[Special Episode] The Mindstate Marketing Hour #21 with Will Leach - The ROI Online Podcast Ep. 95

Hey everybody, welcome to a special series of conversations sponsored by the ROI Online Podcast with Will Leach. He's the author of Marketing To Mindstates, the practical guide to applying behavior designed to research and marketing. And in these conversations, we're going to deep dive and explore all the insights from Will's book, as you learn how to use science to connect better with your clients. I'm Steve Brown. And here we go. Welcome, everybody to The Mindstate Marketing Hour with Will Leach. I'm Steve Brown your host. And guess what we're going to talk about? We're going to talk about one of the best books that you could read Marketing To Mindstates and Will, you wrote this book on how to use science to connect with your clients. And today, we're going to talk about how to expand your creativity and strategic thinking with digital detoxing. Say that three times.

I know we got to get some practice on that. Yes, we are not only you know, we always we think about mindstate marketing around client engagement. But you know, behavioral psychology can do many other things. And one of the things you can do as a business owner is trying to clear your mind for strategic thinking. So I'm going to tell you about an experience, why, first of all, tell you why I think it's important for you to do it and show you some research behind it. Then I want to tell you about my experience, and then teach you guys out there a little bit about how do you maintain some habits, to keep your mind kind of constantly, you know, iterating, constantly thinking about new creative ideas, things like that. So I will be doing a bit of lesson development today actually their suit.

So Will, what inspired you that made this the topic of today's when we could have talked about so many different things? Was something going on personally, that convicted you you needed to detox?

You know what? It kind of was, and what it was was I had a face book, what do you have these memories, you know, on Facebook, these memories pop up. And then memory came up where I was in Paris, France. And in that memory, it reminded me I don't know if you knew this, I was very close to selling my company to a French based Firm a couple years ago. And I'll tell you, you know, basically, the high level story on that was that it wasn't, I was very close to selling and with that I would have sold the content and the rights to Mindstate the book, everything. And at the time, I was really excited about it. It wasn't just for the money. I mean, I love the group, great company but it was through this experience of just before I signed the paperwork, like let's say they brought me out to France with the family, they wined and dined us, we were getting close to everything. And after all the due diligence, everything else, I was very close to signing paperwork, I'm probably like two weeks away. And it was gonna change my life, right? You know how that is and of all people, my lawyer, my lawyer, you know how lawyers are, but my lawyer actually said, Will, I didn't know, I didn't know you really wanted to do this like kind of was he basically said, Are you sure you want to do this? So he stopped things because I think he should take a weekend because he looked at the contract the real details. So no longer was it kind of just a letter, it was more of the details. And through that process, I realized that I was very clouded in my thinking I was very, very short sighted. And it was this idea of Oh, my gosh, and I backed out, right, so I have the company. So I backed out. And it was through that experience that I remember thinking, I've got to I've got to start thinking about the long term, 10-15-20 year horizon versus the three years that I was thinking about in terms of getting a nice payout. But also these things I really wanted to accomplish with this new company. And it was I was close to losing everything, you know, the things that I'm passionate about, my life as a father, meant me traveling the world a lot more 40 employees all of a sudden, big, big responsibilities. And I was about to give up all the things I love in life around my business, my own business, and it was through that thing. I said, Man, I've got to do something different. And then I was introduced by my business coach to a digital detox and that in many ways, I'll tell you about this biggest decision I ever made with that after coming out of a digital detox, but when he described that I thought you know what, I need long term visioning. And I need to have a structured approach to doing it not just sitting down and go Okay, from nine to nine to five on this day. I'm going to think strategically and we all do that as small business owners. I need something bigger than that. And that's what a digital detox does for you.

So you were recognizing that distraction was clouding your vision. But it's like we all go through this, we have to make decisions. And so you're saying that by backing out for a little bit and helped you to get clarity? What, you envisioned something that made you interested and then you realize that it wasn't what you were envisioning? What happened?

Yeah. So you know, just think of it this way, right. Research tells you that you make about 35,000 decisions on every day. Now, that's collective decisions and, you know, I know that there's some work out of Cornell that says you've made over 225 decisions just on food. So if you're a small business owner, imagine all the short term decisions you're making every single day, because you're so distracted, because you're so into the day to day, that forces you to only focus on those things that you can control today. And it just, it just narrows your focus on short term, whether that's one week, one month, one year for me, maybe whatever. So when that whole thing happened to me where it was because I was so engrained into the proposition at hand, which was selling the company and begin becoming a part of a bigger company, all that kind of stuff. That it when it when it basically came to mind that my lawyer of all people we're not close, I mean, he just he just kind of knew me a little bit. He just said, Are you sure you want to do this because I didn't think this was the type of guy you were, you know, cuz he was talking about the number of hours and the travel. That scared me Steve, because I thought, Man, I didn't see it myself, my wife, she wasn't saying anything about it. But she kind of had concerns but I kept telling her all it's gonna be we're gonna be so much better off in a couple years, it's been I get to live my new fantasy, my new life, everything else. And it was my lawyer. And when that happened with somebody who I barely knew, basically forced me to stop and think about who I am as a person that's when it scared me. And that's why I said I needed to do something more than just visioning sessions every so often that you know, the books will tell you to go off and do you know, so that really was the impetus of at least trying to figure out how do I make this more of a habit in my life? And that's why I talked to my business coach Steve Agus, and he introduced me to this idea of going digital detoxing, and making that part of your kind of daily or maybe, you know, least, certainly your monthly routine.

So how are, give us some ways that we would recognize maybe we're not thinking about how distraction is killing the vision for our business?

Yeah, you know, I think that's a hard question, right? Because the problem with this stuff is, so there's this cognitive bias out there called hyperbolic discounting. But for you guys, just imagine this, we tend to value things more in the present than we do in the future. Meaning that's why when you win the lottery, so many people go I want the money right now, Why? Because the value of a big lump sum of money now feels more you know, immediate, the rewards are immediate versus in the future. So you are designed to focus more on the immediate needs, you just are, so it's very difficult to know whether or not you need to focus on the on the external what it was for me was like I said, a random moment that happened to me, so I didn't recognize that I was doing that. But I so it wasn't until I almost made a big mistake, I think for you and thinking about it is you got to do something to where you are putting something in your calendar or some amount of time somewhere in your calendar that says, focus on goals. Now I do things on Sunday nights I look at my weekly goals for sure. But I don't think that's really what we're even talking about either right? But at least when I look at my goals I can also see my one year goals and that's my personal goals as well as my business goals. But I don't know if many people will really recognize it because you are designed not to, your mind is designed to focus on the immediate and and even if you do focus on the long term, the value, the emotions are often in the short term because those are, you can feel those, you can feel a check coming in, you can't feel how your life is going to be 10 years from now. So that's why it makes us so difficult unfortunately.

So do you have remorse from that decision? Or it was like you have total peace about it?

Total peace about it because of I knew after I made the decision, it was the hardest decision I made as a business because I was close Steve, I mean, I was close. And I had that email that I sent was, I just sat there with you know with the finger over the button like, are you really going to do it? Because it's life changing money, you know, I was gonna be a multi 100 million, but it was life changing money like, you know, family could not worry about going to college, I could pay off a house kind of money, right? So it's life changing. It was very, very difficult. no remorse because I grounded myself in my, and I was able to really focus on the long term potential that I had. No, I didn't know what that potential was. But when I came here In my digital detox, I came out of that with a vision. So when I almost got bought, I realized that I wasn't focused on a vision. But the next thing I was like, okay, so I almost gave up something that was really precious to me. Now how am I going to go focus on something was very precious to me, my family as well as my mindstate, the book, the whole thing that I'm doing with mindset now? That's when I got clarity on that, the digital detox gave me clarity on that. And that now a year and a half later, I have a whole new business up and running, I have multiple streams of business going on. Because of that, I didn't have that foresight, back a year and a half ago, it took a digital detox for me to, and I'll tell you how it worked, to expand my thinking and then hone in my thinking afterwards. And it has to do with a with nature, actually, which is a really cool thing about it.

So I think that many of us, you know, we get a business going and we have some wins. And these things fall into our lap. And we haven't really sat down and done a very deliberate path that we want to go because we're not sure yet. And so this happened at a point where you didn't have a real defined path, you hadn't sat down and really gone through the planning, strategy, identification, etc. Because you hadn't done this detoxing thing, there were a lot of distractions keeping you from this process.

Yeah, and not only that, Steve. So research will tell you that when you are constantly stressed, or let's just call it, I would suggest to you that the more distractions you have in your life, you know, the more things going on, the more times you look into social media, the more kind of input that's hitting you, that leads to stress, stress in your life, research tells you, leads to for a lot of people, it's correlated anyways, with rumination and meaning that the more stressed you are, the more likely you are as a person, as a business owner, to start thinking about negative parts of yourself. So when you're stressed out, you actually have greater senses of rumination. And when you're ruminating, you start blaming yourself for things that are not under your control. And so when you have higher rumination, then of course, you begin to increase mental illness. Actually, you know, when people have constantly negative thoughts about themselves, it actually creates greater anxiety and increases depression, things like that. So it's kind of like a weird cycle. And you've got to make sure you don't catch yourself into that. So just from the distraction and you think yourself, no, no, I'm just checking my Facebook. And, you know, I just came out of research. No lie, Steve, I just came out of research last week. And we were just as a just a standard question, tell me about how many hours you on social media? And I'm not kidding you. And maybe this feels very normal to most people out there. Most people are saying they're on social media, not TV, just social media of some ammount on the average 25 hours a week, 20 hours a week, I wouldn't have thought that but that and there was a couple people felt bad about it. Other people were like, no, and now maybe that's their entertainment. But imagine the amount of distraction you have with social media you get on these, you know, you watch it, you get something and you go into Facebook, or you go into Instagram or whatever. And then you go down these rabbit holes, and all that stuff is actually creating stress in your life.

Rumination, that's like this big thing that you fight against, is you got to win the battle in your head first before you progress. But if you're having all these distractions, you're not helping yourself, and that sending you on a rumination or sitting in mulling the wrong things over and over and over. So on here, you say that the secret is to get back to nature, we find ourselves right now in this time of the pandemic or whatever, we want to call this where we've done probably a lot more rumination because we're alone more than we were before. I don't know and so how nice to hear maybe the secret that we can be applying that would help pull us out of this funk, this change, this thing that we're all having to learn how to deal with, this new status quo?

That's right. So you know, I'm sure for years you've heard the same thing, oh, go take a walk, go take a hike. And I didn't know if it was really based in science. It was just like people think, you know, it's like people tell you to do yoga, you know, okay, you know, maybe it works for you or whatever. Well, there's actually science behind the impact of nature, and how it impacts your creativity and your ability to think about the long term parts of your business. So there was some research out of University of Houston a couple of years ago, and it was in the Journal of marketing research, and it was done by an assistant professor, Melanie Rudd. Guess what she did? She studies "awe" and "awe", and I'm not familiar really with "awe" but imagine "awe" are these moments when you have all these different emotions that are coming together, and it creates this moment in time where everything kind of slows down, and everything feels very clear and big. So "awe" it could be something like when you see your child born, I'm sure like, there's this moment of "awe". Or let's say, if you're at the top of a huge mountain, or you're looking at the Grand Canyon, you have a moment of "awe". So she studies "awe", right? So here's what she did really cool study, she wanted to understand if having a moment of "awe" could increase people's ability to think strategically, desire to learn, and be creative. So here's what she did, she went out to the Alps. And she recruited a whole bunch of different people. And she asked people to at the bottom of the Alps, they're all inside of a room with no windows. And she said, Hey, I want you to go ahead and select between you just picking up, you know, we're about to do some work. So do you want to get some trail mix? And what she did was she had some trail mix was sitting in packages, and other amounts of trail mix, you can make your own. So right, you can be more creative if you made the ones you know, on your own, or you just pick whatever somebody already made for you, the manufacturer. So she found that she had those people on the bottom of the Alps. Most people chose the prepackaged trail mix, she then took people up in a gondola and then at the top of the Alps, she then had this great moment of "awe", she made sure everyone had this big, great moment of "awe" then she looked around, and was looking around and then she had the same task. Do you guys want to create some trail mix? Or do you want to buy or have this prepackaged trail mix? Different people, right? When there's a moment of "awe" in nature, people always or almost always chose to go make their own trail mix. Not only that is when she asked them, Do you want to learn more about what's going on up here in the Alps? More people are likely to say yes, I want to learn more about this. So they're more open to education, they're more likely to be more creative and more open to long term thinking. So nature in itself, the vastness and the power of nature, especially in a moment of "awe". And how that makes you reflect on your part in a much broader world gives you perspective on your life and your business that otherwise maybe it's really difficult if you're in a confined space, or you're digitally distracted. That's why I think nature is so important. And I felt this firsthand when I did my detox, and I'm not environmentalist guys. Like I like the city so I didn't necessarily believe it. Until I actually did it. And once I did it, it was a structured process. I was like, yep, after about a day and a half. And I'll tell you how that worked out. I was I was kind of hooked. I was like, Yeah, I get why nature matters as it relates to getting your thinking. And if you guys didn't know it, I don't know if you know this, Bill Gates, you know, any study of Bill Gates, Bill Gates has been doing this since he was just I think just after he got married, but he does these detox where he goes out by himself into the woods into a cabinet. I'm sure there's lots of security around there and he just reads no electronics and does it for a week. But it was he called it something but you guys know, Bill Gates, he's done it back in the days when he was the CEO of Microsoft, and he just got away. Why? Because it forced him to not think about Microsoft, he was thinking 20-30 years out. And so looking back on that I'm like, if it worked for Bill Gates, maybe it could work for my little business, too. You know?

You know, in my book, I talk about this, I went outside of town here to the, it's the place where they had the Flint Quarries back in the day. But I remember at the top of a hill, when they finally kind of taught you what to look for, you could see all the quarries, you know, they they were covered up a little bit, but you can start to discern the quarries. But I made these connections on how that related with how we look at our business. And so as you're telling the story, I had that "awe" moment. I didn't know. But I talked about it in my book.

That is really cool. Yeah, I bet we've all had these "awe" moments, but just didn't use that moment, to now say, Okay, now that I'm in this "awe" moment, let me focus on my life. Let me focus on my business. So what I did was, here's what happens. I worked with this guy named Steve August, coaching. He's worked with me for a couple years and he did this retreat. It's called disconnect, reconnect. So I fly out to Portland, with other CEOs, it's really small group of CEOs. And we fly to Portland and at the airport, he meets us and we go and we change kind of because we're gonna go right into the woods. We're not going to stop at anything. We're gonna go out in the woods. He rented a house out in the woods out near the Columbia Gorge, beautiful part of our country out near Portland. And we get to the airport and we change and then we get out to the car and he goes, Okay, everybody, give me your phones, and everyone takes their phone and we drop it into a sealed container. And he says, okay, no, of course for emergency you can get it, only for an emergency, but he basically gave us one cellphone number that he holds, in case our case our family had to get ahold of us for some reason other than that, he's got it. He's got all that and we immediately went out to the woods and did a small hike, but just to see, you know, we're all from different parts of the country. Some from New York, Boston, I was kind of from the Dallas area. And getting out into nature and seeing waterfalls and getting up the top of some of these mountains and looking down on the Columbia River Gorge and just driving. But one thing we couldn't do is we couldn't talk about business. We were not, because we were like, We didn't know each of us were like, Well, what do you do? He told us up front, we're at the car, he goes, you guys going to be assigned new roles? Will you're not a business owner at all. You're an author. And that's all you are. And you don't tell anybody else about what you do. Same thing with these other owners, which is really cool. Because you initially, especially talking about the business, you want to talk about your business, and then that gets you back into the narrow thinking. He's like, nope, we don't talk about business here. All we're gonna do for the first two days is expand thinking and nature does that. So over the course of the first two days, we did hikes, we did whitewater rafting, and at night time, we would sit outside in a beautiful house and look at you know, the night sky. And he had a journal for us to reflect on things like, basically, looking back, I didn't realize at the time looking back the questions, were basically trying to show me that I'm just a small part of a much bigger universe. And if I think about that, and so the things I want to do with my life, not my business, my life, and making the journal on some of these things and answer some of these questions, it kind of just after about, I'm not kidding, you at first was a little bit nerve wracking, when you get off your phone man, that's hard, you don't know what's going on with your business or whatever, it's hard. By about 12 hours in, so that night, I actually felt a calmness at first, everyone's really didn't like it very much calmness came. And after two days, I was sitting, drinking coffee, you know, on this beautiful deck for like, an hour without ever even thinking about work. And who does that? You know, how it is, it's hard as a business owner, and it was a great moment of disconnecting. Then what we did was on day three and four, we went to reconnect. So we did some activities, as groups and other things. But basically, the idea would be focus now. And now that you've seen the expansiveness, and you've brainstormed ideas about your life and your business, what could be and that's when I start think about Mindstate as a company back then, it was a book, a book that would feed money into Triggerpoint, my research company, all of a sudden, because I thought no Mindstate a bigger idea. It's not a book that brings people into Triggerpoint it's an idea around small businesses and growing small businesses using the power of behavioral science that the big guys get to use, and not the small guys. And I was a small guy thinking, this is not right. That thinking I don't if I would brought it up.. So I was always focused on trigger point and driving that company, not even think about the possibilities of building a brand new company called Mindstate Group, which is now my passion. So we spent the last two days focused on how do you take this vision or creating a vision for Mindstate Group, which I turned into, you know, this kind of whole new training company and consulting company. But then Okay, then what are you going to do to go kind of make that real? And you know, we can get into brass tacks, because that's real focus day to day stuff. But just understanding where do you want mindset group to be five years from now? How many? How many small businesses do you want to touch? How do you want to help them? Some of those big broad questions we're being forced to think about, and how does that integrate into the person I want to be? The father, the husband, the spiritual, you know, that kind of stuff. And so it was a forced way of reconnecting and then we all got back to the airport, we all jumped back in the car 4 days, got back to the airport, and all sudden, the box gets opened. We pick up our phones, we turn them on, and like, you know what? I mean you know, honestly at about 1000 emails, but looking back, very few of them really meant anything. That's a whole other thing about it, right? So I would have had 1000 emails that I at least looked at and deleted or filed. And all of a sudden, a thought almost 1000 emails had come to me in the last four days. And I remember thinking, none of them really matter. Very few of them really mattered, like 17 or 18 of them really matter. The rest of them were just distractions, man, things that I was supposed to read, but the world kept going the company did fine. They didn't need me for four days. That's what I think I got out of it. And it just it changed my life, the best decision I've ever made. I mean, that's how I met you because of my Mindstate Group. I've met great small businesses. I've helped small business I'm teaching at Texas A&M, why? Mindstate group. I mean, that's really why it was, and it was that one digital detox.

Hey, I wanted to pause right here and tell you about a book that you need to get today. It's the funniest book on marketing, it's called The Golden Toilet, stop flushing your marketing budget into your website and build a system that grows your business. And guess who wrote it? That's right. I wrote it. And I wrote it just for you because I want to help you get past the last hurdles of setting up your business and getting it squared away. I wrote it so that you can avoid time, wasting time, wasting money, wasting frustration, get the book on Audible, you can get it on Kindle, you can get it on Amazon, but get the book, take advantage of the insights in there, and let me know what you think. And now, back to this excellent episode. So was sitting there, do you remember that moment where Mindstate Group became really clear? There was this moment where all of a sudden this clarity came to you? And it, you got this big burst of energy from it? Do you remember that moment?

Yeah, I can't tell you the question. But I was around a table with these other CEOs. And we are going around the table, talking about, there's an activity that we're using, trying to figure out some of our biggest blockages, mental blockages. And for me, we did an activity where I got around this moment of, I oftentimes put myself into a box like, you're not smart enough to do that Will or you were, I used to say this, I was never supposed to be where I was today. I used to say all the time, I was never supposed to be here today. Because you know, I mean, I grew up kind of, you know, not very smart. Just from a part of the country that you know, didn't have a lot of wealth. And I remember him stopping me and he said, You he goes, You deserve being here, he wrote something on a sheet of paper and he's like, you always label yourself, say you're not supposed to be here, which limits my thinking, Will, it's, you know, through God's blessing them here. It wasn't supposed to be here. I'm not smart enough to be here. And I remember it was after that moment that we said, okay, let's assume that you were put on this earth because you understand these Mindtsates better than anybody. This is why you belong here. And I think it was something a kind of a weird shift on that in that moment of me writing that out. Basically, he said, Stop saying I was never supposed to be here, you were always supposed to be here. And then I think from there, it was only like an hour later that we started thinking about, Well, where's your passion? It's more on Mindstate. And it grew from there of all the possibilities it could have been. But it grew in that moment I think it was where he may be, he stopped you right in mid sentence as introducing the company. I mean, I said I was never supposed to be here to stop, because he'd heard me say that for a long time. Yeah, he's like, I gotta have you stopped saying that. So he made me write it down.

Yeah, you're always so open and honest, and it's funny and it's true. I mean, we all do the same things. But we get to hear you say, and then we go, Yeah, I do that. So step one?

Yes. So if you want to keep the digital detox, and the problem with doing a detox, whatever detox you do, I'm sure you some people out there do these health detox as to the problem is maintaining it. So I had this great moment of clarity. And I walked away from there going, you know what man, I'm looking at the phone too much. And I'm being distracted too much, I think, but I really focused on the phone and social media and kind of even TV to a certain extent. So I wanted to bring that to my house. I was like, I want to make this kind of a weekly thing. I want to make sure that I've got this clarity. And so well, how do you do that? Well, you know how it is? You first and everything you learned from Marketing To Mindstates, right? Is you have to identify if you want to drive behavior, and I knew I wanted to drive my own behavior, you got to identify first goals. So I put out one simple goal, I said, I want to at eight o'clock at night, turn off all email and the phone, like I was going to stop business. If I was going to read about business, maybe that's okay, I was going to stop. So that was my functional goal. And you know, me like functional goals are great. But you got to get to the aspirations like, why is that important? So I was ladder like, Well, why is it important for you to turn off your phone at eight o'clock? And so I did my little thinking that I always do in the book, I have the activities in the book. And I forced myself, said why is that important? I laddered it up twice. And in that I came up to the concept of the reason why it's important for me to shut off everything at eight o'clock, was that I have this aspirational goal of being present in the moment. Because when I was in nature, you know, I'd never seen this part of the country, it's beautiful. And I remember, Steve would focus us to be in the moment and like, Don't think but just look at that waterfall. Like look at that waterfall like that thing took millions of years for that thing to see millions of years, and you're here for like 14-15 minutes. So I remember being in the moment, I thought that was a great moment. That's a great feeling. And that's something when you're distracted you're rarely in the moment, right? How many times, you know, My son will come up in the morning, I'm looking at emails, and he's trying to talk to me, and I'm like, hold on a second night. And then all of a sudden, 10 minutes go by, and he's already walked away, why? He's not waiting for his dad. He knows that he knows more important than him at that moment so he walks away. I didn't want that to happen. My son goes to bed around eight o'clock. So I figured when he goes to bed that gives my wife and I this moment of kind of we can be in the moment together because I work all day she does her thing. So it's hard for us to kind of be together. So that was my hierarchical so you have to figure out your higher order goal because it's okay to say yeah, my function goes turn off my phone at eight but at 8:05 if you get kind of antsy, I'm just gonna go for a quick minute, I went to the aspirational goal. And I wrote that down just like I tell you to do in the book for your business, I do it for myself, what's my aspirational goal? I want to be connected. The second thing you do after that is, well, yeah, you can have a goal, but you better marry that goal up with what drives you. And that's motivation. That's the second part of our model, right? So there are these nine motivations. And I said, Okay, what's the real reason why I want to be in the moment? And I think a lot of people, and I thought it first it'd be like, one of my one of the motivations is nurturance, the desire for love that's certainly plays into it. Another one is belonging, the desire for connectedness, and I thought, yeah, there's something there to actually what I think after I looked at all is, I said to this, there's this other motivation, called engagement, and engagement, you know, I got to hear is to feel captivated, excited and absorbed in an activity fully absorbed. And when I looked at that, I said, You know what, here's, I think, why I want eight o'clock, and for her and I to connect. It's about being fully absorbed in the moment and release. So I'm like, you, right? I work all day long in my business, I have to be the smartest person in the room, because it's my business. So all day long i'm thinking, I'm trying to be the smartest person on every call, because I'm trying to navigate this world of change. And sometimes, at the end of the day, I'm gassed most days I'm gassed,

30. And I'm eating and I'm in this kind of haze where my wife is talking to me about Nicholas's grades, I'm doing my best. But I said, you know, what I really need is, the reason why I can be in that moment is it pushes me to a moment of release, where I can get rid of all that stuff of the day, it's gone, that day's gone, I don't need to think about it. Tomorrow morning, I'll wake up and I'll go deal with stuff in the morning on my business, but this fully engrossed in the moment so that I can, you know, like, be present in that moment, in this moment of relaxation, that does good things for me spiritually, for my family, for my marriage, it just, it was so much better and lowered my stress. And I said, that's the motivation behind it. The motivation for me turning off this stuff is that I can lower my stress, even if that's two hours, you know, can we go to bed on 10 - 10:30? So even if it's just two, two and a half hours, I would that would be enough for me to reset myself for the next day.

What do you mean by create points of friction versus willpower?

Yeah, so here's the thing, guys, you know, it willpower is very difficult to maintain, you know, a behavior, you know, and so, a lot of us say, I'm going to go to the gym, I'm gonna have all this willpower and willpower fades. We all know that. So rather than trying to force yourself to, you know, get your willpower up every day and just fight through it all, fight through it all. Why don't you create friction? So it's really funny, because in business, we're always focused on, take friction out of the system, take friction out of system, because you're trying to make a behavior more available, right? easier. But if you want to stop a behavior, in this case, checking emails at eight o'clock, writing emails at nine o'clock, still maintaining business, use friction to your advantage. So here's what I did. Here's my four step, so basically what I first did remember, as I, I figured out what are my goals, my functional goals, turn the phone off, turn off all my business stuff, all my apps at eight o'clock. And then I knew that I wanted to do because I needed a moment of release, and engagement was my motivation, my desire for captivation. Then I created friction. First thing I did is this, okay, so if I'm going to actually do this, I've got to make it difficult. I've got to make I don't want to use willpower, I want to make it difficult for me to use my phone during night. So here's what I did. At 7:45, I create alarm, so

45 an alarm goes off at night. And it basically signals to me that I have 15 minutes to do any last minute business things I need to do, text, staff, see how everybody's doing, whatever. At eight o'clock, another alarm goes off, and I take my phone, step two. And it automatically takes off notifications off of everything. So I don't get notified of anything after eight o'clock at night. I then take my phone, I walk into the bedroom, it's all habit now. And I put it on the charger. So we watch TV or we kind of you know, interact, of course in the living room. And so I put the phone away from me, right, I made friction, place it on the charger and then I wrote a card I have an index card that I wrote basically, the phrases of, Will, your moment to release is now It better be important, basically is what I have in this card and I put it on top of my phone. So here's the point, right? Right now I have it to where if I really need to get my phone I can, right? And is this 100% effective? No, of course not. There's times every week. I'm like I gotta see if this proposal came in, right? But that's okay. But at least I put friction into the process where it forces me to get up, walk into the bedroom, take action That I wrote to myself, that tells me is it really worth it, you have this vision, you have this motivation is it worth it, then I have to remove that card, I then have to basically reset to where I can get my notifications, get back on Wi Fi, there's a lot of friction in there. So I don't know if you do this. But previous to that, if I'm watching TV, my phone is next to me when the TV goes to commercial, I grabbed my phone, check out social media, check out the emails really quickly, then you turn it off, and you put it down because there's no friction in the process. Now I have to walk all the way into the bedroom to do that and by time I got out, I would already be kind of done right? The commercial be over that's what I mean by creating friction, don't don't rely on willpower, unless you are hardcore. And there's not many people that are you can do it by year. It's just sheer willpower eat healthy, whatever exercise, I wanted to create friction points. And by doing friction points, it just forces me to be more consistent with my actions.

Well, that's what we call Will Lech power.

I like that. That's good, nice touch.

So I love that this ritual way of disconnecting, that empowers you to turn off and going and doing these things being present actually gives you more creative power later when you need it.

That's right.

You know, Will, I wanted to add a little thing into our weekly conversation. There are certain quotes in your book that I really like. So I thought maybe we would review one of those. How do you feel about that?

Depends if I remember the quote, but yeah, let's do it.

So when we're talking about these efforts in here, so this regulatory fit theory, here's the quote, I have underlined, it creates a communications roadmap to drive behavior change, not only because it feels natural, but also becomes the brand feels more relatable, consumers will feel that the brand gets them. And so this detoxing is a way to actually implement a version of that.

Well, I can see that, I could totally see that. I mean, you know, if you think about that friction, that is the almost the opposite of what I just said in the book, it's using regulatory fit. But rather than creating salience for your brand and making things feel natural behavior feel natural, what I did was I created friction to where my natural inclination, which was to look at that phone, whenever I had a chance, it forced me to go against my natural inclination. So yeah, I'm just using the same behavioral sciences that I talked about in to market to, you know, better, better engage with your customers, you can use them for your own behaviors. It's funny, because I've been telling people this lately, it's really a human behavior model even before, it's a marketing model, it's just using science in the realm of creating better marketing and better business practices.

So in these in your class, right now, you're teaching a class and then you have some, you're launching three new Mindstate Marketing Programs for small businesses, where we learn some of the things that you're talking about right here, maybe you're not going to detox in this particular class. But you're going to apply some of these principles and processes to help you do a better job with your communication.

That's very much it, and we just launched them. And there's different levels of kind of interaction, there's first the starter pack, which is a you get access to the book, and the workbook and all the things that you need to do to get started immediately. And you can buy that in the only the digital version or I'll mail you a copy that's been autographed. And then the second one, so more of our most popular business right now, which is the master class, which is a video based class, which teaches you all the concepts in the in the Mindstate To Marketing process, and shows you step by step how we built a brand from the ground up using this process, you can see how we did it, and how we, you know, basically launched a brand using Minstate Marketing. But then the last program is for people like yeah, that's cool that you told me about your company, but I want to bring it to my company, and I want you to be there with me. And that's our partnership program where you get access to the masterclass hours worth of video based content. But also, you get to work with me live for a day to make sure that we're applying these principles specific to your company. And every month afterwards, we meet together so that we can make sure that you're applying these concepts for you know, greater return on your investments. And ultimately, you know, this idea of getting customers to listen to your messaging care about your messaging and act on your messaging.

And tell us about your latest column that came out in Forbes.

Yes. So there is this concept, of course, that you know, 2020 was a tough one guys, you know, it was, and we only expect that 2021 is gonna be volatile as well, it just you have to assume that it's going to be you know, we haven't really come out of economic crisis yet. There's still people that have biological threats to them, we've seen a large loss of life. So what I want to do for Forbes was saying, Okay, how can we shift our focus away from just thinking, how do we survive 2021? shift it to how do we thrive in 2021. So I go through a series of activities using goal theory parts in part one of my book, right, of using goal theory to really help you understand the goals and how to create these goals for your business, but then how to adjust as these changes start coming at you how to adjust. So you're not just surviving 2021. But hopefully, you're going to thrive and 2021. So it's just a mental activity, mental exercise I give you in Forbes, but something that I think is going to be really helpful to get your mind right to really try to grow your business in 2021.

Well, this has been another excellent conversation of The Mindstate Marketing Hour. So Will tell us a little bit about your class and what's going on over there? Although people can't go and sign up necessarily, unless you're a student. But we'd like to know what's going on.

That's right. So I teach a course at Texas A&M University, Aggies, at the human behavior lab. And we're giving applied behavioral economics certifications to professionals that you know, to be a professional, we have two MBA students actually, that are in there. They're students from all over the world who want to become stronger at behavioral marketing, behavioral economics, how do you do stronger AV testing. So there, it's basically a year and a half program. It's on your time video based learning. But right now, I am working on behavioral marketing. And I'm working with people from all over the country, different sized brands, I got one guy who's a fire eater, he's a street performer in Toronto, he's amazing. I've seen him on YouTube all over the place. And I've got like agencies that are really taking the class, I've got people from Maker's Mark that are taking the class. Anyways, it's a great video based instruction, every semester, we you can take multiple classes, I'm just doing behavioral marketing room behavioral sales next year, or next week, next month, next semester, a whole bunch of introduction to behavioral economics, etc. So you take the course and you walk out being certified in applied behavioral economics. And what makes it different than any of the courses out there guys, is that we are all business owners we are, we're all trying to go through this together. So it's not a bunch of academics that are teaching these courses. These are business people who have lived the world of business, and they've lived behavioral sciences and payroll psychology, and applying it to their own businesses. So it's very practical. Any class you take from Texas a&m University is gonna be very practical. So go check it out at the human behavior lab, and you can sign up for next next semester, which is our summer semester,

Then tell us, you've got a new version of your book that's coming out as well. So when should we expect them? Where do we should go sign up to?

Do I do so we have a new version of Marketing To Mindstates, you know, the book was written in 2018, the end of 2018?. Well, a lot has changed since 2018. So we're doing a updated edition of the book, it's already been written, it's now been kind of going through the process of editing and things like that we should get that book out in about six weeks is the last thing I've heard new cover, which is gonna be really cool. So yeah, it's gonna feel new, it's got some refresh information in there. But the same old great sciences that are in the first book are going to be in the second book. So six weeks from now, that will be out there. And on the website, hopefully soon, you will have the ability to go to the website, mindset group comm sign up to get some notification, sign up for my blog. I have videos that go out every week, I have a blog that goes out every week. And in those Of course, I'll let you know when the book is out and and tell you whether or not you know, you should go ahead and invest in the book or you know, or maybe even just kind of do something with me personally, to help you take the new information and apply it to your business that may be another program that we offer.

All right, how to xpand your creativity and te ch thinking with digital deto ing, take some time, reconnect, aybe even take Will's book with ou. As you're sitting and looki g at the stars and pondering wha you should do. You should ma be consider how to use scienc to connect better with your lients. Will, have a great wee end. And I'll see you next wee on The Mindstate Marketing H ur

Can't wait. Thank you very much, Steve. Take care, guys.

All right. And that's a wrap. Thanks for listening to another fun episode of the ROI Online Podcast. For more be sure to check out the show notes of this episode and feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn where we can chat and I can help direct you to the resources you're searching for. To learn more about how you can grow your business better, be sure to pick up your copy of my book, The Golden Toilet at surprise, thegoldentoilet.com. I'm Steve Brown, and we'll see you next week on another fun episode of the ROI Online Podcast.