How to Fix Mind Viruses

Transcription of Podcast

[00:00:00] When I first got started with Infusionsoft, it was on a training company that my brother, Trent, and I had just started. The first money that we made from that business, we actually used to buy Infusionsoft. At that time, there was a pretty steep up-front fee to get started.

We started that business using Infusionsoft.

I remember going to my first Infusionsoft conference, and I assumed everybody in that room had- because by the time we got to that conference, we had already done over a million dollars in annual revenue. So I assumed everybody was immediately successful as soon as they got that tool in their hands.

Just add the tool to the business, immediate success. And so that was actually, and that sounds pretty naive at this point for me, but that's where I was mentally.

I thought, "Everybody in this room is immensely successful and it's just because they added Infusionsoft to the [00:01:00] mix."

I think everybody listening to this podcast knows someone who is either in the Infusionsoft community or uses Infusionsoft that maybe knows a lot more about it, probably a lot more than I do, and yet they're not successful and they're not making money.

The reason why is because what goes on between your ears has a bigger determination of your success than the tools that you actually have access to.

Granted, good tools can help someone that's got the right game going on in between their ears, but there is a kind of subtle dialogue that goes on in our heads and these dialogues go largely unnoticed.

It takes some real introspection to even recognize that they're going on. These dialogues are what stop us from actually executing on the things that we know, which may not be everything. It may not be enough to be a billionaire or whatever, but what you know is enough to have you be very successful.

And what you have access to through the [00:02:00] internet, I mean, even this podcast is enough to help you to be very successful, IF you can be aware of what's going on between your ears.

So we have these mental processes that happen.

Many of them we've picked up along the way. Some of them maybe from your youth, from when you were a child. Some of them may be from your early adulthood. But whatever they are, we have these functions, I'm going to call them functions for the rest of this podcast episode, which are these there's some sort of input, then there's a number of steps, and then there's an output or a result outcome.

We run these functions all day long.

Functions is a coding term. It's actually a mathematical term before it was a coding term, but the area where I think about functions the most is in code.

In code, you have some sort of input that comes into a function, and then you do some stuff with it. It could be some logical evaluations, and then maybe some modifications of the input that we received, then you have an output.

But in our lives, in our daily lives, we [00:03:00] have all sorts of functions that we run without even thinking about it.

I have one, which is, I love to make fruit smoothies for breakfast. So I have a function for making a fruit smoothie. I don't think about it that way, it's an unconscious thing, it just happens.

I just have this input of, "I want a smoothie," so then I start going through the process. For me, and I just want to give you the steps of this process so you can get a feel for what this function thing is I'm talking about.

So, the first step in that is I look for the smoothie jug, the blender jug. The reason I look for it is because I've got a lot of people I love in my home and they move it around different places. Before I start making the smoothie, once I find it, I do a visual inspection and make sure it's actually been cleaned. If it's not, then I got to clean it.

So I want to stop right there and just take you back through what happened there. Inside of this function of, "make a smoothie," I had other functions.

Like, the first one is the function of going and finding the container. Which involves, for me, first scanning the countertop, because [00:04:00] that's usually where it is. I start from by my fridge and then go to the left across towards the sink because it's usually in one of those areas. Then, if I don't find it there, then I continue beyond the sink.

That function of, "find the blender jar," has some logic into it. Which is, there's a starting point, and then I'm scanning across the counter, and if I don't see it by the time I get to the sink, I look beyond the sink.

There's an "if", and then if I don't find it, then I continue on, and if I don't find it, I continue on. That's kind of the logic that goes on in that.

Then, once I find the jug, then I look at it to verify if it's clean. Normally for me, if I find out it's dirty, there's a little bit of grumbling that goes on as I clean the thing because I figured after you're done, you should rinse it and all that.

But that's a process that is an unconscious process that I go through as I'm making a smoothie.

Then I put in the fruit, I pour the juice up to the top of the fruit, then just maybe a centimeter past that. Then I turn, [00:05:00] my blender is a Blendtec, I think it is, and so I'll turn the dial to four, then I flip it on. And as soon as I hear that it's starting to capture some traction, then I spin it up to six and then I spent it up to ten.

Okay, so that's like a process that I have and I run that function without even thinking about it. It's just ingrained into me.

Well, in your life, you have functions like that, too, that impact your business.

You have a function for facing a failure.

You've tried to do something in your business and it didn't produce the outcome you wanted. That's now an input that goes into this function and then you, at an unconscious level, are running a function now to deal with that situation. How you deal with that situation largely produces your outcomes in business.

That's just one function that runs, but that's a pretty important one because a large portion of business is making choices that don't produce the outcome that you're looking [00:06:00] for, and sometimes we'll call those a failure.

Sometimes we have a cascade of failures that end up creating something we consider a huge failure, and then maybe we'd give up on the business. We feel like we can't go forward anymore.

So that function of how you deal with failures is probably not something that you wrote out and designed. It is probably something that was inherited through your youth, the way that you saw people around you that you respected or looked up to or that cared for you dealing with failure. And it could be not even how they actually dealt with it, but how you perceived that they dealt with it.

Your program, your function that you created, that was created through that process, is what you run every time you face the situation that we call failure.

That really kind of controls what you do and your life. If you've never considered that concept before, then the reason I'm introducing this concept to you is to let you know that.

[00:07:00] One of the cool things about code, and, as you know, I work in code a little bit, is if something isn't producing the desired outcome, you don't just throw your hands in the air and go, "Shoot. That's a bummer."

You go in and you go through that particular function where you've identified is a problem and you go through it line by line.

So, just like I went through my smoothie making function, you can go through the function by thinking about past experiences you've had where you faced a failure that you can recall. You can think about, "What was the process that I went through? What was the mental dialogue that occurred?"

That mental dialogue is part of our processing or parsing out that information that's coming in and says, "Hey, what you tried to do didn't work."

And the interesting thing about a function is, in a function, there's something called variables. A variable is just a container for some meaning. We add some value to that container and then we use that container later on in the function in different ways.

Sometimes that's [00:08:00] informed by information that comes into the function, sometimes it's just a standard default that we've set into it, and sometimes it can be something that's stored in the database and then is recalled.

Well, as you've gone through your process of trying to organize a business and grow that business, no doubt you've had experiences. And, as you've had those experiences of facing failure, what happens is you start assigning meaning to the variable of your ability to accomplish certain things.

The more that you've assigned certain values to that, let's say that you you add one if you feel like you did well and you subtract one, or two, or three if you feel like you didn't do well.

As you go through more and more of these experiences, you might start to create a variable that gets low into the negatives. As that happens, that hurts your ability to make choices in the future because you've already come into that equation or that function with this deep negative value on your ability to deal with growing a business.

This can lead you [00:09:00] to judge yourself harshly, and that harsh judgment can lead to second-guessing your efforts, which can lead to not putting forth the effort and doing the things that you know you need to do because you feel like you're going to fail anyways.

If I had a program that had something like this going on where it was kind of building and taking the outcome in the wrong direction because it was storing and recalling some information actually wasn't accurate, it was just something I had to sign the wrong meaning to or the wrong value to, what I would do is I would remove that from the function.

I would try and clean up that function.

Normally, if you have a function that has a bug in it, it normally occurs because the function is over complicated.

So, part of the process you'd want to do is you evaluate the function. Evaluate it and say, "Why are all these steps here? Do each of these steps serve a purpose that is congruent with the outcome I'm actually going after?"

Which, if you're growing a business, the outcome is to grow that business profitably. It probably includes some sort of liberation of your time [00:10:00] so that you're not a slave to the business, but that the business serves you.

You're looking at those kind of outcomes, but even as you evaluate the function, the question is, is the function contributing to that outcome? And you want to eliminate some things that are going on in that, but what's hard sometimes with the function, one of these mental functions that runs is, we're not even aware, half the time, that it's running.

I'll give you a good example from my own personal life.

When I've made a mistake and it's negatively impacted a member of my family who I love and they call me out on it, my natural function is to get defensive and then want to turn the responsibility for my poor choice away from myself.

That's my natural inclination, so that would be my default function that I inherited somehow, picked up, whatever. But, that's the function that normally runs when I get called out on something.

I didn't like that about myself. I didn't like that I got defensive and that I would maybe even go and attack sometimes in order to keep the attack [00:11:00] off of myself.

That may be part of human nature or whatever, but that wasn't a part that I wanted to keep around.

So what I did with that function is I inserted a prompt early in the function. I'm going to tell you how I did that so you guys can do the same thing with your "facing failure" function.

I inserted a prompt that would tell me, if I recognize that I am getting defensive, which I can tell because of a certain feeling that I get. It's not a pleasant feeling, it's not a feeling I normally experience, but it's a feeling that is deeply associated with this scenario of feeling defensive and trying to push blame away from myself.

And what I did is I decided, "Okay, when I feel that feeling, that's a prompt to tell me that, 'you're following this program and you get to choose now where you want to go.'"

In my prompt, I inserted, "What can I accept responsibility for right now?" And maybe I couldn't accept responsibility for the whole thing that I'm being told wasn't acceptable, but what CAN I [00:12:00] accept responsibility for?

Sometimes, when somebody says you're responsible for something, you may say, "Well, you had a part in doing that as well," and that might be partially true.

But the question that I inserted was one that would prevent a circle of argument from occurring, which is to take total ownership of the thing that I knew that I did that I should not have done.

Inserting that into that function of, "How do I respond when I am accused of doing something wrong?" allowed me to reduce the amount of friction that have occurred in my relationships, and so I was really happy with that.

The way that I did that is I replayed through my my default function, which was, "Okay, I feel defensive because I disappointed somebody I didn't want to disappoint. I don't want to feel that way, so I start finding ways to get away from being responsible for what was being said."

And then I'll start to feel this kind of crummy feeling and I said, "Okay, that's it. The crummy feeling is something I do not enjoy, so when I feel that, that's my signal to ask that [00:13:00] question. 'What cna I be fully responsible for? What can I fully accept?'"

I added in a safety for that too, which was, if I find myself trying to justify behavior that I don't normally accept, that's another signal for me. That was like another place where I could insert that prompt.

If I find myself trying to justify behavior that I know I don't normally accept, that's another indication I need to take full responsibility for what I've done.

By inserting those two things, I'm able to switch.

You can ask my wife if you ever get a chance to talk to her, sometimes it's almost disconcerting to her because I'll be defending something I shouldn't be defending and then suddenly I'll switch and turn on a dime because I realize, "Hey, that's my prompt. I'm in the wrong area. I'm going the wrong direction. I want to switch and go back the right direction, I'll take full ownership for what I've done."

It can be a little disconcerting to her sometimes because she's expecting, we're fighting a little bit, and then all of the sudden I'll turn and I realize, "No, that's the wrong direction. That's not Direction I want to go."

So, in the same format, in your function for facing a [00:14:00] failure, you can do the same thing.

Go through a few recent examples where you faced failure and you don't feel like that function was serving you well.

Go through and see if you can identify anything in that that would serve as a prompt.

Usually it's some sort of emotional trigger, something where you're feeling a feeling that you know is not comfortable. You can actually step into that feeling, can imagine yourself feeling it, and then ask the question that you want to really ask, which is, "What can I learn from this?"

For me, curiosity in facing failure is my big secret.

When something doesn't work, instead of giving it un-due meaning about me, or about the business, or blaming somebody else, what I do is I get curious about what caused the situation. What caused it to fail?

I start dissecting and taking apart that experience so that I can see what was broken about it.

Now that might not tell me immediately how to solve it, but I'll at least know what's broken about it. That teaches me at least one area not to step in again.

You [00:15:00] can use that same kind of process. Identify for yourself, what is it that you start to do when you face failure that is not producing the outcome that you want? Let that become an anchor to signal a question that will help you to get curious about that experience.

"What caused this not to work out the way I wanted it to?" is a much better question than, "how come I keep screwing up?"

I don't know what your question is. That's not my question, but that might be somebody's question that they face when things don't work out right.

What I've discovered is if you can learn about and be aware of these functions that you run in your life, then it gives you at least a shot at being able to inject into that function some sort of code, some sort of signal to yourself, to ask a question that can give you an opportunity to choose.

That's the fascinating part about this life, is we have the ability to choose between different things.

As you can put all of those things into perspective that you [00:16:00] face, all these functions that you run, and you can start saying, "Oh, I can actually impact that function. I can actually introduce a moment of choice. I can open up some breathing room for me to not be running the program without realizing it, but to actually be able to choose if I want to continue in that that function or if I want to have this moment of choice.

"To have this logic point, be a point where I said, 'Okay, now I'm in the situation, do I want to continue down this function as it runs normally, or do I want to exit the function and go into the new function that I've created.'"

Which, in this case, if I'm facing failure, the function I want to run is curiosity, not giving un-due meaning to things and preventing myself from trying in the future.

I'll look at it, say, "What can I take ownership of? Why did this happen?"

When I say ownership, I don't mean beat myself with a stick or beat myself up with experience. But, what could I do differently that would allow me to have a different outcome?

That's what I mean when I talk about [00:17:00] ownership. Being able to face things instead of beat yourself up or run away from them.

This is Ryan Chapman with FixYourFunnel.

I hope that this little discussion about mental functions can serve you as the things that happen between our ears are much bigger indicator of our success in business than the tools that we use or the strategies that we follow.

If we can't get our mind right, then everything else seems to fall apart.

Keep moving forward.