AMY PORTERFIELD: Well hey there, welcome back to another episode of The Online Marketing Made Easy Podcast. I’m your host, Amy Porterfield, and today we are talking about all things accountability.
I will be the first to say that I am not always true to my word. When I was growing up my dad used to say, “You are only as good as your word.” So when things fall through the crack and I make promises to myself or to my team and I don’t deliver I start to feel incredibly guilty.
It’s hard for me to shake off those moments knowing I didn’t follow through like I said I would. But I’m learning that feeling guilty is not a productive emotion to have. It’s not going to get me anywhere and instead I need to become a student of habits and accountability and I need to learn how to turn the knowledge I have into action.
This, I know, is going to help me move my business forward even more so than where I am today. So a lot of times when I’m learning something new or feel that I need something extra in my business I like to share it with all of you because I’m guessing you could use a little extra help with accountability as well.
That’s precisely why I’ve created this episode. Hopefully it’s going to help you and it’s going to help me. My guest today is Carrey Bentley. Carrey, with her husband, Demir, have created Lifehack Bootcamp, a top-ranked online productivity program.
Their mission is to up level our work performance so we can have the time and freedom to live extraordinary lives. I was interviewed by Carrey for one of her programs and I absolutely love talking to her. She’s incredibly intelligent but she also knows, again, how to turn that knowledge into action.
The people who go through her program, oh my gosh, she has an 80% completion rate because she knows how to keep her audience engaged and keep them accountable. Carrie and Demir have created four levels of accountability.
They say if you can stack these levels of accountability, and I’m going to walk through all of them in this show today, you will be so much more capable of always taking action when you learn something new, when you start a new project, when you dive into an online launch, or whatever it might be.
I think we could all use an extra shot of accountability and getting into daily habits that make a huge difference in getting to the finish line. Again, that’s what this episode is all about. I won’t make you wait any longer. Let’s go ahead and welcome Carey to the show.
Amy: Carey, thanks so much for being on the show. Welcome.
Carey: Thanks so much for having me Amy, I’m so excited.
Amy: I’m excited to have you here as well. I want to start at the beginning. Just talk a little bit about why you and your husband, Demir, are so passionate about productivity and accountability. It feels like you’ve been productive from Day 1.
Carey: Well, what’s funny Amy, we were definitely not on the top of our game back in the day. We have definitely not always been productivity experts. In fact, as recently as several years ago we were that couple that just works way, way too much and we weren’t really getting ahead for all of the work we put in.
I think a lot of people out there can relate to this. The conventional wisdom is to push harder and harder and grit and bear it. We probably would have just done that but we both live with chronic work-related illnesses so our bodies just gave out on us and really forced us to start redesigning our lifestyle that optimized for not just our career but also for our family and our friends and marriage, really.
Fast forward a few years later and we’ve cracked that code. We’re making more money than we did before. We’re working on a business that really makes a difference in the world all while working between 20 and 30 hours per week and living in an exotic country every other month.
Through our 60-day LifeHack Bootcamp program we train people on how to get things done so that they can create that sort of lifestyle for themselves, whatever that looks like. What is great is that we get to live our mission and our passion, which is showing people how to get things done.
I’m really excited for this conversation today because I’m going to be sharing some of our biggest hacks from moving from knowledge into action which include our accountability method.
Amy: I absolutely love that. I love that you didn’t start out being a pro in this area. We know that it’s teachable and we can learn it, which is great. Second, when you and I were talking earlier before we hit play you were saying that you just really had to start over with a blank slate and redesign a life that optimized how you want to live.
I think a lot of what you’re going to be teaching us through this episode means we don’t have to start from a blank slate because that’s not actually incredibly easy. Instead, take some of these tips and tricks that you’re going to teach us and apply it to our life where we are right now. Would you agree with that?
Carey: Absolutely. I really want to show people who might be frustrated out there with how much they know but frustrated with the results they are getting in their life, how to convert more of that knowledge into stuff they actually do on a day-to-day basis.
Amy: Fantastic. It sounds like you’ve made a study of productivity. I know you see the setbacks we face all the time. Would I be right there?
Carey: Absolutely. Our work environments have changed dramatically over the last few decades and we face a lot of productivity issues that our mothers and grandmothers never even had to deal with. For example, distractions. We are living in an age of distractions and it’s really just getting started.
If you feel unfocused or scattered and can’t pay attention to something longer than a few minutes a big reason is all of the distractions that pull us off course. I know a few weeks ago you had a podcast about this.
Amy: Yes.
Carey: The stats are crazy. The average mobile phone user checks their phone about 150 times per day.
Amy: Geez.
Carey: That’s 150 distractions right there. The average office worker can only focus for about seven minutes before they change browsers or check their social media or check a text message. It’s very en vogue right now. Everyone’s talking about distractions. But this isn’t a fad.
I believe this is just going to get worse. I think this is the canary in the coal mine. An another side we’re facing is that we’re in a much more competitive economy today. I actually call it the winner-take-all economy.
I’ll explain that really quickly. It used to mean you used to be able to do a decent job and get decent results. We had great pay with decent respect and a decent lifestyle. If we wanted to step up then we would get commensurate results.
In today’s winner-take-all economy decent performance actually gets you crappy pay and a crappy lifestyle. Good performance only gets you a decent lifestyle and so on. So, folks today are really feeling dissatisfied. They can sense the game has changed and it’s gotten a lot tougher.
Let me give you an example that everyone listening will be able to relate to. In our business we compete with everyone in the world to be on the first page of Google search results. There is no real consolation prize for landing on the second page. It is kind of all or nothing.
Consumers today can easily find their way to the best person who provides any service anywhere in the world. This might sound like bad news. But it’s actually good news. It means the folks that can focus on being the best and being 1/100th of a second better or faster than the rest of the pack can truly start living outstanding lives.
The rest of us struggling with digital dementia are going to keep sliding further and further into the distraction land, if you will. So, what I’m really trying to say here is the winners in this environment are the people who can turn knowledge into action.
We all love to learn new things but the problem lies when we don’t put it into practice. We might hear an incredible podcast and get so excited and jazzed about what we learned but then we’re disappointed if, a few weeks later, we realize we haven’t taken any action to make a change in our lives.
We have the knowledge but we aren’t putting it into action. That’s what I’m really passionate about, turning knowledge into action and that’s why I’m so excited for this interview because this is exactly what we’re going to tackle.
Amy: Definitely what we’re going to tackle, for sure. I like your approach to productivity. A lot of my listeners have a lot of knowledge. They are smarty pants. They really study. They dive in. They know what they need to know in order to move their business forward.
Where they really struggle is turning that knowledge into action. So, this is so timely and so perfect.
So, in terms of your approach to productivity, a lot of times we approach it like a class or something we learn once. You say that’s not the way to do it. Right?
Carey: Yeah, that’s right. And the biggest difference in our approach is that we approach productivity like training for a pro sport not taking a course. That’s why our program has an insane completion rate in an industry that usually has a very low completion rate.
There are so many amazing courses out there these days. Like you said, the knowledge is out there and it’s such great stuff. People posting these courses are thinking, “Hey, it took me decades to learn this stuff and I’m just giving it to you in a matter of a couple of videos.”
But we still have that gap between knowledge and action. So the way I explain this, it’s not either party’s fault here. It’s actually the faulty mode of education we have been raised with. It’s kind of like the classroom model with didactic education.
We’ve experienced this all ourselves. We passively learn a subject. We memorize it for the test and then promptly forget it right after. The most valuable things in life can only be learned by doing them a lot. That’s what we call experiential education.
Leadership, you can read every book on Gandhi and still not be a leader. Sports, you can read every book about basketball and your reflexes can still not improve. The list goes on and on and on. Some of the best things in life really need to just be practiced.
It turns out that productivity is in that category. In fact, we had a student once (you will appreciate this) who had literally read every book on productivity, gone to every seminar, read every blog post. He could have taught a class on productivity. But he wasn’t doing it himself. He didn’t practice what he preached.
You can imagine how that made him feel. He was frustrated and hypocritical and just not understanding why he wasn’t getting results. I love a quote by John Wooden. He said, “Champions do the basics brilliantly.”
I love that because, like you said, it means there is no magic ingredient here. It’s about drilling the basics again and again. What happens, you kind of go through four phases. There is unconscious incompetence where you are doing it wrong but you don’t know you’re doing it wrong.
There is conscious incompetence where you can start seeing what you’re doing wrong but you still might be doing it wrong. The more you practice you move up to conscious competence where you are doing it right but it’s taking up a lot of brain power and effort.
Finally, you get to unconscious competence. This is kind of like LeBron James. He’s not thinking about what he does, he’s just drilled it so many times that it’s automatic. It is totally beautiful. Really, he’s just doing the basics better than anybody else.
Here’s the main point here, if you don’t take anything else away from today’s podcast then take this. Focus on getting things done is the ultimate super power for your success in life. If you want to get good at it you just have to train until unconscious incompetence becomes unconscious competence.
When you’re not even thinking about it, it just happens. It’s really amazing because we’ve seen people facing major limitations like ADHD become astonishingly productive because they just put in that time drilling the basics brilliantly.
Amy: Okay, so our goal is to get to unconscious competence. Correct?
Carey: Correct, that’s exactly right.
Amy: And you’re saying to approach it like a sport. But, how do you do that exactly?
Carey: That’s a great question. Social scientists and psychologists like Carol Dweck and Angela Duckworth have figured out that there’s a right way and a wrong way to get better at hard things and turn that knowledge into action.
Let me give you a great example that all of us can relate to. Most of us have been typing on a keyboard for decades. But the average typing speed for an adult doesn’t improve much at all after college.
We’ve been practicing at typing for hours and hours a day but we’re not getting better at it. That’s the wrong type of practice. We are putting in tons of hours but not improving because we’re not actually trying to get better. We’re not testing ourselves. We’re not identifying our weaknesses and focusing on improving them.
The right type of practice is intentional effort full practice. That’s where the quality of our practice is just as important as the quantity of it. It’s where we chunk down our big goals and actually measure ourselves as we get better.
We’re zeroing in on the things we’re bad at rather than just leaning and supporting ourselves with the things we’re good at. That’s the rub. This right here is what separates the men from the mice. It’s discipline. Some of us need to have it in enormous quantities and most of us don’t have all that much discipline.
I joke sometimes that discipline is the most scarce resource in the human brain. If discipline was plentiful we’d all have successful businesses and be a lot skinnier, right?
Amy: Yes.
Carey: So, the problem with effort full practice is that takes a lot of discipline, discipline that we just don’t have. This is where most people fall back. When we do things alone, usually within weeks or months we just stop doing them.
The good news is you can actually hack discipline and create massive amounts of discipline for yourself. This is not just for productivity, it’s actually for anything that you want to tackle that requires discipline.
The hack I’m talking about here is accountability. Think about it. When you promise your boss in front of all of your coworkers in a meeting that you’re going to deliver a sales report it always gets done. Sometimes you work miracles in 48 hours.
But if you promise yourself that you’re going to lose some weight, three years later nothing has really changed. And the difference is accountability. Accountability is amazing. It’s an extremely potent source of social pressure because it’s programmed deep into our DNA.
We are programmed to be social creatures. Even if you’re an introvert it’s extremely effective in elevating your discipline. So I want to quickly share some high-level observations we’ve learned in the last couple of years studying how to hack accountability to accomplish any big goal in life.
We’ve learned that some accountability relationships actually don’t work and some work really, really well. We call the type of accountability that really works “layered accountability.”
Layered accountability doesn’t just give you one form of accountability, it provides four overlapping layers to an accountability that reinforces iron-clad discipline and gets you doing things you actually hate doing and actually gets you enjoying doing those things.
I’ll break down each layer and as I do this try to think about the things you’ve done before in your life where you’ve been tremendously successful. Ask yourself if any of these layers of accountability were present to help you reinforce that discipline.
The first layer is a coach or boss or teacher or mentor or leader of some sort. This person creates a space of elevated expectations for you. This is what you do for the folks that are in your curated community and programs, Amy.
Inside of this bubble status quo isn’t acceptable. Average isn’t acceptable. There’s no B.S. allowed, only your best effort. You set the bar high. The person in leadership position is responsible for setting the bar high. That’s the first layer, a coach.
Amy: I’ve got a question for you. Does this have to be one-on-one accountability? You mentioned one of my programs and inside the group status quo isn’t acceptable. But, is that enough?
Carey: Actually, it does not need to be a one-on-one relationship where you have a mentor that you talk to every day. The most important thing at this particular layer is that your coach holds that nice high bar for you no matter what.
If you think about talking to them you’d be nervous about talking to them unless you really have some results to show. You also have to know that this coach has your best interests at heart. You need to kind of give them permission to get tough on you.
No, that first layer is not enough just by itself.
Amy: Okay, then move me into the second layer.
Carey: Great. The second layer is one of my favorites. It’s a team of people who you respect. These should be like-minded individuals who are in the same boat. These are people at your level or higher and they are all rowing towards the same goal.
Teams are at their very best when you really respect the people around you. If that respect is there then you’re highly motivated. And when they offer support or feedback to you it really means something to you. You care. You listen.
But, by far, the best part of teams and this is probably why I like them so much, is the competition. Let’s be honest, you can’t make excuses when someone else is out there getting results. Teams help us stop feeling sorry for ourselves and motivated to get in the game.
Actually, a funny story here. We had a CEO on one of our teams who wouldn’t stop complaining about it being too hard. He couldn’t do it. He had all of those excuses for what we were asking of him. It just wasn’t possible.
Then we had a lower level executive suffering from ADHD who started blowing everyone else out of the water. We didn’t even have to say a thing. This guy just saw someone who he perceived as less talented than him blowing him out of the water and he immediately just shut up and did it. So competition is good. At least in my opinion.
Amy: Yeah, I agree.
Carey: There’s a huge power in having that social experience.
Amy: Okay, with the second layer it’s all about the team. I know you said earlier when you were talking offline that you’ve got to give when it comes to this team. You’ve got to engage with the team. I love the idea of competition because that really gets me going.
I am actually sometimes embarrassed to admit how competitive I can get in those settings but I do believe it serves me well as long as I don’t get crazy around it.
The second layer is team. Talk to us about the third layer.
Carey: Awesome. The third layer of accountability is a buddy. This is more of a one-on-one relationship. It’s someone who’s responsible for you and your results and you’re going to be responsible for them and their results.
It’s kind of like the buddy system in kindergarten where you hold each others’ hand. This actually continues up through the U.S. Military. The military has really mastered this layer of accountability and it’s so powerful because one person is responsible for another person.
They are tied together so they literally have to sink or swim together. That obligation really keeps them in the game no matter what. It keeps them showing up at the gym, as it were.
Let me warn you here, a lot of folks are probably thinking they want to call up their best friend to be their buddy. That might be a mistake. We have found that your best friend is usually a terrible accountability buddy. Best friends aren’t going to call B.S. on you when you’re making excuses.
You have a friendship on the line so you want someone who you really respect and look up to but who isn’t that close to you. A lot of people can make that mistake. You want a good buddy, someone who won’t be susceptible to your emotional bribery. We all have it, right?
Amy: We all have it, for sure. Okay, so the third layer is getting a buddy. Talk to us about the fourth and final layer.
Carey: Great. This fourth layer is public accountability. Amy, I know you personally are a huge fan of this one.
Amy: Yes.
Carey: In sports you are accountable to your fans. There is nowhere to hideout if you choke. But we don’t have a lot of opportunities for public accountability in our life. If you don’t write that book that you’ve been wanting to write no one usually finds out. We just quietly bury the bodies of our failures and kind of push them into the past.
What you can do is create opportunities for public declarations. On Facebook, for example, to your friend group, to your office, your clients, kind of like you did recently with List-Builder’s Lab, you’ve got to tell your clients what they can count on from you.
That’s something that puts you on the hook to really deliver that. Take an action today that commits you to an outcome. You can even accelerate this by declaring what you’re going to do if you don’t achieve this goal.
I love the example of Domino’s pizza. If I don’t deliver this product in time then you get it for free. This is all in service of putting skin in the game. The more skin you have in the game the more likely you will be to cross the finish line.
Investing money, for example, in a program or training is a great way to get skin in the game as well. Actually, hopefully people will love this, there is a great app called Stickk where you can actually put money on the line for not accomplishing your goals. They will deduct it from your account.
To wrap up these layers, everyone knows they need discipline to get things done. But we found that when we layer these four types of accountability all at once with a coach, a team, a buddy, and public declaration with skin in the game you can amplify your discipline to a level you just never thought was possible.
We’ve had people call in to their accountability calls from Antarctica because they were that committed. We even had someone step out of an Oscars party to do his check-in call because he treated it as non optional and crucial to his success.
That’s the hack. That’s how you turn knowledge into action. You create layered accountability to get skin in the game, close off your escape routes, close the back doors, and truly commit yourself to finishing what you start.
Amy: Oh my gosh, so many good points there. I love this idea of layered accountability. I’ve never looked at it from this angle before. So this is really, really good stuff. The good thing is you have a process to help hold you accountable to your buddy system. It’s called the “champagne moment”.
I absolutely love the name. So what is it and why is it called the champagne moment?
Carey: Definitely. Here’s the thing. You don’t want to get on the phone with your buddy and wonder what to say to them. You kind of want a process you can follow reliably to know you’re leveraging that relationship in the right way.
Let’s assume you’ve gone in and created layered accountability in your life. Now you need to turn your focus towards getting the right things done. This can be one of the hardest things to do, prioritization. How many times have you gone through a week and realized you didn’t even start working on your top priority? Too many times, right?
Amy: Yes.
Carey: Definitely. So we created something we called champagne moments. A champagne moment is a really easy exercise you can do weekly even with your accountability buddy to sort out the important things from the seemingly important things. I know you can appreciate that, Amy, as an entrepreneur.
Here it is and think about this in your life right this second as you’re listening. What could you do this week that, if you got it done, you’d be so happy that you’d stop by the store on your way home, you’d grab a bottle of champagne and you would pop it open with your significant other?
Just think about that for a second. This is not something that would just deserve a little celebration. I’m talking about what could you do this week that would deserve popping a bottle of champagne and truly celebrating?
What’s so great about this thought exercise is that it instantly strips away the shallow work on your plate and gets you to thinking about the deep, deep work. This is the work that really moves your life forward in a massive, massive way. We’re so used to grinding through emails and sitting in meetings and we start thinking we’re doing good work.
The problem is you don’t want to look back at someone’s life and see that you answered one million emails. What a great person, what a champion. Emails and meetings are necessary but they are not creating your legacy. They are shallow work.
So, we ask our clients to identify a champagne moment every week, even if it’s a small one, something that pushes their life or career forward in a big way. If you’re having a problem identifying something that you’d pop a bottle of champagne for, or worse, if you don’t think you deserve to celebrate with a bottle of champagne every Friday then ask yourself what that means.
Are you playing too small? Are you not stepping outside your comfort zone? Are you punishing yourself? Are you holding back and refusing to celebrate yourself? You want to start pulling this thread and you want to discuss this with your accountability buddy.
We encourage you to ask this question every Sunday night as you’re planning out your week. I always come up with amazing insights into my work and my relationship actually to my work. You can also have these champagne moments for your month or your quarter or for your year.
You want to ask yourself what’s the one thing that, if you got it done this year, even if you screwed everything else up royally it would still move you forward in a really, really big way. I’ll give you an example. We had a client named Tiffany. She kept asking this question relentlessly every week. She would discuss it with her accountability buddy. Her buddy would help hold her accountable to getting these things done.
Within six months she went from being on probation at work, literally almost fired, and she actually got promoted two times in less than 12 months because she stopped focusing on the shallow work and got clear on her big stuff that she really needed to do.
Just to make this real, just try doing it right now. Just ask yourself, “What’s the number one thing this week that, if you could do it, would make you feel so satisfied and so proud of yourself that you’d stop by the store, truly buy some champagne or maybe chocolate if you don’t want to buy alcohol, and go home and kick off your shoes and just raise a glass to yourself?”
If this is tough for you, it might be tough, that’s totally fine. Just keep with it. It’s designed to challenge you. It’s designed to kind of make you uncomfortable. You are going to want to share this champagne moment with your accountability buddy and ask your buddy to share theirs with you as well.
Figure out what’s going to potentially distract or block you from reaching your champagne moment and come up with some defense plans to keep those things from happening. We tell our clients, if at the end of the week you didn’t to get your champagne moment done just learn from it and just own it. It’s also okay when we just learn from what we do.
There are usually three reasons why it does not get done. You either overreached meaning you overestimated what you could do so we can learn how to chunk down to smaller goals and become reasonable with our expectations of ourselves, or maybe you didn’t show up at your peak level and you needed a little more grit and discipline. Or, life just happened.
Some weeks you didn’t do anything wrong, your week just goes sideways. The trick is to try again in the next week. The champagne moment exercise helps you clarify your week. It helps you measure your progress and put in that effort full practice that really improves your performance and makes it very easy to dialogue with your accountability buddy.
Amy: Oh my gosh. So good. I absolutely loved a champagne moment when you first talked about it and I was asking you if you are cool with first explaining it on the podcast but then putting it into a freebie.
I really want my listeners to take this freebie, look at the champagne moment, and then do this exercise. I love your idea of doing it on Sunday night before the week starts and really asking yourself if this is something that would get you really excited and you would want to pop that bottle of champagne.
I want to first thank you for allowing us to put this into a freebie because it’s going to be incredibly valuable. I also want to encourage all of you to download it at http:// amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/174download. You can get this champagne moment written out step by step so that you can put it into full effect.
Carrey, thank you so much for allowing us to use it.
Carey: Awesome. No problem.
Amy: We’re not stopping there. We’ve got one final piece that is so incredibly valuable before we wrap up. I’m sure that you and your husband, Demir, have heard every excuse in the book why people aren’t getting stuff done.
Can you run a few of those by us and kind of give us some ways to move past those limiting beliefs?
Carey: Oh man, yes. We definitely have. In fact, we started hearing so many excuses over and over again that we realized they were all based on five sort of basic excuses. We started calling them limiting mindsets because they are the worst kind of lies that you can tell yourself.
The worst kind of lies are that because they have just enough truth to them to make them feel really real in our lives. So they are kind of like poison for your productivity. They convince you that you’re a victim to your circumstances or that you’re not to blame for your results. Then you end up quitting before you actually break through and that’s such a shame.
Listen, your brain is the ultimate technology. It’s not your phone, it’s your brain. If your brain is wired to extreme ownership of your circumstances then you’re going to be LeBron James 52 weeks out of the year. You’re going to crush it all the time. You’re going to sail through challenges that stop everybody else.
But if your brain’s wired to these limiting mindsets you’ve got negative voices just running rampant in your head, we all have those, it’s not going to stop no matter how productive you are. You’re going to get stopped at small obstacles and you will genuinely start to believe you can’t go further. That’s just not true.
You need to be really vigilant about looking out for these limiting mindsets because they are kind of like leaves. They are just going to take over your whole garden if you don’t really weed them out.
Here’s the first one, I don’t have enough hours in the day. Have you ever found yourself saying this one?
Amy: I say this one all the time.
Carey: Exactly. That’s because there’s a kernel of truth here. We tend to be over committed as humans. We have really long to-do lists. But, the lie part of this is that with more time we could actually catch up. If we had 36 hours in a day then we could finally get ahead and do everything we want to do.
Amy: Oh yeah, I believe that one. So you’re saying that is not true?
Carey: Exactly because study after study shows it’s not just about your time, it’s actually more so about your energy. You have a limited amount of cognitive energy each day. In fact, you have a decision bank of about 200 decisions per day regardless of how much time you have available.
Once you exceed that then your brain kind of calls it quits for the day. It says, “I’m done.” Have you ever had it happen to you where you go in to work and step into a really intense meeting and by the time you get out at noon you’re toast, you’re fried?
Amy: This happens to me when I’m creating content. If I’m recording content for an online course, after about three or four videos I literally can’t think of anything else. I often wonder what my problem is and am like, “Get it together Amy.”
I’m toast, like you said.
Carey: Exactly. We call this cognitive load. Cognitive load is the cost of making decisions on your working memory. When you max out your cognitive load decision fatigue sets in. This is actually a psychological condition where you literally start making bad decisions.
Studies show that you work slower, you make more mistakes, and you tend to be very grumpy. Unfortunately, our brain has no idea what an important decision is or an unimportant decision. Even little things like debating what kind of sandwiches we eat or what to wear for the day are also taxing your cognitive energy that you could otherwise use to move the ball forward in your life.
This is where the higher truth comes in. If the limiting truth traps you in a corner then the higher truth sets you free. It actually gives you a path forward. The higher truth here is that even if I could give you more hours you couldn’t’ use them.
A lot of us are depleting our cognitive capacity way before we’ve run out of time in a day. We actually need to learn how to make better decisions with the time we have, not necessarily get more time. That makes sense. You, Oprah, Richard Branson, none of us have more time than the other person. They just use it differently.
I love, Amy, how you say that you do your content creation in the morning and you get that creative work out of the way because you know those are the best hours of your day. When I broke through on this personally it was totally huge for me because instead of just trying to fit more and more and more work into my day and starting to burn myself out I just refocused myself on my champagne moment and really moving the ball first thing in the morning.
That’s what convinced me I need to work on the hardest stuff first right when I’m fresh.
Amy: Okay, so when you were saying that you need to make better decisions, did I hear you right where you were saying that you really need to make better decisions. Is that right?
Carey: Well, we need to make better decisions about what we’re going to do with that cognitive energy.
Amy: Oh, got you. Okay. That makes perfect sense. Really deciding what I’m going to work on today and now I see how you’re tying that in to your champagne moment because if you’re working on things that aren’t going to get you to the champagne moment come Friday end of day then you likely should be working on something else that’s going to move the needle forward.
Carey: Exactly. We want to be careful about frittering away that cognitive load and energy on unimportant things, for example, doing laundry or procrastinating by cleaning the house and we want to be very aware of that. We want to focus our energy into those first two to three hours where we are most powerful and the most fresh and then go easy on ourselves later in the day.
Amy: I love this. If you all follow my podcast and listened a few episodes back when I talked about ditching the distractions I feel that episode is so much better when you have a champagne moment and you know where you’re going for that week. So, when those distractions come up they are very easy to identify because you know they have nothing to do with that champagne moment you’re trying to get to.
I love how this is all coming together. That’s one of the first limiting mindsets. Give me a second one. We’ll go through two of them here and then I’m going to save the last three for the freebie because the freebie is going to give you the step-by-step walk through of how to create your champagne moment with your buddy.
We are then going to list all five of these limiting mindsets. We’re going to give you two right now just to peak your curiosity.
Carey: Awesome. Great. Here’s the second one. I just can’t stay focused. There must be something wrong with my brain.
Amy: Bring it on. I think this one’s going to resonate with a lot of listeners. Talk to me about this one.
Carey: The half truth here is you are distracted. A lot of us are facing distraction these days. I would say that’s just a trend that’s going to keep continuing. But the lie here is that there’s actually nothing wrong with you or your brain.
You are most likely just overworked. The fact here is that your work is the product of your habits not of your feelings. That’s one of the biggest distinctions you can make. A lot of us are emotional workers. In order to combat this limiting mindset is to realize we need to develop better work habits.
Habitual behavior goes back billions of years. It easily predates the human brain. Habits can actually get us to do things even when we don’t feel like doing it. They feel easy to do.
Habits can actually induce and modify and destroy our mood or our state of mind that we’re currently in. The most powerful organizations in human history have leveraged habits to enhance work flow and do states of mind and push human performance to its limits.
What’s great about this is that you can form your own habits and they can be created and modified in just a matter of weeks. The best part about it is that habits do not incur any cognitive load. Remember, when we talked about cognitive energy, habits don’t actually take up any power in our decision bank.
Once we get focused work as a habit, not just as a state of mind that we have to white knuckle ourselves into then we’re going to be able to fix our state of mind, fix our habits, and turn a bad work flow into a great work flow.
We will turn distracted workers into productive workers. What’s great about this is, as animals, we respond to our environment in very predictable ways. We can use that to our advantage here.
Amy: I’m guessing that you talk a lot about habits inside your own community. This has got to be a topic that comes up a lot. Would I be guessing right?
Carey: Yes, definitely.
Amy: Like I mentioned, those are the first two limiting mindsets. But there are three more and I’ll give you a hint. One has to do with you feeling like you don’t get to control your time, another one has to do with you feeling like there’s way too much on your plate, so those are just a few little hints as to what’s to come. If you go to http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/
174download you can grab the freebie and we’ll go through all five of them plus that champagne moment.
First of all, thank you so much. This was so well thought out. You could tell that you prepared for this and I cannot thank you enough because, as you know, my listeners are busy. They don’t have a lot of time. So when you come prepared you just blow them out of the water which I’m sure you just did because you did for me.
Thank you so much!
Carey: Absolutely. Amy, thanks so much for having me on. You have been such a huge inspiration to me and to all of the people in your community. I just want to acknowledge you for what you’ve created with this community and for the help that you’ve given me in my own business.
Amy: Thank you so much. That means the world to me, truly. I want you to tell my listeners where they can learn more about you. I think they are going to want to learn from you and your husband, Demir, for sure. Where can they learn more?
Carey: Definitely. Our mission is that we’re here to help people unlock 100% of their God-given talents so that they can get the most important things done and actually create the success they deserve. With that said you can check out our website. We’re at LifeHackBootcamp.com.
If you’re the kind of person who is already successful but you just know there’s more in the gas tank; or, if you’re sick of sabotaging your success with your really bad work habits then we’ve got a ton of free information, some free downloads, and even some free master classes that can help you take yourself to the next level.
Amy: LifeHackBootcamp.com. Definitely go check it out. Carey, thanks again so very much.
Carey: Thanks Amy.
Amy: There you have it. Hopefully you enjoyed my special interview with Carey Bentley. I absolutely love talking with her. I want you to get your hands on the free cheat sheet that Carey and her husband, Demir, have prepared for this episode. It’s The Champagne Moment so when you get an accountability partner you’re going to want to bring this up and work through the process together. It is so incredibly valuable.
Plus, we’ve included the five limiting mindsets. These limiting mindsets, we did a few here in this episode but there’s more, they are poison. They will encourage you to stop before you even start. We have to mind our mindset. We have to pay very close attention to what we’re thinking at any given moment, especially as it relates to growing our business and getting work done.
Go to http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/174download and you can download the cheat sheet right away. I can’t wait for you to put it in motion in your own business. Thanks so much for being here with me. I cannot wait to connect with you again next week. Bye for now.
