324 Addition Through Mental Subtraction

Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. Today I want to take you through an exercise that I've taken my team through in the past. Uh, I've also taken some of my Metrics Masterminds members through this exercise. And the exercise is called addition through mental subtraction. Now, this exercise, when I created it, it came out of, or it was inspired by the book, The Gap and the Gain, which many of you are probably familiar with. In summary, what is The Gap and the Gain? Too often in life, in business, and in personal, we have a tendency to focus on the gap you know, what it is, what it is we do not have, what it is exists between where we're at today and where we want to go, and do not focus nearly enough on the gain, which is the progress that we've made. So, the analogy I love to give is if you're standing on a mountaintop right now and I said to you, go hike out across that valley over to the horizon, and you spend all day hiking, you know, across the mountain, down the valley, and you're hiking to that, that horizon. What happens when you get to the horizon? Well, the reality is you never get there. You never get to the horizon. It's not possible. And you're disappointed because there's still a substantial gap between where you were and where you thought you were going. But if I turned you around and pointed you back and pointed you, you know, had you look in the direction where you started from you would see that you covered many, many miles, a great deal of a distance, and you would appreciate that, hey, wow, we've made some significant gain. So this addition through mental subtraction is kind of doubling down on the concept of the gap and the gain, because here's what I know, you know, as high achievers— and if you're listening to this podcast, you either are a high achiever or aspire to be a high achiever— One challenge that we have, one challenge that we face, is that we take a lot of things for granted. We just do. I mean, it's— we're constantly, you know, we're so goal-oriented and we're constantly moving forward, it's really easy to take certain things in our lives for granted. Now, by imagining that the important things that we may be taking for granted, or the important people in our life, that we may be taking for granted, if we imagine that they no longer existed, you could actually really start to appreciate what it is you have. This takes you out of the gap and puts you into the game. So here's the exercise. I want you to, I want you to get out a pen and a piece of paper, and I want you to work through this with me. If you don't have that available, work through it in your mind, in your head. I am going to have a worksheet put together that you'll see in the show notes. That you can leverage. But here's what I want you to do. I want you to select one thing, one specific thing to mentally subtract from your life. This thing may be a relationship, it could be an achievement, it could be something health-related, it could be a possession. I want you to select one thing, one specific thing that we're going to mentally subtract from your life. Write that down. Now I'm going to ask you a question. I'm going to ask you a series of questions, actually, and we're going to go through this. I want you to jot down the answers. What would your life be like without this thing? What if it was instantly taken away from you forever? What would life be like? Next question: What is the impact this would have on you right now? Next question: How would losing this one thing affect your future? Lastly, how would this affect others? Okay, so let's, let's, let's stop there, kind of work through an example. Let's say you had a business partner. So we're going to select that business partner who maybe we've taken for granted. We're going to select that person and we're going to subtract them, mentally subtract them from our life for sake of this exercise. Now, this is someone we, we, we have taken for granted. We're aware of the fact that maybe we've taken them for granted. Now, if this person was immediately taken away from you, what would life look like? What is the impact this would have on, on you right now? So if you took a business partner away from me right now, and I really like this business partner, somebody I want to be in business with, I just maybe have taken for granted What is the impact this would have on me right now? Well, just, you know, just thinking about business partnerships in general, nothing specific to me, but I mean, I think we could, you know, I'll give you a couple things that we can all probably relate to if we have a business partner. What impact would this have on me right now? Uh, I would be going at it alone, maybe be lonely. Uh, I wouldn't have a sounding board, so I'd lose maybe some confidence. I wouldn't have somebody that complements my abilities, so maybe I'd have some self-doubt in that I'm diving into areas I'm not accustomed to. I wouldn't have anybody sharing the burden, the responsibility, so maybe I have— I'd have more anxiety or more stress. Now, next question: how would losing this partnership affect your future? Again, if this is a part— if this is a relationship I value, how would it affect my future? It would have a direct impact on my financial future, on my growth, on my company's growth, on the success of my employees and the people around me. How would this affect others? I just kind of touched on it. Without having this partner and without us growing at the same clip, at the same rate, it would have a material impact on the success or future of others. So in this example here, I'm using partnership, a partnership that maybe we've taken for granted Because, well, we're always moving the goalposts and we're always go, go, go, but I'm trying to get out of the gap and into the game. So I've mentally subtracted a partnership. Now let's, let's double down on this a little bit. Let's, let's shift our perspective. Still focusing on, on this one thing that you've chosen, I want you to shift your focus to the present moment. I want you to recognize that this thing we've been focusing on, that that we've been focusing on, whatever you've ch— whatever you've chosen for sake of this exercise, recognize it's a huge gain in your life. Now, some follow-up questions to that: How can you appreciate this gain more than you have up to this point? How can you multiply this gain and turn it into even more gains? How have your thoughts and feelings changed about this one thing? Since we started working on this exercise. So let's use the partner example again. If I'm focusing on that partnership, I'm going to shift my focus to the present moment, and I'm going to recognize this partnership's a huge gain in my life. How can I appreciate this gain more than I have up to this point? Well, I think it would start in this partnership by me expressing my appreciation for this individual. I think maybe it's me listening with more intent, me recognizing what, what value they bring to my world and to our business world. How can you multiply this gain and turn it into more gains? Well, by working more closely together versus distancing because I'm taking things for granted, we could expedite, accelerate our success. We can multiply the gain and turn it into more gains. Lastly, how have my thoughts and feelings changed about this one thing since the beginning of this exercise? Well, this partnership, which is, which is frankly a hypothetical partnership for me, I, I'd be lying if I didn't say I've gone internal since I started walking through this myself. I started thinking about some of my key partnerships, and I'm recognizing, man, maybe I have neglected a few partnerships. Maybe I do need to be more appreciative. Maybe there are ways to multiply the gains if I took a different course of action versus the one I'm presently on. So the idea here is for us to get out of the gap and to get into the game. And the best way to go about doing it that I know is to think around something that you can mentally subtract, something that you know is important to you but you've been taking for granted. And you mentally subtracted from your world. Again, I went partnership, but maybe it's a— maybe it's something health-related, or maybe it's some possession of yours, or maybe it's an achievement even. And then it could be whatever you'd like. How would this impact things? How would losing this thing impact your future? How would it impact others? How can you appreciate this more, this gain, a bit more? And how can you multiply this gain into more gains? Some really big questions, and you add to your world through this mental subtraction exercise if you do it right. So the challenge for you— not the focusing question today— the challenge for you is to sit down and spend 3 to 5 minutes working through this exercise. Then once you do so, take action around whatever it is you came up with, because you will have some action items you find. That's all I have for you today, the No Days Off Podcast. Thank you so much for listening, and remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.