5 Habits to Help Us Work On the Inner Game of Success

(Episode 2 of 2 with Noah St. John)

Welcome back to another episode with Noah St. John. In the last episode, we discussed what head trash is and why we need to get rid of it. In today’s episode, we’ll discuss three levels of service Noah offers to his clients, the inner game of success, and five habits that will help us with that inner success game.

Three Levels of Service

Noah spent years paying gurus to help him, but he found that they couldn’t teach their way out of a paper bag. They were teaching nothing. Noah said, “I’ve given them all this money, hoping they would give me something . . . and they would give you maybe a little kernel of something, but the rest is just nothing.”

He discovered a better way to do service with three levels: done for you, done with you, and do it yourself. There is a constant battle in everyone’s mind whether to spend their time or money on something. This model offers options to our customers for spending time, money, or a little bit of both. We can offer three levels of service so our customers can choose how much time or money they want to spend.

Done for you is the agency model. This means a customer can pay us to do it all for them. They won’t have to worry about it, and we’ll take care of it without bothering them.

Done with you is like the coaching model. Noah said, “If information alone was enough to cause transformation, everybody who has an internet connection would be a millionaire.” Sometimes our customers need a more guided model that will hold them accountable. In this model, we’ll help them and teach them how to do it, but won’t do it for them.

The do-it-yourself model is fairly self-explanatory. Some customers work better on their own and have the motivation to do it themselves, so this model gives them the information through something like an online course and lets them work through it on their own. The only problem with this option is that we often have to compete with the internet where there is a lot of free information they may find instead.

The Inner Game of Success

We often focus a little too much on the outside factors when it comes to our business, but Noah is all about focusing on the inner game of success. As we discussed in the last episode, we often have head trash that holds us back from growing and achieving higher goals.

For example, Noah had a client come to him when his company was stuck at $4 million in revenue. This might not seem like a bad thing, but the company had grown to $4 million very fast and then plateaued for four years. Before going to Noah, this client had hired many big-name gurus and none of them had been able to get the company unstuck.

Noah worked with him for about 18 months, and in that time, the company went from being stuck at $4 million to gaining over $20 million in sales per year. At that time, they didn’t really focus on marketing or sales; they focused on the inner game. Noah worked with the CEO on his head trash and other mental blocks that were holding him back.

“Everybody’s working on the outer game, but it’s only when you learn how to master the inner game and the outer game when you put them together, that’s when you have that exponential growth,” Noah said.

In Noah’s book Power Habits, he shares many habits to help us work on the inner game. Here are six of these habits.

1. Affirmations

In the last episode, we discussed this habit at length and how Noah had the realization that affirmations don’t work, but “affirmations” do.

Instead of telling ourselves affirmations like “I am rich,” we can ask affirmations, “Why am I rich?” This allows our brain to focus on what we have, instead of focusing on what we don’t. For a more in-depth look at affirmations, check out episode one with Noah.

2. Loving Mirrors

There are four basic gaps that Noah teaches his clients to fill: knowledge, skills, support, and belief. Knowledge gaps happen when we don’t know what to do. Skill gaps happen when we don’t know how to do it. There are support gaps when we don’t have the right people in our lives helping us get there and supporting us. The belief gap happens when we think we can’t do it.

Of these four, the belief gap is the most powerful. We can fill the other three gaps, but if we don’t believe in ourselves, we won’t get anywhere.

The problem that many of the self-help gurus don’t focus on is that we can’t just believe in ourselves. It isn’t a switch that we can just turn on. We need someone else to believe in us first.

Telling someone to believe in themself without having any support is like asking someone what color their eyes are but not letting them look in a mirror. They need outside help to know what color they are because they can’t see them themselves. We all need loving mirrors — someone who believes in us — to help us believe in ourselves.

In the Empire Strikes Back when Yoda is teaching Luke to use force, Luke tries to lift a spaceship out of the swamp. He can’t do it. A moment later, Yoda uses the force to lift it out of the swamp and Luke says, “I don’t believe it.” Yoda then says, “That is why you fail.”

Luke didn’t believe in himself. He knew it was possible — he saw Yoda make it so — but he didn’t believe in himself. Just like Luke, we all need Yodas to believe in us and help us to believe in ourselves.

3. Activate Our Activities

As the CEO and entrepreneur, we need to be very aware of how we are spending our time because it is our most valuable resource. We need to understand what we should be doing with our time and what we shouldn’t.

There are many activities that we shouldn’t be doing such as tasks we aren’t good at, time-consuming tasks someone else could easily do, or anything we want our team to be doing eventually. Instead, we should delegate and automate these tasks, so we can save our time and focus it on the most important things. We also have to be willing to say no to things that aren’t worth our time.

4. Enhance Our Environment

Both our inner and outer environments are very important. We function in a physical space and a mental space, so we must ensure that we take care of and clean up both.

“You have to clean the clutter both from [inside] and [outside]. . . . It doesn’t mean you have to buy a new house, it just means you take where you are, and make it as [good] as you can,” Noah said.

5. Install Introspection Systems

We must take the time and make the time to introspect. We can evaluate our goals and make sure that we are going after the things that we really want, not just the things we think we should want.

As Stephen R. Covey, an educator, author, businessman, and keynote speaker said, “If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.”

If we’re pursuing the wrong goal and we go after it for a long time, when we eventually realize that isn’t what we want, we will be disappointed with ourselves for wasting so much time. In addition, it may also take us a lot more time to get back on track for what we really want. This is why it is important to take time every so often to introspect and make sure we are heading in the right direction.

Key Takeaways

Thank you so much Noah for sharing your stories and insights with us today. Here are some of my key takeaways from this episode:

1. We can offer three levels of service so our customers can choose how much time or money they want to spend.

2. Too often we only focus on outside things like sales and marketing, but we must master the inner and outer game to achieve growth.

3. Affirmations help us focus on what we have.

4. We all need loving mirrors or people in our lives that will help us believe in ourselves.

5. We must carefully choose what we spend our time on and delegate and automate the tasks that aren’t worth it.

6. To be productive we need a good inner and outer environment.

7. We should take time to introspect and evaluate whether or not we are going after the right goals.

Connect with Noah

To learn more about or connect with Noah:

• Connect on LinkedIn
• Visit his website at NoahStJohn.com
• Get a free copy of Noah’s new book Get Rid of Your Head Trash About Money

Next Steps

1. Get my free ebook about passion marketing, and learn to identify and leverage the highest passions of our ideal customers at PassionMarketing.com.

2. Subscribe to Monetization Nation on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, our Facebook Group, and on your favorite podcast platform.

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