How to Do Anything in 90 Days w/ Todd Herman

Listen. The enemy to confidence and momentum, two things that I know people are searching for is confusion and uncertainty. And what I'm trying to do with people is give them a very simple model that works.

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Todd Herman helps ambitious people perform, period. He's worked with both entrepreneurs and athletes and has even had 18 of his clients compete in the Olympics. Listen to his talk with Ryan to find out the small tweaks you can make to multiply your performance. Figure out where to put your time and energy, and get things done. In this rebroadcast, Todd shares his strategies to tackle big goals through structured 90 day sprints. This is one of Ryan's most downloaded podcasts of all time. So listen close and take notes and you can make achieving your goals inevitable.

Welcome to Freedom Fastlane. Today I am joined by the man, the myth, the legend, Todd Herman. Todd, thanks for hanging out with us at Freedom Fast Lane.

You are a fant introducer.

Todd. You know, when I met you, I was, I told somebody, I was like, this is probably the most interesting person in my circle of influence right now. A, because what he does sounds so cool and B, because he's so mysterious. And I like to think of myself as mysterious. But then I met Todd herman. So in 30 seconds, could you. I could try to in intro you, but would you explain a little bit about what it is that you label yourself as, if you will, so we can kick this thing off?

Yeah, sure. I mean, if there's an umbrella that hangs over my head, the word on it that I care about the most, it's always the word performance. So I've been a performance coach and advisor to professional and Olympic athletes for almost 18 years now, actually past 18 years. And what that means is I basically work with them on the inner game of their sport, helping them with either confidence, overcoming stress and anxiety type things when it comes to big event or getting traded and just handling that new mess that happens when you're moving on to a new team or what are you going to do when you retire? There's all these stresses that come along with athletics, but because of a lot of the work that I've done with athletics, you talk to any type a entrepreneur or business individual and they ask you, well, I've got to perform at a high level. Do you work with people like me? The answer has always been, yeah, it's not really that much Different. It's actually a lot easier to work with an entrepreneur like yourself or other people because you have more control really over your world than an athlete does. They're still at the whims of the sport and the organization that they're inside of. So performance is the thing that I care about. And if a person isn't performing to the level that they feel like they should be or could be, it just takes a few simple tweaks in mindset and you can get a huge lift in performance.

So let's dive right into that. You have worked with all these high level people and then you start getting all these requests from entrepreneurs who want to perform at a higher level. What have you found to be the crossover behaviors that really improve performance that you took from the athletic world and brought into the entrepreneurship world that actually had an impact on the entrepreneur's performance?

Sure. So one of the big things is, I mean, one of the first things that I do is I start talking to people about this concept called the 90 day year. With athletics, I've always called it the 90 day sprint. But with business people, it's easier to break things down because business people understand the calendar, because there's always projects that are going on and whatnot. There's this really huge myth, misconception and fallacy that's been passed around the personal development and self help world for decades upon decades on this need to set long term goals.

Sorry to bust a few myths for people out there, but it's, it's completely and categorically the wrong way to work. You should never set a goal beyond 90 days. And there's semantics in the words that we're using. You can definitely have a long term vision for yourself like where Ryan Moran wants to be going three years or five years from now. That's very much an ethereal thing. You have this kind of picture in your mind of where you'd maybe like to be and could be where you're living and the types of businesses that you have. But it's nothing that's truly tangible that you're really working on right now. You're definitely going to be breaking that down and kind of pulling the thread back all the way to here and now. What are some of the things I can be doing that could impact my business to kind of get me to that place. But it's not a goal, it's just a vision is what that is.

So if I could interject here, I spent my life dream is to own the Cleveland Indians and this is going to take me more than three months.

Unfortunately. Yes.

So I spent, I spent a couple years of my life really depressed, Todd, because I felt like I wasn't working on my goal.

Yeah.

Of owning the Cleveland Indians, which was taking, it's going to take some time and some effort. But I've found that when I chunk my vision about working on myself or my businesses in these shorter windows, I actually improve what it is that I'm measuring and what I'm working on to where hopefully, you know, after many three month goal setting sprints. Yeah, that is, that is a reality that owning the Cleveland innings becomes possible. Sure.

And I mean it's, there's, there's a lot of things that are happening with changing that mindset shift that you had. One big thing is if you have, if you've got a goal that I'm calling a vision, that's way down the line and that's the thing that you're constantly shooting towards. Here's the problem with that. The feedback loop is so far away that you're not closing it fast enough. And here's what confidence, here's where confidence comes in. Working with athletes when we can get people incremental, constant, consistent, measurable improvement. Confidence naturally is the byproduct of that. And so when we work on very short term goals and we're closing these feedback loops a lot, what's happening is you're doing something today, then you're closing a loop rapidly that ends up coming back as a result into your business or your life that says, oh wow, I am getting better. So I'm working out for the next two weeks and then we step on the scale and oh, okay, the number's going down.

Cool.

Or I'm working at improving my number of leads coming into my business and that's my main focus for the next 90 days is just I want to improve the lead structure and the lead campaigns that I have going on. And then because all your focus is going into that area, you're going to see massive improvement. Anyways, getting back to this whole 90 day thing, there's actually a psychological and a neurological reason as to why we do this as well. Because my background has always been on the mental side of sport. Really that I've got two neuroscience researchers that are on staff that feed me information of all their different research projects they've been doing for a very long time. And when we take a look at 90 days to the mind, 90 days is really the horizon line to the mind. It's about as far out as it can really see to get a tangible taste of what something could impact on my today. So 90 days from, let's say today is January 15th. So 90 days from today is March or sorry, April 15th. And if I think to myself about a goal and I'm like, geez, if I actually had a lead generating system built out, working and generating.

People coming into my business by that date, and it's built out and it's systemized, that would make a huge impact. And whenever we have something that's tangible and we can actually see it inside of our life working for us, it untaps natural motivation. So now we don't need to push ourselves to go and do it. There's a natural pull effect that's happening. So 90 days is the sprint or the theme that we create. And then whatever those few goals are that we're working on.

That'S where our focus lies, is on those few things. Not 50 goals, it's just a very few amount. So you were talking before, what's the question? Or the question was what's the kind of interplay between athletes and entrepreneurs? It's that it's taking this principle of focusing on in athletics, we would focus on what's the highest impact skill that if we improved right now on the field of play for you, would give you the highest impact on your performance? Well, then let's devote the largest portion of your practice time on developing that thing. So let's say it's a hockey player. And that hockey player, when we kind of really analyze and diagnose where he's got strengths and weaknesses and where he's kind of missing the boat on some of his performance numbers, we establish that it's actually he's not a very good outlet passer. Or the number of passes that he actually connects on from tape to tape, from stick to stick, is actually a very small percentage. So what we do is 80% then of his personal practice time, not team practice time, because he has no control over what his coach is going to be doing or what the team's meta goals are. But for him personally, he would be spending at least 70 to 80% of his personal practice time just on passing and passing drills. How most people operate is they have 15 minutes on passing or, sorry, 15% on passing. Then we've got 25% on my skating, my speed, and I've got 25% on my slap shot and 18% on my wrist shot and my snapshot, and 5% on my deflections. And I also got to work on my checking and my defense. And so that's not what we do. That's how we hack away at performance. And people can get huge impacts because it becomes muscle memory. You become unconsciously competent of it. And when you dial in focus, what I'm really caring about is how can I get that player into the zone and flow state as consistently and as much as possible. Because that flow state is where all of that work that you've ever done over the course of your life and all of that knowledge that you have about your sport naturally flows out of you and then you get these phenomenal boosts in performance.

So I'm going to try and translate that into a business example and you can correct me where I go right ahead. Missed the mark. So from a business perspective, we would be looking at where are the obvious, where are the obvious holes in our business or places in our business where we could grow exponentially. So if we're, if we're on Amazon and we're building our own sales channel or our own sales funnel, if we're seeing that, that has a monumental increase in our business. Rather than spending 15% of our time improving this system and this system and this System, we're putting 80% of our time on the thing that is going to create the maximum impact in that three month period. And in three months we then reassess where our strengths and opportunities are and we massage this process once again.

Yeah, so there's a three phase model that's actually built into this. We talked about goals, but really there's three different types of goals that we're really working on. Athletes, type A personalities, entrepreneurs, and especially men are naturally gifted at thinking about outcomes, even in conversation. When you're. That's why we have this communication difficulty between males and females. Men are constantly like trying to get to the outcome. Okay, well let's make a decision, let's solve this problem. And females are just trying to work through the process. They just, they're in the process mindset where it's just, it just feels good to get it out. Whereas men, it's like, no, no, we gotta solve this thing. And so we're naturally gifted and especially athletes are naturally gifted at thinking of an outcome goal. So an outcome goal is something like winning the race, winning the medal, selling 100 products per day on Amazon. If that's the example or the revenue mark of a million dollars per month revenue, that's an outcome. I know it's an outcome because I can see it, taste it, touch it, smell it. It's a thing, right? Like I can hold the metal in my hand, I can see the million dollars in my bank account. So that's an outcome. Great goals to have very important goals because they kind of give us the direction. But if we focus only on the outcome, and that's all our lives are about, is outcomes. Well, here's what it creates. It creates high levels of stress and anxiety. So if you're living a life that's highly stressed and highly anxious, it's because you're constantly in the outcome world and we need to pull you back down the mountain. So if people, just to use a metaphor for people, if you think of a mountain, the very peak of the mountain is the outcome. It's the planting the flag at the top saying, hey, I climbed this thing great, now we know where you're trying to get to. But if we slide down the mountain a little bit and we used maybe a third of its portion of the mountain as a reference for.

How we focus our time. The goals below outcome are called performance goals. And performance goals are all about what are you going to improve?

Because your listeners are familiar with a lot of marketing speak we're getting into, those would be things like conversion numbers. And marketing by its very nature, thankfully is actually a performance driven world. So I will improve the number of.

Lead or number of people that see my listing from 10 per day to 20 per day by. And then what we do with this, this is how we hack away at it. We pull the thread and we only set those goals two weeks out. This is how we close feedback loops really, really rapidly. And so I will improve the number of leads that see my listing from 10 to 20 buy and then two weeks from today. And then you find another one, another kind of high impact, measurable activity that if it happened, is going to impact my outcome goal. So here's how I like to break it down. If I have one outcome goal, I have three performance goals, typically sometimes more that are going to measurably impact that outcome goal. And the way that I think about it is I want to make my outcome goal inevitable. The achievement of that goal is going to become inevitable by how I break down these last two phases of goals, the performance goals. So it's all about. The performance goals are all about improvement. What are you going to improve in order to get to that outcome goal? And then like in my own business when I first started out, because I was a sort of a naturally and I don't really like, but I worked a lot at my speaking skills I thought, you know what? Then that's going to be the mode I'm going to use to drive my business. I'm going to try and do as many speaking gigs as I possibly can to start my business. And in the course of the first 90 days, I did 68 speeches in 90 days across the province where, I mean, I live here in New York City now and have for almost a decade. But I grew up, I'm a farm and ranch kid from Alberta, Canada, And I did 68 speeches in 90 days across that province. And it became so easy to get the speaking gigs because I built up so much momentum. And this is the key to it all. When you are focusing on some core activities that definitely drive your business or definitely drive your personal performance, it becomes so much easier because you get that ball rolling down the hill. It just catches so much speed and momentum that it gets to the point where you got to learn how to say no to a lot of things because that high impact performance thing is really working well for you. And that's what happened for me. I had an opportunity to do five different speaking engagements on one night. I had to pick the one that was going to be, you know, the best for me and the message I was trying to get out so then from the performance goals. So if I'm going to improve the number of leads to my listing by, you know, a certain date, which is two weeks from now, I'm going to say, well, what's the process part? So these are the process goals that make that up. Process goals. This is the formula. So everyone can write this down. It's four W's equals C plus M. Hold on.

Before we add math into the equation here, Todd, I want to make sure that we're all on the same page here. So we've got, we've got an outcome goal which is in three months, I want to have lost £20.

Yeah.

That's the measurable result that we're happy with. The top of the mountain.

Sure.

They were breaking that into two weeks to performance goals.

Correct.

That we measure throughout the process. So this could be something like for the next two weeks, I'm going to go to the gym one time.

Yeah.

And then after that it's, I'm going to go to the gym three times this week.

Exactly. So it'd be building up. I will improve the number of times I go to the gym. And then we take a look at what's the data. How many times have you been going to the gym? If you're just starting out, it's zero. So I'll improve the number of times I go to the gym per week from zero to one by and then the date that's, you know, two weeks from now. And then if you start averaging that out and you're doing and you are hitting that one now we just ramp it up. Now I'm gonna go from two from one to two or one to three per week.

You can do three of those in each two week mini sprint. So it could be I'm gonna reduce the amount of soda that I'm drinking from three a day to one a day for the next two weeks.

Exactly.

And then we can add one more in which is I'm gonna walk from zero steps a day because I sit on the couch all day to 500 steps a day which is a two minute walk around my neighborhood.

Yeah, yeah.

And then, and then every two weeks we're building on those three measurable metrics.

It's behavioral in nature most of the time. Exactly.

And measuring those three performance.

Goals makes the losing £20 in three months inevitable.

Exactly. Because we chose, because we chose activities that are directly going to affect that outcome.

Got it. Okay. Hey guys, this is Ryan. We're going to take a quick break and, and we'll return to the show in a second.

Hey, fastlaners. Ryan here and I wanted to take a second and brag on one of our backroom members. Our backroom is our mastermind, really. We're focused on getting to $10 million in top line revenue. And I wanted to brag on athletic greens. They're in the back room and they have just absolutely killed it, not only with expanding their sales, but really by making incredible fricking products. So the products were made out of need by the founders and as a result they've been featured on Tim Ferriss. They were featured in the four hour Body and you've probably seen them all over the web. The reason why I'm telling you about them today is because I want to support them by encouraging you to go over to athleticgreens.com Amazon obviously you know that I am really big on maximizing your Amazon presence. And I also just really believe in the product. So for example, I like to wake up in the morning, put my greens in a water bottle, add in some creatine. Sometimes I add in a fat burner. If I'm on a cut, shake it up. And that's sometimes my morning pick me up if you've ever heard me talk about my tribe. 5. I have five habits that I Practice on a daily basis. My B point every day is getting to the gym and having my greens. And when I don't have time for a big salad or making a smoothie, I supplement with athletic greens. So I'd highly encourage you to support them. Head over to athleticgreens.com Amazon and give their 30 day packs a try. All right, let's head into the episode.

So when I first heard you talk about this, I got it wrong. I was doing the total man way of doing this, which was I was at three month performance goals or three months, three month outcomes and then two week mini outcomes on my way to those. So it was, I'm going to take my Amazon business from 250,000 to 400,000 in the next three months. So in the next two weeks, what can I do to increase it from 250 to 270,000? Yeah, yeah. But the real way to do that would be then to say, all right, I'm getting, we're getting listed or getting our listings viewed 1,000 times a day. What can we do? What, what can we do as far as advertising or, or what can we tweak in our marketing to increase that incrementally the next two weeks?

Yeah, yeah, cool. So, yeah, exactly. Now you got it. I mean, this is the case for anybody that's listening to this. You're not going to get it 100% right the very first time, but the very act fact that you're actually doing this in any way puts you so much further ahead than everyone else. People who implement this, they get it's such a perfect model. That's why this athletics world and the business world, they work so well together because these two just overlay on top of each other so well. Getting back down to breaking it down to the process now, now that you've established your performance goal, then we go, okay, well, because that's kind of the what now we're getting back to your equation. We're not going to give people math, but if we had the four W's, it's who is going to do what, when and where, and that's going to equal clarity and momentum. So if we're improving the number of people that are seeing our listing or the amount of traffic, and we want to improve the traffic that's going to a listing or to a product page on your own website, whatever the case is, it's okay. Well, how are we going to do that essentially? Well.

This is what it would sound like. These are all very schedulable things. Every Monday.

Ryan will launch a Facebook ads campaign.

By noon. And then on Wednesday, Ryan will log in and review all of the ads, mute or pause the ones that aren't converting and tweak, change, add more, dial up the ones that are working, and launch some new ones. And then Friday, you're just going to do that same process again.

Because that's a process. We know who's doing what, when they're doing it, and where it's happening. The. Where it's happening, it's on your computer inside of Facebook.

Right now. The phenomenal thing about doing it, if those of you that are out there are solopreneurs and you're completely overwhelmed, which I know that you are, because it's the very nature of being in a startup business. It's supposed to be this way. Just so you know, it's supposed to be this way because it weeds out the people that can't cut it. It weeds out the people that don't have the big enough vision to fight through this.

But the great thing about if you get good at this process stuff, Ryan, when it time for you to actually have, when you have the money in your business where you can start outsourcing or hiring assistants, you have your processes built out. Because now you know what, you can farm off to people because you know what, everyone loves to. I mean, I've got some friends that are in the online business space. We've got a lot of mutual friends, and a lot of them think that running Facebook ads is the thing that they have to do. And I'm like, why? Why do you think that that's the thing? You have to do what you need to do. Maybe you spend five minutes and go in and review it, but you don't need to do it.

Right?

You don't need to actually execute on it. You can review it. But anyways, by you getting really good at mapping out these process steps for how you're actually going to be achieving these performance goals, now you've got something you can completely hand off to someone else when the time comes.

I confess to being one of those people that has spent plenty of my time anxious and stressed about my. About my businesses. But, but the, the simple, the simple act of bringing it into, what can I. What can I control over the next. The next three months? And what is the actual process I'm working on puts me in a more relaxed state because I can actually do something about it. For example, there is a, A big temptation for myself and for a lot of people around me to say, to try to project where we're going to be or what we're going to do a year or two from now with no. With no capacity of knowing what is going to happen in between those times. Like, six months ago, I had no, no idea that I was going to be a dad in 2015. How could I possibly plan the next few years of my life? And it causes so much stress and anxiety.

Yeah.

By removing myself that far from the present moment. Do you find that when you're working with an athlete or with an entrepreneur that you can turn that anxious energy into productivity just by moving the scope of time with which they're working?

Absolutely. I mean, think about today. I mean, you and the people that probably listen to this podcasts, you live in a world where there is constantly changing technology to try and project out so far creates an immense amount of friction in that process.

I've been telling people when I do speeches or when they hear this for the very first time and they start implementing it, I'm like, so it's not you. You're not broken. You don't have the inability to make things happen or create change for yourself. You were working with a broken model from the very beginning. If you take a great person and you put them inside of a broken model, you will have a broken person by the end of it. If you take a broken person and put them inside of a great model, they will get a result.

This is where we can take average. I mean, there's so many entrepreneurs I know that always classify themselves as, you know, listen, I'm not smarter than anyone else. I'm not bigger, stronger, faster, anything like that.

They just worked a better model than other people. They thought maybe differently. And so by compressing this thing down to 90 days, you feel a far greater sense of control. Listen. The enemy to confidence and momentum, two things that I know people are searching for. They might not verbally say it. They don't wake up in the morning and go, you know what, Ryan? I want confidence and momentum. But deep down inside, it's what they truly do want. When you kind of break away and chip away at the words that they're using to describe their life, they do want confidence, and they do want some momentum. And the enemy of confidence, momentum is confusion and uncertainty. If you want to give a person some, or if you want someone to feel a little bit depressed about where they are in their life, just confuse them. Teach them things in a way that confuses the hell out of them and then give them a level of uncertainty about Their capacity to do it. And what I'm trying to do with people is give them a very simple model that works. I mean, it's worked with. At the last olympics. I had 18 clients at the last Olympics, and they all did very, very, very well for themselves. That doesn't mean that everyone won medals, but there was a lot of personal bests in there, and they just worked really good, simple models. They keep things focused and streamlined.

Absolutely. If people started running this, they would see a dramatic improvement in that anxiety that they feel about their lack of control. Because the very nature of the people that are listening is you probably want to control a lot of things in your life. Well, the great thing about process goals is you have 100% control over them. The bad thing about outcome goals, you do not have 100% control over them. Doesn't mean that we don't set them. But if we only focused on outcomes, you're going to be anxious. It's the very nature of that world.

I keep laughing when you're talking because you're describing me so well. Probably a lot of people who want to be high achievers or are high achievers. So we've outlined the prescription, if you will, that the way out of this tense, anxious, I can't get anything to work mode is to bring our timeframe much shorter and to work on the. The process that leads to the inevitable outcome. I want to talk about the opposite now. I want to talk about the problem.

Yeah.

Because you said something interesting before we started recording this, which was my. My blueprint for if I want to get depressed or anxious or destroy whatever it is I'm working on is isolation, which is 100% true. If I am alone for too long, I. I get drained of energy, I get depressed, and I sabotage my businesses. I spent the first two years out of college where I went from being around my best friends all the time and building crazy businesses. I had this idea that I would then, once I graduate, have all this new time. I'd build these incredible businesses, graduated, was by myself, got an apartment in a high rise, removed from my family and friends, didn't see anybody all day. And all of a sudden I'm like, why the hell am I unhappy? Why the hell can't I build anything of value and just completely sabotage my businesses? But everybody has a different blueprint for how they get into that mode. So we've talked about the prescription of how to get out of that. How can people identify when they're starting to get into that mode so they can Stop that, reverse it. And have triggers that bring them into a state of performance rather than pressure.

Well, I mean, basically a blueprint for most people on the planet. I mean, like I had said to you before we started the podcast, like you had mentioned, was if there's a blueprint for Ryan to getting into a state of depression or a depressed state, it would be isolation. It's this idea in the online community that the world exists on the 13 inches of my monitor, that it's just not the case. There's just a bunch of tools that are inside of there to help make your business or deliver the value that you have to the world. But.

Here'S the one thing I know that most people lack when they go onto this. Because entrepreneurialism, it is the greatest personal development program there is on the planet.

You will always be the stopgap in your business no matter what level you're at, even if you're the CEO. You take the CEO of Enron, he was the stopgap in that business. He burned it to the ground. And it happens the same way for just solo entrepreneurs as well. What I know from most people is most people are terribly unaware of really who they are. And they don't take a lot of time to reflect back on.

What'S worked for me for the last three months. We just ended 2014 and I have this, this program that I work with people on. You've gone through it, which is basically Operation Unpack and planning out the first 90 days of your 2015, or if it's next year, 2016. But the worst thing that you can do is start setting goals without ever looking back. If people in their own minds or if you've got a pen and a piece of paper in front of you, if everyone drew a line down the middle of the page from vertically and then a line halfway down that basically creates four squares. A left quadrant, a top right quadrant, a bottom left, and a bottom right quadrant.

This is a model that I use with people that allows them to kind of unpack who they are and what they did so that they can actually take really focused and quality action based on really the needs that you have right now. Some of the activities that a lot of entrepreneurs do is they are actually working on what would be perceived as high value activities, but they work on them at the wrong stages. Like when you're just starting out in business, one of the last, not the last thing you should be doing, but systems really isn't the thing that you should be building in the beginning. What you should be building in the beginning is traction. You need marketing traction. You need your name out there. You need money coming in. Door systems usually don't do that for people because that's an operational side of business. So they work on things that don't actually generate shuffling papers around and creating busy work themselves, but it's not impacting the business. So when we take a look at this quadrant, on that top line, when we take a look at.

The quadrant, the very top arrow or the very top of the line is the word action. The opposite of action on the very bottom then is reflection. And in the far left part of the quadrant is the past. And then obviously on the far right, it's the future. So we have this top left quadrant where action in the past is. So when we actually take a look at our actions of the past, this is where we get concrete data on what we've done. Too many people, when I start working with them, whether it's organizations or individuals, come to me with a story, here's what my life is, and they give me these really ambiguous claims and they give me these generalizations like, you know what? I'm just not very good at focus. I'm not good at this, and I'm, okay, well, where's the data on that? What do you mean you're not good at that? That doesn't mean anything to me. Have you been tracking it?

So we tell ourselves these stories and then we basically pencil ourselves into a corner because, oh, I'm that type of person. I'm a big idea person. I'm not a person who actually finishes things. I start things, but I'm not a finisher, which most entrepreneurs are. Fantastic starters, horrible finishers. They've got 19 projects going, and maybe one of them is completed. And they wonder why they're harried and frantic and they can't sleep at night because they've got all these unfinished loose ends everywhere and they feel guilty about them. But I want to get concrete. And when you get concrete about your actions of the past, that gives you a very high level of awareness. Because when you look back on your passion, you go, what actually was my income? What were my expenses? On a scale of 1 to 10, how would I rate the lead generating system that's inside my business? On a scale of 1 to 10, how would I rate the marketing systems that we have? On a scale of 1 to 10, how would I rate.

The customer service team that I have? And that's one way that we can get some data. I mean, it's still a little bit judgmental, but it's, you know, scale of 1 to 10 type things. Help us at least get some sort of data. But we're looking for numbers. What are our leads that came into the business? What's our conversion percentage? Things like this.

Okay, so, Todd, I feel like I.

Just got in the last three minutes.

The Todd Herman download. That is, I feel like I'm trying to download the entire Internet with a 14.4k modem in the last three minutes. So I'm going to try and make sense of this. I think here, how I'm making sense of what you're saying is that most entrepreneurs come to the table with a story about their performance with absolutely no data to back that up. And so a lot of times us crazy entrepreneurs who have all these ideas in our head will look at this mess of our business lives and say, see, I can't make anything work with his. Which is really just a feeling. A feeling how we. Of what? Of the interpretation of our story at that time. But the way out of that is to really look at measurable results. And a lot of times when we feel anxious, it's because we are creating some sort of story about results that.

We can't even measure.

And you're saying that one of the ways out of this state of overwhelm, the state of anxiety, is to measure progress incrementally because that's when we can actually do something about it.

Yeah, that's where, I mean, action can happen. Smart action can happen out of that. And I mean, it's.

You know what?

It's not easy for people. I know that it's not easy because there's a lot of people who just want to, like, shuffle things underneath the rug, and they don't want to look at it. They don't want to be honest with themselves about whatever category of their life they're not happy with. And it could be because they have these rules that, you know what? By 30 years old, I said to myself, I was going to be a millionaire, and I've got $80,000 in debt. Well, whoop dee doo, that doesn't have to determine the rest of your life. I mean, I've been there.

An entire business went completely belly up and lost my entire life savings because of it. But that doesn't define all my actions in the future. And I'd much rather have something go belly up because it proves that at least I'm out there trying to do something.

I'm sorry to interrupt, but you talk about this idea of story a lot. This idea of these stories that we create. In fact, I've seen you on stage give. I love this part of your presentation where you show a really random moving of shapes and then you ask people in the audience, what is this story? And people give you the most bizarre and well thought out answers to what the story is about. These shapes moving. And you're like, actually, it's just shapes moving, but we're meaning making creatures.

That's right.

I've heard you also talk about the fact that we can basically enter into a scenario with a different story in the sense of almost creating a new personality around performance.

Yeah.

Giving that personality a different story and temporarily suspending whatever story it is that we're telling ourselves. Giving it a new one for the really just the benefit of temporarily performing at a different level or being good at something different. I'd like for you to comment on this because this had a big impact on me.

Yeah. So this was the thing that actually built my name in the sports world. I started to see a pattern amongst the professionals that I was working with that many of. Well, all of them had a different Persona that they stepped into when they would go to compete. And you have this experience many times when people would.

When the layperson goes up to someone on the street that, you know, they had this idea of what they would be like because they watched them perform on the basketball court all the time and they were a big fan of them. And then they meet them in real life and they're like, man, he's a lot different than I thought he was or thought he'd be. And, you know, someone who's competing is super outgoing and gregarious and loud and everything on the field of play. But then you get them off the field of play and they're super quiet, they're super introverted and all that. And so I called it. I mean, I call it character crafting. A lot of people might call it alter egos, but I became known for being the person who comes in and actually crafts those things. Because there's an art form to it. When you think about it. We all have these slight little insecurities that we have about ourselves. And if we took them into the performance, onto the field of play, whether it's business or whether it's sport or it could be theater, if we took those insecurities with us, it's not going to allow us to perform at the peak possibility that we have based on all the practice time and time that we devoted. And so why don't we just suspend that? Let's not take Ryan onto the field of play. Let's be someone completely different. The last thought that would even go through their head is the thing that you're thinking about and you can do it. And so you can take a look at for inspiration from whether it's comic book characters, it could be movies, it could be television, it could be from nature. People use animals as alter egos or characters that they can step into. You can take it from anywhere. It could be the supernatural, anything. Or you can combine them from other people, people that you might admire or like real life people. And you strip away a lot of the stuff that unfortunately hampers performance. And I'm like, how would I be performing if I was that thing or if I was that person? And I'm really seeing myself go through those motions? How would I move? What's my behavior like? Is there a certain facial expression that I have? What's my body language like when I'm that thing, that person? And the key thing with it, though, that I tell people and remind people about is there's also a portion of this called we have to have totems and artifacts. We have to have something that triggers the character that we either put on. It could be a sweatband, it could be a watch, it could be a ring, it could be something special that you got from a loved one.

But like, for me, you're a lucky piece of underwear.

Yeah. Oh, they're just. They're in the ether now.

But like, for myself, when I first started out, I had a real hang up about the fact that I had a baby face and I was 21 years old. And who's going to listen to me stand on stage and talk about the concepts that I'm talking about? Because I don't have enough life experience and whatnot?

I think.

Well, you know this, but my mentor for a very, very, very long time, for over a decade, was Jim Rohn. And I spoke with him once a month for every month of the year until the day he passed away. And when we were talking about it, he said to me, he said, if I'm sitting in the audience, the only thing I'm caring about is, did I get value? Is there something I'm getting out of this? This is going to help me. I'm not judging you based on your age. So that helped, but I still had to hang up. And I also had this thing in my head that I also felt like people who wore glasses seemed smarter than other people. I always Wanted glasses. The only problem is I've got 2015 vision. The last thing I need is glasses. So I went out and I bought a pair of fake glasses, and I started wearing those glasses. In my head, I was doing the reverse Clark Kent, Superman thing. Clark Kent became Superman when he took off his glasses. I did the exact opposite. I became a Superman in communication and in business when I put on the glasses. To this day, I still wear glasses, and I don't need them. It's only become like. It's honestly become just an unconscious habit that I have. But it triggers something. I think differently. I'm more articulate. I'm more not overly excited. I'm far more kind of stoic with the way that my responses are more responsible with the way that I speak. And it transformed and took away those insecurities because I use that as a trigger to be and give myself the excuse to be something different.

It's the same psychology as wearing a suit. For me, sure, where I spend when I'm working at home, I don't dress up. But if I am giving a presentation something, I wear a suit. And I swear I become a different person when I put on that suit. You know, I use this trick to meet my partner, who's now pregnant with my daughter.

Well, I take no responsibility for what happened.

Well, I had a lot of hangups around meeting girls for years, and so I was given the challenge of interacting with girls out in public. So I had to think about, okay, how would I act if I was totally confident in this process? How would. What would. What would my body language be if I was completely comfortable going up to a girl saying hello and asking for her number? And this is. I had to actually process that because it was so not part of the story of Natural Ryan.

Yeah.

And then stepping into that and giving myself the permission to operate from that place for even a few minutes. That is actually how I met my partner and now the mother of my children. But we do this all the time, right? Am I wrong in saying we're doing this on a conscious or an unconscious basis all the time? Entering into these different modes of. We act differently with our family. We act differently when we're on a podcast. We act differently when we're on stage. So why not be conscious in the process of who it is that we're becoming and who we're showing up as if we want to get a certain result? Why not? Why not just consciously decide what type of person we're going to show up? As in, even if temporarily in order to perform at a higher level.

Yeah, well, I mean, it gets back down to. I ask people this question all the time, too. It's who do you think you are anyway? How do you think your personality has been crafted from the beginning anyway? I mean, me now having two little girls, there is definitely a lot of baked in personality that I have not done anything to encourage some of the funny nature of my girls. But they're going to be influenced environmentally by the way that dad talks, the way that mom talks, and my interests and mom's interests and things like that. It's going to influence their personality and shape it in a way. So who do you think you really are anyway? We are constantly evolving. Why not just choose the evolutionary process? Why not just take back some of that control and you decide what it is that you want to be, how you want to be acting, what thoughts you're going to actually be thinking in that moment. It's incredibly powerful. Just asking yourself the question, what are the thoughts I'm not going to be thinking? Because that's honestly sometimes the easiest place to start. What are the things I'm not going to be thinking? What are the things I don't want to be experiencing in that moment? What's this thing? It's important to give that alter ego a name.

I'm just going to use the word Max. If Max is my alter ego, what is Max not going to be doing? Well, Max isn't going to be fiddling with his pen like I do. It bothers me that I fiddle with my pen because it makes me look like I'm nervous and not confident. So Max doesn't fiddle with a pen. And Max also asks really engaging questions, isn't afraid to interrupt people when they're going off track and they're not.

Sticking to our plan of action if it's a meeting or something like that. Just thinking through these things and then taking action on it. I mean, I can't tell you how many people it's helped out, whether it's the sports world or whether it's working with entrepreneurs here in New York City. I work with a lot of executives, and presentations is something that pretty much most people at a high level constantly have to do. You'd be surprised at the number of people who earn phenomenal incomes for themselves, really struggle with presentations. Well, the easiest fix for that is let's not be you anymore. Let's just be a completely different thing.

Todd, a lot of these. These tools that you've given us today are kind of like Muscles, they're kind of things that need to be practiced and built over. It takes a little bit of conscious effort for me right now to take myself out of thinking about where I'm going to be in 20 years and just be thinking about where I'm going to be three months from now.

Yeah.

So these aren't things that we can master in form 45 minute interview together. So of course, where could people find out more? Where could people connect with you or download some more of the stuff that's out there that you've published so that we could practice these as habits?

Yeah, sure. I mean, and I'll be honest, I mean this gets to the mystique of Todd Herman. I mean I've built my career basically on the private side of things. I've worked inside of really large organizations and I've never really been on the consumer facing side of things or in the public eye very often. I mean I've got at my sports website, which is thepeakathlete.com which is where I help athletes. But if people wanted to and I literally have nothing to sell people whatsoever right now, but if people wanted to go to ToddHerman me, that's where they can find out more information or just get on a list where I can when I have things to offer people. Whether it's because this year I'm going to start publishing some more things for people. They can find out more and contact me there.

Todd Herman, the man, the myth, the legend. Thanks so much for inspiring, educating and empowering us to live more extraordinary lives.

Keep on changing the world. Thank you. I appreciate it. Ryan.

I really appreciated what Todd said about confidence, about how confidence is something that can be built almost like a muscle rather than than something that's just instilled upon you at birth. It's a learned behavior. So our momentum, our progress can be somewhat hacked as a result of the decisions that we make and the planning that we make. I started implementing this process of a 90 day year and breaking my life into more 90 day sprints rather than year long marathons or 10 year marathons because I find that time God's right, I get a lot more done and I instill a lot more confidence when I follow this process. So as you are planning out your next year, as you're planning out the next level of your business, think about what your next 90 days looks like rather than trying to do it all at once. What is, what does the next 90 days look like? And can you build momentum on the things that you need to do right in front of you and build up momentum that way. I hope you enjoyed this podcast with Todd Herman. As always, we appreciate your reviews on itunes, and if you haven't subscribed to the show, let's make this official. Just go over to itunes, search for Freedom Fastlane, and hit subscribe. Obviously, it's free. In fact, it'll make you a lot of money because we share a whole bunch of investing and business tips here at Freedom Fastlane. It'll probably increase your bank account. It also reduces baldness and prevents shark attacks as well. Thanks for listening to Freedom Fast Lane, and I will see you on the next show.