Dear Friend,

This week we’re going to talk about something that doesn’t cost any money but could end up having the biggest impact on your bottom line this year if you were to employ it.

What I’m going to talk about tonight is something that Napoleon Hill, the author of ‘Think and Grow Rich’ and several other books, credited as one of the top ten principles of personal achievement, and that is the principle he called “accurate thinking”. As I said thinking is free, there is nothing that is more profitable. If you can teach yourself to engage in thinking, in quiet meditation, in sitting and just thinking through the opportunities, the obstacles, the challenges within your business, you can have a dramatic impact on your bottom line.

Just like the carpenter has their axiom of ‘measure twice, cut once’, I like to think in terms of ‘think twice, execute once’. If you can learn to think something through and play out a scenario in your mind ahead of time and you can adopt some of these skills that we’re going to talk about today, you’ll be able to really increase the opportunity that an idea that you have, or an initiative you take, will be ultimately successful.

So I’m going to lay out six thinking models for you that I’m packaging together here and calling them your “thinking toolkit”. I’ve really been doing a lot of thinking about how to think and going through a process of formalising the way that I think and doing it in a way that I can pass that on, that other people can think like this. Tonight’s the first attempt at that.

There’s six types of thinking that I’ve identified and I’m going to share them with you and if you’re listening to this in iTunes, if you go to MarketingMonday.com there are video examples of some of the videos that I’m going to talk about that you can watch and will really help enhance your experience of this. So if you’re just listening to this go to MarketingMonday.com and you can get the video links that go with this.

Number 1: “Visual Process Thinking”

I like to think of this as ‘assembly line’ thinking. This was the one that really stimulated the thought for me that there really are different types of thinking and they open up different avenues, or different parts of your brain, that stimulated a different kind of thinking. Visual process thinking I like to think of ‘assembly line’ thinking.

I started watching this show on the Discovery channel called “How It’s Made” and I’m going to put some video links here for you to take a look at this. What they basically do is in about a four or five minute period they show you how things are made. It’s very fascinating to see the visual process of an assembly line from making something as simple as marbles or something like pencils, or like putty knives.

Marbles

Matchsticks

Toilet Paper

 

There’s all kinds of different things and every week they show three things in one show and what I noticed as I started watching this, (I was at a main event and I came across a mini How It’s Made marathon, there were three or four episodes on in a row and I was just sitting there watching it) was how my mind really grasped onto this and it started stimulating the part of my mind that can see processes as three-dimensional visual flowcharts, processes. Where that comes in handy is if you start visualizing the processes that you go through in your business as assembly lines, as a visual assembly line.

So let’s take your before unit for example. We’re talking about the part of your business where you are trying to identify people who are going to buy, sell or borrow. If you were going to start and map out your before unit as a visual, three-dimensional moving process it would start with your raw materials of your target market and it would go through the process of deciding what offer you’re going to make to your target audience and how they’re going to actually come in contact with it. When they see your offer and take the step of calling and listening to a free recorded message, or coming to your website, that is what will set this whole chain of events in action that you can visualize them moving across an assembly line.

They call, they listen to your recorded message, at the end of the recorded message they’ll leave their contact information. You can visualize a worker, as what they would call it on the How It’s Made show, you can visualize a worker, or you, would call that person back and have an initial conversation with them. You can visualize them making the decision on whether this person is a 5-star prospect or not and you can visualize them sending them down the assembly line as a 5-star prospect or not as a 5-star prospect. You can see them making the decision on the assembly line dividing them into two different paths of whether they’re going to buy now or whether they’re going to buy later. Being able to visualize that process, look at what’s happening in that process for you and be able to identify where the constraints are, is a very valuable type of thinking.

Same thing would go for your during unit, if you think about from the time you get an appointment, all the processes, all the things that have to happen from the time you get that appointment until the time the transaction closes and then 30, 60 or 90 days after the transaction.

And the same thing in your after unit, you can visualize all of your top 150 or your top relationships going through an annual assembly line where each year they’re going to go through the process of getting your newsletter, getting your evidence of success postcards, getting communications from you, a birthday process. All of those kinds of things can be easily visualized as a process, as an assembly line and if you’re watching those videos, if you watch some of them, just notice how that part of your brain gets stimulated, that starts to think in terms of visual processes.

Number 2: “Scenario Planning”

Now what stimulated this line of thinking for me is after watching How It’s Made I realized that it was stimulating the part of my brain that could think in terms of visual processes and I realized that that reminded me of a time when I was playing lots of chess in college.

I remember that in learning chess it stimulated a part of my brain that would think in terms of ‘if I do this, they’re going to do this, and then I can do this’ and that scenario planning was starting to pass itself into my life and I would realize I would see myself in interactions thinking that way, thinking in terms of ‘well if I do this they’ll do this’ or being able to see things in my life two or three moves ahead, rather than just thinking about them one time.

Where this ultimately becomes very useful for you is maybe even in objection handling. That’s a great way of thinking about it. If somebody is set on paying a lower commission or they’re selling their house on their own and you know that that’s probably not the right thing for them, but being able to think – not convincing them in one move but getting them over to a position where you can easily move them to the next position. I remember learning a technique called “The Safe Island” where if somebody is talking about paying a lower commission, that’s what they want to pay and if you can get them to think in terms of a common ground, where you can move them instead of one step from paying a low commission to paying a higher commission, to get them to a logical place where you can say “well I can appreciate that Mr Suller, but let me ask you this, if you knew that paying a lower commission would actually net you less money in the sale would you still be interested in paying that lower commission?” You see, the only logical answer to that is that if they knew that paying a lower commission was going to ultimately net them less money they would be much more likely to be able to see an argument for why paying a higher commission might actually net them more money. You can show them how the commission structures are set up, that the commissions are offered to the buying brokers and they’re much more receptive to a message like this when you’re on a common island.

So that kind of thinking is stimulated by something like scenario planning thinking. So if you think about what are the most common situations that you are faced with that if you thought them through you would be able to, instead of just trying to go in one move, be able to move people in two or three moves to your desired outcome?

Number 3 is “Outcome Thinking”

Outcome thinking is about identifying what it is that you ultimately want, about thinking about the end result first. I like to call this ‘accelerator pedal thinking’ where if you can press the accelerator pedal and follow an idea all the way out to the end and see what that ultimately means, see if it’s going to get you where you want to go. An idea around that might be that, if you’re trying to build your business to a point where you’re doing a certain number of transactions and your current model of getting there requires that you make 100 cold calls a day or that you do so many prospecting activities that are time consuming and one-to-one relative to your effort and involvement in them. If you push the accelerator pedal on that and see what that looks like at the very end you start to see that there is no end to that, that there is always going to be the need to do that manual hamster wheel prospecting. But if you’re thinking of outcomes, if you’re thinking about getting to a point where you can do two or three transactions a month without having to do any cold call prospecting, you can see that time invested in building a system that can automate the process for you will be time well spent and that’s going to mean time thinking about ‘how can I implement a system that will prospect for me?’.

Number 4 is “Life or Death Thinking”

I’ve mentioned this before when we’ve talked about lead management. A great place to get yourself to is if you can think of anything that you want to achieve and ask yourself the question “if my life depended on this, what would I do?”

We pose to the provocation of, ‘if you were given 100 leads and I told you that if any of those people were to buy a house in the next twelve months without you, that you were going to be beheaded, what would you do?’ That is the type of thinking that will clear away all the clutter, it will clear away all the ramifications of something and make you really see what is the most effective action that you can take.

It can also get you to take actions that you might not otherwise take. I was just in Fort Lauderdale at our main event and had a gentleman chairing with me that he just, he can’t get himself to block off time to work on his business. One of the things I pose is ‘if your life depended on it, if you, for instance had a kidney ailment where you had to be on dialysis for four hours a week, one afternoon a week that you had to block off that time and do it, or you would die, that it would be a very uncomfortable experience for you, what would be the ramifications of that? Would you be able to get yourself to block off four hours a week if your life depended on it?’ That’s the kind of thinking that you have to ask yourself. “Am I just making excuses or is this something that I would treat very differently if my life actually depended on it?”

Number 5 is “Detached Thinking”

Detached thinking is being able to view something, not through your eyes, not to view something from your perspective but to view something from somebody else’s perspective. I learned this as a competitive tennis player.

I played tennis in college and high school and as a junior and one of the greatest things that I learned was from a book called “The Inner Game of Tennis”. This was fascinating to me when I first discovered it. It gave this mindset, that the very best mental state to be in, in any kind of competitive situation where it requires that you are calm and cool and collected, is to think from a detached observer’s standpoint.

To give an example of a tennis match, there are the two players and there’s also an umpire and depending on who’s perspective you’re looking at the outcome of a particular point, or a match, it’s going to change the way you think about things. If I’m player A and you’re player B and we are in the middle of a rally and I hit the ball out of bounds, that’s going to be a bad thing for me, I’m going to view that as a bad thing. Now this same exact event from your perspective is going to be viewed as a good thing because you’ve won the point, because I hit it out of bounds. I’m disappointed, you’re happy but then there’s that third perspective of the umpire. The umpire is looking at these events as objective, he’s looking at it and doesn’t have any emotion attached to it, the ball is out and that doesn’t matter to him, it’s in or out, it doesn’t matter to him. That is, he’s going to have a less emotional experience going through the course of a match because he’s not going to be riding the highs of a string of one points or managing the lows of a string of lost points, he’s just observing and seeing that there are some that are in and some that are out.

If you can get yourself to think about that in terms of your experiences with buyers or sellers or borrowers, that sometimes you’re going to work a long time and something’s not going to work out, sometimes you’re going to work a very short amount of time and things are going to work out well, and those times you’re going to be very excited and then the times that they don’t work out you’re going to be very disappointed, but if you can think from that detached observer’s standpoint and see what actually happened and see if there’s any patterns that are happening and see if there’s anything you can do to duplicate the great results and eliminate the bad results, that’s going to have an incredible experience for you.

Number 6: “On Demand Thinking”.

On demand thinking is being able to bring yourself to a point where you can train yourself to focus on short notice and think creatively, or think critically, or strategically, or whatever it is that you need to do at a particular time.

I’ll give you a little insight into how MarketingMonday happens for instance. I’ve trained myself over the course of this year – it’s coming up on one year now that we’ve been doing the MarketingMonday podcast – and what I do is on Sunday nights I watch 60 Minutes and I also like to watch The Sopranos, which comes on at 9 o’clock, so I have this one hour window between when Andy Rooney finishes up on 60 Minutes and when The Sopranos starts at 9 o’clock. I’ve trained myself over the year now to be able to think clearly on demand and be able to outline and deliver a MarketingMonday within that one hour window. So what I do, I look at it and for the first 20 minutes I outline exactly what I’m going to talk about, so tonight I outlined the six elements of the thinking toolkit. Then at the end of that first 20 minutes, whatever I’ve outlined, that’s enough, and I open up my Mac, I open up my GarageBand program, I put on my microphone, I press record and I record for 20 minutes, sometimes 15, sometimes 20, not usually much more that 20, but I do that and it all works out and then I spend the final 20 minutes duplicating, putting on the music, sharing, putting it into iTunes and sending it over to Jesse in Australia who puts everything together and I wake up in the morning and MarketingMonday is ready to go.

Now that type of thinking, rather than trying to be scattered all through the week, trying to think about what I’m going to talk about, or think about what I’m going to do or when I’m going to do it, I’ve trained myself that that is the time for that, that Sunday night is the time for MarketingMonday and I’m able to deliver in that short amount time.

What would be the impact on your business if you could get yourself to think, even if it was for just one hour a week, for one year, about your business? If you could train yourself that there’s a specific place that you go, that when you sit down it automatically triggers that part of your brain that starts to think about your business, to think about the opportunities, to think about the challenges and how you can overcome them, that would be very powerful. And it doesn’t cost any money.

So Napoleon Hill was right. Accurate thinking really can be one of the most impactful principles for personal achievement for you. I hope that over the next several months here that you’ll be able to set aside some time and practise the art of accurate thinking.

That’s it for this week, tune in next time and we’ll talk about even more ways for getting listings, finding buyers and converting great leads. Have a great week.