How to Overcome the Lack Mindset and Become Abundant

G', day, guys. Episode 53. We've broken the 52 episodes. That's over a year's worth of content every week. I know we've been running a little longer than that, but it's still nice to hit a number. So today I'm going solo. It's the time of year when a lot of people get a bit freaked out and start to panic and worry about the fact they haven't done any marketing. And you know, it gets a bit dry in some places for work. And some of that's true. But what I wanted to do today was really focus on shifting your mindset away from that kind of like, well, everyone said it's quiet this time. You're. Therefore I'll just accept that defeat because it doesn't have to be that way, you know. And so what I wanted to do today was dig into that old idea of mindset and how to overcome that lack mindset that so many filmmakers adopt at this time of year and hopefully encourage you to do things differently from today and not be like, oh, I'll do that in January or February. So guys, hope you enjoy the episode. As always, it's an absolute pleasure to be able to come to you every week. Thank you for listening and watching and we love reviews. So if you get a chance to go into the itunes store and do a review and leave us a, a review and a and be a five star, you know, comment, we'd really appreciate it. And you know, we love to, to do more of these episodes. Please share these podcasts with your friends in the industry and yeah, enjoy the episode.

Welcome to the Video Business Accelerator podcast. Each week we uncover the secrets to creating a wildly successful and scalable video production business. With your host, Dan Lenny, discover how the accelerator program is transform, transforming the lives of our members at www.videobusinessaccelerator.com. enjoy this episode.

So I thought it'd be interesting to kick this episode off, acknowledging the fact that we're at episode 53, which is pretty awesome.

But really what I wanted to do was given that it's the 18th of December when this episode's going, I'm actually recording this on the 22nd of November. But I came off a call with a colleague, actually a friend of mine, and he was saying, oh, you know, I'm gonna start this marketing plan in January. And I was like, dude, it's like the middle of November. You got six weeks till January. Why not start it now? He's like, oh, yeah, I know, you're right. You probably should. And it got me realizing that, that this is not an uncommon attitude, if you like a mindset this time of year, especially with creatives. So I wanted to just really do a solo episode today to focus on this idea of mindset and abundance over scarcity. You know, we all grew up with both abundance and scarcity, but we can choose where to spend more of our time. And you know, look, it's. Business is never easy. You ask anyone, no matter where they're at in the journey, it's never easy. And this friend of mine was saying, oh yeah, I had a colleague of his last week, they'd lost a big job and they were like, I'm fed up with this, maybe I'll go and get a job. And I was like, that's the wrong attitude. You know, running a business is hard. And I think that as filmmakers we've, we've always relied on word of mouth, we've always relied on referrals. And I've just been having so many conversations with businesses recently that it's not something you can rely on anymore. If there's more players in the market, there's more work. But I think there's going to be a challenging time for a lot of filmmakers who are in that kind of freelancer semi business mindset where they're, you know, they've always relied on the word of mouth they've always liked on one or two big clients. And then one of those big clients kind of says, hey, I'm gonna, can't do it anymore. And I was saying this to my accelerator clients on a coaching call a few weeks ago. I'm like, right, imagine your biggest client. Stop spending today. What do you do? And thankfully, you know, we've got a series of classes and coaching calls weekly. And we've actually been running recently a six week intensive marketing accelerator to get yourself ready for 2020. And you know, we, we, we always address the elephant in the room in our coaching. It's like, right, let's imagine the worst thing happens. I posted on my Facebook feed a couple of days ago, like the story of how I broke my ankle on, on Mont Blanc. And I've never really written about it before, but that was disastrous for my career. You know, I'd been freelance for like two years. I broke my ankle, did this job, you know, about two years later, I wasn't feeling quite right. I was shooting in South Africa for a show called A Place in the Sun, Homer Away. It was the pilot episode and I didn't feel quite right. And Went back to see a specialist and he said, your career is over. So, you know, that was a pretty dark time. But what I've learned over the last 18 years is that you never really learn anything from success. You learn everything from failure. But anyway, back to mindset. And that's really what I wanted to focus on today. Because, you know, we are 18th of December when this episode's going out, coming up to Christmas and in the middle of the summer holidays for us here in Australia. Australia tends to shut down for January. It's like August in Europe or in the US and then I know it gets quiet in January in Europe and but, but there's also a danger, a real danger of assuming and spending time with the wrong people saying, well, things are slowing down, it's gonna be really quiet. Batten down the hatches. Just hold on, let's get through December and January. And I want you to be really careful of that mindset, that lack mindset, that nobody spends money in December and January. There's no work. Cause I did one of my biggest projects one January. It was like a 30,000 pound project. It was a one day shoot. There are incredible opportunities if you've been approaching your clients in the right way for the last few months to say, hey, you know, January's coming. It's a typically a quiet time for us. We've got some special offers if you're looking to shoot something in January. Maybe we'll do half price editing or we'll do an extra shoot day for you. It doesn't matter what the offer is, but it's about presenting that. And I think where the, where the obstacle is for most video business owners at a smaller scale is that just, it's hand to mouth. It's like you're still kind of building your business as a freelancer.

And if you're a bit bigger, then you probably got some strategies in place or you factored in that it's a quiet time. And a lot of the businesses we work, the bigger businesses just take January off. You shut down because they factor their year into a 10 or 11 month year. So they're making a lot more coin up to December and then they're kind of coming January off. So there's a couple of different ways to look at it. But what I wanted to do today really was focus on this idea of an abundance psychology. And if you're really clear on why you're doing what you're doing, then you know, it makes it a lot easier. And also I wanted to talk a little bit about the understanding that fear stops most people from ever reaching their potential. Now, if you're watching this, I will be glancing down at some notes I've got here because I want to make sure I give you some really good value here on this, on this episode. So the first thing I want you to think about is that fear stops 95% of filmmakers from ever really going out and going hard or getting out of that, that kind of feast and famine hole. And fear is just false evidence appearing real. Our brain is processing and overanalyzing thoughts. And sometimes, and I'd say in a lot of cases as filmmakers, we are really anchored to procrastination. We're anchored to not putting something out because it might not be good enough. And that fear of being judged, that fear of feeling that you're not delivering your best work is what stops people from being more successful. And I'm not suggesting that you shouldn't put out great work when your client's paying. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the lack of commitment to marketing consistently. And by marketing consistently, I mean being really clear on your why and telling your story and standing for something. The most dangerous place to be in video is a jack of all trades, master of none of the we do video for everyone. And I'll probably have this argument with filmmakers till, till I die that specializing in a vertical or a style or a niche one at a time is the only way to scale a business. Now, if you are an established business, like Ryan Spang are we had in the podcast a few weeks ago, has been running his business for 18 years. They do a lot more general video, but they have been running their business for 18 years and they do significant amounts of jobs and they've got a very solid reputation in the industry, but they still focus on government and corporate comms and education as their core focus. But if you have been in business less than five years and you are struggling or you're hitting an income ceiling, this is the quickest and easiest way to build your business by a country mile. So let's look at this idea of abundance versus scarcity. So you know, what personality type are you? What tend? Where do you tend to go? Are you more abundant? Are you more scarce? So here's some examples. An abundant person will be happy, they'll be positive, they'll tend to attract people and they'll have a degree of charm about their, their personality, a scarcity mindset. Those people tend to be a bit needy, a little Bit clingy, they tend to polarize and they complain a lot. So, you know, let's look at that again. If you are happy and positive, then you're more likely to have an abundance mentality. So.

If you. I'm going to read this, actually, because it'll make a bit more sense. So if this resonates with you, what a scarcity mindset looks like, anxiety and fear. You wonder if you have enough coming in, and you're afraid somebody else will take it from you. Therefore, you're always on your guard. You certainly won't take any risks, you certainly won't invest because you can't stand to lose what little you have. And the importance of every single opportunity you have is magnified tenfold. So when you chat to a client about a job, it's kind of stressful because you're worried there's not many jobs out there and you really need this work. And if you don't get this job, you might not get another shot. So much pressure you put on yourself. And many of us spend a lot of time in this scarcity mentality because we've got years of practice of being in that scarcity mentality. So it's really challenging to make the mental shift to abundance. But you have to become aware that we have both abundance and scarcity inside us. And what you want to do is recognize when scarcity is showing up and how that affects your decisions to stay kind of in the safe zone, not to invest, not to develop and to protect what you have. Now, that is a really dangerous zone to be in because you will not grow in that zone. And I think as filmmakers, because we're empathic, we tend to be, and I know from my own experience more emotionally make decisions from an emotional standpoint. And I have certainly done a lot of work on recognizing when that's coming up. So the first step of this process is to be aware of when you're going into scarcity mindset and acknowledging it and saying, okay, I'm in this mindset. And if you can stand back and acknowledge and you can have this little. We all have this internal voice, right? We're always having conversations with ourselves. And when you feel that scarcity coming into play and you go, okay, I recognize that you are trying to protect me. It's your ego, right? Your ego is literally saying, hey, or this doesn't feel right. It's like the little devil on your shoulder. Don't. Don't take any risks. You might lose everything. So you want to be acknowledging that it's real. It's like, hey, I feel this feeling, but it's not real evidence. It's. It's false evidence appearing real. So there's a distinction between what is real and what appears real. Now, in truth, everything we feel, everything we think, it's not real. It's our lens on the situation and we're seeing that lens through a filter. And if you think about it in photographic terms, if you've got a neutral density filter, it darkens the image. If you've got a promised filter, it softens the image. If you've got some sort of graduated filter, it graduates half the image. If you think about your emotions as the filter you're placing on your lens, on the world, you know, think about it this way. When you win a job and you have a really happy client and is paid, how do you feel versus not winning a job, not getting paid, or a client not being that happy? Now, hopefully you don't have too many clients that aren't that happy. But we feel different emotions. And this is to do with what we call an emotional pendulum. We can be, you know, highly charged in a positive area or highly charged in a negative area. And when we make decisions from a high positive charge or a high negative charge, we're not seeing the full picture. And so I want you to think of abundance and scarcity as, as, as the charge and, and negative. And you always want to be making decisions from a place of neutrality.

So, you know, in terms of how do you combat this? Well, this time of year particularly, there's a lot of negativity. I pop into a few Facebook groups and there's a lot of negativity and a lot of fear based charge. You know, I was in a group recently and they were like, they were saying, oh, yeah, you know, why is my cash flow so up and down? You know, why is it clients can't pay on time? Why is it my, my cash flow looks like a kind of jagged sawtooth wave?

I posed the question, well, who here bills 50% up front and 30% on completion of filming? And the only thing you're waiting for at the end is the 20%. And it was like tumbleweed. And I realized at that moment that no one in that group wanted a solution. They just wanted to complain because it made them feel better that they were all in the same boat. And you have to be so careful if you want to be the top 5% who actually build a business, who actually achieves their goals. Like Tim in my group, who has just had his second six figure quarter. He started working with us a year ago and a year ago Tim was doing everything himself. Now he's working three days a week, he's looking after his kids two days a week, and he's putting everything out to contractors and he is being the business development manager in his business and he's growing rapidly.

That's a mindset shift. And, and so you want to make sure that you acknowledge if you have this mindset because it's not serving you, it's certainly not going to get you to where you want to get to. And you know, if you're not clear about where you want to get to, it's very difficult to hit a moving target. You know, one of the first things our members do in the accelerator program is we do a module called Define your why, what does success look like to you? And we go through a process of creating a vision board for what your life looks like. And then we do an audit of your current clients and we work out where the opportunities are. And then we marry up the vision for your future life with the audit of where your current business is and we look at the profit opportunities to help you achieve that. And then we create a strategic plan to execute. Now that's the mechanics of it. But the weekly coaching calls and the weekly accountability help you stay in that abundance zone and out of the negative zone. And so, you know, it's really important that you acknowledge that the people you spend time with will influence which space you sit. And if you want to stay in the lack mentality, then, you know, go to some of those Facebook groups and say, hey, I'm really, I'm really pissed off that, you know, my, my clients haven't paid me for three months. The fact is, that's on you. You know, if you're not setting up deals correctly to make sure you get money out front, then you deserve to be getting the treatment you're getting. And I don't mean that with any malice, but it's like if you don't set the deal up correctly, you know, you're screwed. You really are screwed. And so it's really important that you acknowledge your mindset and also set up the business in the right way. So I guess my closing thoughts, if you like, for this episode are, you know, if you are sitting here listening to this middle of December, worried about the lack of work in January, take this sage advice, okay? It's because you didn't do enough marketing in September, October and November that the marketing that you have to be Doing may not see a lead for three to six months. So my guys in my group are marketing every single day with organic traffic, with, with. With some paid occasionally, but mostly on LinkedIn, mostly with just, you know, organic outreach and, and a strategy that we use to connect with people and, you know, they're really going for it. And what we typically find is the work you'll do in the next 30 days may not yield a return for 90 days, but if you're doing a post a day every single day, you will start building up an incredible relationship with your audience. And if you're really clear on what you do and who you serve and how your product and offer helps the market, you will start to get into a position where this time next year, you will be in a very different space. You know, who doesn't want to be like Tim. Where he went from having this big client, sat back when I'm all right for a few months, and then realized that he hadn't done any marketing. He joined the program in February last year. He's absolutely smashing it. In fact, I'm going to get Tim on the podcast at some point to tell his story. But I want you to think really about, you know, not if you haven't done marketing for the last few months, that's okay, but where do you go from here? What. What do you do next? How do you change things? You know, I think it was Albert Einstein that said, you know, if you. The definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. So if you're sitting in the middle of December worried about, you know, what's going to happen with work next year, and then telling yourself, well, I'll maybe do something about it in January or February, like, just accept that that's probably not a great strategy and that if you want to accelerate that process, you want to be surrounding yourself with the right people. And, you know, whether that's in my accelerator program or someone else's, it's kind of irrelevant. You know, I don't worry about, you know, that it's like, I want to support you to grow your business and to not feel this feeling of lack. And so the only decision you've got to make is what are you going to do about it? How are you going to fix this problem? Now, if you want to do that with us, then by all means, you know, go to videobusinessaccelerator.com, click on Accelerator Program, follow the instructions, and we can have a call. There's absolutely no pressure to do anything on that call. But if we feel is a good fit, we might offer an opportunity to work with us. We're not right for everyone, but I am really. My mission is to help video producers accelerate their business and not feel this pain of the fear of, like, I had a great summer but maybe didn't save enough money or I didn't do any marketing. And now things are looking quiet because as I said before, I've had some pretty big jobs in January. You've got to be marketing and you've got to be coming from a place of abundance. You've got to be coming from a place of wanting to help your market achieve their goals. And that's the secret to success. But I'll leave you with this thought. None of it is easy, and it's certainly a lot harder on your own. And, you know, the guys in the group that I facilitate say, you know, it's the community that helps them get through it. We've got, you know, business owners from all over the world in different stages all supporting each other. And that opportunity is available to you, but you've got to take that first step. So if you're interested, you know, video business accelerator.com and follow the instructions on the accelerator program. And just to say, guys, you know, it's been great creating 52 episodes of the show. I didn't, you know, we started a podcast back in 2012 and I think we did 15 episodes and then we ran out of steam because we didn't have a plan and we ran out of guests. We ran out of steam. And this time around, we've been very consistent. We put an episode out every single Wednesday. And, and we've been building an audience and serving you guys with, with hopefully great content and, and, you know, thank you for listening and watching and. And we intend to go even harder next year. This is a really important part of our own marketing, but also something that I love to do. And, and I get to speak to a lot of cool filmmakers. And. Yeah, so that's it for me. Next episode will be Christmas Day, so I look forward to sharing with you on Christmas Day with another update. All right, guys, take care.

You've been listening to the Video Business Accelerator podcast with your host, Dan Lenny. If you are a video business owner who is tired of going it alone and would benefit from mentorship, support, and weekly accountability, then mouse over to www.videobusinessaccelerator.com to learn more about how the accelerator program can help you today. 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.