Business Psychology | Finch Sells

2 Small Powerful Concepts to Explode Your Conversions

Mar 25 2014

Why is split testing so important?

Because small changes add up to big dollars.

My favourite example comes from Colleen Szot, the world renowned infomercial writer who shattered a twenty-year sales record by changing just three words in one of her scripts.

You would miss them if you didn’t know where to look.

She didn’t insert superlatives, or extra promises, or yet another celebrity endorsement.

Here’s what she changed:

Version 1: “Operators are waiting, please call now,”
Record breaking Version 2: “If operators are busy, please call again.”

And sales took off in to the stratosphere.

It would be disingenuous to suggest that small wordplay can turn a losing product in to a multimillion dollar success. But it can certainly shape a winner.

Conventional sales logic says: make the sale as pain-free as possible.

Why would you piss off the customer by threatening to waste her precious time on hold?

Szot would argue that believable social proof is worth it.

After all, who is more likely to rip out your eyeballs?

The salesman peddling a product that is flying off the shelves, or a call centre full of eager, idle lions who haven’t been fed for days?

Whatever you are selling, you will sell more by adding social proof.

If you are in the service business, this means appearing busier than you actually are.

You are publicly seen to value your time; your writing is concise, your communication succinct. The world knows you refuse to take a shit without checking your calendar first. It’s a staple of your vocabulary that you only ever have room for one extra client.

If you are selling products, this means threatening to run out of them, or stop selling them, or start raising the price on them. Whatever you are selling, the cost of not acting now is always going to rise exponentially (even if the price doesn’t).

In both cases, the best possible reason for denying a customer your service or product is because somebody else got there first.

It’s annoying to walk in to a shop and find that shiny new gadget is out of stock. But it stings to see the last box snatched up by the guy ten paces in front of you.

Social proof creates intrigue, desire, validation.

Scarcity creates a monster.

Every piece of sales copy you produce should have both.

Extra: Read more about how I use social proofing and scarcity in my neuromarketing post series, originally published in 2012.

How to Delay Gratification in a World of Immediate Distractions

May 14 2013

Delayed gratification is the theory behind the old saying, “Good things come to those who wait“. It is our ability to resist the temptation of an immediate reward in favour of a larger prize in the future.

Numerous studies have shown the ability to delay gratification as one of the biggest indicators of success through life.

It can be relevant in so many ways; from your ability to budget, to the type of woman you wake up next to, to your willingness to stoneface a Sausage & Egg McMuffin in favour of training for a marathon at 5am. The latter of which, in my case, will never ever happen.

Those who can resist temptation in pursuit of long-term goals are blessed with an enormous advantage over the playing field. It is the essence of focus, concentration, productivity and even the classic quote that an affiliate can’t go 7 hours without seeing on Facebook:

ENTREPRENEURSHIP IS LIVING A FEW YEARS OF YOUR LIFE LIKE MOST PEOPLE WON’T SO THAT YOU CAN SPEND THE REST OF YOUR LIFE LIKE MOST PEOPLE WON’T

Looking at the career of Internet Marketers, many of us were exceptionally good at delaying gratification when we made the jump to running our own businesses. But it doesn’t always stay that way.

In a rather cruel twist of fate, the more successful you become, the more distractions that entwine their way in to your life. It’s kind of like Muse, the band. Does anybody remember how awesome Muse were in 2002-2003?

Here’s a reminder:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3H0hQpA-Ho8

Fast forward ten years and you’ll find a caricature of a space rock trio who have clearly spent too much time indulging in fantasies of the apocalypse. If Matt Bellamy spent less time playing with his [admittedly very rich] balls on Above Top Secret, and more hours alone with his guitar, he’d probably write better rock songs.

Many artists produce their best work when the rewards and recognition are nowhere to be seen. It takes a special personality to cancel out the white noise; to produce the best possible work; when distraction is all around him. And that’s what success brings: distraction.

Vincent van Gogh, one of the greatest painters of the last 300 years, died alone and depressed. You could count on one hand the number of people that appreciated his work. Van Gogh’s tragedy, among many, was that he blew his brains out before seeing the recognition he deserved. But it does go some way to explaining why that work is so highly regarded, particularly for its emotional honesty.

There are only so many distractions that one man, a paintbrush and his mental illness has to bear. The product of that delayed gratification – van Gogh’s lifetime battle with depression and introspection – is what we now call genius.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that the way to get in touch with your best possible work is to despair and retreat from the world. But I do believe that anybody who has the privilege of working from home has to become fine-tuned to his ‘levels of comfort’.

Too much comfort is a bad thing.

Too many distractions will fuck with your ability to see straight through them and catch the bigger prize.

On a personal level, this isn’t something I had to worry about before I quit my day job.

For a period of several months, I would work all day in the city, and then all night in my bedroom. There’s very little reward at 9:02am, day after day, parking at your desk and feeling like your every fibre has been shagged by a pygmy hippo. But there’s an awful lot of potential if you can sustain the act long enough to achieve progress that wouldn’t have been possible at Pound a Pint Night.

The better you are at delaying rewards, the more productive you are likely to be in the meantime. Likewise, the more motivated you are, the more natural that is going to become. Learning to delay gratification is thus a two-part recipe of finding the right motivation and instilling the right discipline.

The effects it can have on your life are pretty remarkable…

The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment

One of the most famous studies in to delayed gratification took place over 40 years ago at Stanford University, courtesy of psychologist Walter Mischel, 600 children, and a plate full of marshmallows.

Mischel led each child in to a room free of distractions where they would find a treat of their choice, usually a marshmallow (would have demanded a salted caramel brownie personally, but whatever). The children were told they could eat the marshmallow if they so wished – or wait 15 minutes, and receive two. A very simple premise: more good things come to those who wait.

All of Mischel’s guinea pigs were aged 4 to 6, and it was hoped that the experiment would reveal the age at which a child learns to defer gratification. Sure enough, there was a clear correlation between the older children and a better ‘waiting game’. But it wasn’t until a follow-up study, twenty years later, that the groundbreaking extent of those marshmallows became apparent.

The children who had shown the best ability to defer gratification; to wait for the second marshmallow; had gone on to lead strikingly more successful lives than those who caved in to the immediate reward.

The first follow-up study in 1988 revealed that “preschool children who delayed gratification longer in the self-imposed delay paradigm, were described more than 10 years later by their parents as adolescents who were significantly more competent“. A subjective analysis, admittedly, but one that would be backed by further findings.

The children who delayed gratification were later paired to better SAT scores, greater academic achievements, a healthier body mass index, among other favourable life outcomes.

Whether the ability to delay gratification comes from nature or nurturing is difficult to assess. A 2011 brain imaging study on the same Stanford test subjects (now seasoned guinea pigs) showed greater activity in the prefrontal cortex for the adept delayers, whereas those who struggled to resist the first marshmallow saw increased activity in the ventral striatum, an area of the brain commonly associated with addictions.

Biology and marshmallows aside, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how a talent for delaying gratification is useful in our world of immediate distractions.

A large number of affiliates walk this earth with the patience of bloodhounds OD’ing on viagra. They wouldn’t wait for the second marshmallow. They’d karate cock slap Mischel, steal the entire bag, and be promoting Adult Friend Finder before lunch.

So…how do we manage that? How do we keep an eye on the greater prize? How in the name of Lucifer’s anus do we learn to defer gratification?

Improving Your Ability to Delay Gratification

Alter The Path of Least Resistance

The Marshmallow experiment is interesting, but one of the conditions I find troubling is that the marshmallow had to remain in front of the child at all times. It was never more than a sweeping arm’s grab away, which is like sticking a bee in front of honey.

What would have happened if the child had been forced to stand up, cross the room, and climb up a pile of boxes if he wished to have the marshmallow? This is what we call altering the path of least resistance.

You take temptation, you bag it up, and you get it the hell out of your sight.

In doing so, you considerably raise your chances of removing a bad habit, or not doing something stupid.

Take for example the confessions of a shopaholic.

What’s a good way to stop yourself from splashing the cash on excessive online purchases that you probably can’t afford? Well, taking your credit cards and freezing them in a block of ice is one option.

Credit card in ice

I make this the equivalent of the consumer ‘cooling off’ period. If a purchase is truly necessary, it can wait 24 hours while the ice thaws.

Note: I highly suggest you get your groceries in before freezing Mr. Plastic Fantastic, and do not try this with your business cards. It will not say much for your professionalism.

The frozen credit card is a good example of how placing a roadblock in the path of least resistance can save you during a moment of weakness. It’s pretty extreme, but it’s a step in the right direction for people who never learn.

If you can take a bad habit and put it 30 seconds away, there’s a good chance you’ll remove the habit. I spoke about this before in my Premium Posts with examples of blocking time-wasting websites, putting your phone in another room, hiding the PS3 controller in your loft, and so on. Alter the path of least resistance.

The less immediate the distraction becomes, the more likely you are to procrastinate over pursuing it, and maybe – just maybe – get some bloody work done.

I heard an amusing tale from a Yorkshire friend who didn’t want to have sex on a first date, so she would turn up in her least attractive underwear and abandon sexual hygiene for the day. The theory being that no matter how drunk she got, she would always remember that it wasn’t a good night to go home with company. I think she probably overestimated the underwear receptiveness of Sheffield men, but I can see her logic. Fair play to the crazy bitch.

Clearly, one of the best ways to delay gratification is to understand your own thought processes so that you can prepare for weak decisions and create gremlins to prevent them.

For example, if you are the kind of guy who likes to take a break from work to play a few games of pool, firstly a) Don’t be so stupid as to buy a pool table for your dining room.

And b) If you are going to be so stupid, use it as a laundry post from Monday to Friday so it doesn’t kill your career.

Pool table distractions

(Life lessons. You’re welcome.)

Kids Need to be Taught About Money

I believe in this quite passionately.

In school, we spend hours teaching our kids about how Jesus fed 5000 with bread and fish, but we don’t teach them how to manage their money. That’s a pretty fucking big problem in my book.

Schools need to do away with political correctness, starting with religious education, and get teaching kids some life skills that actually matter. Like how to manage their finances. How to budget. How to distinguish between materialistic needs and paying the god damn gas bill.

While bestselling hack-jobs like Rich Dad Poor Dad have attempted to instill a wiser attitude towards finance in today’s younger generation, it should not be a responsibility left to men like Robert Kiyosaki. It should be taught in schools. In the absence of any foreseeable change, parents have to pick up the ball…

Pressure on Parenting

I was having a conversation the other day about the difference between Yes parents and No parents, and whether it is good or bad for the kid being raised.

Like many key skills in life, the seeds of delayed gratification are sewn in childhood. Parents who feel inclined to say yes to their child’s every demand are likely to give him a skewed attitude towards the supply and demand of ‘getting what you want’ when he reaches adulthood.

I would argue that, similarly, parents who never praise, or who keep both eyes locked on expectations and ‘minimum requirements’ (you will get a degree) are likely to inherit children with damaging self-esteem issues. And those can be just as difficult to shake.

Either way, I encounter so many 8-12 year old fuck-ups on the London buses that I can’t help but think the best advice is “If you’re not ready for them, don’t fucking have them.”

Parents need to prepare their kids for the real world by teaching them about money, and the critical law that governs just about every facet of our lives: supply and demand.

Money doesn’t grow on trees, and neither should it. Expecting millions when your net output is peanuts just isn’t going to work, as the Western electorate is only just discovering. If everybody could have what they wanted; all of the time; nothing would be worth having because all that would be left is sticks and stones.

Delayed gratification is a virtue to those who understand it, and a royal pain in the arse to those who don’t. Would it be better any other way?

I don’t think so.

And on that note, I’m off to shove my pool table in the freezer.

Have a good week.

The 2 Crippling Fears That Sabotage Your Affiliate Business

Dec 11 2012

One of the best decisions I ever made was to stop looking for affiliate programs to promote and start thinking about products I could create.

Creating products is the logical progression from affiliate marketing.

Most affiliates arrive at the same conclusion, whether it takes 6 months or 6 years in the trenches, “Why promote somebody else’s million dollar idea when I am quite capable of concocting my own?”

It’s certainly not due to a lack of ability. A better diagnosis would be a lack of faith.

Many affiliates are scared to create.

There are two fears that hold us back. The fear of failure and the fear of success. I’m going to explain both, and what you can do to defeat them.

Why Affiliate Marketing is Easy… and Why Creating is Not

It would be denial to say that playing the lone shark affiliate doesn’t have its advantages.

There’s no such thing as a recession in affiliate marketing. Not when you can change industry in a heartbeat by pausing one campaign and unleashing another.

For much of the last three years, my relationship to affiliate offers could be described as ‘ships passing in the night’.

If product owners are the gigantic ocean cruisers with a fixed path from one coordinate (the land of messy whiteboards) to the next (the land of launched products), affiliates are the pirate ships that loiter in open waters, with no real direction, no real homeland, just a desire to pillage whatever profits come their way.

Affiliate pirates

There are many reasons why we prefer to stay in those open waters.

The idea of travelling from A (the whiteboard of ideas) to B (the launched product) requires discipline and planning; a sense of direction.
Procrastination feels less criminal when your work requires that you drift aimlessly. We are reactors to opportunity, but rarely the architects.
There are no passengers (aka customers or investors) to satisfy when you don’t claim to be going anywhere fast.

Some affiliates are quite happy to operate as Chief Arbitragers of the High Seas.

Most are not.

It’s the nature of any businessman to wish for a sense of direction. We all love the feel-good buzz that a satisfied customer brings, and the idea that someday we might just dock our ships on dry land (sticking our flags in the humble turf of stable profits)

I don’t care what anybody says. Operating on the open seas, as a CPA affiliate marketer does, with virtually no control over the fate of his vessel, is a recipe for severe seasickness. It’s not just the lack of direction that grates us. It’s the uncertainty. Affiliate businesses are prone to go missing in the night, victims of icebergs that were seen too late.

And those of us who have being doing this shit for too long – surviving in limbo, rich but rudderless – know exactly how harmful the resulting sea scurvy can be. Drifting aimlessly affects all parts of our lives: the social isolation, the blood pressure readings, our physical health and mental well-being.

When you have nowhere to be, and nobody to please, you really can drift aimlessly for months, even years.

Some might call that a life of freedom.

When you look beyond the brash talk of being one’s own man, I often find that affiliates are hesitant to create because they lack confidence.

They are paralysed by our two recurring fears:

The fear of failure
The fear of success

These fears are the twin terrors of procrastination.

The Fear of Failure

What if I fail?

Fear of failure is most likely to arise from low self-confidence, anxiety, and perfectionism.

What stops you from launching that ambitious Facebook campaign? Or that exciting new website?

All too often, perfectionism stops us from creating.

If we accept nothing less than número uno in our industry of choice (and let’s face it, that’s usually the target during initial brainstorming), is it any wonder that we are hesitant to get started? Our expectations are so high.

Time and time again, I see affiliates drowning in information paralysis. How many blogs, ebooks and forums have you read in search of the ‘perfect’ formula?

Why do you do this?

It is usually because we believe that reading enough opinion pieces, and uncovering enough anecdotal evidence, will lower our chances of failure.

Often, the reason we don’t just get shit done and launch that ambitious Facebook campaign is because we are scared of failing; scared of making a wrong decision that could have been avoided with X hours of research.

Those fears are compounded by the fact that so much of online marketing requires investment of both time and money.

The same applies to creating products and launching new websites.

We would rather dither and procrastinate, killing the idea through a lack of action, than throw all our resources in to a project that stands a chance of failing. At least that way we are in control of how and why it fails.

We somehow feel smarter by not confronting our potential. “Well, I know I could have crushed that weight loss campaign for $1000/day, but I certainly didn’t lose any money by not trying!”

This fear has certainly haunted me in the past.

I have found myself stalling on projects for weeks in search of the perfect WordPress theme, or the perfect logo. What looks like procrastination is actually a superficial sign that you have underlying concerns about the project, and/or your ability to deal with its success or failure.

But is it a logical fear?

Most of us know that creating products and services of genuine value is the way forward in 2012. Where I believe we shoot ourselves in the balls is our interpretation of ‘genuine value’.

Genuine value does not have to mean perfection.

I get a lot of people contacting me with fears of creating products and services on the basis that they can’t do a good enough job. Perhaps they aren’t great writers, or great speakers, or they don’t have enough time, or they don’t know what to create.

In nearly all cases, it comes down to:

a) A lack of confidence
b) An obsession with perfectionism that paralyses us from just getting started

My Experience Creating Products

Before I launched Volume 1 in my Premium Post series, I was more than a little apprehensive about the reception it would get.

A number of thoughts crossed my mind:

What if readers reject the idea of paying money for my work?
What if the material doesn’t live up to their expectations?
What if customers slag off my products over Twitter and Facebook?
What if I disappoint?

There is no doubt about it. Launching a product with your name on the cover is a personal experience, whether it gets credited to the company account or not.

My biggest fear was that the product wouldn’t be good enough. This manifested itself in to all parts of my work day. Instead of steaming ahead, I found a myriad of ways to keep my feet in the sand.

I didn’t want to make any wrong decisions, so I made none.

How to Overcome the Fear of Failure

Let’s say you want to get over that fear of failure. You want to stop procrastinating and start making some empowering decisions (like “I’m going to create my own product!“), and then actually following them through.

Where do you start?

Given that perfectionism is so closely tied to our procrastination, the first step is to accept that our self worth is not dependent on a single task, project or affiliate campaign.

If your identity is built around the idea that nothing less than perfection will do, there’s only one way you can hold yourself to such high standards: by giving the world no output to judge you by. By doing nothing.

Similarly, if like many affiliate marketers you view yourself as a “self-made entrepreneur, aka the boss“, it’s likely that you will feel great anxiety over the success of a project. It is what defines you as a person.

When Dedication Harms Your Work…

Imagine the unkempt hermit who lives, works and sleeps in his mother’s basement.

His identity is built around succeeding as an online marketer, and he spends every moment projecting that image to the world – on forums, on Facebook, to friends and family.

These individuals, ironically, are some of the most likely to procrastinate – to delay putting their stamp on the world. It is their stamp that defines their sense of value as a person.

The hermit’s self-esteem has become so dependent on his online success that every project is critical. If it fails, then it means he has failed as a person.

When entrepreneurism becomes such an integral part of your self-image, the pressure to do it well increases to an intolerable level. Sooner or later, you find yourself wasting time. You would rather shy away from the creation process than give the world something less than perfect to judge you by.

Procrastination hides your stamp from the world.

Many affiliates are deeply proud of their self-made roots, and with that pride comes a self-assessment that is typically counter productive: “My work reflects my worth”

How do you avoid the plague of perfectionism?

The most famous method is to ‘diversify your self-worth’.

If your self-esteem is driven by more than just business success, you will have better supports when it comes to taking risks and handling stress. You can deal with a failed venture because it is not the assassination of your value to the world.

Diversifying your self-worth could mean many things:

Leading a rich social life and enjoying the company of your friends
Being a good father or mother
Being a good daughter or son
Learning a new skill and putting it to good use
Volunteering and helping the less able
Doing a good deed every day
Making an effort with strangers

When you establish a self-image that is balanced – one that does not depend on the success of your online business – you will reduce your fear of failure. You will spend less time procrastinating, and less time ‘grinding’ against your will.

Ironically, the best way to gain the confidence for new and challenging projects is to disconnect completely. Build your self-esteem and focus less on work. You will soon notice that work makes you less anxious, and therefore more productive.

The Fear of Success

What if I succeed?

Perhaps an even greater burden to productivity is the omnipresent fear of success.

Many entrepreneurs refuse to accept that their professional stagnation could have anything to do with the fear of success. I think it often has everything to do with it.

Consider these scenarios:

Scenario 1:

John Doe wants to launch a new male fitness website promoting a supplement product. He writes a few useful articles and gets a slow trickle of traffic. As much as he enjoys the initial response and the buzz of his first sale, he soon realises that success is going to take a large commitment of time. John’s friends are already badgering him about his refusal to come out on Friday night – he wonders where he would find such time. John browses his rival’s site and is deflated by the amount of content they produce. He can’t imagine that he would ever manage to replicate the effort, and he worries what effect trying might have on his relationships with family and friends. Instead of producing more content, John slowly disengages from the project feeling. He feels inferior to his rivals (who all have larger budgets and better writers). An advertiser emails John offering to buy banner space for a nice monthly sum but John is now so paralysed at the gulf between his current site and the imaginary site in his head that it feels like enslavement. The prospect of committing to the project is seen as a threat to his lackadaisical lifestyle. He ignores the email, distances himself from the site, and meets his friends on the next Friday night.

Scenario 2:

Jane Doe runs a successful forum for Work at Home Moms and has attracted a large number of dedicated followers. As her fame has grown, the demand for her brand has grown too. She has companies offering to pay her generously for speaking appearances, and one large firm is even willing to double her monthly income by hiring her on a part-time consulting basis. Jane loves her forum, appreciates her members, but fears she couldn’t possibly balance the forum with the new better-paying work. She relies on those friends to help her through motherhood. Instead of seizing the opportunity to advance her career, she rejects the speaking proposals, ignores the consultancy offers, and sticks to what she knows best.

It’s not just failing that scares us.

There’s the thought of what might happen if we actually succeed.

The fear of success is most likely to materialise in those who lack the confidence to test themselves outside their comfort zone. It is also apparent in online marketers who have grown too accustomed to the life of home comforts.

Many of us are guilty of dithering on projects where success has the potential to coax us out of our rabbit holes, and god forbid, in to the real world of meeting rooms and ‘deliverables‘.

Affiliates are terrified to create products because:

a) Succeeding could represent a leap away from anonymously fingering their balls in the basement while reporting to nobody.
b) Failing would be… failing. And many affiliates take that as a damning verdict on their self-worth.

Success is a threat to the easy-going affiliate lifestyle, which creates a subconscious anxiety projected to the world by our endless procrastination.

One of my favourite analogies sums up the resistance perfectly; “Success is like an escalator. Once you get on, there’s no place to get off except at the top.”

When you jump on the first step, when you take that leap of faith, you worry that you might not be the same person if you succeed. The ‘successful you‘ comes attached to higher expectations, busier days, and eroded relationships with your family and friends.

It’s irrational – but maybe we are not as keen for success as we like to think?

Drifting aimlessly as an affiliate does, happily pillaging profits, ensures that we never have to jump on the escalator. We maintain full control over our lives, free from outside influence, our resistance ensured and typically masked as “freedom to do what we like!“.

What we sometimes neglect is that the freedom to work from home is no longer a freedom when you are too scared to leave the front door for fear that you might lose what is so comfortable. And predictable.

How to Overcome the Fear of Success

Behind the fear of success you will typically find a simple (and very damaging) learned belief; “I am not good enough.”

The source of this false belief varies from individual to individual. It could be the relic of an unstable childhood, a vicious relationship break-up, or a class that you flunked many years ago.

The bottom line is that without pinpointing what exactly you are afraid of, you will continue to procrastinate while digging your heels in the dirt.

LiveStrong has a good ‘troubleshooting’ technique that uses a lifestyle analysis to create self-affirming statements while pinpointing the source of your fears.

Self-affirming statements are used to encourage a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset.

Fixed mindset: “I wish I could be a successful online marketer, but I’m useless with technology. I can’t code for shit.”

Growth Mindset: “To be a successful online marketer, I need to improve my understanding of technology. I’ll start by learning how to code.”

The Self-Affirming Statement: “I am a fast learner. I achieve whatever I put my mind to”

Fixed mindset individuals are terrified of the unknown, which is like being allergic to success.

Do you identify your skill-set as being a ‘part of you’? Or do you view it as ever-changing, ever-improving?

A fear of success – the apprehension about ‘leaving the nest’ – is nearly always traced back to self-affirming statements of negative origin, and a fixed mindset.

For the affiliate marketer, this might be a stubborn resistance to authority (“Working as a consultant goes against my principle of reporting to nobody!”), or it might be the deep-rooted discomfort that creating something means jumping on the success escalator. Once you’re on, you can’t get off.

Either way, you need to isolate the source of your anxiety and resistance. Once you have found it, use self-affirming statements and small achievable goals.

You might not see a change straight away, but with a learned belief that says, “I am getting better“, the fear of success will slowly diminish.

The Action Plan

Can you relate to the twin terrors of failure and success? Have they affected your career decisions, or another part of your life?

If they have, here’s what to do next.

Diversify your Self-Worth – How do you want to be judged as a person? Many online marketers jump straight to the narrative that says “as a fine entrepreneur“. That’s great, but it makes for a pretty uninspiring tombstone. Choose at least two additional roles: be it as a good father, a good friend, a charitable leader, a skilled musician, a talented sportsman, and so on. Pay attention to these roles. Allow them to flourish by setting time aside that is of equal priority to work. Define your success as more than just a talented Internet swindler.

Identify Your Source of Anxiety – Are you scared of the effect success would have on your relationships? Do you resent the idea of losing your playboy affiliate lifestyle? Are you worried that people will judge you to a greater standard, one that makes life so much harder, if you dare to succeed? Identify where your anxiety stems from.

Adopt the Growth Mindset – Entrepreneurs in possession of the magic Growth Mindset are more successful than those with a Fixed Mindset. It’s important we learn to disassociate failure with an attack on our self-worth. Accept failure as a lesson learnt, and a chance to better yourself. Take on new challenges with the perspective of one step closer to success, not one more pie in the face.

Use Self-Affirming Statements – Once you have pinpointed your anxieties, use self-affirming statements to slowly mould your self-esteem by focusing on the positives. Make it a daily ritual until you actually believe them.

Recommended This Week:

The Empire Strategy has become the bestselling volume in the Premium Posts series. I owe a major thank you to all of you who’ve snapped it up so far. If you haven’t read it yet, you can grab your copy here. Enjoy!