How I brainwashed myself into growing my business

Have you ever blamed your lack of business growth on a saturated market, biased algorithms, or a lack of capital?

I used to think these things were holding my business back as well, but it turned out it was all… bullshit.

The real reason your business isn’t growing is because your brain is getting in the way.

So what if you could brainwash yourself into breaking past that and ACTUALLY start growing your business?

You see I used to self-sabotage and hit business plateaus that I couldn’t break through.

But one day I discovered a method that changed my business forever.

2 years later I make over $20,000 a month and my brain no longer holds me back.

And I did it using the 3 simple principles that I’m going to share with you in this email so that you can get out of your own damn way and take your business to that next level.

But for them to work, you need to understand why your brain keeps holding you back from achieving your business goals, otherwise, these principles, as powerful as they are, will be useless to you.

How is your own brain stopping you from taking your business to the next level?

Well if you think about what your business is, it’s just a reflection of you.

Or more specifically it’s a reflection of the combination of actions you’ve taken up until this point right now - after all, it’s these actions that have built your business to where it is.

So if your business isn’t growing the way you want it to, you mustn’t be taking the right actions, you mustn’t be doing the right things.

So why aren’t you taking the right actions?

Well, to answer that you need to understand how your brain makes decisions.

You see as a human you are a goal-orientated creature.

We are always setting and chasing goals - sometimes consciously like when trying to build your business and sometimes unconsciously like when you’re hungry - and these goals act as filters.

And so you take every action you take and make every decision you make because of the goals you have, they filter what you deem important and what you believe to be the right thing to do in that situation.

But the problem here is that your unconscious mind is much more powerful than your conscious mind and so the filter of the goals you unconsciously set will overpower the filter of the goals you consciously set.

If you have the conscious goal of building your business to a million dollars a year but have the unconscious goal of staying broke, then the goal to stay broke will be stronger than the goal to build your business.

So subconsciously your actions and decisions will reflect the stronger goal and you will do whatever it takes to stay broke - and the wildest thing is that you’ll not even realise it, you’ll just see that your business isn’t growing and wonder why.

Because the thing about a subconscious goal is that it’s subconscious.

You don’t realise you have it and because you do what you think is right in each situation, you’ll not realise your actions are holding you back.

This is how your brain sabotages your success.

It has unconscious goals that override your conscious goals and cause you to do whatever it takes to make that unconscious goal a reality.

Now I know what you’re thinking, why on earth would anybody have a goal to stay broke?

Well, this is thanks to your identity.

The goals you unconsciously set are goals that will help you confirm your identity - the beliefs you have about yourself, which is massively influenced by the environment you grew up in and are currently in.

Beliefs are formed through repeated experience.

If you grew up around the normal person, you’ll have consistently heard negative thoughts about money and being broke that overtime embed these thoughts in your mind as beliefs.

So if you look at this from a bird’s eye view.

Your business is the result of your actions.

Your actions are the result of your goals.

Your goals are the result of your identity.

Hence, your identity controls your business - and if you have a limiting identity then your business is going to be limited.

If you have the identity of someone who can’t grow their business past 10k a month, then you will subconsciously set a goal to make sure you can’t grow your business past 10k a month and so the action you take will be ones that hold your business back.

And because you believe you’re doing the right thing, since your actions are based on the beliefs you have about yourself, you’ll not even realise you’re holding yourself back.

You cannot act outside of your identity, outside of the beliefs you have about yourself and the world.

This might sound crazy but this is something humans have known for centuries, take a look at these quotes.

“as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he”

“he who says he can and he who says he can’t, are both usually right”

“a mans life is what his thoughts make of it”

These quotes are all nearly 2000 years old.

And they all say the same thing - your beliefs control your life because you cannot act outside of what you believe to be true.

Your own brain is stopping you from growing your business because of your identity, your beliefs about yourself.

And so to grow your business, you must make a change in your business which requires you to change your actions.

And a change in your actions requires a change in your identity.

So how can you make this shift?

Let’s dive into the 3 principles that will help you change your identity and in turn, grow your business.

Imagine you’re building a house.

You can’t just go and start laying bricks because after a month that house isn’t going to look very much like a house.

No. Instead, you need to put together a blueprint of what you want that house to look like in the end, this way you have an idea, an image of to what work toward.

Well, shifting your identity is the exact same - you can’t just go and wing it, you need to know the identity you want to build.

But you don’t want it to be some random identity that you think sounds cool, no, you want it to be the identity of someone capable of growing your business and so to figure it out you need to ask yourself this exact question.

“What sort of person would be capable of growing my business to a million dollars a year” or whatever your goal is with your business.

The way I’d recommend you do this is to take out a notebook and a pen and journal about it.

Don’t rush it and carefully think through the process, making sure you are as detailed as possible and cover every area of that person - so your beliefs about yourself and the world, your mindsets, your habits, your routines, your nutrition, your work, everything.

Be specific and be detailed.

If you had a blueprint for a house that just said build 4 walls and a roof, even though you have an idea of what to build, you would still have a hard time building that house.

The blueprint needs to be detailed with dimensions, designs and structure.

The same goes for when you’re deciding on what identity to build. Detail, specificity and clarity, especially around the areas I mentioned, are crucial for this to work.

But if you think about building a house, a blueprint alone isn’t enough to turn some bricks into a liveable structure.

Once you’ve got the image of what you want, you need to then create a plan of action - what gets built first, then second, when do you need what equipment, when does the electrician come and all the rest.

So when you’re trying to shift your identity, it’s not enough to just know who you want to become, or in fact, who you need to become - you also need to know how to get there.

Michael Jordan didn’t become Michael Jordan by accident, he followed a damn training plan and so you need to do the same.

Now how do you build your training plan?

Well in the gym, you don’t just walk in amd bench 2 plates on your first day.

You start small and each week you progressively overload, lifting a bit more weight, doing a few more reps and over time you get bigger and stronger until you can bench 2 plates.

So you see all the habits and beliefs and routines that you wrote down in the last step?

You want to list them all out in their categories.

So list all the habits in a column, list all the beliefs in a column, list all the routines in a column, etc

And each row represents a week.

For example, if you have 10 habits, on week 1, you want to focus on building the first habit, on week 2 you want to focus on building habit 1 and habit 2, on week 3, focus on building habits 1, 2 and 3.

This creates your training plan were each week you progressively overload, doing a bit more than the last week.

Now if this is too much, instead of building another habit, belief or whatever else each week, do it every other week.

But here’s the best part about this.

You’ll be surprised by how easy you find this and you know why?

Think about what happens as you follow this training plan…

This training plan is like building a damn house.

At the start, you’re sitting there staring at an empty plot of land, but by the end of the first day, you’ve laid 10 bricks, by the end of the 2nd week you’ve got the whole foundation built, by the end of the first month, you’ve got the entire external facade constructed and every day that empty plot of land starts looking more and more like a house.

As you go through this training program, you’re building the habits, beliefs, routines, and all the rest of the person that is capable of growing your business, and each week as you build more of those components you become more like that person and therefore doing those things and building more of them becomes easier.

An athlete doesn’t think about eating healthy, getting 8 hours of sleep or training daily, they just do it. It’s easy because those actions are aligned with their identity.

As you follow this training plan you build the identity of the person you need to become and so following the plan gets easier as time goes on, but if you don’t follow this 3rd principle, it’ll actually get harder.

You see, when you’re building a house it’s incredibly easy to follow the plan.

But you have so many different things going on at once, some people are laying bricks, some people are installing pipes, and some people are landscaping the garden, this makes it incredibly easy to forget what’s been done and incredibly hard to track the progress of the build.

But there’s a way around this, you keep track of and note down what gets done each day, this way you can look at what exact progress has been made in each area and make adjustments as needed.

So when you’re following your training plan, to make it easier to follow as time goes on and to help cement the internal transformation you’re going through, you need to stack evidence.

Now what do I mean?

Well as you follow your training plan, on week 1 you’ll be building 1 habit, 1 belief, 1 routine and whatever else each day and so every time you do the habit you’re focusing on or you follow the routine or work on your beliefs or do whatever it is you need to do to lay a damn brick in changing your identity, you want to write it down.

This is creating proof that you are becoming this person you need to be, after all, you’re doing what that person does.

This will change the game not only in your ability to transform your identity but in both the speed and the stability of that change.

Because if you ever doubt yourself or have a day where you cannot be bothered building that damn house, you can look at the evidence that you are this person, you can look at all the progress you’ve made and realise, that this is easy for you because this is who you are.

And over time you shift your identity and become the person that is capable of taking the right actions and making the right decisions needed to grow your business.

- Ross

PS: If you want to truly master yourself and grow your business, shifting your identity is only step 1. Click here to find the next steps.