Mindset & Mastery

Hello everybody, welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. So excited to have you here. In this episode, we get to listen as Dan Kennedy interviews Chris Cardell. Now, a lot of times we put so much emphasis on the tactics of what you should be doing in your business and the marketing and the processes and the things you need to be doing as a CEO of your business. But often we don't talk about the things that are going to 10x those results. And it all starts with mindset and mastery. Now, this set of tools, if they're ignored, are going to either lead to the sabotage of your business, or when shined and used properly, they'll be used to build your business. This may be one of the most important episodes that you've listened to, and you may not know it yet. Let's get started.

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Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. Welcome to this month's Diamond Call. I have with me Chris Cardell, who I assume is calling in from the other side of the pond. Chris, welcome. How's the Queen and the little baby and the castle?

The Queen sends you her love and best wishes as ever. There is still the open invitation for tea at the palace whenever you so choose, but she knows how busy you are.

Wonderful, wonderful. We can do that on this call. As you know, I have discovered that Brits have a wonderful sense of humor about everything but the Queen. It is not like we make fun of our presidents by any stretch of the imagination. So you and I share an interest in, passion for, fascination with why and how people sabotage their own success and create their own success as much by their thinking and behavior as by any particular business or marketing methodology. And that will be where we'll go with this call. And we will let people get in fairly early and start playing. But I'm going to let you do your own introduction and origin story. So a little bit about what your business is today, a little bit about the starvation period of time and the bridge between the two.

Sure. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. It's always a pleasure to be here with with you and the team. Okay, so the easy description I guess of what I do now, if you want a simple description for everybody, I kind of do what Dan does, but I do it in the UK and Europe. That would be the simplest. So we provide marketing, internet marketing, sales, and business success strategies to business owners across the UK and Europe. We don't niche. We do it kind of across the board. We have membership levels. We have seminars and events. We have a high-end $15,000 a year coaching group. It's the model you're kind of pretty familiar with, I guess. In terms of the story, well, my story is I started off my professional life in radio. I grew up with a passion for communication, which maybe this is also where the interest in mindset started, because when I look back, there's kind of some interesting links. I had all sorts of interesting things going on in the first few years of my life, including when I was about 4 or 5, I fell over and knocked my front teeth out, my two front baby teeth out. If you've never had any front teeth, you can't really speak because nobody understands what you're saying. So by the time I got to about 5, 6 years old, I was incredibly shy. I couldn't look people in the eye, and I really had sort of stopped communicating. I was sent to speech therapy, and there's still a letter from the speech therapist to my mother. And the quote is, "Christopher will have a lifetime of problems communicating." And I have that up on my desk next to a gold medal I got for my later radio broadcasting career. So somehow this all morphed into a fascination with communication. And to cut a long story short, I ended up working in radio broadcasting, which was and still is a big passion of mine. So back then, this is going back like 20, 25 years ago, radio in the UK is very different to the US. And back then there was only one big radio station in London. I got a job there. I was the morning news guy and producer, and it was a big deal back then. I mean, like, the royal family used to listen to our news in the morning and the Prime Minister's family. So we had to be kind of pretty good at what we did. I got into doing that very young, and I did a lot very young. I just started to get kind of itchy feet in my kind of mid-20s, I guess, and I just had that— I just wanted to be entrepreneurial. I could only really carry on and go into management in the broadcasting, and I didn't really want I'm not going to do that. So I decided that I was rather good at what I did, which I was. I won awards and I'm obsessive compulsive, so there's only about 3 or 4 things in the world that I'm good at, but radio broadcasting was one of them. So I thought, great, I'll set up a radio sponsorship company and I'll use these great creative skills. And off I went. And at some point I had that moment, I think probably lots of us on this call have had, where I look in the mirror and I go, you know what, you might be brilliant at what you do, but you've no idea how to get customers. You don't really know what advertising is, and that's probably why you've got no money in the bank. So I then went on a sort of global tour. Back then, really, we had to come to the States to learn how to do all this. And I learned marketing really for myself, but then when I went back to the UK, clients started wanting help. And that's how I kind of morphed into what I'm doing now. I originally was a consultant, and then when the internet came along, The internet really sort of took everything to the next level. Now that hides a few years in the middle which you referred to, which was a, how can I put it, a considerable lack of money. I'm not sure what the debt got to because I never actually counted it. But in dollars it was probably up in the $150,000-$200,000 area. And at that point I kind of added to my, knowledge I already had about the marketing, I became again somewhat obsessive about learning about the mindset of how people who had achieved what I wanted to achieve had done it. So what is an entrepreneur millionaire doing differently to me who is broke? Not just in how they're running their business, but in how they're running themselves. And alongside that, a real fascination with— the subject of money, an in-depth study of how does money work, how does money move. Again, something that you and I share a fascination with and interest with. And it was really that that got me out of where I was, and I now run two very successful multimillion-dollar businesses. I have a second business that's a done-for-you business. Because I knew the marketing stuff when I was broke.. But I was still broke. The difference that made the difference was understanding the mindset and the mindset of—

That's such an important point. I mean, there's an enormous number of people who know the mechanics of things— advertising, marketing, selling— as well as the technical aspect of a business and are somewhat mystified by the fact that they're still not doing well. And, you know, there's this entire other box of non-technical things that matter as much or more and that many people tend to devalue or even sort of think badly of, make fun of. Simplistically characterize as that positive thinking stuff. But it's hard to find somebody who's really kicking butt and taking names who isn't invested in that, who isn't working on that. You also found your way to NLP, right?

Yeah, so I got very interested in that about the same time. I also had a lot of my own stuff. We all have our stuff. I had my stuff. So apart from looking my teeth out, the other thing that, without going into a Freudian session with you, I had 6 operations by the time I was 5 years old because I was born with no vision in my left eye. So I had lots of operations. This is another reason I ended up really shy. I grew up with no vision in that eye. I started asking in my late teen years, what I could do about it. And there's a street in London called Harley Street where all the top eminent surgeons are. And I went to 12 Harley Street surgeons and everyone told me I was wasting my time. And one of them actually shouted at me. And what I ended up doing was I combined kind of natural vision approaches and some natural vision therapy, but also I got involved in the When I say NLP, probably not the NLP that people think of as NLP. But I got to know John Grinder and Richard Bandler, the founders of it. I went to the core of it and I really got deep into the connection between the conscious and the unconscious mind. Your unconscious mind runs your body. Your unconscious mind runs your emotions. Again, to cut a long story short, I started getting some vision and I started improving my vision. Now, I've done something that's supposed to be completely impossible. And so that was a very powerful metaphor. When I hit business problems or debt problems, and even today when I run into business challenges or problems, they kind of pale in comparison to what I was able to achieve myself. So yeah, that's how I sort of stumbled on NLP. And again, I became a bit obsessive about it. If you learn it from the right people, it's an extraordinary tool.

So tell me, so you work now coaching entrepreneurs and business owners. You have obviously those who make great strides and while they are with you multiply size, earnings, revenues, etc. And I assume you have some that kind of never get their act together. And come and go relatively unchanged, probably not at the top level of the business but at the other levels of the business. And it gets us to the, you know, to the perpetual mystery of what's the difference? How is it that two people in the same business at opposite sides of London One can get very, very rich and the other one in the same period of time can still be where they were at the very start. What do you find and maybe what frustrates you the most trying to get people to get their act together?

Well, it's obviously a huge subject, but I can give you kind of 3 biggies if I've got a chunk of time to give you the 3 biggies. The first one is what I call unconscious ceilings. So I came across this when I had my first sort of high-end group. So I had a kind of, I guess, similar to your platinum, titanium groups. I did the 20 or 25 people paying you $20,000 or $25,000 to meet 3 times a year, sit around a table, and sort out their businesses. And they were successful people. Several of them were running multimillion-dollar businesses. And they all got use out of that group. But as you said, they had very different results. And what I saw, and it was just crystal clear very, very quick, is that we all have a ceiling, a limit to what we unconsciously believe we can or will or should achieve. I believe we all have that limit, including you and I.. You and I are probably, hopefully, reasonably consciously aware of what that limit is. I, for example, don't want to spend the next year, years growing a $100 million business. I don't want to do what's involved, etc., etc. I kind of know what my limits are. The problem comes when people consciously think they want millions and millions, but they're not unconsciously aligned. So if you stop 100 people in the street and say, "Would you like to win a million in the lottery?" 100 will say yes. The reason none of them will do it, will end up as millionaires, or probably no more than 1 out of 100, is they don't have the kind of unconscious alignment. So we, through early beliefs mostly, end up with this kind of feeling that's either what we believe we can achieve deep down— and believing you can achieve something deep down is different to wanting something— or it's a feeling of ethical, moral, beliefs around success. This is a bit different culturally in the UK. We have more negative hangups about success and wealth in the UK than in the US, but I think they exist everywhere around the world. And if you don't become consciously— now, you can change that unconscious feeling, that limit, but if you don't become consciously aware of it, it will sabotage you. If you've ever run into a situation where, as you say, somebody has the knowledge and they know what to do, but they don't do it. They're sabotaging because they're hitting the ceiling. And they don't know why it happens, but things just start going wrong. So that's one. And I can talk for hours about any of these, so feel free to come back to me later. The second is what I describe as a lack of intent. I think there's 3 ways of going for anything in life. One is a sort of wanting something. Again, we all want to be rich and we all want to be successful. It's better than not wanting, but it's reasonably useless on its own. The other is where you have pretty clear targets and goals. I'm running my business and I want to achieve X income, sales, profits in my business. That's kind of a goal or a target. That's much better than most, but in my experience it's not enough. The third is what I call intent. Intent is you're going to do it. You are going to achieve it. I love the Stuart Wilde analogy from that great book, The Trick to Money is having some, where he says, "If you're swimming along the bottom of a swimming pool and something grabs your ankle, how much ferocity and determination and strength, what's your intent going to be to get away from that grip and get back to freedom?" And I think it's the same with us as entrepreneurs. If you don't have that intent, that absolute— and this isn't positive thinking, this is a whole state of mind and state of being— then that's the other reason it doesn't happen. And the third, and you said what's the thing that really frustrates me, it's the difference between people who dabble and people who are into mastery. And I think there are only two types of entrepreneurs. I think there are people who dabble and there are people who are into mastery. And what frustrates me is when people come up to me at seminars and say, "You know, I'm thinking of—" Maybe I've told them to go and learn Google AdWords or something. "I'm thinking of doing it, and what we're going to do is we're going to spend the next 6 months getting our website together, and then we're going to do this. I'm going to have a holiday, and then maybe I'm going to—" That's pure dabbling, and most of the population dabble. If we're going to have an honest conversation about this, even successful entrepreneurs, you can do pretty well dabbling because your competitors really haven't got a clue. So you can do pretty well dabbling, but the rare at the top of the tree are committed to mastery. They will do whatever it takes. And that's extraordinarily rare. But it's there for the taking for anybody who wants it. You know this, Dan. I try at least once a year to come to one of your events. You did a direct mail training seminar event a couple of years ago in Cleveland, and I decided to go to it. People said to me, "Why are you going there?" Because I do a lot of direct mail. I don't claim your expertise or experience, but I've done a lot. I've mailed millions of pieces. I know what I'm doing. The reason I want to come is because you might have some nuance. You might have done some test on something. I don't want to miss out. So I chose to go to your event in Cleveland. Flying across the United States, I can't remember where it was, but some tornado or something hit, and we landed in the middle of nowhere the afternoon before Dan's event. We're in the middle of nowhere, some tiny little airport. I went up to the counter and I said, "I need a flight to Cleveland." And they said, "Well, the next flight's not until the morning. You'll get into Cleveland at lunchtime." I said, "Well, that's no good. I've got to be there first thing in the morning because Dan's starting at 8 o'clock. I might miss something." "Well, no, sorry. There's nothing you can do." And I stood in the middle of this airport and I thought, "I don't have any choice." And I got my cell phone out.. And I Googled private jet for wherever I was in the middle of nowhere. I pressed the button. I said, "I need a plane. I've got to get to Cleveland tonight." They said, "Stay where you are. We're sending a limo. We're taking you to Cleveland." That seminar cost me, I think it was $18,000 just to get to. But to me there wasn't any option. That's mastery. That's mastery as opposed to dabbling. And the thing that drives me nuts and very frustrating from people who've had They're smart enough to be open to new thinking and new ideas and approaches. They're smart enough to buy products or go on seminars. But for some reason, something in them— and they're not bad people— but something in their psychology is stopping them from really, really mastering the subject.

Yeah, and I think you can often judge somebody and predict their future based on how easily they are stopped and disrupted. And, you know, the story you just told is very parallel to one I tell often about flying cross-country on a red-eye and using a helicopter all to get to a seminar on time in order not to miss a word of the first speaker who I really wanted to hear. And at the end of the day, I walked out of there with less than a page of notes, but one of the things in the notes was well worth it even though at the time I could ill afford the expense. At least you in this case are well past the point of that being a economic issue. It's more an emotional issue about do I want to spend $20,000 to get from point A to point B in order not to be 3 hours late. But I think— I find most people are very easily disrupted, derailed, stopped, and that's really why they don't get where it is that they set out to get. Is that it doesn't take much to get in their way. They accept there's nothing you can do, sir, way too easily. And some of that I think is sort of, you know, conditioned behavior that your people are conditioned to believe that there are all these circumstances beyond their control and that there are authorities that they have to bow to and to accept. And it seems like the highly successful people basically ignore all of that. When you say culturally that there's a little more, oh, I don't know, success reluctance or success intimidation in the UK than there is here.

What do you mean? There's the way it's often described in Britain. It's changed somewhat, but when I was growing up, if you saw a Rolls-Royce, it would often have a scratch down the side because if people saw that sort of demonstration of wealth, they would attack it. So there's that side of it. There's a perception that people— I know nobody particularly likes being sold to generally, but we're very, very touchy in the UK about being sold to. So therefore, there's a whole kind of thing around money and wealth. And there's just the kind of the wartime, post-war spirit of the UK that kind of got us through rationing and all that kind of thing is about sort of toughness through— we're proud of our toughness through adversity as opposed to being driven by success, whereas you're a country that didn't really exist not long ago and look what you've created in however many years it is. So you have in your culture this drive towards success and achievement. We have more a drive to sort of get out of bad situations.

Well, so that's— I often say that one of the bad things about being broke but resourceful is that you can get so good at being broke that it stands— those skills stand in the way of the skills you need to be prosperous. And I was certainly once there. And when you talk about entrepreneurs being able to do pretty well just dabbling, you're right. And that is a skill set in and of itself that gets in the way then of the skills of mastery.

And so— It's particularly true, by the way, if you link this into marketing. It's particularly true because of what you can now do online. I mean, if you look at things like Google AdWords, that system is set up— and I've spent $3 million of my own money on Google AdWords. It's one of the things I feel I'm pretty good at. The whole system is set up so that the mass of people who come on there and don't really know what they're doing, do well enough to keep going. But what they've done so brilliantly is within the system they've also built, it's in there if you want it, for the high achievers to really do well. I mean a great Google AdWords advertiser will probably do about 10 or 15 times better than everybody else. But there's a lot of things now you can do quickly and pretty effectively online successfully, which is great. But again, if you ask them if the frustration was, oh my God, if you would only really master this subject. When I learned AdWords, it was— I went into a room on a Friday afternoon and came out on a Monday morning. I think all I did in between was watch The Sopranos. Just total obsession about it. I'm sorry I interrupted, but it is sort of an important thing around the internet world these days.

You know, the margin— so when you say that somebody really zeroes in on it and is obsessed with it and really learns how to do it will do 15 times better than most. I just saw a statistic, actually I think it was earlier today when I was taking my lunch break, that here the top 20% earners in taxable income do 7 times better in income than the bottom 20%. And these sort of big margin differences exist in pretty much every business, every field. Every population group you would put together where if somebody takes the trouble to get more knowledgeable, smarter, more capable, the return on that time invested, the return on that energy invested is such a big multiple that I mean that's a big key. To wealth through earnings at least, if not through equity. I mean, I, in my own professional practice as copywriter and consultant, I mean, the last— so last week the two contracts that were signed here with clients, one is for $128,000 and change. And the other one is for almost $80,000 and change. And earlier today somebody booked me to write copy and speak at an event and I didn't even have to ask. They put a $75,000 guarantee against 33% of their revenue on the table and my field is full of people. Who I have a 10, 15, 20, 25 times spread between what I bill and what they bill. I'm not 15, 20, 25 times better, smarter, or more capable. In fact, they're close. It's that last, you know, 10 yards to the goal line of mastery-level understanding that they stop short. And in this particular competency, I didn't. And yet its multiple is far greater than the proportionate difference in our skills. I think that's true in everything, don't you?

Yeah, I met somebody in the summer who was— she's a nutritionist, and she'd worked with the Olympic— the UK Olympic team, I think in the athletics. I said to her, "When you watch it on TV, you do get this impression that people are either gifted athletes to a certain extent or not." I said, "But I just have this niggling doubt. What's the truth?" She said, "The truth is you can tell within a minute when they walk in. You can just tell from their attitude." She said the people who got gold, the minute they walked in, they were bombarding her with questions. They wanted to know everything there was to know about how this vitamin, that one, could give them this edge over that edge. They'd researched it. They'd understood it. They lived and and they breathed it. And yes, absolutely, I think it applies across the board. And it definitely, definitely applies to our world. I mean, when you go back to Google, when you look at Google, there's results, there's 3 results top left, and there's about 7 or 8 down the right-hand side. The ones top left do get 10 times, 15 times more clicks than the ones on the right. And so it's sitting there in every single field just waiting to be taken. Don't fall into the thing of thinking it's all about talent. In fact, in our world, we all know people who we probably think we're more talented than who are doing better than us sometimes. So absolutely, it's there for the taking, I think, is the message.

Well, I certainly know a lot of people who think they are much more talented than I who aren't doing nearly as well. And they may be right about talent. It's more about this whole beyond the base level of capability that almost everybody in a field shares. It's that extra, in this case, willingness to steal the woman's invitation. There's a great Eisner story when he was a good CEO at Disney of him dragging 4 executives into the middle of the night in dark clothes to climb over a fence to go see what Universal was building in their theme park that they had under wraps. These stories are sort of normal among the abnormal. They are almost every— I just read this great book about Edison, and, um, he's our guy, by the way. You guys have lights because of him.

Thank you very much.

You have a country because of us. Yeah, well, yeah, um, yeah, if you guys hadn't all marched in unison and read, we'd be in trouble. Um,— this great book about Edison. And, you know, the general perception of him is as a great inventor, but if you really study Edison, that's probably the least of what he brought to the table. He himself— and he was not a humble guy— but he himself characterized his skill level as a engineer and a technician has adequate. But it's everything else he did and that he did to a greater extent that he was cleverer about, smarter about. He was really the first, if not the first, one of the very first American entrepreneurs to actually do personal branding and to make it make a difference whether you were getting this particular device from an Edison company versus any other company because of your understanding of the man, of Thomas Edison. So when you now coach, what does the process look like for you Like with somebody new who enters the Cardell world for the first time, how are you trying to get traction, to get them moving in a new or better or faster direction?

Well, on the surface we're providing knowledge and information. So on the surface we're providing Here's how you do your Google AdWords. Here's how you do your Facebook. Here's how you do your direct mail, etc., etc., etc. But if you look at anything I'm doing for more than about 5 minutes, inbuilt at every level is everything that we're talking about. And I made the decision, and I think you follow a similar course, and I probably got it after advice from you, that with a few exceptions— I'll do some courses sometimes on advanced thinking and related fields.. But generally speaking, I don't promote it as part of what I do. But it's just kind of inbuilt there from the beginning. So around any kind of training or knowledge or information, I pack it with metaphors, examples of success, real-life things that they can relate to. And whenever I can, I have the conversation that we're having here. Sometimes if it's my private coaching group, we'll do sessions on this. If it's a kind of lower level, we just incorporate it into the conversation. But it is just hammering away at people that the difference that makes a difference is mindset. One of the, I suppose to specifically answer your question, one of the things I aim to do And it is tough because it's tough to change other people's belief systems. But it's not impossible. One of the things I'm trying to do is to raise people's internal unconscious belief about possibility. And I'll do that. I'll do whatever it takes to achieve that. Either through examples and stories. The best way to change someone's belief is to give them an experience, which is why I and you and everyone in this, probably on this call who, particularly those of us in info marketing, obsess about trying to get people to implement. Because the important thing to understand about implementation is it's not just the result and the success and the money in the bank. It's a shift in belief system that happens. It's a shift in belief about themselves. So what I'm focusing on very strongly all the time is beliefs. If you can shift someone's beliefs, you can shift and change their lives. If I'm doing it on a more personal basis, if people are open to it, then you can do some really cool stuff. I mean, if you're one to— so some of the advanced NLP and related fields have belief change processes. You can spend an hour or two with somebody and I mean literally you can go through and you can show them how to reprogram their thinking, their mindset, and their belief systems. I did a lot of that early on in those difficult years, and it absolutely makes a huge, huge difference. And as I said near the beginning, you know, we all have our stuff, and the idea that there is some kind of split between our professional working lives and our personal lives and that they are separate, I think most of us at the level of this group would probably know how insane that is. There's a very strong overlap. I do a lot of things probably more under the radar, but I guess the number one is I'm focusing on beliefs. If you can shift the belief system, you can do amazing things.

All right, Chris. Thank you for your time and appreciate you being on the call. For everybody, thank you for being on the call.

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