In each Own It!! podcast, Nicola and Judith discuss their chosen Business Word Of The Week for that particular week.
Their words for Episode 024 of the Own It!! podcast are Commitment & Leverage:
Nicola: What’s your word of the week, then?
Judith: It’s quite a serious one after all that giggling. It’s COMMITMENT.
Nicola: Ooh.
Judith: I know. I wrote an article about commitment and consistency, because one of my clients was saying – well actually it’s a common thing that she can’t stick at anything – and I suggested that she stick at something forbidden. So she’s picked vlogging – creating a video blog every day – and she’s whizzed off to a great start, which is good. And she’s said that she will stick at it for a bit, which I believe. But I was reading this book by Gabrielle Bernstein (I don’t know if you know her, and I saw her speak at the Alternatives before Christmas), and the particular book I was reading was called Miracles Now – A 108 Life-Changing Tools for Less Stress, More Flow, and Finding Your True Purpose. Well, it’s a big promise; I can’t say it’s done that for me, but Miracle Message #106 (which was last week) was – I’m going to read it to you, it’s a couple of paragraphs.
“In 40 days, you can reroute the neural pathways in your brain to create permanent change. Practicing every day for 40 days straight will break any negative habits that block you. If you feel called to take this further, you can continue the repetition. Practicing for 90 days establishes a new habit in your conscious and subconscious; it changes you in a very deep way. Practice every day for 120 days straight, and you will confirm the new habit. Practice every day for 1000 days straight, and you will master the practice. With repetition, you establish a deep connection to the practice; no matter the challenges you face, you can turn to your practice for help at any time. A habit is a subconscious chain reaction between the mind, the glandular system, and the nervous system. Our most deep-rooted habits are developed at a very young age; some of them serve you, and some of them don’t. By doing 40, 90, 100, or 1000 days practice, you can rewire that chain reaction and develop new and powerful habits that serve your highest good.”
Now I think we can do anything for 40 days, don’t you?
Nicola: Nah. [Laughter]
Judith:Do you mean that?
Nicola: No, I don’t.
Judith: So, so, so… if you were my client, who was going to vlog (video blog) every day, I definitely think you can do that for 40 days – it takes 3 minutes, she tells me.
Nicola: Yeah, it’s not – it’s deeper than that though, isn’t it? It’s whether you really want to do it, because I find that…
Judith: Well I think – yeah, you’ve definitely got to pick something like that. But actually, even things you don’t really want to do that you think you would like to change in your life – I reckon that if you make that decision – what Marian calls an unbreakable promise to yourself – I think you could stick out 40 days.
Nicola: Yes, well there are lots of things I should be doing, and I should be trying them for at least 40 days.
Judith: But then, don’t try all of them. That’s the point, just pick 1; because I think what the point of this is: if you pick 1 and commit to it – excuse me – and achieve the 40 days, somebody once taught me that you then come to know yourself as a completer, finisher. Somebody who can stick at things and you kind of reinvent your sense of self by commitment. I think our listeners should have a think: is there something you’d like to commit to for 40 days? And if so, just leave us a comment somewhere and tell us that you’ve picked a challenge and you’re going to commit to it for 40 days, and let us know how it goes. And I think, if you could get to 40, might as well go on to 90 and 120; but frankly, 1000 is quite a lot, but I don’t rule it out. Anyway, so my word of the week is COMMITMENT. What about yours, Nicola?
Nicola: Well before I go there, I just want to recommend a book to everyone. It’s called “Discipline” and it’s along the same lines of, you know, Learned Optimism – I suppose you call it “Pop Psychology” but it’s extremely good. And it is about how we wake up every morning with a certain amount of discipline – self-discipline that is – and every decision we have to make erodes that part of discipline. And so this is why it’s so important to do things that you need to do, like go — like exercise, and Miracle Mornings is based on this, basically – that you do, or anything else happens before you have to make; even decisions about what flavor of ice cream you usually want to have. It’s a decision; and by the end of the day, we’re worn-out with all the decision-making. We’ve got no discipline left, and we just take the path of least resistance – which I’ve certainly noticed, having lots of gorgeous, lovely, healthy food in the fridge and not having to go around the co-op every night, has made it very easy to be very disciplined about what I eat because I haven’t been making any decisions about it.
Judith: Good.
Nicola: And be confronted in the co-op by lots of different, lovely, but not very good for you things.
Judith: Yes.
Nicola: So, my word of the week comes on really nicely after that. [Laughter]
Judith: Good.
Nicola: Which is LEVERAGE — and I might even have talked about this before — but what I’m ready to talk about is batching a leverage, really. We — I did 4 podcast recordings last Wednesday. I did the one with you in the morning, and then I did 3 for The Business Success Factory Podcast, and it was – I’m batching them now into 1 Wednesday a month. So that, instead of having every Wednesday, having to have 1, I’ve only got 1 Wednesday a month, so I know that if I want to go away for example, I can do it as long as it’s not on that Wednesday; or I can just say to Sarah, “Okay, I need to be away that Wednesday, let’s batch them another day.” It makes it a lot easier to reorganize things. But the other way of leveraging things is, you know – say for example, your video blog lady – she could do a whole week’s worth in one morning and then schedule them to go out later. Now, all the creators in our listenership will be shouting at the radio or whatever it is they listen to. [Laughter] (Funny how we still think in terms of the radio.) You know, because that doesn’t feel very creative but actually, it’s better because you can plan out a sort of sequence of 7 video blogs and you can record them; and even if you just change your shirt so it looks like it’s a different day, it’s going to work – it’s going to flow much better because you’ve got the flow happening with it.
One of my clients has – she said to me, you know she’s got an event coming up and I said, “What do you normally do to promote that?” She’s only sent up 1 or 2 emails. I said, “Well this time, we’re going to be sending up 10 emails. The first one’s going to be announcing it, the last one’s going to be closing it down, and you’re going to have a couple of social proof, a couple of case studies, a couple of testimonial emails, and you’re going to write them side by side. So you’re going to open up 10 little notepads on your desktop and have them side by side, great – you know, long thin ones – and you’re going to write it as a sequence, because you’ll be able to do what we call cliffhangers then, you’ll be able to say on email 3, “Well tomorrow I’m going to be talking to you about ‘blah’ and yesterday I talked to you about ‘blah’. And you tend not to do that unless you have them side by side. It just makes productivity so much easier.”
And the other thing is—two marvelous tips for leverage – I had, we need to talk about this Judith, because I had this marvelous idea about our Client Challenge of the week: bidding, transcribed, and turned into content for both of us to use, or perhaps it made into a book. Love to hear what listeners think about that, and the other one is: I heard a brilliant tip – which is, whenever you do interviews – you know, like we’ve both been interviewed by Marc Mawhinney for…
Judith: Yes.
Nicola: …The Natural Born Coaches. What you do is you take the – you get an audio copy of your interview, and you get someone to edit out the questions bits, and you get it transcribed, and it turns into a massive article on your specialist subject – which can then go onto your blog or into your membership area, and Google loves, loves, loves blog posts over a thousand words. And I can’t think of an easy way to create a massive – what they call pillar – article blog post, you know, doing that. So I think, definitely thinking about an office here – if you had audio and you had a transcription, that’s lovely multimedia content and Google loves that too; and so do your members and your membership site. But you could then just pay someone that – we used to pay Proveena in Pakistan, something like – I can’t remember, it was so inexpensive it was unbelievable. She’d take a blog post and turn it into a slide (PowerPoint slides) for about under $10, and you could then get someone else. And there’s a track called Serial that I use to put audio to slides and turn it into – and that’s videos right there.
Judith: Yes.
Nicola: So one thing of you doing something you were going to be doing anyway for these seminars, for these online conferences, for any podcast interview – you can take that audio and leverage it far and wide which helps you, your content creation enormously.
Judith: Very good.
Nicola: Went on a bit of a rant there, sorry.
Judith: That’s okay.
Nicola: [Laughter]
Judith: So your word of the week was batching and leveraging.
Nicola: Well it was leverage, really – I threw batching in there just as a cheeky one.
Judith: [Laughter]
Nicola: You know I like to if I can get away with it.
Judith: I do, I nearly went for commitment and consistency – commitment myself this week but I thought, “No, I’ll let Nicola break the rules.”
Nicola: I’ll tell you – I’m writing it down now, Commitment and Consistency. I’ve thought I can’t spell it – Is it an E or an A? But I’ll get there in the end.
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