What Personal Development Is Worth Your Hard Earned Money – Episode 12

I know I should do personal development, but what should I do? The Boss Life Podcast tells you exactly how to know what personal development is right for you, and what is not worth your time or money.

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• Stop listening to the wrong people for advice.
• Start doing personal development yesterday!
• Stop trying to re-invent the wheel and instead model the successful.
• Stop waiting for other people to believe in you.
• Stop spending the money you’re earning, instead of investing it back in your business.

What Personal Development Is Worth Your Hard Earned Money

In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about how you decide what personal development is worth your hard-earned money.

Wow. You’re singing?

Karaoke time. You put a microphone in front of me, I will sing you a song. No, don’t worry. Keep listening. Please don’t hang, don’t hang up. Don’t hang up.

They’re not listening. Don’t worry. You’re not listening to the radio. We are going to talk about something valuable today.

So today we want to cover the topic of where you should invest your money in terms of personal development. We’ve talked about person development in the past. But want to be very clear so that you have a strategy in terms of what to invest in. Where does… and when we say invest, we don’t necessarily just mean money as well. We also mean your time, right? Because sometimes time is money, right? So what should you invest your time, your energy, your money into with personal development?

Let me start us off today, and let me frame this in a certain way. There’s different types of personal development that you can do, right? There’s one on one coaching with people mentorship. There’s podcasts like this one that you can listen to. There’s buying books and purchasing books. You could purchase courses and learn through courses that you purchase. You could do full immersion, which would be conferences. When you go to a conference, you’re fully immersed for four or five days and you really rapidly grow as a person. And personally, it’s really, there’s all these things. There’s even high end masterminds if you want to be around, incredible people. We’re a part of a few masterminds. There are so many things that you could engage in. One of the first things that you should ask yourself is how do you best learn?

How do you best learn as a person? Because I’ve learned over the years working with thousands of clients that at the end of the day, you could have the best conference in the world, but if someone is just a strict introvert, they do not want to be in a conference and they’re going to walk in there, they’re going to know. It is much better for them to even possibly get notes from people or buy the online version of the conference and watch it from home, take notes, and they will learn so much more than even flying to the conference. Now, there’s some people on the other hand, who just love being extroverted, or maybe they’re introverted, but they’re okay with sitting in a conference room and just really immersing themselves and taking massive action.

There’re some people that love listening to audible and audio books and things like this and but they don’t love to read. And so I would never suggest to anyone to do something that isn’t going to be enjoyable, right? So you kind of need to ask yourself, how do you best learn? Do you enjoy sitting by a fire, having a glass of wine, reading a book and learning? Or would you rather drive in the car and listen to a podcast and then get back to their desk and take some notes? It really kinda depends on people.

I think that one of the things that we haven’t necessarily talked about with personal development is the time factor. I think a lot of times people leave this to the last thing that they have to do. They don’t necessarily prioritize working on themselves, to better themselves to their business. And so if you are one of those people who, this is your side hustle, right? So you’re trying to manage your time. You’re like, how am I going to fit in this time? Maybe you don’t have the time to go for a four day conference and maybe you only have the time between your drive, right?

So many of you guys are probably listening to us in your car and like that’s the time that you have to better yourself. So you also have to look at your timeframe that you have to do the learning. So if you have time and you want to get a podcast in, get an audio book in, when you’re driving, that’s the way that I started to make time for my personal development because honestly, at the end of the day with a full time job and three kids, putting a book in front of my face was a sure way to fall asleep.

Yeah, that’s great. So let’s move on the next point.

If you look at yourself, and you look at the way you learn and you look at maybe what you liked, what you didn’t like, maybe someone said, “Hey, you should read this book. This book is really awesome.” And they give you this book and you’re like, “It’s sucks.” Right? Or maybe, you bought an audio book and you’re like, “Oh, I just, I can’t get into it.” Or maybe you did a course and you’re like, that’s not really where I’m at right now. You have to look at what you’ve liked in the past and what you didn’t like. And sometimes those things change.

I used to love reading books, physical books and I would read a lot of books. But what has happened as my life has become busier, I had to find different ways in order for me to get in the work that I needed to get in. And so for me, what I like now is not what I liked then. And so just so you know, that can change for you. So if that’s the case, maybe you tried to listen to a podcast years ago and now you’re listening to it and it’s really working for you. That’s part of the plan.

I love it. So hopefully, I’m going to be a little selfish here. Hopefully you love podcasts and you love our the best, right? So hopefully you’re learning a lot of stuff. Let’s go on to the next one, which is really, what’s… some people don’t know, like there’s so much information, right? It used to be that 2030 years ago you have to go to a library. I remember wanting to learn, I was really addicted to chess back in the day. I loved it. And I’m showing you guys look Geeky I was. And I go to the library and was trying to take out a specific book, right? Like maybe I wanted Garry Kasparov Teaches Chess. Well, it wasn’t in the library then I couldn’t get it, right? It was, and I had to wait until someone returned it and sometimes you don’t, wouldn’t it?

My point is it used to be really hard to get information. It used to be really hard to get information. Now we live in an era where information is everywhere. It’s almost like information overload. You know, you can learn from so many people. You could learn anything this moment right now. The second so how do you know what you should be spending your time on? How do you know which podcast to listen to? How do you know which books to take out? How do you know what conference to attend to. This point is very important. What you need to do is to focus on what’s the next thing that your business needs in order to grow.

So maybe you write this down. If you’re not driving, what’s the next thing that your business needs in order to grow? That’s what you should be focusing on because listen if there’s a hundred steps in growing a business to the point where you want it to get to, if you’re starting point 0 you don’t need to be investing time in point 32. You don’t need to be investing time in point 3. You need to be investing time in point 1 followed by point 2 followed point 3.

It’s really all about baby steps, right? If you took a baby that doesn’t know how to walk yet and you said, “All right, we’re going to learn how to do a jumping Jack pushups, or we’re going to how to do sprints.” It would never happen, right? It would never happen. It’s all about like to use the analogy baby steps, right? You really have to learn to walk before you can run. You got to learn to run before you can start running. You know, 10K you gotta learn to do a 10K before you can do a 15. You got to learn to do a half before you can do a full marathon. That’s just the way life is and it’s the same in your business. I’m telling you right now, there are a lot of people that fail to start their business or fail their business because they’re trying to learn things, but they have no business learning.

You really got to figure out, so right now I’ll say as an example, you’re getting started. You know, maybe you don’t have an Instagram account set up. Maybe you don’t even have a website set up. All that stuff. Your, you know, your step one is to figure out, you know, how to do Instagram properly. You don’t need to figure out how to create like XYZ thing down the road in four years. You don’t need to figure out how to run a conference yet, right? There’s no point in you investing time on how to learn. How to run an incredible conference. You know, we’re running a conference in July for about 1500 people at a beautiful hotel. But if we had started there seven years ago, this business would not have gotten off the ground.

So really what I want you to understand is right now is think about what’s the next thing you need to learn your business. And a lot of you, that’s why you’re listening to this podcast is because you don’t know what all those steps are. So this podcast is unlocking all those secrets to you, but you really need to invest your time. And what’s the next thing that your business needs in order to grow?

And I think that you have to look at, what are the different types of things that you need to learn and grow with. Some of these different avenues that you can go in and learn from like audio books or podcasts. You’re like, I don’t know what I should read next, or I don’t know what I should learn next, right? And as long as it’s in line with that next step, that one foot in front of the other, asking somebody that is where you want to go, you know a recommendation of a book that maybe has changed their life or you know, even an audible, like, I love getting recommendations from audible because it looks at what I’ve read in the past and it’s like, “Oh hey, these are pretty similar things for you.” Those are always good ways to get your next piece of personal development.

This is audible. Well, that’s pretty good.

That was pretty good. Your impressions are on point today.

On point. All right.

All right. So let’s look at the next one. I think this is a really important one, especially if you’re just starting out in your business. There’re are probably a lot of you who are listening to this, who you’re pretty well established, and your options are going to be different once you’ve kind of built your business up to a certain level. But you have to look at the budget that you have. How much are you currently making in your business and, how does that affect what you spend it on? I think the more that we’ve earned in our business, it’s enabled us to spend more, I think we spend the most of our entire budget of what we earn is on personal development.

Yeah, absolutely. I think… like for us, personally, we spend about 30 to 40% of what we make basically back into personal development. Like this year alone, we’ll probably spend well over $100,000. I would say, just in, just in conferences that we’re attending, let alone everything else that we’re doing. We’re in masterminds that we’re spending some money. And we just yesterday we were doing another mastermind with some high end people, Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi, and we’re in a mastermind with a whole bunch people, Russell Brunson. Like people you might not even know, right? And the whole point of that is that we’re trying to learn from the best. But again, if we had just gotten started and we had made no money in business and we went and dropped $50,000 in a mastermind-

That would be a bad plan.

It would be a very bad plan. And it’d be all over. And you could say, well, you’re going to learn from the best. Yeah, but if you’re learning from the best, then you have literally no money to put back into the business, then you’re going to have struggle, right? So I would say you don’t want to start there. You want to start based on what your budget is based on where you’re at.

A lot of you are starting free with podcasts, right? And I think that, that’s brilliant of you. And you’ll have to look at that as, even though it’s free for you right now, you are getting… if you think of the amount that we spend on our personal development, you’re learning from us and what we’re learning from other people. And if the only thing that you can afford this year is a $20 book, then that’s what you can afford. But don’t just read a billion books and be like, “Yay, I read like a hundred bucks this year.” Because one of the worst things I see our clients do is they’re like, “Oh, I’m going… you know what? There’s that challenge. I’m going to read 52 books this year.” And so you read 52 books, you realize there are a lot about the same thing and then you implement nothing. One of my favorite analogy is, is this. If you go to a gym and you read the manual for the treadmill, are you going to lose any weight? No. You have to get your butt on the treadmill, right?

That’s so good. I was just at the gym. There’s was a lady reading the manual. No, I’m kidding. Well she kind of was, she was looking and pushing all the buttons. She stood there pushing all the buttons for literally five minutes.

Yeah.

And then she got off about 20 seconds later.

But that’s the whole thing with personal development that it doesn’t matter how much money you spend, it doesn’t matter how many books you read, how many conferences you go to. If you do nothing with the information in your head, your knowledge is not power unless you take action.

Totally. So the last thing I really want to talk to you about is the difference between business development and personal development. Because these are two completely really different things.

They overlap a little bit, but they are different things that you can work on.

They’re very different. So why don’t you go ahead and kick us off and I’ll jump in and interrupt as usual. I’m kidding.

If I look at business development, when I was first getting started in my business, I was like, “Oh, personal development.” I have to read a book that tells me how to be better, or get over my crap or anything else like that. I thought that that was the only personal development I need to do. However, I might need to learn how to host a successful Webinar, or I might need to learn how to record a podcast, or I might need to learn how to upload certain files to a Google Drive. There are so many different things that you need to run your business that just because it’s not personal development where you’re working on the insides of you, it doesn’t mean that it’s not business development. It’s not important. And it doesn’t mean that you should just do either, right? You have to do both.

Yeah. You absolutely have to do both. Like for me, as an example, there’s those different things that I’m working on personally. So there’s personal stuff, personal reflection stuff that I’m working on that changes all the time. Then there’s also business development, right? There’s business development, which is like, as an example, when we were creating this podcast, I already knew, and this is another one about being open to coaching. I already knew a lot technically, I’m a very technical person. I knew the microphones, I knew the setups, I need the softwares. I knew all the stuff I could probably had figured it out. But I also knew that there were people that were better at me at execution, right?

And I wanted that execution game plan, right? And so what I did is I actually, like I’ve mentioned before, we bought a course and that course… and by the way, you don’t have to spend a lot of money. That course wasn’t that much. And we executed the game plan back to what Erin had said before. I could have bought the course, I could have let it sit there and not done anything. A, I could have bought the course, watched every video and nothing anything. B, or what I did is I bought the course and when they said do this, I paused the video, I went and did it and I went onto the next one. I mean, and to me like that is just common sense.

But it’s not.

I don’t understand [crosstalk]

Well, common sense is in common, right? And I think that, that’s where we get mixed up. Is that we think that just ’cause we do this or we buy this, that all of a sudden it’s magically going to happen.

Right? And so that’s why you have to do this. So, business development is critically important to your business, but at the same time… the point where I wanted to make there, is that the personal development is what made me complete that course, right? So I bought the business development course. So that’s development, but doing the personal development, the things I’ve done for years with Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar, all these things that got me to a point to just naturally know to execute on what I was learning like that didn’t just happen overnight. That was like 10, 15 years of failing. That was a lot of years of buying stuff and not doing anything.

And so, I finally learned the lesson. And so those things work together. You can’t just listen to this podcast and go and execute stuff if deep down inside you have issues with confidence, right? If you’re really struggling with confidence in your life, all the business development you’re doing on the planet is not going to save you because you’re not going to have the confidence in yourself to implement anything that you’re learning.

Yeah. And I think that if you look at the two different kinds of development that you need to do to build a successful business, there’s some that you’re going to be so uncomfortable with that you’re like, no, I don’t want to do it. And that’s the one that either you need to pay someone to do it for you so you have to make a lot of money in order for that to happen or that’s the one that you are supposed to be doing right now. The stuff that you’re uncomfortable with. You know, my introvert is out there, oh, you know, I wish I could put my arms not around you ’cause I know you wouldn’t like that. But you know, I really want you guys to understand that if you’re looking at extroverts or people you think are extroverted, and you’re like, “Oh, I can’t ever be like them.”

You have to start working on that because you have a certain gift that is so, so, so important for the world that if you don’t work on those things that you are allowing to hold you back, then no one’s going to benefit from that light that’s shining inside you, but you’re not letting out.

That’s huge. That’s huge. Hopefully these five lessons, have given you a lot to think about. We’re going to move onto the challenge. Let me just summarize a couple of, some of the points that we’ve talked about. So number one, we were trying to figure out what person development to do a or business development to do. And number one, ask yourself, how do you best learn? Just think about it. Just write down like how do you best learn and then start there. You don’t have to read a book. If you hate reading, don’t make yourself read a book. Listen to a podcast. If you don’t learn either way. Find a conference, attend the conference. Figure out which way you learn. Number two is what you done in the past. What you done in the past that that you enjoyed, that you liked. How how did you best learn in school? What was that one class? That one teacher that really got you fired up and just… you were all in and you’ve learned so much better.

Number three, what’s the next thing that you need to learn in your business? That you need guidance on right now, this moment, this second. Maybe it is confidence. Maybe you’ve learned so much for the last five, 10 years you’ve implemented nothing but it’s time for someone to teach you exactly how to get confident and take massive action. If that’s what you need, then that’s the next step, right? That’s the next step. Not figuring out how to write a blog post, not figuring out how to do Instagram.

Your next step number four is what type of budget do you have right now? Don’t go blow the budget on something that you don’t have the money to get into yet. I’ll tell you a little secret, a lot of what we’re developing for the Boss Life is to get you from point A to point B to point C to Point D gradually. And so that one day, you will be able to spend incredible amounts of money maybe on masterminds because you know what? It’s going to take you to that next level, but you can’t start there, right? You got to start small and you’ve got to build up from there. So figure out what your budget is. Of course, if your budget is high, then maybe you do start there. But if your budget’s low, then don’t worry about it, then you, it’s more about what you need, not how much you spend.

Number five is know the difference between business development and personal development. I honestly truly believe that personal development in a lot of ways is way more important than business development. That you can learn anything. But if you don’t have the personal growth on relationships, on yourself, if you don’t have the confidence to execute on all the stuff you’re learning, you’re just going to struggle your entire life. But there’s not a secret out there that you can’t learn right now. But there is one secret and that really is personal development. So with that Erin, why don’t we end with a really awesome challenge for them.

I think that one of the best challenges for this particular podcast is maybe you haven’t tried an audio book before. Maybe you haven’t tried a course before. Maybe that’s something that you’re… I want you to look into a different kind of method of personal development and you more than that. I want you to look at the different development you’re doing right now and is it the right one for you? Is it the right one that’s going to get you to that next step in your business? And if it’s not, I want you to put it down and pick something else up because that is not going to serve you to read a book that someone said, “Hey, you need to read this book.” And it’s not speaking to you. I want you to make sure that you know that you’re the owner of your life. You’re the boss. So you get to decide what you’re going to do with your personal development. One other challenge I’m going to leave you with today is kind of like part two of the challenge.

Part two? Before you say that there is this is really cool book I read. You need to read it. I’m kidding. On that too, ’cause we’ve talked about relationships they’re like one thing I’ve learned ’cause I used to do that. I used to be like, “Hey, you should go check this out. This is awesome.”

I’d be like, no.

Like this sucks.

No, I just, yeah-

So my trick now is I’ll play a video and I’ll be like, “Hey, look what I’m watching. What do you do? What do you think?

And then I’ll kind of walk away ’cause it’s not nice.

It depends.

It depends. In a way it depends on what you need at the moment and the moment changes, right? So what you needed five years ago, and maybe you picked up a book in five years ago, you weren’t ready for it, right? And maybe you’re ready for it now. So that’s always going to change. But one thing I want to do for part two, so part two, I want you guys to take a piece of action. So look at what you’re doing right now. I’m pretty sure in that little book-

I got a little excited there. I think it might take a little piece of energy.

A little piece of action that… I want you guys to look at the personal development that you’re doing right now. I guarantee that there’s an action step in there today. I guarantee there’s either a worksheet with it or an actionable item because most people don’t put out stuff without challenges. Or if they do, then that sucks.

That’s awesome. That’s great. So hopefully you got a lot out of this episode of the Boss Life podcast. With that we’d like to end all of our episodes reminding you something that’s critically important. I really think, and we say it, let me explain a little bit today. When we say

[inaudible]

employee mindset and start living the Boss Life and we’re going to do an episode fully on this, right, Erin?

Yup.

It’s going to be really exciting, is really, we want you to think differently. We want you to step outside the box. We really think that too many people right now are living in that employee mindset.

I think that a lot of the times it’s because they’ve been conditioned into it doesn’t mean that you’re bad, it’s just being the way that you’ve been brought up.

Yeah. And the cool thing is that you all have a gift to those people that are living in this employee mindset. But you have this gift inside of you. You’ve got something to share with the world, and it’s really time to let that out. And you can’t let that out without really having… starting to live the boss life. So with that, we want to remind you to ditch the employee mindset.

And start living the boss life.

We’ll see you in the next episode.

Bye guys.

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