Creating new habits, (I'm learning to touch type) - EP #115 Shorty

G', day, guys. It's Dan Lenny here, host of the how to Scale a video business podcast, dropping in to your feed with this week's shorty. So this week it's been an interesting week, actually. I want to start by telling you a little story that I think you probably find quite retarded. But it's an interesting one because it demonstrates that sometimes we just need to slow down in order to be able kind of see what we need to see instead of pushing ahead and being busy all the time doing things that are just getting in the way of us actually achieving proper outcomes.

So I have never learned to type, to touch type properly. And I have been finding myself recently getting increasingly frustrated when I'm typing things because I just developed such bad habits around typing, touch typing. I look at the keys, I use the wrong fingers. And the bottom line is I'm absolutely fed up with not being able to type. And a friend of mine said to me six months ago, you know, if you just learn to touch type, you'd save yourself so much time. And I started getting really kind of agitated in the last week. And I was like, why am I so agitated? Things weren't going so, starting to kind of gel for me for some reason.

And I realized that I was spending so much time getting frustrated correcting with Grammarly, my bad typing, but also I was starting to develop this blindness around it like this. So. So I wasn't, I was typing stuff, but I wasn't. I was skim reading it, but I wasn't seeing the mistakes and I was publishing it. And sometimes it was absolute gobbledygook. And so I kind of took the extreme ownership appeal mindset and said, well, okay, what am I doing here? What is this? What is the universe trying to teach me here? What is the lesson here? And, and the bottom line is I was just rushing too much. I was rushing too much. I found it the same with my drums. I was playing the drums, but I wasn't, I wasn't spending the time doing the rudiments. I'm trying to teach myself piano, but again, I wasn't spending time doing the rudiments. And then.

I, I started yesterday. It's decided I'm going to take a touch typing course. So I joined this kind of this touch typing thing called the typing club. And I started learning. And the first thing I learned was that there's two little nodules on the keyboard. And I was like, I never even noticed them before. Anyway, I did a bit of practicing and I started to get A bit better. But the lesson here is that I've decided that I need to slow down and put the discipline into the tasks that are, that are challenging and do them repetitively. And this is something that we've been exploring inside the video business accelerator recently, is that often, oftentimes video businesses are just kind of keen to get more leads. They just want more leads. They want more leads, more opportunities, more jobs. And what we were doing the last couple of weeks was looking into customer avatars and actually getting very, very clear on who you're targeting.

And again, this takes some discipline because if you were to say, oh, I just want to deal with a marketing manager who's 35 to 45, works for a medium sized company, that's very broad, very vague. And when you're vague and not specific, you get very vague, non specific results. And so when I think about my typing, like it's as kind of daft as it sounds. I've just never had the need to learn touch typing. I spent most of my career as a television cameraman and over the last 11 years I've been running a business and again, I've just somehow managed to get by. But I feel myself writing a lot more these days, probably because we're in the mastermind group a lot when I'm communicating with members. But I find myself like rushing ahead and being really bad at it and, and so I had to stop and go. I actually need to spend the time, spend the patience and the discipline to learn how to do this properly, which means typing really slowly. My current speed are seven words per minute. It's that bad. But I know with diligent practice every day, I'm going to commit to half an hour practice every day. In a month I'll be up to maybe 20 words a minute and in two months I'll be up to 30 or 40 words a minute. And that is going to have an enormous impact.

On my life. And so what is the lesson here? Well, the lesson is what are you doing in your life or business just now that's a bit cack handed. What are you doing that is not serving you? What shortcuts are you trying to take that are meaning that you're taking longer to get to your destination.

And this is so true across business growth. I think as creatives we do struggle with the discipline to just kind of do the mundane stuff because our brains are kind of hardwired to want to create. And what I found is that the most success I've ever had in business is when I become really consistent with every aspect of sales, marketing process, delivery, and that takes a bit of work. Building a system for anything takes a bit of work. But when you understand that your brain has neural pathways that are hardwired a certain way because of habit and of historical data like the way you've always done things, it's easy to, to think that you can't change that. But in actual fact, you can with, with practice, you can change a habit by doing something the same way every day for 60 consecutive days. You will rewire the way in which your brain thinks. And, and I've found this to be very true with meditation. And I talked to this before on the podcast, is that when I don't meditate regularly, I get out of balance. And when I do regulate my balance by meditating regularly, I feel imbalanced. And the last week had a bit of a cold. I didn't do any exercise and so I hadn't exercised and I wasn't meditating and I felt really unbalanced and had some few drinks on the weekend and Monday morning was like, ah, I just felt out of sores. So I meditated, I rode my bike and instantly felt better. So you know that that practice, that, that repetition is what creates new neural pathways. So if you're stuck in your business just now, if you're struggling with something, if you're stuck at a point where you want to try and get to the destination, like, please understand there aren't any shortcuts. There are certain parts of a process you just have to do. If you want to scale your video business to a sensible size that is manageable and consistent, you have to know who you're targeting, you have to know who you're talking to.

And yes, you'll get work just people calling up saying they want a video and that will be fine. But if you want clients that don't spitball you on price, if you want clients who really respect what you do, if you want to build long term meaningful relationships with clients, then this is the part of the process that I strongly encourage you to invest in. Figure out who you want to do business with. People often get confused by this. When you run a video production company, you don't have to deal with everyone. You don't have to go out to the marketplace and provide a service for everyone to enjoy. You can say, I only want to work with this type of customer. Now in order to do that, you have to communicate that effectively and you have to push your marketing message out through channels. And that takes Time and effort and money and resources, and you have to learn how to do it. But, but once you start doing that, you begin to only attract your ideal type of customer clients. And when you work with your ideal clients every day, it doesn't feel like work. It feels like you're working with old friends. And Ben was, was just telling us last week in his weekly, when he's just built a new studio in Hertfordshire, his first client come, they had such an amazing day. End of the day, the client was like, hey, let's go for a beer. Now that, to me, is an incredible measure of a client relationship. When your clients become friends, when your clients say, hey, let's grab a beer, they. You get to understand the deeper level of understanding of that person and how they live their life and what's important to them. And if you gel and connect, you will find yourself in a situation where you'll never want for work again. I've had a number of those relationships in my career where we've just got this incredible relationship where the client would just call up and say, hey, I want this doing. Can you do it? Here's the budget. And it's easy and effortless. And that is the kind of work that I love to do. Work where you're working with clients that, that are, that are not satisfying, that are giving the run around. What you have to understand is you're letting them into your world. And, and if you're saying, oh, but I have to take the work because I've got no work, it's like, well, that's fine, but do something about that. You can change that. You can change who you do business with. You get to choose who you do business with. There's three levels of customer in any market. That's the top of the market, the middle of the market, and the bottom of the market. I would always go for the top of the market. Choose who you want to do business with, and if someone isn't a fit, repel them. That will make your life so much easier. And the first step in that is getting clear on who you want to target. Anyway, guys, I've got Pat Henderson coming on the show on Thursday. Pat is one of my clients from Boston, and he's going to be talking about how he overcame the reluctance to go down a niche. So I will talk to you then.

You've been listening to the how to Scale a video Business podcast with me, your host, Dan Lenny. If you're a video business owner who's hit a ceiling and we benefit from mentorship support and coaching. Then check out how you can work with me over@denlenny.com don't forget to subscribe and rate the show over on itunes and we'd really appreciate you taking a few minutes to leave a review. And don't forget to share. If you feel you've gotten value from this episode and you think it would be useful for other filmmakers you know, then please do me a massive favor and share it on social media and in groups that you might be in. See you next week.