The Growth Booth

10 Simple Steps Towards Building A Foundation For Your Success | The Growth Booth #55

January 24, 2023 Aidan Booth Season 1 Episode 55
The Growth Booth
10 Simple Steps Towards Building A Foundation For Your Success | The Growth Booth #55
Show Notes Transcript

Is your head in the game this 2023?

Welcome to the 55th episode of The Growth Booth Podcast, a show focused on supporting budding entrepreneurs and established business owners alike, towards achieving lifestyle freedom through building successful online businesses.

This week, Aidan shares his simple steps on how to get into the right frame of mind as you navigate into 2023 with fresh goals and aspirations. Learn how you can build a foundation for your success by starting with the most important aspect: mindset.

Whether you're looking for step-by-step strategies to start building an online business, simple game plans to grow your business, or proven lifestyle freedom frameworks, you’re in the right place.

Stay tuned and be sure to join the thousands of listeners already in growth mode!


Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

02:09 Common Traits of Successful People

06:53 A Very Vivid Vision

09:09 The WHY

10:19 Defining Goals

12:10 Getting Real Progress

18:37 Losing Momentum

20:49 Outro


Links and Resources Mentioned:


About Our Host:

Aidan Booth is passionate about lifestyle freedom and has focused on building online businesses to achieve this since 2005. From affiliate marketing to eCommerce, small business marketing to SAAS (software as a service), online education to speaking at seminars, the journey has been a rollercoaster ride with plenty of thrills along the way. Aidan is proud to have helped thousands of entrepreneurs earn their first dollar online, and coached many people to build million-dollar businesses. Aidan and his business partner (Steven Clayton) are the #1 ranked vendors on Clickbank.com, and sell their products in over 100 countries globally, as well as in 20,000+ stores across the USA, to generate 8-figures annually.

Away from the online world, Aidan is a proud Dad of two young kids, an avid investor, a swimming enthusiast, and a nomadic traveler.

 

Let's Connect!

●  Visit the website: https://thegrowthbooth.com/ 

●  Follow us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aidanboothonline 

●  Let's connect on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aidanboothonline/ 

●  Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheGrowthBooth 


Thanks for tuning in! Please don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe!



Welcome to episode number 55 of The Growth Booth. We are getting pretty close to closing out January 2023, which is just amazing. We have the last few weeks gone, but there are still eleven months left in the year. It's really important that you have got the right frame of mind to be able to make sure that you achieve the things that you want to achieve in 2023. So to help you with that, I thought that I would provide a few ideas from my own experience. And these have been taken from The Mind Game, which is a course that I created I guess about a year ago, where I shared a lot of information through 66 bite-sized lessons about how to put yourself in a position to be the best that you can be and to be a high achiever. We're not going to go through the whole thing, obviously, but I did want to take a few lessons away from that and share them with you so that hopefully you can build upon where you're at right now and push forward to achieve greater things throughout the remainder of this year.

 

Now, for me, mindset all comes back to – and not just mindset, but the ability to get results comes back to a fundamental understanding that the results that you get are a result of the behaviors that you take. The behaviors that you take or you make are a result of the thoughts that you have. There's a direct flow of effect from your thoughts to your behaviors to the results that you achieve in life, and I think that's absolutely fundamental to understand. It's the first lesson that I want to leave with you here today. We'll dive a lot deeper into this, but this is something that I have learned from taking massive action on a lot of different projects myself and having built out actually multiple very successful businesses. But it's a common trait that I've seen in all of the self-made, multimillionaires, and very successful people that I know. There's an understanding of whether it's conscious or just sort of happens subconsciously, but the highest achievers are aware that the thoughts lead to behaviors and behaviors lead to your results.

 

So when you start with this, I think it's important to think about what does ‘finished’ look like. What is it that you are trying to achieve? If it's freedom, well, what does that mean? Is that waking up without an alarm clock? Specifically, what is that? Is it getting up and going for a walk along the beach in the morning? And where is that beach? Is it having a cup of coffee? Is it doing a couple of hours of some kind of workout? Is it working throughout the day? What specifically are you trying to achieve? So for me, for example, I like to wake up in the morning, and I like to go for a swim in my own pool in the complex that I live in. And if it's cold, maybe I'll hit the indoor pool instead. If it's too cold, it doesn't really get that cold down here. In one of ours, I think I could swim all year round, quite honestly, but having that option, and then after I've done that, maybe I'll take my kids to school, I might have a coffee with my wife and then start working on whatever it is that I want to work on.

 

So if that's what finished looks like for me, then how do I get there? I get there by starting to think about the behaviors and the thoughts that come prior to this. I've just spoken briefly about the result, the thing that you want to reach, and the piece that comes before that, the behaviors. So in order to have the freedom to wake up without an alarm clock, to go for a walk along the beach, you need to have a mostly automated income stream. And this is an example, by the way, because obviously everyone there are lots of different ways to achieve what you want to achieve, and deliberately trying to give an if-then sort of example here. So in order to have freedom, then you need to have a mostly automated income stream. This is my personal example. To get this, the way I need to be is focused, dedicated, disciplined, action-orientated, strategic, and committed to doing the things I need to do.

 

That's a reflection on different behaviors that can help me get the kind of results that I need to get if we go back one step further because the behaviors don't just happen. The behaviors happen as a result of thoughts that you're having. We can then say that in order to be focused, to be dedicated, to be disciplined, to be action-orientated, strategic, committed, and everything else, then you need to be thinking about achieving your vision every day and keeping it at the forefront of your mind so that you can consciously and subconsciously maximize your awareness and be mentally prepared to blast through any obstacles that may come your way.

 

There are lots of different things that you can do to get your conscious aligned with your subconscious and your mind working in 100% congruency with your body. These are examples of the kind of things that we get into in the Mind Game program, which, as I mentioned, runs through 66 days of drip-feeding content. Actually, it's not drip-feeding, it's all there, available on day one, but it's designed to be absorbed one piece of content at a time.

 

So far, we've spoken about sort of this underlying flow, if you like, of thoughts to behaviors to results. And I think the next big part of this that's worth thinking about when you're getting started and planning and really trying to hit the reset button on your mindset is visualization. These are the things that you think about. These are the things that are your dreams, essentially. And there's a trivial sort of exercise that can help you with this.

 

I want you to vividly, or I should say, now there's a trivial sort of exercise that you can do to understand the power of visualization and having a very vivid vision in your mind. So what I want you to do is close your eyes and think about the sensation of biting into a juicy lemon. Now, when you do that, you'll probably get a physical reaction starting to happen in your body. I'm salivating just thinking about it without even visualizing it too much, but that's an example of the power of visualization and what it can trigger inside you.

 

There are lots of different ways that you can get visualization working for you from a lifestyle standpoint. In fact, when I first came to Buenos Aires back in 2005, one of the things that I did was I went to look at some luxury properties in some of the nicest buildings in Buenos Aires. And at that time, I didn't have a dollar to my name. In fact, I was in quite a bit of debt, so I wasn't going to be able to buy one of these things. But going in, having a look around, seeing what was out there, understanding that, that gave me something vivid that I could hang onto in my mind. Fast forward a period of time and I'm thankful to live in one of the most amazing properties in the city of Buenos Aires, but I don't think I could have gotten there if I didn't have an idea of what that would eventually look like, if that makes sense. I think it's also important for you to think about what's going to keep you going, what's going to keep you moving forward day after day after day. And a vision is part of that.

 

Also, I like to think about ways that you can constantly be drawing on your real reason why. This is something I've spoken about in the past, but it's coming to grips with and really understanding why you do what you do. It's easy to say, “Hey, I'm building an online business because I want to have financial freedom,” but why do you want that financial freedom? You want financial freedom so you don't have to work a day job. But why don't you want to work a day job? Because you want to have time to spend with your kids. Now you're getting down to what is probably more a fundamental reason, a core reason why you do the things that you do.

 

And for me, my reasons why are my kids, my family, my friends, and charities that I support, and everything else is kind of layered on top of that, but drilling right down to the reasons why, that's really for me, what it comes down to. And again, everyone's different. There's no right or wrong answer to this, but the more in tune you are with why you're doing something, the easier you're going to find it to stay motivated. I think that's something that's really important to be aware of.

 

The next tip that I've got for you here today is just around the way that you write your goals or think about your objectives. There's an acronym that I've been falling back to for well over a decade now, and it's the SMART Goal System. When you are defining your goals, I think this is a good one to use. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based. So for example, we could have something like “On 1 January 2024, I would have built a lifestyle business that earns me $100,000 per month in profit that I could run on just 1 hour of work per day.” Here we've got something that's time-based, I've got a firm date there. I've got something that's specific. I'm talking about $100,000 in profit per month, so it's specific. And by the way, that's also measurable because it's got a number there. It's attainable as well if you're using the right system. And again, you could change the numbers. It could be $10,000 per month. It needs to be something that you feel is attainable and it's relevant to what I'm wanting to achieve.

 

So that's the SMART Goal System. And I like linking this up with a longer-term goal, a mid-term goal, and a short-term goal. So I don't just have one of these things. I might go come back a little bit sooner. If I want to get to $100,000 per month in January 1, 2024, then maybe on June 1, 2023, I would have some other specific goal. The key here is that they align. The way that I like to do this is by mapping out a ten-year plan and starting from, “Ten years or 15 years from now, where you want to be in your life? Five years’ time now, where do you want to be in your life? One year, what do you want that to look like?” and then, “What do you need to do in the next ten weeks to be able to move towards that?” And ten weeks, the thing that I like about it is it gives you 70 days. It doesn't matter, by the way, if it's ten weeks or twelve weeks, it really doesn't matter.

 

But the point is, it gives you enough time to get some real progress happening, but not too much time that you flounder around and just don't do anything. There is a real urgency when you're working toward a ten-week goal. So I like to build a ten-week plan, and it starts with identifying a goal and then coming up with a large list of tasks. The tasks are things that need to be done in order to achieve whatever it is that you want to achieve. I normally start out by writing a big list of tasks and then eliminating the ones that are not mission-critical in order to actually achieve my results. And once I've done that, I then break it out into ten weeks or ten blocks.

 

So in week one, these are the first things I have to do. Once I've done them, I'm going to be able to do the things that are in week two. Once I've done them, I can do the things that are in week three. And if you do this well, then just by virtue of completing the tasks, whether you like it or not, you will start to get results that are aligned with what you ultimately want to achieve. So I think fitness is always a good one to look at here. Like, if you've got a goal, an objective, in ten weeks' time to lose whatever it is, 10 lbs or five kilos or something like that, and one of your tasks that you're going to be doing every week is 20 minutes of exercise a day, three or four days a week.

 

If you're not doing anything right now and you start implementing that, then whether you like it or not, if you're marking those tasks off and you're getting them done, then you will be moving towards your objective. So I like to make sure the tasks are tangible and related to what I'm ultimately trying to achieve. This allows you to sort of build out a critical path. A critical path is something that you can come back to over and over again. I like to visually build this out, actually. You can see where the different parts, different things that need to be done are sort of scheduled. If I've got a ten-week time frame and I'm building out a critical path over the next ten weeks, I know that in the 7th week, I need to be doing a bunch of things before I do the 8th week, whatever that may happen.

 

I then get more granular on a weekly and daily basis. I like to plan for the week ahead. So if you think about the critical path of the ten-week plan as being very high level on a Thursday or a Friday of each week, I start planning out specifically what I need to do in the next week to get ahead from where I am today. Then once you've done that, you can get even more granular by drilling down to the specific things that you want to do tomorrow. This is where I like to create more like a to-do list. I've shared it in the past, I've got a little book that I like to do this on. I like to write it out freehand. And on my daily to-do list, there might be seven or eight different tasks on there. However, there will be two or three that is the absolute do-or-die task. These are the big things that I'm going to knock out one way or another. And even if I just knocked out those big tasks or those most important tasks are not always big, sometimes they're just more important, then I'm going to feel like I've moved the needle a little bit and I've progressed along my journey to where I need to get to.

 

So this is how we sort of start. This is how I start out thinking about mindset, and not just mindset, but building a real plan that I can fall back to day after day after day. And then on top of this foundation, I really start getting into things that I can do to help myself stay focused, on things that I can do to make sure I'm in the right frame of mind with regards to having gratitude. I do this using a morning routine. I make sure that I'm not constantly derailed by distractions and there are things that you can do for this. And then I also make sure that I'm always improving on a day-to-day basis. It's amazing how you can make the kind of like a microscopic improvement day after day after day and how this compounds on itself to make you so much better at what you're doing in the course of a period of time, like months or a year. I make sure that I've got measures in place so that I can course-correct them if need be. It's not that I'm just for the next ten weeks I'm going to be heading in that direction and that's it. No, I want to check my progress along the way and then look at seeing how I can improve that over a period of time, making sure that I'm always pointing the ship in the right direction. I have a friend who I've interviewed on this podcast in the past and he's done a couple of crossings of the Atlantic, he said it's very rare that you are pointing directly toward where you need to go. Like, if you look at it on a map, it ends up being a big zigzag. You're heading north, you're heading south, you're heading west, and so on until you eventually arrive. But if you keep pointing the ship in the right direction, then eventually you're going to get there, no matter how far off-course the weather might push you.

 

And then the last thing I'd like to leave you with here today is something that I call – not I, but Seth Godin – calls the Dip. And I've seen this a dozen times. In fact, it's regularly happening to me. So it's where you'll get off to a good start with a project, maybe really excited about something, and then you'll sort of just get blinded by the lights and you'll get stuck and you'll lose momentum before eventually capturing that momentum again and being able to push forward. I feel like this happens to me on almost every single project that I start. It's pretty rare that I go from having all that excitement and momentum on day one and just continuing that the whole way. Normally, I get some quick wins on the board, I make some progress, and then I sort of need to regroup and remember why I'm doing this, and then focus again and move off in that right direction.

 

I think the lesson here is awareness and understanding that you will lose momentum, especially when you're doing new projects that you might not necessarily know that much about. You will go through lulls, you will go through dry spells of not having sales when you start new businesses, particularly in the online space, and you'll hit this thing that Seth Godden calls the Dip. And this is the opportunity for you to take stock of where you are, refresh your mind, refresh where you're heading, why you're doing this, and go through a lot of the other ideas that I shared with you in this podcast episode here today.

 

I think it's important to figure out how you can get a few quick wins happening again and get yourself back on track. And one of the best ways to do this is to have a support system around you. And if you're part of one of our programs, then you're going to have this, but it's up to you to make sure that you use it. It's up to you to make sure that you reach out and you seek support and guidance when you need it. I think just by doing that, by showing up every day, you eventually get through the Dip. You come out the other side and are so much stronger for it.

 

So, look, I'm going to wrap this episode up right here. If you do want to learn more about this, you can head over to TheMindGame.com and you can see how you can get access to an entire course where I build on a lot of the frameworks that I've started to share with you here today. I build out 66 different lessons. Most videos are in a three to the five-minute range, along with transcriptions and so much more. In any case, though, look, we are almost one month into the year, and you've still got eleven months left to turn this into your absolute best year yet. So don't delay. Take massive action. And I look forward to hearing from you and about your story one day soon. Thanks for listening.