Self-Sabotage & Success: Traps & Clues Exposed | The Growth Booth #57

Aidan

Hey, Aidan Booth here. Welcome to episode number 57 of The Growth Booth. Great to have you tuning in here today. Today I want to talk about the number one skill that you need to work on in order to achieve your potential. And we're talking about mindset, we're talking about some of the soft skills, if you like, of performance. No one better to have with me here today to chat about that than Brett Tannahill, who is a performance coach, a mindset coach in our Blueprint Academy Mastermind. So, Brett, thank you so much for taking some time out of your, I guess your evening there, to be with me today.

Brett Tannahill

You're very welcome, Aidan. Very welcome indeed. Yes. I've been looking forward to this opportunity, having a senior program.

Aidan

So you're in Perth at the moment?

Brett Tannahill

I'm in Perth, Western Australia, yes, which is problematic for some people on the other side of the world, but we managed to work it out.

Aidan

Yeah. So you're 13 hours different from me, so when I'm waking up, you're winding down. We can make it work. And look, I met Brett through our Blueprint Academy program. He originally came in as someone who was building his own business, and we soon realized that Brett was an absolute master of mindset and performance. That led on to Brett actually working with us as our lead performance coach in our Blueprint Academy Mastermind. And what this has done is it's given Brett an insight into seeing how a lot of people operate. And for our Blueprint Academy members, it's given them this huge advantage of being able to have a performance coach essentially on their team.

So you've worked with hundreds of budding entrepreneurs over the years. You've had this unique insight into watching people's journeys unfold. You've helped with the trials and tribulations and celebrated the wins. Has the softer side of performance been something that has always interested you or is it something that you sort of fell into?

Brett Tannahill

Good question, Aidan. At a very broad level, it's always interested me. When I was working in the corporate world and managing people, it was always important to me that I empowered them to bring their best forward because ultimately, I'm lazy, so I'm not going to be micro-managing people when they should be doing it themselves. I would always set things up that way, which meant I needed to have an understanding. I’m just a natural. It's been a natural journey for me. Where I've come into it in more recent years is leaving the corporate world and then working with BPA and with the support in general, support desks.

And what I've learned in that space, really opened my eyes to the troubles, the challenges that people have, not just in e-commerce, but in life, but they bring their life challenges into the e-commerce world and that really, people tend to struggle. I guess I saw an opportunity there. So I've upskilled myself. And I've also made the decision some years ago now to work remotely to satisfy my own interests and way of life. It all comes together in that way. So the more I get into it, the more I love it. It's something that I never bore of. I love working with people, talking to people wherever I can, and helping them grow their businesses and grow themselves personally as well because that's ultimately what it's about.

Aidan

Yeah, there's a lot of satisfaction in that. I know that for me and the businesses that I run, the things that give me the most satisfaction are when you're able to help someone and see them make that leap forward in their own life. Have you seen a lot of similarities between, I guess, managing people and some of the struggles that people would have in the corporate world versus what you're seeing from budding entrepreneurs? Or do you think that they're two very different challenges that people tend to go through? Do they stem from the same place? What's your take on that?

Brett Tannahill

I used to think there'd be sort of not a seamless transition from real life, as it were, or the corporate world into the e-commerce world, but I no longer think that's the case. I think that no matter how successful one has been in we'll call it the corporate world, but pre-e-comm and post-e-comm, no matter how successful people have been in that space, that does not guarantee success in e-commerce at all because it's still a new space.

Aidan

I think also it's when you start building an online business, and when you say e-comm, we are of course talking about any kind of online business, affiliate marketing, and building e-commerce stores, it could be anything, but I think there's a big difference between getting up, going out your comfort zone, working a job which you may have done for 10, 20, 30 years, versus sitting down and being a self-starter and having to live and die by your own decisions essentially, at least in the business sense.

So, I think there are some similarities there, but also quite a lot of differences. And people start to realize those differences. And it can be especially challenging for people who have been relatively successful in corporate or traditional jobs to then come in and start challenging and facing some of their demons in the online business space.

Brett Tannahill

Absolutely. In fact, that was one of the first things when I got serious in my e-commerce and online world. This applied at so many levels that applied in how I came into the actual business, to begin with. That came about how I managed VAs. It came about my decision-making processes. What I realized is that what had worked in the past wasn't working here because what we don't understand is that when we move into a new space, we've got underlying fears that we may not have a sense of, but they manifest in different ways. And one of the ways they manifest is in our decision-making. We don't take the risks that we might have taken when it's on someone’s dollars and someone else's time because, “Hey, I'm going to get paid anyway,” or it doesn't work that way when we go online because it's a whole different dynamic and that's what goes on in people's mind. But people don't understand. They just got to transfer from here to here or, okay, not at all.

Aidan

Have you seen common traps? Like maybe you've seen common traps that people fall into when they are building an online business that is kind of rooted in their mindset. At the same time, maybe on the flip side of that, you've seen some people succeed and you've seen some commonalities about why those people succeed. Maybe we could dive into some of these.

Brett Tannahill

Yes, plenty of traps. There are plenty of avenues to success, but they tend to be not natural spaces for a lot of people, so they don't recognize them. If they do have a sense of them, they then got to make some changes to the way they go about the whole process. And that's where mindset comes into it in a big way. But some of that typical traps, a big one is overthinking. Just putting way too much thought into it, into a situation that's pretty straight up and down. Like if the training says to do it, do it. There's a reason it's been put that way because the people who are teaching you and the people who provide the program are very experienced and have got proven success in that space, if people find their own way to make a version of it.

Aidan

You're thinking about overthinking. Do you think it's a result of people being afraid of making a mistake? Is it a result of procrastination? So I don't want to move forward because I'm worried this is going to happen. Any thoughts around why it is psychologically that people tend to overthink? I've seen it so many times. The message I've always given people is just keep it simple, just follow the recipe and you can tweak things later. Just wondering if you've thought about the psychology behind it.

Brett Tannahill

Yeah, absolutely. It's really a form of self-sabotage because people kid themselves into thinking they're busy. And when you're busy, we're doing what we're here to do. Again, we go back to the previous life and the new online life. This was one of the big things for me pre-BPA. When I first started, I was really busy creating systems to do things. It was only when my business, the first one I was involved in, grew, and then it plateaued because I was busy doing things that weren't producing outcomes. I was busy doing things that might have applied one day when the business takes up another direction. I've just wasted a lot of time, which often and usually it does because you don't know what's coming. You've got to be very agile in this space. And this is I must admit, when I heard you and Steve talking in my early years and you were saying these things, and I think, really, if you miss all these things, but I really get it now and that's what I'm teaching now because I understand it now.

So it's a lot of self-awareness in my own journey, it’s just - stop - I’m not getting the outcome I wanted, having to be accountable for our own outcomes, that's really important as well. That's another trap. There are a lot of people out there who think “I've paid my money, now they can provide for me what I paid for.” That's not the way it's going to work either.

Aidan

Yeah, you sort of have to be a participant in your own rescue. I mean, it's kind of like, what do they say? “You can lead a horse to water, but you can't force it to drink.” So I think that first one, going back to that first trap, overthinking is something we see all the time. And I guess the solution to that is just to simply have faith and follow a recipe that's been laid out. It's like I often think about or use the analogy of cooking. Now, I'm not a trained chef or anything like that, and when I'm creating a recipe, I don't say, “You know what, I'm going to put 200 grams of butter instead of 100 grams.” No, I don't do that. I just follow it because I know that there's so much more chance that the recipe is going to turn out well if I'm following the instructions that a professional has given me versus trying to just make it up as I go.

I think that the exact same thing is true in business, and not just business, but in all areas of life. If I'm training for something in the gym, I can follow guidance from someone who is a trained professional in that area, or I can just sort of wing it myself and see what happens. More often than not, you're going to get better results if you're going with professional advice. 

So overthinking is the first one, and the solution to that, I think, at least from my perspective, is to just keep it simple and put your faith in the recipe that oftentimes you may have paid money to use anyway.

Brett Tannahill

That's it. Trust is a really big thing because a lot of people don't trust themselves even when they're in a new space. And so if they're not going to trust themselves, there's no way they're going to trust the messenger who they pay good money to receive the message from. But this is the subconscious stuff that plays out here. This is one of the things that fashioned me about it.

Aidan

I think there is a unique opportunity if you have had bad experiences in the past or you don't trust your own ability to do something. I think when you come into a training program or start working with an expert, there's an opportunity for you to lean on their expertise. So have that expert, whoever they are, be almost like your savior, and you say, “Well, I haven't been able to achieve this in the past but now I'm going to be able to not because of my own ability but because I'm leaning on someone else.” So I think there's a little switch that people can do there to be more effective. Any other traps that you've seen repeat themselves?

Brett Tannahill

There's one which is hard for a person to understand, but there's a real skewed focus on money and there's a neediness in that space and that impacts our decision making. Again, people want to get there fast. We provided an opportunity to get there fast, but they want to get there even faster. And what that does in the mind, it starts to create what I call faulty thinking. It's faulty thinking. It’s dysfunctional thinking because it makes the decision-making process actually take people down the wrong path. That's one of the things where people are not listening and not reading and not implementing as the training goes because they're too busy trying to go fast, too busy. Now we've got, as you know, the course drip-feeds every week, where people who say “I'm going to go to week four. I don't need to do this for the first two weeks. I'm going to go to week four where I can make money.” That's not the way it works, it's not the way the mind works, and it certainly is dysfunctional and inappropriate and that really messes people up.

Again, it all comes back to a self-sabotage outcome really one way or another. But one of the other big ones is just literally coming from a background or an upbringing, I guess, of dysfunction. I don't mean that in a disrespectful way or a judgmental way, I mean that as that’s most people's normal space but the society we live in these days imposes barriers that impose challenges, that impose blocks to the natural way our mind is supposed to work. It sort of tries to corral us into certain ways and when we don't challenge that, and I am a natural challenger of things, if we don't challenge that then we will end up being like a horse downed us through the corral chute just being told to go where do you go. Again online is not a space for that. You pay for your training and you do the training, but you also need to have some self-awareness to go and learn more outside the training. It's like a driver's license, the training. It's not going to teach you how to be an advanced driver.

Aidan

Yeah, you mentioned something about the skewed focus on money. I want to touch on this again because this is something that I see over and over again. People expect miracles to happen even if you try to manage those expectations. I think oftentimes there's a bit of importance that needs to be put on managing the expectations. I always tell people when they're starting an online business, look at it through a longer-term lens, and that's going to be more beneficial for you in lots of ways. One is because you're not going to have pressure on yourself to make money in the next week or two or three weeks. Instead, you're going to be able to do something which is going to be better for you in the long term. And when I'm saying long-term in the world of online business, I might be talking about six months. I'm not talking about six years. So I think that's really important.

Also keep in mind, there is no business out there that I know of offline that you can build as quickly as you can online. So, again, we're not talking about waiting five years to break even and have a business that provides you with a lot of freedom. We're talking about a matter of weeks, but not one week or two weeks in most cases, maybe something like six months, so 20 weeks or something like that. I think when you do that, you're bringing a level of reality to what you're doing and you can then start to treat it like a business and little by little build it in a structured way that enables you to get the kind of results that you want. I think that skewed focus on money and “I must have it yesterday”, it's flawed from the outset because it forces you into trying to hit a home run on every single swing, and the chance of hitting a home run is so much lower than just knocking singles as we talk about in our business. So I think that's a really, really important one.

What is the antidote to that or what is the solution to that? What advice do you give someone when they've got this skewed focus on money?

Brett Tannahill

I'll just go back to that. But what you're saying there, Aidan, I just want to use a sports analogy. Sports are wonderful to learn things from, but Michael Jordan is the best, the most successful, most high-scoring basketball player ever, but he's also the guy who shot the most shots and had the most misses. And the reason he did is that he kept putting the ball up. So if we align that with what we're talking about here with our online business, we just keep turning up. We just keep turning up. Whether it's putting a product in your store or putting another campaign in place, you just keep turning up without judgment, without expectation. You just keep doing it. Because there's a thing called the law of averages out there, and that is a universal law, and that works. You just have to keep turning up, but people don't. Again, that comes back into mindset.

Aidan

Yeah, I couldn't agree with that more. I mean, so much of it is just turning up and being there and taking those little steps forward. A good friend of mine used to say, “People don't fail online, they just give up before the magic happens.” I've seen that happen, unfortunately, more often than it should. But if you do keep turning up, if you do keep chipping away, you can eventually get to a place where that magic does start to happen. What else have you seen there in the coaching that you've done that you think people listening to this today could learn from?

Brett Tannahill

Well, obviously what we talked about is traps, but if you flip that over to the people who are successful, well, it's a bit like a SWOT analysis, isn't it? The opportunities are those things that are your threats, so you just turn it around. One of the ways to do this is to reframe things. So if you're doing an action or whatever it is, and whatever the outcome is, you don't like it, but there's always another side to it. The duality of life. There's always another side to whatever is in front of you. So you've got a choice. You can look at the negative side, which tends to be a negative mindset space, and those people get stuck and there's a whole lot of ways of being in that space, but they're the typical people who do get stuck. They're blaming everyone else or everything else for their lack of success that it acts actually within their power to make a decision to look at the other side and say, “Well, stop. What's going on on the other side?” That's where you'll find the positive side because that's where the learning is. Because wherever there's a block in place, there's an opportunity to learn. I just call it feedback, and a really good one, which is very frustrating, I know, but that's where some of the platforms that we aligned with, we have to use them because that's what their role is, and that's the place we're in. 

I use Google and Facebook. We go back a few years with Google and COVID, all sorts of stuff that’s happening. We had no control over it. But if you were the sort of person who took it on, it's, “Okay, well, this is the way. I've got no control over it. All I can control is how I receive that.” Then there are some people who just say, “You need to help me. You need to help me.” Or you can go into Google and find out exactly what Google's policies are and learn from that because they're still implementing their policies.

But there's a key thing I want to mention here. When we look at our store, whatever business we're in, we typically look at it from where we are. And that's understandable, but it's not the best way. We need to turn it around and look at it when things are not going right. Look at it from the other side. Look at it from our customer's side and look at it from the customer’s, the same customer as Google or Walmart or Facebook. No matter what the marketplace is, no matter what model we're working with, the same person out there paying the dollar, we are a part of that marketplace. So if we understand that we're on the side with them, it changes how we relate to it. They're not picking on us.

Aidan

Yeah, a lot of people I've seen fall into almost this victim mentality, like “Google shut down my account,” versus really taking control of what you're doing instead of being a passenger in your life, actually steering your life in the direction that you want to go. I often talk about cause and effect, and two people could start off at the exact same point and get to a completely different place. Why does that happen? In fact, you mentioned something quite similar to this at the start of the call about this point of intrigue. Do you want to talk that through a little bit? Because I think it sort of ties in here with taking accountability and showing up and everything else.

Brett Tannahill

Yeah, there's a thing that struck me fairly early on in my coaching life. It's probably one of the things that really influenced me to step further into it and really embrace this because it's not what I do full-time. As I said, I love it, but we all turn up for the training. I say we because I was in the same boat as everybody else who's listening to this podcast and everyone else who's been doing it. At one point in time, I was in the same boat. We turn up for the training, and the training is exactly the same. No matter where you live on the planet, if you pay the money, you get the training. It's exactly the same.

From when I got into support and started to understand and started to see your outcomes and then talk to people and learn all about things, how come there's such a variety of outcomes from the very same training? It's the same as you talked about, the recipe and cooking. We've got one recipe. You put ten people in a kitchen or in their own kitchens and you're going to get ten versions of that recipe. It's the same word, it's the same ingredients, it's the same measurements, it's the same everything. So the only variable in all this is us as individuals. And so if it's not working, we've got to look at ourselves. We'll look in the mirror and say, “Well, why isn't it working?” This can take some time. It means digging deeper and it means some things you might not want to face about yourself as well. It's as simple and as complex as that.

Aidan

Yeah, I think it's a wonderful example because it really is the case where oftentimes people start at the exact same point, they've got the exact same recipe and it works out for some people and not as well for others. I think in the vast majority of cases, it comes down to the mindset and the approach and the outlook because everything else is the same. Now, obviously, there are elements of luck along everyone's journey, but I do believe that you make your own luck. I'll give you another example of this.

Brett Tannahill

Absolutely.

Aidan

Let's say you've got an e-commerce store or an affiliate website and you're testing out different offers. You can test one and you're going to have one chance and maybe you get lucky. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. If you test ten different offers, then you're going to have ten opportunities. Do you think you've got a better chance of getting lucky in e-commerce here if you're testing ten times more? Of course, you're going to have so much more chance. All else being equal, again, make sure you've still followed the recipe, but you're just getting a wider cross-section of results. And again, if the recipe is a good recipe, then you're going to get a result that is going to be a win. So I think that's really, really interesting.

I think everyone is a little bit undercooked in the area of mindset and awareness. For the most part, I think it's something that people should continue to work on. I know that in my life, I work on it regularly by reading books, learning from people who are the best in the world, and also trying to make sure that I've always got a good frame of mind and a balanced frame of mind.

So anyway, we've discussed making sure people don't overthink. We've discussed having trust in the system. We've discussed just turning up and continuing to put things out there, using the Michael Jordan analogy, reframing things. Maybe there's a silver lining or a good element to something that you may initially be frustrated by. And we started talking about taking accountability and being a driver in your journey to your destination and not falling into this trap of being a victim or someone that's just sort of pushed along. Any other things that you want to mention here that you've seen come up over and over again?

Brett Tannahill

Yeah, I guess one word is this plateau. There are people, once they talk about versions of mindset, different types of mindset, and this comes into the accountability side of things, people tend not to become accountable for their own lives. Now, I know you well enough to know you've got a book list going around, which has been going around for many years now, and it's got some wonderful books in it. So if there's going to be some advice for anyone who wants to improve, start by reading. Start by reading books by those people who have had success in this space, because you might have to read them for two days, two weeks, doesn't matter how long it's going to take you to read them, but if you can get one nugget out of it, that's worth that time. 

I'd also suggest that you be responsible for your own growth. Learn what's involved in establishing not just a positive mindset, but a growth mindset. I came into this online world like so many people are - technophobic. I knew what things did, but I didn't know how they did them. My first entry into Shopify was “Help, BPA. Help, help set up my store.” But I decided I had to make a decision because I'm going to stay corporate, which I did want to do and I wasn't going to do. So I had to reinvent myself, that's what I call it. I started to do that by doing exactly what I've written here: Be consistent and persistent. I forgot what I had to do in a Shopify store. I’d read it, but by the time I get to it, I forgot what I had to do. But I kept at it.

And then one day I worked it out, and then one day I started to understand the thinking, and then now there's no bit of software I will not go into and I can work out the thinking behind it because I developed my brain through neuroplasticity. I developed what they call those axions. So it might be a bit scientific, but this is what happens. So you've got the capacity, everybody has got the capacity for this. It's not about a young dog and an old dog. I'm an old dog and I did this in the last five years. It means I can add so much more value to my business than I do, and obviously, I'm doing this as well. So don't think that it's not possible. It's possible. You have to believe in yourself. You have to trust yourself, which means trusting the unknown. But just turn up, keep going, read, be exploratory, be curious, and ask questions. We've got all the support there in the context of the different programs that Steve and Aidan run. It's all there. So use it and use it with an open mind and a growth mindset. Know that there is success somewhere out there. You've got to keep turning up and finding it.

Aidan

Yes, I think a few sorts of comments to leave us here, adding to what you've said. I think there's a phrase that I keep going back to saying over and over again, and that is “What you think about comes about.” And if you are turning up every day and thinking about a problem or thinking about, “I'm going to create this passive income online,” and you're just always thinking about that, one way or another, those thoughts are going to turn into behaviors and those behaviors are going to turn into results. A big part of this continuous thinking about something is linked to your mindset. It's about thinking in the right way. You can focus on the problem and ultimately you'll get that problem. It's like when you're teaching a kid to ride a bike, “Don't ride into that tree,” and sure enough, the bike keeps leaning towards the tree and they smash straight into the tree and the same thing happens online. “Don't go over there, don't go over there,” and then you focus on that and you start going over there instead.

However, you can focus on the destination where you actually want to get to and keep that at the forefront of your mind. Try to incorporate a lot of these ideas that you've mentioned here about not overthinking, having trust in the process, keeping on turning up, seeing the positive side of everything, taking accountability, having responsibility, not being a passenger, but rather being the person that paved the road, a driver in your own destiny, and having an open mind. Keep learning. A lot of these things are like buzzwords, but they have been proven over and over and over again, not by people like Brett and I, by the way, although I think we've got some good experience this year, but by the most successful people in the world.

That thing of ‘success leaves clues’ is absolutely true. You don't have to look that far around you to see some people made it and really hit their potential and others have sort of battled away and not been able to do it. I think the vast majority of results ultimately stem back to your mindset and the way that you think because that will enable you or disable you to be able to act and behave in certain ways, which then flows on to the result. 

So, any final comments or thoughts to leave people with their Brett?

Brett Tannahill

As we said before, I could go on and on and on in this space, so anyone who wants to hear me keep talking, then you have to have to hit me up with my email. But one other thing I would just say is that there's a concept, it's more than a concept, it's what happens, people come to these areas, whether it be online or whatever it is in life, and if they turn up from a historical perspective, their identity is, we'll say school teachers. They've had enough of teaching, so they move into the online world. Ultimately, the online world is out of entrepreneurship. If we're treating it just as a hobby, as a business, we're just creating a job for ourselves. So we're not actually changing anything because if we're creating a job for ourselves, we bring the same dynamic into places when we had a job, which is not going to take us anywhere.

So we need to start looking from the perspective of an entrepreneur and the growth mindset, which is negative and positive or growth mindsets are two overarching. But within the growth, there are a number of different mindsets. The entrepreneurial one is one, and the fastest way to that, there are a number of ways, but the easiest way I guess is to just embrace that. Trust the process. Trust the fact that people who are entrepreneurs have had success for a reason, because they've got certain habits and they are in all the libraries, they're on all the YouTube channels, they are everywhere. As Aidan said, success leaves clues. It's everywhere, these learning opportunities. So take it up, be responsible for your outcomes and you're going to have success. Doesn't guarantee tomorrow or next week, or next month, but it will happen. And success does not equate to money, let me tell you that. Success is another space altogether.

All this you learn by embracing this journey of growth, and mindset is going to just take you down there. So work on your identity as an entrepreneur and that will make a big difference. Then you become an entrepreneur who was a school teacher versus a school teacher who's trying to make a dollar online. 

Aidan

I'm going to leave you with three important links that you might want to go and check out in your own time. So first though, as always, you can find the transcript and these important links at TheGrowthBooth.com, navigate to episode number 57. To see a list of the different books, the types of books that Brett and I were mentioning earlier, you can go to AidanBooth.com/books. This is where I publish the different books that I've read and I think you get a lot of value out of those. If you want to learn more about the soft skills of mindset and things that you can do to really strengthen yourself in this area of your life, then you can head over to TheMindGame.com. That's a course that I put together. It's got 66 bite-sized step-by-step videos that work you through some of these success traits of the most successful people that I know or know of in the world.

Finally, if you want to be able to get more coaching from Brett, then the way that you can do that is by participating in our Blueprint Academy. You can find out more about Blueprint Academy by going to TheBlueprintAcademy.com. The Blueprint Academy is not something that is always open. We do intakes at different times of the year, but there's normally a waiting list that you can get on, and Brett, as I say, is one of the amazing coaches that I'm fortunate to work with there. And there's so much more that we could dive into with you.

So, Brett, thank you so much for taking the time out of your evening there. Always a pleasure to jump on chats with you and hear words of wisdom. I know you've been able to help so many people over the years and I look forward to hopefully doing it all again very, very soon.

Brett Tannahill

Thank you very much, Aidan. I very much appreciate the opportunity, and, yeah, I look forward to seeing some of you out there in the trenches and hearing about the success stories that are just up around the corner.

Aidan

That's a wrap. Head over to TheGrowthBooth.com, find episode number 57 to listen to this, again, to see all of the links that we've mentioned. I'll see you on the next episode of The Growth Booth.