Success Sucking Rules That You Didn’t Even Know You Had – Episode 15
In this episode, The Boss Life helps you unlock your true potential by getting rid of some of your biggest limiting beliefs. Erin and Miguel Carrasco walk you through how these rules go into your head, and how to get rid of them.
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Success Sucking Rules That You Didn’t Even Know You Had – Transcript
In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about success sucking rules that you didn’t even know you had.
Success sucking rules. You have success sucking rules?
Well, I probably still have some. I had lots before, but I dumped them all because they were sucking.
They were sucking your life out of you?
They were sucking the life out of not only just me but my business. I think what’s interesting… Let me set this all up. Is that cool? Then we’ll dive right into the- [crosstalk]
Sure. Let’s do it.
What does this even mean? I don’t know if you know this or not, but in a lot of ways you don’t have free will.
What?
Yeah, you don’t. You actually don’t do what you want to do most of the time.
You’re going to need to explain this a little bit.
Yeah. People are like, “Yes, I do it. I do what I want.” You don’t do what you want. The way your life works is based on a lot of factors which is what we’re going to cover today. You created rules in your head that govern every decision you make. For example, let’s say you’re going to have a bite of brownie. There’s a bite of brownie in front of you and you’re about to eat it.
Mmmm, brownie.
You actually decide whether you’re going to eat it or not. Your brain goes to rules, neural pathways that have been created in your mind to decide what you’re going to do based on your past experiences. In reality, a lot of what you’ve… what’s happened to you in the past is what’s created this rules, and then based on these rules is how you take action. A lot like software.
So I have rules about brownies?
You have rules about every little thing. It would blow your mind. The fact you just laughed a little bit now, there was a rule in your head, said that you made a joke that was kind of funny and so you’re going to do a little giggle.
I have a great rule about that. Everything is funny.
Everything’s funny. You just laugh at everything?
Absolutely.
That’s sweet.
Makes my life much better.
It does. That’s a big part of what we want to cover today is these rules, because some rules that you’ve created needs to… we need to get those written out and then we need to get rid of them because they’re the reason why you may be are not having the success that you deserve to have in your business based on… I meet a lot of people that are having great success in their business, but they can’t take that next level. Chances are they’ve got rules.
Yeah. The whole point of this podcast in particular is to enable you to be aware of them. You hear us talk a lot about that in the podcast, is that awareness is kind of your first step to changing any of the habits that you have or any of these rules. So we’re going to talk a little bit about generational rules. We’re going to talk a little bit about societal rules. We’re going to talk about rules that you’ve might’ve made up. Why don’t we dive right into rules maybe that had been passed down generationally.
Generationally?
Yeah.
What does that mean. There’s rules that have been passed down generationally?
Yeah. A lot of the rules that have been passed down, we aren’t really even aware of them.
So it’s not like a book that your great-grandpa gave you because he’s read the rules.
No. He didn’t write out the rules. It’s like, these are the Carrasco family rules. No. It’s usually we have absorbed these rules from our parents or our grandparents. It’s something like… it’s so subliminal, so subconscious because these rules aren’t necessarily told to us. Sometimes they are, but a lot of the times they’re modeled. So when we look at behavior as a whole, the best way for someone to teach you something or the best way that you absorb stuff is you watch it happen. When we’re kids, maybe we watched our parents however they decided to earn money in their life, and how they decided to talk to you about money or the phrases they said about money or working. Those begin your rules.
I’ll give you like a great example of a couple rules that might fall into this category. Some of you might have the rule that you get paid for the hours that you work, because that’s what your parents did. So your whole goal was to get a good college degree or a university degree-
Go to school.
Go to school.
Get a job.
Get a what? Job.
Yeah. Get a J-O-B.
Yeah. Once you leave that job, you’re going to… once you leave that… the university or college, you’re going to get a job, it’s going to pay you something, you’re going to start paying off the student loan that you have. Then that’s just basically your life. You’re going to work somewhere for 25 years, are going to retire-
Get a pension.
… then a nice little pension plan.
Yeah. Don’t ever leave the pension.
And maybe some of you generationally have a rule of money. Like, well, all rich people are what? Evil. So sometimes that’s passed down. So-
We’re going to do a whole episode on money specifically just because I think it is such an important part in the behaviors that we have and the action that we take or do not take around success. But that is one of the biggest one that’s passed down is besides the job one is the money one.
Yeah. Some of you might have other roles as well. You might have rules for example of, don’t need to work on the weekends because you work a nine to five job, Monday to Friday. Therefore, weekends are for partying. Right?
Right.
Have a good time.
Even like-
Relaxing.
… in your relationship, how many of you guys, if you can think of this right now, you know in your house there’s a blue job and there’s a paint job. I know I hate using those labels, however, we kind of have them. So we’ve either created them ourselves with our spouse or our partner or they’ve been passed down and usually, I mean, if you’ve been married or you’ve been living with someone for a long time and you kind of look at their rules that they come into relationship with and your roles, a lot of the fights that you have at the beginning, it’s like the rules are different.
Yeah. You need to be really aware of these rules that have been passed down generally generationally. I almost can’t even say that word. That was a scientific word Erin came up with.
Yeah. I think when we’re looking at generational rules, it’s going to be harder to pick those out because we’re going to have a cool assignment for you at the end. Miguel’s going to give you an awesome challenge, but being aware of these generational rules, like what Miguel said was, a lot of the times, it surrounds our job, right? So if we’re working a nine to five during the day and we’re like, “Okay, I’m going to… I’m tired tonight after work. I’m just going to vege and watch TV.”
You got to make a new rule. That rule is almost the number one rule I hear from people that are trying to build businesses. The way they say it isn’t so much that they’re being lazy.
No.
You can hear when they talk to you. It’s almost like they’re saying, “Listen, the rule is, weekends are for me to relax. You’re telling me that I need to work on the weekend.” And that rule that’s been passed down needs to get crushed. That’s a big rule. If you believe right now you’re listening to his podcast that you know, you’re working really hard, nine to five, Monday to Friday, and then on the weekends you can’t wait to party. That’s our big problem.
Yeah. And you might not be partying for some of you guys who are parents. It might be like, “Oh, it’s family time.” We’re not saying, “Don’t have family.”
How dare you Erin. It’s family’s time.
Right. I mean, we have three kids. So I mean, we absolutely understand that weekends are really busy, especially for us and probably you guys too. We’re not saying like, “Don’t spend time with your family.” But if you look at it saying, “This is the only rule I have to do this weekend, is spend time with my family,” then it is limiting your success of you trying to build a side business.
I will be really real with this family thing. Just I want to be really clear on this whole thing. For example, this weekend we worked our butts off in this business, but we also worked our butts off in our relationship with our kids. I think a lot of people amount things to time. So, how much time they’ll spend?
Or balance.
For example, this weekend, let’s say you had 12 hours a day. So 12, 12. Let’s say 24 plus I save four hours on Friday. So let’s say you had 28 hours this weekend.
That’s some fast math.
Yeah. Fast math. Yeah. 28 hours to do whatever you wanted to do. You had 28 hours. I’m not including sleep in there. Think about it. What did you do in those 28 hours this weekend? How much of that time did you spend with your family? But fully engaged. Because to me it’s like, this weekend we did our kids to a movie. We weren’t on our phones. We had power and great time. We took them to church, we were engaged with them up singing, dance and doing the whole thing. Came back home, had fire, made S’mores, did the whole thing. Spend time with them. We dug holes and they tried to help us clean and said they were making bigger masses. We were fully engaged with them during that time.
Yeah. It was actual quality time where… because there is time, and I’ll be honest with you guys, there is time where I’m trying to balance it all and I’m on my phone, my kids are talking to me and I’m not fully engaged because I have a lot on my plate. So I know we’re not knocking that at all. But when we say quality time with the kids, like our phones are down.
Right. But even then, like that all total, all right. Talk about 10, 11 hours out of the whole weekend. But we spent like quality, quality time with them. If you talked to them, they know that. But at the same time, here’s what we do. We recorded a podcast this weekend. We just told them, “Hey guys, we’re going to go downstairs, record a podcast for half an hour. Is that cool?” They know that. So they get to know. Our social norms that we’ve taught our… what we’re teaching our kids is that you can have a great time, you can spend quality time together, but you also have to balance that with work. It’s funny, today, this morning I drove the kids to school and they were like, “Hey, can you put on the podcast?” We listened to the podcast, our podcast in the car. Somehow, they listen to us more when we’re on the radio because they think we’re like legit.
We’re authentic.
Yeah. Now you’re legit parents. You’ve got a podcast. Number one business. I’ll listen to this. But when you talk to me in person, I’m not listening. My whole point in all of this is that think about your 28 hours this weekend. You got to make new rules that, sure, weekends are for the family. I’m not going to debate that. But at the same time, weekends are also for you to build your dream business. That is your time.
For your family.
My rule set in my mind that I created generationally was my parents was you got to build your own business. That’s secure. Build your own business. Way More secure than working for somebody else. That’s a rule set. That’s a core principle in my life that I was ingrained when I was little.
Right. I didn’t have that. Mine was, go to school, get a job, work somewhere for 40 years and retire.
Yeah. Because of that, I’ve made certain decisions in my life and then also I also learned that weekends are for working even harder. Monday to Friday you work on the stuff that’s kind of paying your bills and investing in your business. Then on weekends is a time to really enjoy because now it’s created freedom, you can do whatever you want, you can work on your own business, no one can tell you what to do. So my whole life, all the jobs I had, I was always working that way. So friends would say, “Hey, why don’t you come up party this weekend?” I legit. I think I’ve gone to the bar maybe 11 times my entire life. It’s not a thing for me. I would much rather… if you’re asking what is your one thing, if you could do anything this weekend, besides my time with your family, what would you do? I’d be like work like, “Work.” Because for me work isn’t a bad word. That’s another rule in your head. You might have a rule that says,-
Or a hustle or whatever.
… “Your work is bad. Work is bad. You don’t want to work. Work is bad.” No, to me work is awesome. We’re having a great time.
The last thing I think I’m going to say about this point and then we’ll kind of move on, but is that when you start to change your behavior, and I want you guys to be really aware of this, and you change some of those rules, it’s going to rock the boat with people in your life who don’t have those rules, new rules you’re trying to create. If you’re working on the weekend, and say maybe your friends who have different rules or your parents have different rules-
They will be blowing up that phone.
They will be like, “You need to spend time with this. You need to do this.” Because it’s your activity is making them uncomfortable about their rules that they have.
They won’t even say you need to do this. They’ll be like, “Hey, you want to come out and go shopping?” Or, “Hey, you want to go and have a coffee?” Or, “Hey, you want to go to a party tonight?” That stuff’s going to happen, right?
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
And it’s going to be enticing and fun-
Totally.
… and distracting.
And you worked really hard all week so you’re going to be like, “I deserve a break.” But anyways, we’re not saying you don’t deserve a break, but it just- [crosstalk]
You don’t deserve a break.
[crosstalk] your drive where you are building your business. Right?
I would be building them or not. If you’re just starting, you got-
You don’t deserve a break, because you’re starting that.
You don’t deserve a break. What do you deserve a break for? Are you bringing in a hundred grand a year yet? I’m sorry to be real. You don’t deserve a break yet. You will. It’s going to be a great time. It’s going to be awesome, but not yet.
Yeah. So let’s move on to the next set of rules. The next set of rules is that you’ve created them because of past experiences.
I like that.
Past experiences is like, let’s give the example of maybe in a relationship that you’ve had, somebody is left you because you worked too much. I think that has happened to a lot of people. Maybe it’s not necessarily for your side business. Maybe it’s for your regular job, or for the ladies in the audience who are listening, if you say you have a rule about earning more money than your romantic partner, and that might be a role you created that, oh, well, he said that I can’t earn more than him, or he wasn’t okay with me earning more than him. So you’ve decided like, “Well, I can’t earn more money or I’m going to never have a relationship.” That might be a rule that you’ve created because of past experiences.
That’s so true. There’s so many different things that could have happened to you. Maybe even you had a friendship in the past and you started… maybe you started working on a business, Maybe that business didn’t work out because at the end of the day, nine of the 10 things you’re going to try aren’t going to work. That’s part of success. Maybe you lost that friend because you chose to work on that business. So now you’ve created a rule saying, “Well, I’m going to build a business, but as long as I lose my friends in the process.”
Right. Or maybe you’ve had success in your business and your friends were not okay with you being more successful. So you’ve decided, well, I want my friends more than I want the success of my business. So you stopped working as hard.
Yeah. So there’s all these things that could happen. You might have been married and something happened and you blame it on business, whatever it may be. All these things that happened in your life, you create rules from it. And there’s rules. There’s some rules that are good that you should create for yourself, of course. So the key in all of this is figuring out which rules have created that are actually inhibiting your success and they’re not real rules. Let’s move on to the next one.
Yeah. The next one I would say is that there’s rules that you’ve actually created based on social norms and social pressure. I talked a little bit about this one in the last rules, but if there’s a social norm of… like your role in your family. For me, if I’m talking about our family, there’s certain things like, do I do the cooking? Do I do the laundry? Do either do dishes. Do I take the garbage out? Do I fix the fence? You have to look at the rules that you’ve kind of created based on society. So society a lot of the times says that… and it’s still a thing and I’m not ragging on men or anything. It’s still a thing that men outearn women in certain roles. In network marketing, that is absolutely not true.
Not true at all.
It’s one of the industries that it’s not true. We have a lot of friends who are super successful earning like really awesome income and out often they’re earning more than their partners.
Yeah. We’ve been able to experience that dynamic firsthand with a lot of people because we’ve helped a lot of people have incredible success. But what’s been cool is we’ve been able to navigate that, help them with that for the most part. But initially it’s always a shocker. When you have, in a lot of cases people that get started in network marketing are females that either were on mat leave or they were stay at home parents. But now they just get bored. Because it’s only so much, you eventually, if you have an entrepreneurial bone in your body, you’re going to want to do something.
Or you crave human connection.
Craving human connection? What do you mean? Kids aren’t humans?
Oh, they totally are? But sometimes you need to have an adult conversation.
Yeah. So they started building businesses and then obviously we help mentor them and they work really hard and they become incredibly successful. Then all of a sudden they’re making more income than their spouses. Then that whole conversation happens. But for the most part, as long as he navigated it, it becomes what they cool. But the real point we’re trying to make here is, if you have that belief in you that you can’t make more than your spouse, that’s going to really hold you back because you’re going to just self sabotage yourself.
Absolutely.
Along that line as well, maybe you have a belief that in the area that you live, or the… I’ve met people as well that live in a small town and they literally have beliefs in their mind that they don’t want to make more money because they don’t want to be the rich people in the area. So they literally like self sabotage themselves, to a point where they don’t earn more because they don’t want to stand out and they don’t want to lose their friends and they don’t want people hating on them and all these things. So you got to figure all that out because in reality, that’s not true. That wouldn’t happen. I fully believe that money expands who you are.
Yeah. We are going to have to do a whole episode on money.
Yeah. We will. What money does, so if you’re a good person, I believe money will expand the goodness. But if you know you’re a bad person, it’s going to spend a lot of bad stuff. That’s just how it is, it amplifies. Money’s an amplifier.
Yeah. The next part that we really want to cover is… and it’s… Miguel just really touched upon this, is that, you have created rules because of assumptions that you’ve made that aren’t actually true.
What? I’ve made rules that aren’t real?
Pretty much. You’ve made them to sometimes protect yourself. It’s just a lot of them, it’s something that you have to be aware that you’ve done in order to change it.
Yes. An example with that money one again would be like the… let’s say, I need to have money before I start a business. There’s some people that believe that. There’s some people that full unbelieve that, well, I can’t start a business yet. I’m just learning because I need to have a credit card pain down so that I have $5,000 to start my business. Or I need to have $2,000 in my savings account, or I can’t be successful until I buy a course or go to an event or all these things,
Or I can’t be successful until I lose 20 pounds because I don’t want to be seen on social media. A lot of these things we are telling ourselves and it’s creating an excuse for us.
Yeah. So what you got to do again there figure out what the rules are there that you just quite honestly, they’re just not true. There’s a lot of assumptions that we’ve made in our lives that are meant to basically hold you back and you don’t even realize it. That’s what I wanted to get out of that with you.
Right. I think if we go over all these rules right now, if we kind of talked to you about what we mean by rules and that maybe you have some rules that have been passed down generationally or maybe you’ve created roles because of past experiences to protect yourself maybe emotionally, and maybe you’ve had rules that you’ve created because of society and just the social norms that you have been absorbing in our culture. Then maybe you’ve just created rules out of thin air because of these assumptions.
Their rules. I love that one, because all one more coaching people, I’ll ask them like, “Why did you create that belief.” Like, “I don’t know, I just assumed that that’s… I needed more money to get started.”
Right. This is the most important thing that I really want you guys to get out of today’s episode is that all of these starts with awareness, and all of this is shining light on these areas of our life that we don’t actually know are impacting the success that we’re trying to achieve in our life. We think, “Oh, okay, that’s just… that’s great and all that stuff.” But if you don’t actually do the work and dive into this, you’re going to allow these rules to keep navigating your life. So why don’t you give them a little challenge?
Yeah. Let me give you guys a challenge because I think this is important. This is an important exercise and hopefully you do this now. If you’re driving, don’t do it right now. Just pause it. Do it when you get home. But what I want you to do is take out a sheet of paper and on top of that paper I want you to write out, rules that used to control my life. Just write out, rules that used control my life, because I want this to be an empowering exercise. Not like, “Oh no, these are all my terrible rules.”
Yeah. I don’t want you guys to feel like if you have these rules that you’re a terrible person. Everybody starts with certain rules.
Yeah. You should it be real because if you’re not real, this won’t work. Because, as Erin just said, the whole point of this exercise is for you to figure out what these rules are so we can move forward with them. Once you write out the rules, you start thinking about them and you can either play back this episode and you can hear the different kinds of rules that could be in your head, but I need you to write those all down. So for example, for you it might be, I used to believe that I wouldn’t work on the weekends. I needed to have me time. You’d write that out.
Maybe I was unwilling to build my business because I believed that that would mean less time with my family. Those are all rules that are just quite honestly just not true. You need to write all these rules. Like, I believe that I couldn’t earn more money than my husband. I couldn’t earn more money than my wife. Whatever your rule set is. Write all those rules out. Once you’ve written out all those rules, beside that, I want you to draw a line in the middle of that paper. Then beside that, those rules, each one, I want you to write a new rule. At the top of that column, I want you to write out, new rules that will control my destiny.
Mmmm, I like that.
Yeah. I’m fired up about this topic because really like… I don’t know if you… Have you watched The Secret yet?
Yeah.
Again, I love that movie and people are like, “Oh, why? It’s all hokey.” Listen, I don’t believe that you can just go, “Oh, give me more money, give me your money, give me money. Money fall from the sky.” That that it’s going to work. That does not work. What does work is that you can literally control your future by figuring out what your rules are that you function by and then creating new rule sets for yourself. There’s no one telling you that those rules that you just wrote out or are writing out are rules that you must continue to follow.
You can literally get rid of all of those rules right now and beside each one, write a new rule that will serve you, that will help you, that will lift you higher, that will empower you, that will give you more time with your family, that will allow you to never be stressed again financially, that will allow you to build dreams and visions and goals and be more fired up on the weekend ever then you ever were before when you used to party. You have no idea how you can literally unlock your life if you simply just do this exercise. I know it’s a game changer.
I think that you also, when you’re writing out these rules and sometimes it’s going to be hard. We’re not expecting this to be super, super easy for you to get rid of your old rules and build new ones. But a lot of the times what I want you to think about when you’re writing this new rule, if you’re saying, “I’m going to get rid of being tired at the end of the day and having to work on my business.” One of the things I would love you guys to do is just change. Anytime you have that mindset where it’s like, “I have to do this,” you need to switch that perspective to, “You get to do this.”
Exactly. I love that so much. So, hopefully you will take us up on that challenge when we this podcast episode again, and also you should maybe… I know there’s a lot of people that could use this podcast episode, so hopefully you guys forward this on, maybe send people the link so they listen to this and they can transform their life. But, we’ve kept you long enough today, hopefully enough time for you to get to work. With that we want to remind you to ditch the employee mindset… And start living the boss life.
