s that trap. At some point, you lose sight of what’s important because you’re always striving for the next hill to go take. Two is the imposter trap. It is the feeling of fraud. It’s those deep inadequacies. I have a little bit of this or a lot of it. I’m not sure, but I know I struggle with this. It shows up for me is I will come up with an idea of a product similar to look at high-achiever product.

It used to be that I would talk myself out of it as quickly as I talked myself into it. That’s the imposter trap, “Do you know what I could do with this and that? We could do this. We could do a show, LinkedIn video and have a website.” At some point you say, “It’s not me. That’s not for me.” That’s the imposter trap. In imposter syndrome, you’re saying, “This is a great idea,” but then you’re talking yourself out of it. The third trap is the comparison trap. I’ve always heard the term contrast, but don’t compare. It’s hard not to compare ourselves to others. It’s not just others, but it’s what we envisioned for ourselves. “By this time in my life, I thought I would be X, and I’m not.”

That’s a trap you get into. Finally, there’s that perfection trap, which is a perfect as my line in the sand, and anything less than that is not good enough. It is a constant reminder when I’m putting something out there, and there’s a mistake made in the copy or, “Why didn’t I think of that? I should’ve.” That’s that perfection trap. Those are traps we can’t follow into, but we do. Here’s what I find is going on inside the mind of the high-achievers. Number one, they want to continue to grow their numbers, but they don’t want to burn themselves out.

The idea of going from $200,000 to $700,000 if I have to work 40 more hours a week, “It’s not going to happen. I don’t want to do it.” You shouldn’t do it. There are ways to get you to that $700,000 mark without burning yourself out. Another thing that I hear from high-achievers is, “I don’t feel like I’m leveraging my talents and skills. I don’t feel like I’m doing enough of the things I’m good at, what I would call the zone of genius or the high pay activity.” Zone of genius was a term by Gay Hendricks in a book called The Big Leap.

He talks about, “You have things and I have things that we’re naturally good at,” but we only spent an hour or two a week on those things. It was like, “Why are we spending twenty hours a week doing things we’re not good at or don’t get paid for, and then that sacrifice is a time in our zone of genius?” A lot of people feel like, “Am I leveraging my God-given talents and man-acquired talents along the way?” Here’s another concern, “I feel like I’m proud of what I’ve done. I’m earning a good income and have a good stable job. I know some people don’t. I’m thankful, blessed and grateful for that, but is this all there is to it? I keep doing the same thing. It’s like Groundhog’s day. It’s the same thing day in, day out. I’m trying to infuse myself with adventure and for other things but sometimes, I feel as if this is all there is.” I know we’ve heard that saying a long time.

High Achievers: Building your brand is not always about making more money. It might be how are you going to give back.

I feel like high-achievers have that because they operate on a different plane and a different perspective. “I don’t feel like I’ve built my personal brand well enough.” This goes for almost all high-achievers. There’s a certain amount of reluctance to build a brand. Once you get to a place where you deserve to build a brand, it’s almost like it has the opposite effect. We’re reluctant to do it because we say, “Why would I build a brand? I’m doing fine. I’m reaching out to people going to networking events. Everything is going well. I’m pulling in my $250,000 a year. Why would I want to go down another path?”

My reaction to that is, “Why wouldn’t you? Why wouldn’t you want to tell your stories? Tell the stories of prospects and clients, tell your stories of how you’ve helped people, tell stories of how people have come to you in bad shape, and through your wisdom and talent have helped them transform their lives or improve their business results or outcomes. Why would you keep that from the general public? Would you keep that from your audience?”

It’s going to take the opposite approach. Building your brand is not always about making more money. Usually, it is. It’s about how are you going to give back? How are you going to take the experience you have and send it back out to the world and the market? This is not an exhaustive list, but I hear this idea of accountability. Whenever I start a small group coaching program, as we do, I always ask, “What’s one thing you want to get out of this group? It’s bizarre in a way. Almost always it’s the highest achievers who say, “Accountability.”

It comes from the high-achievers knowledge that that’s exactly what’s going to get him or her to the next level. It’s accountability. Yet we’re reluctant to ask for it from our managers when a guy like me comes along and does a small group mastermind program. That’s where people want to go, especially the high-achievers. Accountability is huge. I’ve got a couple of clients in The 2X Group that I offer extra accountability sessions. It’s transformed their business because every week we chat only 10 or 15 minutes, and it helps them. When they’re thinking about putting something off, they know they can’t because they know I’m going to ask them about it. They do it and doing it works.

Here are a handful of things. I’ve got about 9 or 10 things that I think the high-achievers need to get access to. I’m going to share with you a handful and then we’ll come back next episode and talk more. I have this in a pie chart. One section might be 25% of the pie chart. One might be less depending upon the importance of each one, but this one is important. I’m not sure what percent to give it. What is your vision? What is your ideal outcome for 1, 2, 5 years down the road? Do you have constructed a vision of where you want your life to be? Your financial life, business life or relationship life. We’ve got lots of different lives. Where are you going? High-achievers need this. They must have this. They must start thinking about it differently than just assets or financial because there’s more to life than that. That’s one part of life, but there’s more to it.

The second thing is, what are the required mindsets that you’re going to need to adopt or embrace if you’re going to level your business up? What kinds of mindsets do you need? How do you look at the world? How do you look at your value? How do you look at your customers? How do you look at your roles in the customer’s life? Those are all mindset issues. If you get the mindset stuff right, everything else falls from there. It trickles down from there. It trickles up. If you get your mind right, everything else follows. Mindset is an important part of this. We’ve got vision and mindset.

Number three, it’s important to pay attention to limiting beliefs. We hear a lot about limiting beliefs. We don’t hear much about how to unlimit them. The first step is you have to get clear on what you believe about yourself, and that’s not easy. Sometimes you need another human being there to help shine the light on what your current beliefs are. One way to look at your current beliefs is what are your results? It’s almost impossible for you to believe something different than your results are getting you. If you’re a $200,000 a year person, and you say, “I’m a $500,000 a year person masquerading as a $200,000.” You’re not. Your beliefs are you are a $200,000 a year person. If you thought you were $500,000 a year person, you’d be earning $500,000. That’s not always the case but generally, your beliefs are congruent with your results. If you want to go from $200,000 to $500,000, you’ve got to check out those beliefs that might limit you from getting there.

Here’s the fourth thing, and then I’ll pause and we’ll do the others later. Why are you here? Why are you on this planet? What’s your purpose? What are you here to do? Alignment of purpose is critical because it’s the fire that will be released and the energy will be released once you decide what it is and land on what it is. My purpose in life that I’ve come up with here over the last couple of years is to use my experiences, my talent to share with the world, so people can expand what’s possible for them. My purpose is not to have everybody be a top-level achiever. My purpose is to take what I’m learning and share it in a way that people can consume it like we’re doing on this show. It’s one good example so that people can expand what’s possible for them.

Everything that I do needs to be focused on that purpose whether it’s a fee-based program or a free video on LinkedIn. I always believe that is focused and aligned with my purpose. What is your purpose? This is not the special purpose like Steve Martin had in The Jerk but it’s why are you here? Are you incorporating and aligning what you do in your business to why you’re here? You’re not here to earn money. It might be an output of the purpose, but that’s not the purpose. If you can get clear on this, it will unleash energy in your world.

We’re going to go through this a little bit deeper next episode. If you like the overall topic and might consider being a part of a group if we do decide to assemble one, go to BillCaskey.com, the orange bar at the top will say something like High-Achiever. Click on it, put your name and email address. There also might be a question there too that I ask you about what you might want to include if you decided ever to do something like this. I have no pricing other than I know I’ve got a handful of people who want to do this. I’m opening it up to my readers to get on the waitlist. Hopefully, that helps. I love you, guys. I appreciate you. If you want to leave a review on iTunes, I would love that. Thank you. Bye.

Important Links:

• The 2X Group
• The Big Leap
• High-Achiever Tab
• iTunes – Bill Caskey Podcast