Rebel, page 9
–Do five rounds of box breathing. Close your eyes, quiet your mind, and begin to picture an imaginary box in front of you. Breathe in through your nose slowly for a four-count, imagining your finger tracing the left side of the box going up. Hold your breath in for a slow four-count as you trace the imaginary box across the top to the right. Then exhale through the mouth for another four-count as you trace the right side of the box down. Finally, hold your empty lungs for a slow four-count as you trace the bottom side of the box across to the left. Repeat this breathing cycle four more times for a total of five rounds. This will help reset your sympathetic nervous system and calm you down.
–Name five things you’re grateful for. Do a quick gratitude check by thinking of five things you are grateful for. Acknowledge each one quietly in your mind and linger on each for five to ten seconds as you soak in your appreciation for it.
–Finish with visualization. Spend the remaining time of your five minutes quietly visualizing one of your dreams. Imagine it going well, picturing it in as much vivid detail as possible. Perhaps it’s playing out a certain conversation with someone, or accomplishing a goal. It can even be pre-experiencing that dream vacation that’s coming up. Whatever is part of your incredible future, practice enjoying it in your mind now. This is a powerful mood changer.
When the timer goes off, you are done and can open your eyes. What you will have just done is taken back control of your body (through breathing), your heart (through gratitude), and your mind (through visualization)—all in five minutes!
Your Virtual Board of Advisors
Here is one more way to protect your day when things go south. If you find yourself at an impasse with a very specific challenge or situation, it can be incredibly powerful to tap into your virtual board of advisors. My friend and coach Mike Zeller taught me this powerful exercise and it’s incredibly useful.
The concept is simple: mentorship and counsel are critical tools in life. We never have all the answers. We all need guidance from time to time. King Solomon, one of the wisest people in recorded history, said, “Where there is no guidance, a people falls, but in an abundance of counselors there is safety” (Proverbs 11:14 ESV).
Just like big, publicly traded companies have a board of advisors (people from outside the company who can weigh in on different issues), you and I should have one too. But ours doesn’t have to be limited to people we know, or even people who are still alive! We can create a virtual board of advisors in our minds. Here is how this works:
–List five to seven people (alive or dead) who you admire and would want to have as a mentor or advisor in your life. Mine includes authors of books that have impacted my life, great thought leaders of our day, and even Jesus Christ.
–In one sentence next to each name, list why you would want them on your life’s board of advisors. For example, many of the people on my “board” are there because they have achieved something at a high level in an area I’m trying to break into, but they’ve also done it while staying married and not compromising their character.
–Now spend five minutes in a quiet place imagining sitting with them in a conference room (or somewhere more inspiring like a beautiful dinner table or hotel lobby). Visualize where each of them is sitting in the room, and then present your challenge or question to the group. One by one go down the line imagining how they would respond to you. What advice do you imagine they would give?
A quick example of how I’ve used this exercise involves this book! I was midway through the writing process and was getting discouraged about my progress. I felt insecure and unsure about the direction I was taking the book. So I created my “virtual board of advisors” and did this exercise mid–writing session. It was amazing how, as I went down the line of individuals in this imaginary board meeting, I instantly received powerful, clear, and helpful advice from each person. When I opened my eyes I knew exactly what I needed to do next with the book and regained my confidence and clarity!
Once you have created your virtual board of advisors you can take a break at any moment you find yourself stuck or in need of counsel and “hold a meeting” in your mind. The reason this works is because it forces you to think about your situation from someone else’s perspective. You are literally creating new neural pathways in your brain and this not only snaps you out of a funk or discouraging mood, but can create new insights you didn’t previously have.
GOAL FUNNELS (FROM DREAMS TO REALITY)
Remember the life change formula we discussed a few pages ago? Believe. Think. Feel. Do. That is the order and the flow of how real results are created. They begin with your beliefs. This is why we’ve spent so much time talking about your thoughts, priming your day, and protecting it when circumstances blow you off course. But nothing changes in our lives until we do something. Let’s talk about that.
The best way I’ve discovered to achieve your goals and get real results in your life is through something I call goal funnels. You see, as wonderful as they are, there are three core problems with having big goals or dreams:
–They can be overwhelming.
–There is no clear path to achievement.
–They pull you out of your comfort zone.
These reasons (among many others) are why most people never reach their goals or realize their dreams. But not you. We haven’t come this far only to talk about dreams and work on our mindset. We’ve come here to engage in rebellious behavior, to take actions that will lead us to the results we want!
The key is to not get overwhelmed and overly focused on the end result. The great painter Vincent van Gogh said it best: “Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.” That’s all any major dream or accomplishment is: the result of a series of small things brought together. Goal funnels are the solution. They work because they:
–Fit your actual life/schedule
–Show you what to do each day
–Make achieving your goals inevitable
Imagine a funnel or cone shape. It has three main sections: the top section or opening (which is the widest point), the middle section (which gets a bit narrower), and the bottom section (which is so small it comes to a point). The way I like to achieve any big dream or goal is to break it down into three parts, like the funnel. Here’s how this works. Pull out your journal or notes app and create three sections on the page: the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel.
Top of the goal funnel. At the top, write down what your biggest goal or dream is that you want to see realized in the next twelve months of your life. This can be one simple sentence or a short paragraph. Next, write down why that dream or goal is that important to you and worth pursuing over the next year. An example might be: “I want to get a promotion at my job in the next twelve months. I want this because I want to improve my lifestyle for my family. Specifically, I want to use the extra money to pay off my student loans and put a down payment on a house.”
Mid level of goal funnel. In the next section as we go down the funnel, you want to answer the question: What would have to happen to achieve that top-level goal? You likely know this intuitively. But even if you don’t, this is where you can begin to do some basic research or seek counsel from someone who has achieved this same goal before. The idea here is to pinpoint the core activities that drive results. Going back to our example. If our top of the funnel goal is to get a promotion and subsequent pay raise in the next twelve months, then our mid-level activities might look like: talk to my boss and find out what her biggest challenges are coming up, talk to my coworkers and find out where they could use some help, find the top salesperson (if you’re in sales) or someone who already has the position you want and take them out to coffee to find out what it takes to get there.
Bottom level of goal funnel. Finally, we arrive at the bottom of the funnel, the smallest part. This is where we answer the question: What should my days look like to make all the above mid-level activities happen? This is where the rubber meets the road, as they say, and we go from just a dream or goal to daily habits and choices (the series of small things van Gogh talks about) that add up to major life change. An example of what I might write down for our job promotion goal would be: come in to work thirty minutes early and stay thirty minutes late every day, take one thing off of a coworker’s plate each week, each month ask my boss for an additional project to take on without any additional pay and spend a few minutes each day working on it, do an 80/20 analysis of my work tasks and decipher what 20 percent of my activity is leading to 80 percent of my results and double down on that, and read one leadership book per month.
Here’s the amazing thing. In this example, if you were to follow this plan, one year from now your reputation in your company would be completely transformed for the better and yet all you did were these tiny, boring, incremental steps on a day-to-day basis. Your dream was first created in your mind but it’s created in the physical world by your daily decisions.
Your dream is made up of tiny actions, but you will only pursue actions if you believe they lead to the dream you wish to see become a reality. As bestselling author James Clear says in his book Atomic Habits, “Every action you take is a vote for the person you wish to become.”
JUST TAKE THE NEXT STEP
One final note of encouragement here. Some goals or dreams don’t have as many obvious daily steps to take to make them a reality. Sometimes you don’t know what you are doing and it can feel incredibly discouraging. May I remind you that you don’t need to know the entire map of how your dream or vision is coming true. You just need to focus on the next step.
For example, when I got serious about my dream to write my first book, How to Get Paid for What You Know, I knew absolutely nothing about writing a book and getting it published. All I had was my dream and belief that I could be a bestselling author, which created new thoughts and feelings, which led to my decision to take action on making my first book a reality. But where should I start?
The only step I knew to take was to buy that course from bestselling author Michael Hyatt on how to get published. It was a logical step because I saw some emails from him promoting the course, so I purchased it and watched it all the way through. Then I asked myself: Do I know any bestselling authors personally who I could talk to and get advice from? Turns out I did! I reached out to my friend Jordan Raynor and in one phone call I learned a ton about the process. Which led to my next step of ideating my book idea, which led to my next step of creating a book proposal, and so on.
My point is that, in hindsight, my author journey looks nice and linear. I had a dream to write and publish a book. Two years later it became a reality. In truth, though, I had no idea which path to follow. All I did was take the next step, and then the next step, which eventually led to yet another step. But one step at a time is enough to get you anywhere you want to go.
Remember, you can successfully drive cross country from Los Angeles to New York City (a 2,800-mile trip) in the dark with headlights that only illuminate the next two hundred feet in front of you.
In the next chapter we will discuss the final step in the REBEL framework—letting go of what others think of you (including what you think of yourself) as you start living the Rebel Lifestyle. Spoiler alert: it’s a lot messier than I’d like to admit, but it’s worth it!
The Final Hurdles to Living the Rebel Lifestyle
Step 5: Let Go of Outcomes and Others’ Opinions
In the early 1990s, a brilliant young Princeton University graduate quit his cushy, multi-six-figure-a-year job on Wall Street to open a bookstore . . . on the internet. His name was Jeff Bezos and the “store” was called Amazon.com.
We know how the story ends. Bezos became a billionaire (many years, his wealth ranks him as the richest person on the planet) and his vision for Amazon has grown to a $500-billion-plus-a-year business and the fifth-most-visited website in America every day. What began as a way to buy and sell books online in an era when nobody did that has turned into one of the largest places to buy just about anything you could ever want.
Clearly, we would all agree that starting Amazon was a great move. But thirty years ago, everybody tried to talk Bezos out of the idea.
Bezos’s Wall Street boss loved him and even supported his idea to start Amazon but thought it was foolish to quit his job entirely. When Bezos called his parents and told them he was quitting and starting Amazon, their response was: “What do you mean, you are going to sell books over the internet?” His mom, Jackie, even suggested to her son that he run this new company at night or on the weekends (the “safe” route). Even Bezos himself thought it might be foolish to do what he was doing.
However, one thing Bezos is famous for is his regret minimization framework. When making tough decisions he tries to project himself decades into the future and assess his decision based on how much regret he would have with either choice. In the end, Bezos realized he had to live free of regret and pursue his dream of launching Amazon. In his own words, as detailed in the book The Everything Store by Brad Stone:
When you are in the thick of things, you can get confused by the small stuff. I knew when I was eighty that I would never, for example, think about why I walked away from my 1994 Wall Street bonus in the middle of the year at the worst possible time. That kind of thing just isn’t something you worry about when you are eighty years old. At the same time, I knew that I might sincerely regret not having participated in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a revolutionizing event. When I thought about it in that way . . . it was incredibly easy to make the decision.
Keep in mind that when Bezos made the scary decision to quit his job, be a rebel, and go all in on his dream, Amazon was not even close to the complete vision he had for it. The original concept for Amazon was what Bezos called “the everything store,” an unlimited storefront where you could buy anything you could want online. That is what Amazon is today, but it wasn’t possible to pull off back in 1994.
So Bezos started with the one part of his vision that was possible back then: selling books. It was the easiest item to sell online at the time so he began there. This “limitation” didn’t stop him from pursuing his dream, it only dictated how he would start. The rest, as they say, is history.
Whether you like Amazon and Jeff Bezos or not, the moral of the story is powerful:
Your dreams and your authentic life won’t be made manifest if you don’t have the guts to be a rebel, even when it’s messy, and especially when others you love and respect think you’re foolish.
If the first four steps of the REBEL framework are the “What” being a rebel looks like, this fifth and final step is the “How” to live out being a rebel in the real world. Specifically in this chapter we need to address how to live free, and in three ways: live free from perfectionism, live free from outcomes, and live free from other people’s opinions.
THE REBEL LIFE IS MESSY (AND THAT’S OK)
To live free in life you must let go of the illusion of perfectionism. Perfect doesn’t exist, so if you are chasing it, you’ll constantly come up short and be disappointed. Real life is messy and living the rebel life is no exception. Sometimes it won’t go well. Other times reaching what you’re striving for will take longer than you’d hoped. Still other times you will feel stupid or awkward along the journey.
Speaking of feeling stupid, one of my favorite lines in one of my favorite books, The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann, goes like this: “Sometimes the thing feels foolish, but you do it anyway.”
Much of what we do in life that leads to greatness feels foolish along the way.
Whether it’s judgment from outsiders (more on that in a minute) or just the inevitable frustrating bumps along the path, living a life of purpose and intentionality can feel silly at times. But that doesn’t mean it’s not working or worth pursuing.
In 2018, my wife, Shay, and I decided it was time to try something we had dreamed of for a long time: living in another country for a month. I love the area of Provence in the South of France (and speak a little bit of French myself) so we announced to our kids that 2018 was going to be the summer of France. We booked flights, Airbnbs, and blocked off all work for the month of July.
When you look at the pictures on Instagram or our photo album, we look super happy. Because we were. And when I tell people that we took a month away from our businesses and lived in another country with two young kids, they are impressed. Because it is rare and impressive.
And yet it was equally a hot mess. We almost missed a cross-country train because I couldn’t figure out what track our train was supposed to be on and my French language skills were failing me as my stress levels rose. We got stuck in a parking garage because the machine wouldn’t take my credit card and I didn’t have any more cash. And most of the time my daughters complained that they were bored out of their minds and just wished they were back home with their toys and their friends. These were the inevitable downsides of living internationally for a month. But I’d make that trade again in a heartbeat. You can’t have your dream without some form of mess, frustration, or confusion.
Another rebel decision we made years ago was to have family dinner together around the table (with no technology!) every night of the week. Granted, some nights there is an event where one or two of us has to be somewhere else, but we’ve committed to making family dinner together the rule rather than the exception. And what a powerful rule it is. Parents, I would argue that if you could only do one thing to completely change your family for the better it would be to fight for family dinner together every night and rearrange your life around that.
