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Synopsis

Dr. Misner and John Assaraf from OneCoach address three questions:

1. What causes entrepreneurs to plateau at a certain income level? Internal mental programming based on our genetic and experiential conditioning. You need to develop a clear vision and impress it into your subconscious in order to break out of your rut. Read The Answer for more details.
2. What are three of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make?
   1. Allowing circumstances to control their goal-setting exercises.
   2. Not creating a blueprint for success.
   3. Thinking they can do it themselves.
3. Why is it so important not to participate in a recession? Remember that 90% of your competition is thinking in negative ways. Don’t miss this opportunity to position yourself as the leader.

Go back and listen to Episode 86 of this podcast for BNI’s own positioning efforts for 2009. Visit ReadtheAnswer.com for a special offer on John’s book.

Brought to you by Networking Now.

Complete Transcription of BNI Podcast Episode 092 -

Priscilla:
Hello everyone, and welcome back to The Official BNI Podcast brought to you by NetworkingNow.com, which is the leading site on the Net for networking downloadables.

I’m Priscilla Rice, and I’m coming to you from Live Oak Recording Studio in Berkley, California, and I am joined on the phone today by the founder and the chairman of BNI, Dr. Ivan Misner.

Hello, Ivan. How are you?

Ivan:
I’m doing great, Priscilla. I’m really excited today. I’ve got a good friend of mine, John Assaraf, whom I met in the Transformational Leadership Council. I’ve talked about TLC a few times on the podcasts, and John is the founder of OneCoach, a great coaching organization. We have many of their coaches in BNI throughout North America. He’s also one of the teachers from the movie, The Secret, and he’s the author of Having It All and The Answer.

So John, it’s a real honor to have you be on the podcast with us today.

John:
Thanks, Ivan. Great to be on.

Ivan:
There were three questions that I wanted to run by you that I think would be of value for my BNI members and particularly education coordinators.

And the first one is: What causes entrepreneurs to plateau or to get stuck at a certain revenue or income level, and what can they do to grow again when they get there?

John:
That’s a great question. One of the things that I have found in the brain research that I’ve done is that we become conditioned either through genetics or through our experiences to think, perceive, and behave at certain levels of revenue or income. And we tend to stick at those levels no matter how much information we gather, no matter how many courses we go to, or no matter how many programs we might do at home.

What we must understand is that any of the results that we are getting in our outside world, or our physical world, is an absolute duplication of the internal mental programming. No differently than software on a computer can do certain things, well, software of the brain is due to the genetic and experiential resources that we have in our life. So we’re going to see a direct correlation between how we’ve been conditioned and what our results are.

So anytime we hit a plateau, that tells us not how much information we know or gather, but it tells us what our mental financial conditioning has been up to that point. And in order to break through that, we really have to change the software of the brain so that we perceive and behave differently so we achieve different results.

Ivan:
You know, I ran into something similar, I think it’s similar anyway, to what you’re describing. I was talking to a friend of mine about creating territories, and he had some experience – and this was in Scandinavia – with this company where they were hitting certain dollar revenues, the sales people, and what they did, which was a little counterintuitive, was they actually split their territories in half. And everybody was really upset, but interestingly enough, everybody ended up bringing the revenues right back up to the same level that they were at before –

John:
Correct.

Ivan:
Even though they had half the territory. So the company split their territories again in half. And guess what happened? Within a few months, they were bringing the revenues right back up to where they were before. And they did it a third time before they really started to see any kind of impact.

And the whole point that the company kind of figured out was, the people kind of developed this comfort level with income, and they just want to reach that and they tend not to go beyond it.

John:
Yeah, what actually happens is any time there’s a deviation in the income, high or low, our brain will actually release a neurochemical that will either cause us to pick up the pace or to sabotage the success we’re having so that equilibrium, or homeostasis, is the order of the day. And in order for us to break through that barrier, we have to actually make some neurological changes. No different than an athlete who wants to perform at the next level or a musician who wants to perform at the next level has got to practice different things, business owners must practice mentally different things in their business that will get them to the next level so that their brain doesn’t trip up any of the success that they have.

Ivan:
Well, can you give us a couple of examples of what they can do to grow again?

John:
Absolutely. Number one is to set an absolute, clear new vision of what it is that they want to achieve. And so let’s say you’re earning $100,000 or $250,000 or $1 million, what you want to do is set an absolute, clear vision for the brain to be able to pick up, number one, on that vision.

Number two, you want to impress that part into the subconscious or implicit part of the brain versus the part of the brain called the explicit memory system that actually chooses what it is that you want. And we impress those images into the brain, Ivan, through, A, visualization techniques; seeing ourself playing at that level over and over and over again so that we create the new neural networks in the implicit part of the brain, which is the automatic side of the brain. Number two, we can create affirmations of declarations that when we do with emotion, we actually accelerate the neuron connections of the brain as well.

Number three, we can actually put ourselves into meditative states through self-hypnosis and use auditory technologies, or brain-and-train technologies, that will embed these new affirmations, or declarations, into the nervous system, basically, of the brain.

Those are three simple things that anybody could do inexpensively to make sure that our brains are being rewired at the part that actually is responsible for 96 to 98 percent of our perceptions and behaviors. And over the course of 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, we’re actually reprogramming our brains at the level that’s going to cause all of our perceptions and behaviors to change over time.

Ivan:
For my BNI members that would want to go deeper in understanding what you just described, because you described it very well, but I get the sense that you really have to go deep to understand it and apply it, which one of your books would you recommend that they go to to go deeper with those ideas?

John:
Without question, pick up the book, The Answer: Grow Any Business, Achieve Financial Freedom and Live an Extraordinary Life. It’s a New York Times bestselling book, and it really has all of the science behind what we’re talking about to be able to do a process that we create called the neural reconditioning process. And it’s simple, and it’s easy, and it’s brilliantly effective.

Ivan:
Well, let me ask you one other question. We’re running pretty close to being out of time, but I really want to ask this question. What are three of the biggest mistakes that entrepreneurs make, and how can they solve them, in your opinion?

John:
Right. Number one, entrepreneurs must not allow their present circumstances to control their thinking or their goal setting exercises.

Ivan:
Like maybe a recession?

John:
Like maybe a recession. What I mean by that is, when we look at the results that we’re achieving right now, we’re looking at history. So we’re looking at history; we’re looking at your past thought patterns and your past behaviors.

What we want to understand is we could set any goal that we choose, and when we take that goal and we get emotionally attached and emotionally involved with it, we’re doing a couple things. Number one, we are creating the neurological chemistry that sends out that signal to this quantum field, this space in between everything. Well, we know that the universe is intelligent in response to it.

Number two, when we set a clear goal of what we want and we impress it into that subconscious part of the brain I’m talking about, we’re actually giving our brain an instruction to figure out how to achieve that. So number one, set big goals, and then figure out how to achieve them. Number two, most business owners don’t think in terms of: What strategies and tactics can I apply in order to achieve those goals and create the plan that is going to give them the road map, or the blueprint, to follow?

And number three, they’ve got to get out of the belief that they’ve got to do it themselves. I’ve got a saying that I’ve loved for 30 years, and it goes like this, “Hire people or barter or trade people who play at things you have to work at.” So discover what you play at, what your unique abilities are, and then get people on your team, either that you hire, you barter virtually, or in your local marketplace, that play at all the other things that need to be done in order to achieve your goal. And you will multiply your personal respect of this many, many times over.

Ivan:
Penny Power, who’s the founder of ecademy.com – I don’t know if you’re familiar with it; it’s a great online social business network – she uses an expression that I really like as well, “to be in your flame rather than your wax.” When you’re in your flame, you’re doing the things you’re really excited about, but when you’re in your wax, when you’re doing those things you’re not excited about or not good at, that you’re taking away all of your energy, you’re using yourself up. But when you’re in your flame, that’s exciting. It’s, I think, another way of saying a little bit about what you’re trying to say there.

John:
Absolutely.

Ivan:
One last thing. You were talking about, in the very beginning, something that we agree on, that the recession idea that if you buy into the recession in terms of your actions, if you let the recession determine your actions that it’s going to take you to a different direction. Do you want to just talk about that? I’ve talked about that on a podcast a number of times. I’d like to have somebody else throw in a couple of comments.

John:
Sure. Any time we’re reading the newspaper or magazines or watching TV and we buy in to what’s happening in the marketplace, we’re going to modify our thought patterns and behavior to match what we’re hearing, listening, and buying into. And that’s the absolute worst thing we can do, and I want people to maybe just shift their thinking for just a moment.

If you’re in business right now, let’s assume that 90 percent of your competition is thinking in ways that’s going to be negative in their production and their thought pattern. That means that you have an opportunity now to actually gain market shares; to gain mind awareness, or top of mind awareness; to actually position yourself, your product, or your service at the leader. Why? Because you can buy advertising cheaper; you can get your message out cheaper. You can market cheaper; you can do everything that you were doing before cheaper with fewer competitors in the marketplace.

So now is the absolute time for you to shift your thinking to: How can I utilize my revenues, my investments to gain more market share, to gain more clients, and to make more money? And when you give that instruction to your brain, every one of us is a genius. So we can figure out how to versus why we can. So the quality of our performance is going to be dictated by the quality of the questions we ask and the perceptions that we ask our brain to give us in the marketplace.

Ivan:
And it’s really more of a solutions focus than a problems focus. Would you agree?

John:
You got it.

Ivan:
Focusing on the solutions and how do we get to where we want to get as opposed to “Woe is me; look how bad things are.”

John:
Absolutely. And I can share with you that in our company, we have not just coaching but consulting and a whole bunch of different tools and resources. We’re innovating right now. We’re asking ourselves, “Great; what’s happening in the marketplace,” and we’re responding to what’s happening in the marketplace by innovating our offers, innovating our services, innovating our product lines to match what the marketplace wants and needs. And so we expect to do better this year in these recessionary times than what more people are doing, and that’s how to scale back.

Ivan:
Well, thank you very much, John. That was really some great material.

And for those of you listening, go back and listen to Episode 86 where I talked about Raising the Bar, because the end of that episode was talking about exactly what John just spoke about. We are raising the bar in a time when everybody else is lowering the bar; we’re investing in BNI in one of the biggest projects we’ve ever done in the history of the company. And now’s the time to do it if you want to gain market share.

John, you had some great content. I’d love to have you come back again sometime, if you can. You’ve written some really good books. I’d like to send my BNI members to a particular Web site, ReadTheAnswer.com, which is about your book, The Answer. And you have a special offer. Do you want to share that with everyone?

John:
Yeah, absolutely. For anybody who goes to ReadTheAnswer.com, we’ve got a couple of free chapters for them, and they can also sign up for our million dollar business giveaway. We’re giving away a million dollars – actually, more than a million dollars – in prizes and cash to entrepreneurs all over the world, that we’ve been giving away the prizes for the last several months, and it’s been incredible.

Ivan:
ReadTheAnswer.com. John, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. I really appreciate it.

John:
Thank you. Always my pleasure.

Ivan:
Priscilla.

Priscilla:
Well, that was fascinating. Thank you, both. I just enjoyed that so much.

I think that’s it for this week. I just want to remind all of the listeners that this podcast has been brought to you by NetworkingNow.com, which is the leading site on the Net for networking downloadables. Thanks so much for listening. This is Priscilla Rice, and we hope you will join us next week for another exciting episode of The Official BNI Podcast.