3 Intentional Productivity Tips That Will 10x Your Success [LNIM263]

Mark Mason: 0:00

Episode two six, three late night internet marketing this week on the late night internet marketing podcast. I'm going to talk to you about my experience in a recent coaching session, a personal coaching session from my coach to me, and my three takeaways from that coaching session that are going to help you in your internet business. All this and more on the late night internet marketing podcast.

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The late night internet marketing podcast right when it's late at night.

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At the end of the day, your dreams burn in your sights.

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Keep it up and you will find that you're building your business one night at a time and now broadcasting late at night from a little studio in the big state of Texas, your host, mark Mason.

Mark Mason: 1:27

Hey, hey, hey, how is everyone doing? I am your host, mark Mason, and I'm coming to you from the little studio in Dallas, texas, where we're going to talk a little bit about coaching. You know I've talked on and off about the value of coaching through the years and the way I describe it is something I mentioned to you before. Here in Texas we say that you cannot read the label from inside the jar, and what we mean by that is really oftentimes you need coaching because you need that external point of view to help you break things down, to find the path forward. Sometimes it is about teaching things, because coaches have done something before, have training in an area where they can actually teach you something. But I think the best coaches are the coaches that actually help you unlock things and learn things. And I've had coaches throughout my career, both in corporate professional coaches and mentors and other kinds of coaches people that my corporation paid thousands, maybe sometimes tens of thousands of dollars to hire, to come in and work with me. And I've had coaches inside my internet business, my side hustle, where I've worked with people who I have paid to help me go from point A to point B or to unlock certain skills and capabilities, and recently I've been working with my great friend, cliff Ravenscraft not as a friend, not as a peer-to-peer relationship the way we normally work, but with him in the role of coach and me in the role of mentee. And Cliff, if you're not familiar with his work, you can check him out at Mindset Answer. Man is a brilliant coach. He is truly gifted and, I think, was put on this earth by God the Almighty, to coach people, and I'm lucky enough to be able to take advantage of that. And we recently had a session where I was starting to get stuck on some issues and Cliff, as my coach, helped me break down some things that I was struggling with in bringing my internet business forward and meeting the very aggressive goals that I've set for 2024.

Mark Mason: 3:54

I think it might be common for people to believe that just because you have an internet business podcast and you've accomplished things in a space that everything is always sunshine and roses, and that's just not the way it is. Everyone in online business struggles at one time or another with a thing, multiple things at once. Sometimes things don't always go your way and if you've got the right help wow. It's way easier to navigate those situations and Cliff and I, in working through this things, we really had three main points that we unpacked in this 90 minute coaching session, and so what I'd like to do in this episode is generalize those points a little bit so that you can use them in your own situation.

Mark Mason: 4:47

So the first thing I want to talk to you about is this idea that Cliff and I broke down about values and the rules that you have for success in your own life, and these values are values that you may not even consciously be aware of. Tony Robbins talks about values that are things that you move toward and values that you move away from, and Cliff actually spent a lot of time with me, helping me understand how to investigate these values in my own life. These are the values that are set up in your life that help you decide what decisions you're going to make, what you're going to do, and sometimes it's as simple as the values that you have that cause you to procrastinate. It might be the values that you have that cause you to choose path A over path B, and the thing is that you're not always even conscious of these values that are causing you to move away from or move towards particular things. So let's take an example For me particularly.

Mark Mason: 6:05

I value certainty. I'm a person who is interested in certainty and stability and repeatability. I really want to know the kinds of things that are going to happen, whether that's financially or in other areas of my life. I really like this idea of not being able to fail and knowing what the outcome is going to be. That's a typical kind of engineering mindset. By the way, it's the way that I'm programmed. Engineers build bridges, for example, that they know are not going to fall down. That's the whole idea of engineering, and so I have this value of certainty in my life, and I have many more values, and one of the things that Cliff helped me do is work through a framework to understand these things that I value, these values that create the recipe that I use to run my life and rank them and understand which values are most important and which values are less important. Same things for things that I'm not willing to tolerate.

Mark Mason: 7:16

There are things in my life that are values that I move away from. For example, I will move away from anything that I think looks sketchy or might make people think that I'm not trustworthy. Think that I'm not trustworthy. I really don't like the idea of someone thinking that I am not a trustworthy person. You can break that down further too. It's because I value that trustworthiness, but it's probably also because I have a little too much emphasis that I currently have on other people's opinions, or at least it could be. So you get the idea of how you can break down these values into things that motivate you to move towards something and things that you are motivated to move away from.

Mark Mason: 8:12

Now here's the thing that Cliff unlocked for me Once you understand what your values are and don't misunderstand me, this is a huge step. Understanding your values is a massive unlock and a level that you'd achieve If you were a gamer. That would be achievement unlocked and you'd have new powers. And your new powers are that once you understand these values, you can start to work to eliminate or change the ones that are not benefiting you, and not to say about you. Once you understand that there are techniques and methods and ways of thinking that you can use in order to change that value in your life so that you can get different outcomes. Now I am aggressively oversimplifying. This is something that's taught by Tony Robbins, but it's also taught by Cliff Ravenscraft and, quite frankly, I get way more out of it when Cliff talks about it. These are the kind of things you can find over at mindsetanswermancom, but the action for you is to think about what motivates you to go forward and think about the things that you're running away from and examine those values and ask whether or not those are good values and ask whether or not there's some things that you need to start thinking about changing that you might be putting the wrong emphasis on in your life. So that's the first thing values and your own internal rules for success.

Mark Mason: 9:58

I think the other thing that Cliff and I talked about and God, I have coached on this particular topic myself so many times life is a thing that moves in seasons and life has its own rhythm and there are realities that are going to come into play in your real life that are going to affect your goals. They're going to impact your goals either in a good way or, more often, the ones, at least, we tend to talk about they're going to impact your goals in a negative way. They're going to impact your goals in a negative way and you need to understand and to some extent plan for the impact of real life on your goals. Life is seasonal and you may have seasons of very high productivity because things are lining up in a way that allows you to make progress on your goals in the way that you expected. And then there is going to be times when your values that we talked about before cause you to be in a situation where you may not be able to make all the progress that you needed to make or that you expected to make, and that might be okay when you look at these values.

Mark Mason: 11:16

For example, for me, family commitments and engagement in the life of my children is super high on my list of values. Things that I'm trying to be, the dad that I want to be right, that's super high on my list. And the practical implications of that is I spend a lot of time helping kids with homework, going to sporting events, and oftentimes I'm doing that instead of things like recording this very podcast episode. Let's be clear If there's a one-to-one choice where I've got to decide about being late, getting a podcast episode out or helping my daughter pass her math exam, I'll spend five hours working on whatever algebra problem that she's got, polynomial equations or whatever she's doing. I'm going to spend time doing that because those are my values.

Mark Mason: 12:15

So, understanding that I've made that choice, that puts this in a whole different context. Right, because now it's not that my life is so busy and things are happening to me and I'm the victim, it's that I've made a choice to suspend one gratifying goal for another. I've chosen the goal of being, in my own definition, what I feel like is a good dad, and your definition might be different, but for my definition, I'm doing the most important thing at the expense of another important thing that is less important in my value system. And so I need to think about whether or not that's okay which, once you look at it that way, from my perspective, it's more than okay. It's the right choice and adjust and modify my goals accordingly. And even better than that plan knowing that these things are going to happen and maybe have plans that are a little more realistic around what my real life is, given my values. And I think that's a really important idea that just because you commit to a thing, I'm not saying that you should be a quitter and I'm not saying that you should accept when you don't hit your own targets. We need to hit our targets.

Mark Mason: 13:40

In my corporate life, hitting your targets is super important, but it's not such a black and white thing. There are times in our life when we need to understand the season that we're in and make adjustments accordingly, because when you're operating in conjunction with your values, in harmony with your values, that is still winning, and so we've got to make sure that we understand the context of these situations and react accordingly, and one of the things that cliff encouraged me to do here which I thought was really good is to re-evaluate these goals, reset and have, maybe, plans where I can expand and contract the targets as my time allows. Again, this is not an excuse to watch more reality television. Okay, that's not what we're talking about. What we're talking about is, when I make decisions that are consistent with my value system, understand that these things are going to expand and contract and have a plan for that, and I think that's really actionable and it's not different than what we do in a corporate situation.

Mark Mason: 14:53

I understand, when I have project plans, that I'm going to have unexpected delays in finding engineering solutions. I've spent a lot of time in my corporate career in research and development. It's really hard to predict how long it's going to take to solve a complicated engineering problem. You need to work on it until you're done, and so in those schedules, we're perfectly comfortable with adjusting them as the situation develops, with adjusting them as the situation develops, and I need to learn to better do that when I'm adapting to my goals, to the realities that are happening in my life, when I'm in this season where I've got a lot of family responsibilities that are very important to me.

Mark Mason: 15:36

And the third thing that Cliff and I talked about that I think will help you is about managing productivity cycles and the ability to focus. Now, this is something I've heard for years and I understand this intellectually, but I've never really done the work to understand what my productivity cycles look like and how I might optimize them. This is a very interesting idea. Cliff recommended that I journal what things that I see that are going on in my day-to-day and week-to-week productivity my ability to get things done, how I'm working against my goals, how I'm working against my goals, planning for productivity bursts as they come, and observing when I insist on having downtime like maybe I'm just too tired to record that podcast episode or to work on that lead magnet what's going on when that happens, and so that I can start to see how that is maybe cyclical and how I can take advantage of it and optimize it. He actually had two tips. He recommended that I use a journaling app like Day One, which I have used a long time ago and I'm excited to start using again and to look at tracking apps like A-Time Logger or one of those kind of apps which you can find in the iPhone app store and log my time and look and see where my time is going and how I'm using it and look for patterns and opportunities to manage my cycles of productivity.

Mark Mason: 17:19

After all, this brand is the late night internet marketing brand. It refers to the fact that I worked on my side hustle very late at night when I was getting started After the kids were in bed. I'd work from nine o'clock till one or two in the morning, and I still do that from time to time, but I don't always do that. I'm a lot older now. After all, I started this more than a decade and a half ago. I need a little more sleep than I needed 15 years ago and it's probably time for me to relook at what the most optimum times are for me to be working in my internet business. Obviously, when I'm not working on my day job.

Mark Mason: 18:02

So those are three things that I think could help you Again. The first thing is make sure you understand the values that are underpinning the actions you take. When you take an action and make a decision, you're doing that in response to this underlying value system that you have that describes the things that you're doing, that in response to this underlying value system that you have. That describes the things that you're moving towards and things that you're trying to move away from. Make sure that you understand what those are. First and second, act to change them, to reprogram the script, if you will, to change the programming if that's not working for you. And then the second thing is make sure that you're realistic about your goals versus life's realities. Things are going to happen and that could be okay, depending on what's going on, especially in the context of your values. And finally, pay attention to optimizing your productivity cycles. Be present, get off of autopilot, be introspective about when you are most productive and how you can take advantage of your cycles of productivity to better optimize the work that you are doing.

Mark Mason: 19:17

Just three quick and easy, really powerful points from Cliff. I hope you enjoy that and if you like this kind of thing. If you like understanding what makes you go and what makes all of us go, check out Cliff over at MindsetAnswerMancom. I think you'll find an amazing amount of free content over there that will just really blow your mind and change your life. Cliff is in the business of changing people's lives for good and he's a close personal friend of mine for more than a decade. But that's what close personal friends do for each other they help each other out. Cliff really helped me out this week and I wanted to share that with you and pay it forward, because if Cliff helps me and then I can help a handful of you, then that means Cliff helped a handful of you. See you next week, ciao.

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Until then, go and make some great progress on your internet business one night at a time. One night at a time. One night at a time.

Mark Mason: 20:49

I really love working with Cliff. He is Yoda. I do coaching and I feel compared to Cliff. A lot of times I feel in these areas of human motivation and the science of human motivation, I feel like Luke Skywalker compared to cliff. He's like Yoda and he's just like the master and it's just fun to work with him because we speak the same language and sometimes I know what he's going to say before he even says it. But when you're inside the jar you can't read the label and with me and Cliff that's a powerful combination because he can read my label and be Yoda at the same time and that gives him tremendous power to help me and I'm very thankful for that.

Mark Mason: 21:40

And Cliff has helped a lot of people. Some of the stories and Cliff's told all these stories in public, so I'm not giving away any secrets but some of the stories of the transformations that Cliff has been able to achieve are just legend and I've helped some people right. I've been coaching on and off for more than three decades really, and I enjoy it very much and I feel very good about my ability to help people when I coach them. But the stories that Cliff has about people that he's impacted that have decided not to commit suicide and things like that. Lives that he's impacted that have decided not to commit suicide and things like that. Lives that he's completely turned around Businesses where he's unlocked tenfold increases in revenue.

Mark Mason: 22:32

It's really quite amazing and it's fun to check out. So go on over to MindsetAns mancom. You know, 10 years ago I used to joke all the time that I am the founding member and president of the cliff Raven's craft fan club. I still feel that way Even today. It's watching him help people Even me is is really inspiring. Check him out.

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Mindset answer mancom late night internet marketing.