This weeks Question
I've listened to your show since the beginning and love your guests, and especially when you share your strategies and life lessons, thank you very much. But what for you has made the biggest impact to your growth and success?
Thor - Stavanger - Norway
Welcome to the Success IQ Podcast, the show for entrepreneurs who want to create and live an exceptional life. I'm your host, Geoff Nicholson, and this is episode 122. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening. Wherever you are in the world, I truly hope you are having an amazing week. So we are answering another question from one of our listeners, and this is possibly the coolest name ever, Thor. This is Thor from Stavanger in Norway. So first of all, lovely place. I did many a training over in Stavanger and Thor, you just go down for one of the coolest names ever. We've had a Thor actually on the show in the early days. I think he came from the Shetland isles. But anyway, we digress slightly, so I hope we do hope everyone's having a great week.
Great question. I actually get asked this quite a lot, Thor. And so let's break it down and walk through it. Now, the biggest one possibly if we start from self-work and then move to involving others. So the first one probably is something that I call mirror work. I'm sure other people call it that as well, but I've just always called it mirror work. And that is about allowing an exercise that I do every single morning. I have talked about this a couple of times. It's an exercise that I do every morning. So about, well back in 2006, I was taught this great technique about giving myself a kind of like a pep talk in the morning. I've slightly changed that to what the words that I was taught with and what I teach now are something called a power phrase.
It's an individual phrase that we tailor make to ourselves that it's about sticking a rocket up our ass in the mornings. Getting yourself to that great place, feeling positive, feeling good, and being able to take the day's challenges head-on. Because if negative things happen, if bad things happen. I talked about some of my challenges at the beginning of this season, I need to get myself personally, I need to get myself to that place. Again, I'm protecting the asset, I'm being a little bit positively selfish about it and I'm getting myself to where I need to be. So one of the things I sit down and do is I've sat down and I've created this power phrase and it's one of the things that we're talking about in the next week or so over in the Success IQ Alliance group.
So if you're not part of it, jump over and become a member. It doesn't cost anything, but it's a closed community. And what I'm doing is I'll talk about the power phrase, how to set one up and everything else. But the power phrase is very simple. So in the morning when I get out of bed and get myself sorted, I am standing in front of that mirror and I will say the power phrase to myself two, three, four times. But there's a couple of key important things. It's not only the words that I'm saying to myself, it's what I am saying to myself, how I am saying it and my congruence in that, but also my posture as well. Now if I'm expecting to be positive and upbeat and high energy, then my posture has to be like that.
Again and Tony Robbins talks about a lot of that as well when he talks about, I can't remember which one of his programmes it was, but he talks about when he does the walk and he does this special breathing technique and he has this mantra going on and it was amazingly powerful. What I kind like looked today was, is okay, I need to stand in front of the mirror. I need to look at myself in the eyes, which initially didn't start looking at myself in the eyes. I can like looked at the sink and gradually as I got more confident and I started to believe what I was saying, eventually I could start looking at my eyes. So I started to do this and I start saying this phrase and I get more energy each and every time I do it.
And I'm not going to go through what I said. It's personal to me. What I can say is that the very end, the last phrase that I say is I love you. And the reason for that is very, very simple. For a long, long time, I hated myself. There's a book I carry around with me as bad memory, but also as a badge of honour to say how far I've come. And what I basically did was I wrote down exactly what I thought of myself, I think it was about 20 different words and none of them is good. All sorts of things, insulting me and degrading me and everything else. But what I found was is when I'm standing in front, I've got this power phrase and I'm saying this power phrase, two, three, four times my posture is tall and open and I'm saying it with such confidence, congruence and support and conviction that this is exactly how I feel.
I just feel frigging awesome in the morning. And it's something I've done every single day now since 2007 and it's something that I talk to my clients about setting power phrases up, especially the ones that are wanting to feel high levels of performance. Want to get themselves into that good state very, very quickly and be able to work on a moment's notice because that power phrase, if I'm having a bad day, that power phrase, I'll go to the bathroom, I'll even use the selfie camera on my phone and I will go through it. And I will say to myself, if I'm having a bad day or a challenge or something like that, that's exactly what I'll do. So I definitely would say that the mirror work is definitely something that I've found amazingly useful.
It was difficult at first, but it's getting to the point now, it's way, way past that point now where it's like I just want to feel absolutely awesome in the morning. Some people do it where they write it down, other peoples will do it different ways, but for me the most important bit is, is looking myself in the mirror and saying the words physically. That to me is the one way that's going to get me into the place I need to be. And of course with that as well as I surround my environment with positive phrases, the useful things and fun images. I've got a huge picture in my office of a colourful chimpanzee. I've got some pictures and cartoons and illustrations of some ideas I've had in the past. I surround myself and my wall is bright orange.
It's all about vibrancy. It's all about keeping myself into that positive place. So that is probably the most, the biggest one Thor, is the self-talk. And like I say, if you want to know more, jump over, subscribe to the Facebook group and we will be going through that on a Q&A session in the next couple of weeks, which is as definitely not one to miss if you want to know more and there'll be an opportunity for you to do a Q&A session as well.
Okay. So then the second one. I'm going to give you four, Thor, just to make it easier. The second one generally because I couldn't separate them. The second one is journaling, without a shadow of a doubt were the biggest one, if it probably in some ways it overtakes the mirror work, but without a shadow of a doubt, it has been completely liberating, empowering and inspiring to do the journal process.
I've gone through many different connotations of how I journal, going from the really simple which is I talked about it a thing on the last episode is the five-minute journal. Going all the way to the one that I'm kind of looking at and exploring at the minute, which is The Daily Stoic Journal by Ryan Holiday. That's a lot more deep, a lot more reflective and gets me to think about things in a very different way. Also, it challenges me as well and I've also used the ones like I've got friends who use... What do they call it? It's a free writing one, I think it's called Morning Pages or something like that, it's called, but they do it. But journaling ultimately is that ability for me to sit down and write what I'm currently thinking about myself, my dreams and everything else and allows me to sit down and process stuff.
Because sometimes it's about getting it out of your head and putting it into a piece of paper for you to be able to sit down. I'm not one who likes to record the crap, but what I will always do is I'll write down my challenge and then sit down, mull it over, reflect on it, and then go, okay, these are the solutions. I won't leave a negative piece of writing in my journal until I've gone through it. I'm also experimenting with a platform called Journey, and there's another one, I think it's called Day One or One Day, as well, that a useful thing if you want to be completely digital. But I think that the whole concept for me is it just, it's about getting it out and part of the biggest problem is there's a lot of the stuff we keep inside, it's not doing us any good.
So there's that element of it and we need to get it out in order to process it because depression is the fact that we no longer express ourselves. So we're holding our emotions down and our emotions are supposed to be out, even if it's about venting them and getting it out and then calming back down. I'd much prefer to do that in a leather book or even a spiral book, but just be able to process that and go, okay, these are the solutions. It also gives me valuable information when I'm speaking to my coach or mastermind group as well. So it just very much depends on how you want to challenge that, which way you want to go. So we've got mirror work first and journaling second without a shadow of a doubt.
But there's so many different skills that I've learnt over the last, gosh, over a decade now. And I can't believe that. Not only that, it's what I learned while I was ill as well. I just didn't implement it as much as I implement it once I got better. So that's the second one. The third one has to be the mastermind. Well, I remember when I first started to learn, I remember reading Think and Grow Rich and that was probably the first book I read. Ironically, it's the first book a lot of people read.
They either read Think and Grow Rich or to Tony Robbins product and that's generally the consensus on that one. But the mastermind, having a group of trusted advisors. People who I can speak to who may not have done what I've done, but have got their own experiences and different levels of business or their own skillset and knowledge in a different trade altogether to be able to sit down and know that I'm in a safe environment and that I can in some cases, which has been the case for me and for other members, open my heart and just let it all out. I'm in an environment where I know I'm not going to be judged, what I am going to be is completely supported and they are going to help me find the best solution possible on how to deal with whatever is going on.
But I remember kind like reading it and then I went over to do the mentoring programme with Jack Canfield over in 2009, 2010 for the first Training-the-Trainer programme. And we sat down and we did a mastermind session. It just blew my mind away. It just the ability of having, it's one of the reasons why I host mastermind. It's one of the reasons why I discuss and tell people that you should be part of mastermind groups. It is just an amazing thing to be. And all right. You might not call it mastermind, you may call it brainstorming, you might call it platinum circle, you might call it whatever the hell it is, it's ultimately far as I'm concerned. Masterminding is a group of trusted people, a board of advisors who have got no link to your organisation at all.
They're just there to help you find solutions in different areas of your life from whether that's personal challenges you're going through. What you initially do is, what I find is you initially join on and you think it's all going to be about business and you think, "Right. Okay, so we're just going to talk about business." And then once you allow yourself to open up, and I don't know whether it's a curse or not, but I'm very open, I'm very transparent. It's sometimes got me into trouble about opening up too much to the wrong people, but, hey Sod's law. The ability that you start going yet okay, so here's a problem with the business and within about three, four sessions, you are sitting down there and you're talking about challenges you're having in your personal life or you're opening up to... We had one over in the States, they were opening up to financial challenges and we hadn't known each other for very long but they wanted to play full out.
They wanted to do the full game and they were doing that. So a mastermind is one of those things that is absolutely has been revolutionary or one of the revolutionary things for me in helping me get there. And I'm nowhere near the level of success I aspire to achieve. I'm quite open with that. I'm enjoying the journey, the ups and downs certainly is the ups and downs. But to have that mastermind group and to sit and be able to say, "I want to empower hundreds and hundreds and thousands of people, if not billions of people." And not be laughed at. And to have those people going, "Well, okay, let's get to work." That is a great environment to be in. And all of us can create masterminds. All of us can do that. Some of us find hosted masterminds are better.
And I understand that and I understand that why but others find that they just like creating their own. And again, that's their own personal thing. And we've got a couple of talks planned on the Facebook group, if anyone wants to talk about that, which we've already mentioned before. And then the final one without a shadow of a doubt is working with a coach, which is the beginning when I started to do this, it was kind of like, I guess my ego took over and I went, "I am a coach. I don't need to work with a coach. That's just crazy. Why would they invest in the same skills that I already know?" But to actually be able to sit down on a one on one basis, on a frequent basis.
So some of my clients I work with, and I speak to them every week, some of them it's bi-monthly and some of them is only monthly, it just very much depends on the package that they're on. But they really enjoy the fact that they get an opportunity to go, okay, these are my challenges. We need to work through these. And I've got someone, much like the mastermind group, but more on a very personal level. I've got someone that is going, "Okay, Geoff, let's quit this shit. What's stopping you from doing X? Or why aren't you doing this or why do you want to do this or why all of a sudden have you moved from this product to this product?" To have that ability and that I don't want to go into a room more so because I'm a coach myself.
I don't want to go into that room and tell my coach that I failed and I haven't done something I detest that. I love I'm competitive and I love the fact that I can kind of go, "Yeah, I've achieved that." There's a big goal on my list. What my coach is also very, very good at doing. He gives me some line to be able to go off and do the things, but he's always getting ready to pull it back and just say, "Is this exactly what you want to do? Because you've said for the last three months, this is what you've wanted to do." Because I do suffer from shiny syndrome, generally because I've got so many different ideas and I've got a lot of friends that are able to curb that down and go, okay.
And in fact, part in one of my tasks from my coach was to go, "Okay, write down on the board all the things that you want to create." And I was like, "God, I don't even, can I actually use the whole wall? Don't have to just use my whiteboard." And he was going, "No, no. Use the board. Write down the things that you are really focused on wanting to create to help develop your business and impact the people you're doing." So I'm sitting there and I'm going, "Okay, so there's the podcast of course, and there's I want to get my book done and I want to do my journal. And I've got the roadshow coming up soon. And obviously the mastermind groups, I love doing them, my one-to-one coaching." He says, "Right, okay. So just put them down. And he says, the rule now is to choose one and work on one until it's complete."
And it was like, he says, you've got your running your business and you've got your clients to deal with everything else. But when you've got that downtime, focus on that one thing because what I generally do is I manage it very, very well and I'm productive when I need to be, but there's certain things that basically whether it's limitations or whatever it is and doubts. The big thing with me as I've mentioned on the show was my dyslexia in writing the book and stuff, so we're exploring with different strategies and everything else. And to have that ability to have someone now and going, "Okay, let's get cracking." And that without a shadow of a doubt, one of the biggest things, it is well worth the investment. In our course I would say that I'm a coach and I coach people, but if you are serious about taking your level of success to the next level, if you're serious about pulling yourself out of that slump, then you need to hire a coach.
The rules I would say is when you're hiring a coach, whether it's me or someone else is you've got to make sure you trust them because you want to make sure that the things that you are saying they are going to support you with and they don't put their ideas in. I don't mind coaches that put their input in personally. Some people like coaches who are only going to keep asking questions and driving. I prefer a mixture of consultant and coach. But the other one is, is what you've got to be very careful is that you don't have a coach that is not trained who's trying to be a therapist and you don't have a therapist who's trying to be a coach. To me, they're very, very different skills. Therapy is the past, coaching is moving forward or present to forward. At least that's the way I look at it.
And specifically one of the reasons why I trained in therapy as well as coaching because I wanted to be able to help my client through both stages and walk them through that. But that's just personally me. So yes. So they are probably the four most important one. But like I say, there are loads of things that... A lot of the stuff that we've covered there's many things in the archives in the podcast. But if you're wanting to find more, get an opportunity to ask me specific questions about certain ones of these.
If you signed up to the group, you'll be able to ask me questions because we're going to start doing some training webinars and some live videos just going through that to be able to help you go through that process. So remember, I'm really, really grateful for all of those amazing emails that people are sending me, questions and everything else. Don't forget if you have any questions, if you'd like them answered on the show, please send emails to podcast@jeffnicholson.co.uk. And there are links on the notes and also there'll be a bit of a blurb on the back. But thank you very much for joining me on the show and I wish you the greatest success.
