Insights on Achieving Any Goal Thanks to #SMMW20
Eric Cook recaps Social Media Marketing World 2020, highlighting Cliff Ravenscroft's four-step process for achieving goals: identifying limiting beliefs, disassociating from them, conditioning new beliefs, and using vision boards and public accountability. He shares how this framework drove his own moves, from leaving a 15-year banking career to completing a 100-mile mountain-bike fundraiser.
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Greetings everybody, welcome to the Wednesday, March 11th, 2020 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook coming to you from WSI Digital where we work with our clients to help them identify, connect, and engage with their customers online. You can learn more about us over at www.poweredbywsi.com. Which, if I haven't mentioned it because we've been absent for the last couple of weeks, poweredbywsi.com is a brand new look and feel website complementing our corporate headquarters over in Toronto. You're going to be seeing some more changes to Powered by WSI coming soon as we kind of refine our content and our message, but we're really excited about the new look and feel, our blog area, and know Ellie has done a tremendous job of putting together a lot of Did You Know videos with a lot of interesting information about different social platforms and digital marketing strategies. So by all means, hop over to poweredbywsi.com and check it out and let me know what you think. I'll be very curious on any feedback that you have to share. But today we are here at Free Webinar Wednesdays. As I mentioned, I, I've been absent for a little bit, lots of conference, lots of travel, actually sneaking away a little bit on a mini vacation, but I didn't want to go 3 weeks without having a Free Webinar Wednesday show. And I just got back from one of my most favorite events on the planet, Social Media Marketing World out in San Diego, California. So what I want to do today is catch up and say hello to all my Free Webinar Wednesday friends out there. But give you a little bit of a recap of the Social Media Examiner conference, Social Media Marketing World, talk a little bit about some of the insights and big pictures. And then I've got a particular session that I wanted to talk a little bit about, which really doesn't have a tremendous— I guess I don't want to say relevancy because everything was relevant because it was there, but it wasn't a session that was about social media and digital marketing. It was one that was more along the lines of developing a mindset around achieving goals. And there's a lot of people obviously that are visiting San Diego for this event that are either working within an organization, managing their own company, social media. There are agencies, solopreneur entrepreneurs, people looking for inspiration of starting their own business. And so one of the sessions that I sat in on Sunday, which are typically more workshop-based sessions, really hit home with me. And we'll talk a little bit about Cliff Ravenscroft and his session and some of the observations that I got, that even if you're not intimately involved either as part of social media at your organization or you've got your own company, whatever the case is, some of Cliff's recommendations I think resonate for pretty much anybody that really wants to have the mindset of achievement. And hopefully I'll be able to share some cool stuff that you'll be able to put to use within your life within the very near future. I know some of those are already starting to happen with me. So housekeeping items— today's show and all shows when we have them are obviously live, and I see a number of folks and some familiar faces in the audience today. Live shows are great because I get to hear from you, the audience. So if you've got a comment, question, thought, or just want clarification on something, please do not hesitate to use the chat functionality and let me know. It's always nice to hear, even though I don't necessarily hear, hear you, to see your comments and to get that feedback, which is great. And of course, today's show and all shows, once they are completed, are recorded and made available out at freewebinarwednesdays.com, as well as a pretty robust and comprehensive playlist out on my YouTube channel. So you can always pop out there and get a rundown of all of the shows that we've had. So without further ado, let's chat a little bit about Social Media Marketing World and the awesomeness that exists in San Diego every year. So Painting a picture with pictures or telling a story with pictures is what I'm going to try to do today. I don't have formal slides, but some of the people that I met out there and just kind of how everything flowed over the 3 days. If you have not been to Social Media Marketing World, typically the first day is a half-day session, starts right around noon. Those sessions are a little bit longer in duration, typically around 90 minutes. And they're more workshop related, so you can get into some deep dive. You normally only have like 2 or 3 that you're able to take the first half day because they are a little bit longer. And then the next day and the following day are full days with typically an opening and a closing keynote, and then more concurrent sessions than you could shake a stick at. And the cool part about being part of Social Media Marketing World is the last 3 years now, we've purchased what's known as the All Access Pass, and that gives us the ability after the event is over and all the little technology gremlins do their thing and they transfer all of the presentations into digital content, we get a link that allows for us to access all of the presentations. We get recordings, we get the audio, we get the PowerPoint slides in PDF format, we get transcriptions. So we have that as a repository in one of our tasks. When we get that is we make sure we go out to the Social Media Examiner site and we pull all that information down. So we keep it in our own Google Drive repository. So we've got historical reference to that because there's a ton of stuff and you are never ever going to be able to attend this event and get to all of the sessions that you want to get to. And that was one of the things that became apparently clear to me the first year. The second year was very much an appreciation for having that all-access ticket, and of course we did it again. We have already bought our tickets for Social Media Marketing World 2021 and are planning on going back again next year, and a number of WSI colleagues joined us. One of the things that I was able to do just because of some flexible travel on my end was get out to San Diego Saturday before the event actually started. And one of the guys that I heard speak back in 2018 when I attended for my very first time, who inspired me to think of the concept of a completely new business model, online education and training. You'll be seeing more of this coming out. And ideally, I would have been inspired in '18 and implemented it in '18. But some of the things that we talked about This is Pat Flynn, and he is an awesome guy. Smart Passive Income is his brand, although he does podcasting and all sorts of other online initiatives to help educate and teach entrepreneurs and people that want to grow their business and serve the right people online. I would strongly encourage you to find anything that Pat produces. He's got a couple of podcasts. One is called Ask Pat, the other one is called Smart Passive Income or SPI. Some really, really good information that he's sharing. And I've told him when I got a chance to meet him in person, a lot of his content is being piped into my ears while I'm on my mountain bike or out for a run or walking the dogs. And so, even though this is the first time he had met me, that's oftentimes the case when you run into some of these folks that you get a chance to follow and pay attention to remotely in between the sessions is you feel like you know them. And I imagine it's got to be a little bit weird for some of these people because he talks a lot about his family and his kids, and people are coming up and making comments and asking about his son and his daughter. And, you know, but you kind of put that out there when you're a digital social influencer, and it is what it is. So I was able to get in Saturday, and I caught one of his invitations to do a meetup where it was just basically everybody that Pat knows, and it was invited to people hopped on to Eventbrite and paid $10 to help cover the cost of food. And so this meetup was one where I got to meet a lot of other cool people as well, but certainly got a chance to spend some time with Pat, talk to him a little bit about some of his strategies, ask him some questions. Michael Stelzner— and I don't know if I'll have a chance to get through all of my pictures, but this is the gentleman that actually created Social Media Examiner. And the Social Media Marketing World event. So he is kind of like the man of the hour slash year, whatever you want to call it. And so it was cool to be able to reconnect with Michael. I've met him a couple of times, we've exchanged emails. I imagine he meets a ton of people, but was very gracious, and it was always good to chat and catch up with him. And then the last guy there in the middle, and we joked about going to the same barber from the UK, Chris Ducker. He actually wrote a book and has got a whole process around this thing called the Youpreneur, very similar to an entrepreneur, but the Youpreneur, which is really focused on picking you as an individual and who are the people that you particularly want to serve or take care of with the skill sets and the knowledge and the expertise that you have that is maybe unique to you and no others. And so, Chris's podcast is another one that I oftentimes will pre-download and listen to while I'm traveling on planes or out for a walk with the dogs or a run. And between him and Pat, and you can see they're good friends in real life too, which is always kind of cool because they serve each other on each other's podcasts every once in a while. But got to hang out with both these guys. We compared notes on hair clipping approaches and had some other fun conversations. But it was just good to be actually there. And, you know, I played sports a lot when I was a kid, but I don't really follow a lot of sports these days. But I do follow a lot of digital influencers. And to be able to be at an event like this where you can get right up and have conversations and meet with people right while they're there is, is really like, you know, back in the day going to a Bulls game and hanging out with Michael Jordan for a little bit, asking him questions and just being right there. So it was pretty cool. But what I want to go back to with Michael Stelzner is, is he kicked the event off on the Monday, and in his digital keynote, he always sets the stage for where he sees— they do a digital marketing survey where they poll, you know, thousands of digital marketers from around the country to get a sense of what digital marketers are actually doing and paying attention to and what's on their radar screen. So he shared a lot of that insight with us in the opening keynote, played it off of a Star Wars theme, and it was really kind of cool how he incorporated a lot of Star Wars references into his presentation. But some of the key items that he talked about, I'm just going to list off a handful of the bullet points that jumped out at me that I think need to be on your radar screen and in your own, whether you're doing this for your organization or— I've talked oftentimes here on Free Webinar Wednesdays about the importance of building a personal brand. Those of you that are frequent flyers here on Free Webinar Wednesdays know we do a lot of stuff in the banking space, and, and I often will refer to. It's almost more important in today's day and age more than ever to be seen as your customer's banker, which means they have a personal relationship with you and they feel like they know you, so they trust you and, and they come to you with their business, versus just being somebody that works at the bank. And regardless of what industry you're in, take that banker versus bank mentality and And apply it to whatever industry you're in, and you can kind of see where it's more important for people to get to know you. Because at the end of the day, whether it's a business-to-consumer or business-to-business, which we refer to as B2C or B2B, at the end of the day, most people are now realizing that it's P2P. It's people-to-people or person-to-person. It's those relationships that exist between individuals that have the ability and interest in buying and the in the individuals within the organizations that have the ability to purchase. And, and that person-to-person connectivity is really, really important. So he started off by mentioning the fact that with the, the growing increase in things like GDPR and California privacy and Children's Online Protection, which is starting to influence even some of the video content that's uploaded into YouTube now as we upload video content We have to explicitly indicate that this is not targeted at children 13 years of age or under due to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which has been around for a while, but now it's getting reinforced. The unfortunate reality is a lot of marketers have abused the privilege of being able to use this digital medium, and for that reason, trust and confidence and other sorts of pillars to the ethical marketer are being questioned. You're seeing changes, and he talked about the different requirements that Facebook and other platforms have now as it relates to what access you have to data profiling, lookalike audiences, even advertisements. We work with one bank and had them reach out to me recently, and they were doing an advertisement that they wanted to advertise for an employment position for a mortgage lender, But because it had the word mortgage in the position, Facebook's artificial intelligence engine captured that, looked at the landing page, denied the advertisement. Because if you are going to be advertising anything mortgage related, you have to make sure you've got rates and fees and other sorts of things that Facebook now is making mandatory. Don't even take into consideration the regulatory and compliance things that a bank has to address. But Facebook now has its own layer of requirements which trickle down into Instagram, and other platforms are doing the same thing. We're even seeing Google implementing some of those. But it wasn't an advertisement promoting mortgage loans, so there was no reason to put interest rates and fees and charges. It was an advertisement for employment for someone to work as a mortgage lender. So At our recommendation, taking some screenshots, making sure that it's clear and conspicuous that this is not a mortgage ad. And you are going to have to get comfortable with going back to the advertising platform a number of times to try to break outside of the AI engine that's automatically capturing and rejecting a lot of these things to get a human being to review those. And humans aren't reviewing everything just because of the sheer magnitude and volume of what's going into these ad platforms. And I got an email a couple of days later saying that your suggestion worked, and it took some time, but the advertisement finally did get approved because a human being at Facebook finally looked at the ad and said, oh yeah, this doesn't have anything to do with mortgage loans. They've got equal opportunity employer listed and other sorts of things that you need to have for an employment ad, but they checked all the boxes and then it ended up getting approved. So in all of Michael's opening remarks, it was about how we as marketers or as users of technology in the social arena can get back to this authenticity, transparency, building back the trust so that we're not lumped into the suspicious, oh, you're just trying to rip me off, you're just trying to, you know, trick me into doing something, because it's the unfortunate reality that there's just still a lot of that out there that we just can't get over. So some of that authenticity and transparency, allowing people to come behind the scenes. And one of the— if there was like an overreaching, I guess, theme that was for the conference was being comfortable with storytelling. And not in the sense of telling your story and talking about your products and services and how much they cost, but painting the picture and telling the story of a customer or an experience or some way that you can get into the emotional side. And this is not like rocket science. I think effective ads do a really good job of storytelling, and at the end of the day, you don't know that they're really an advertisement. They're more of a story that's kind of going through— I think of the Budweiser commercials with the Clydesdales and the little doggy. You know, those did— they don't get me to drink Budweiser, but they're a good example of telling the story and painting a picture and creating a feeling. And so part of his presentation was really getting comfortable with storytelling, getting comfortable with video in particular. And that is still, even at the marketer's level, that the people that participated in the survey that he sent around, there's still an overwhelming uncomfortability of getting in front of the camera and telling your story. And I admit that. I've admitted that here. I've done, you know, one video on LinkedIn that went a little bit crazy and was actually generated some really, really good results. But that is still the only one that I've created, even though I know that there's an opportunity to tell that story. And one of my takeaways is doing that more and allowing people to hear what I have to say, but not necessarily just from a, hey, hire us to build your website, or hey, hire us to do you know, all sorts of other things that may or may not necessarily be what I really want people to know about me, more along the lines of, you know, observations and thoughts and industry insight. And that's really, you know, or even personal stuff, going for a bike ride, taking my dogs out for a walk, and giving people that behind the scenes so they get to feel like they know me a little bit better and have that trust. He also acknowledged, and I think anybody that's in the industry knows that they're being impacted by this as well, that organic visibility of social posts is continuing to decline, which means we have to get better at figuring out how we can break through that organic challenge by empowering our employees or getting staff to be able to help share and contribute and participate. Or we have to get more comfortable with the whole concept of advertising and targeting and making sure that if you have to pay for eyeballs to see your information, even if it's information that's not selling your product and service, getting comfortable with the thought of I'm gonna have to buy advertisement to get this message out to a bunch of people that I think I can influence that doesn't even really talk about my product or service, but I really want them to get to know me a little bit better. And normally when marketers share information that is paid for, it has a very advertising product focus associated with it, and this is a different shift that we're gonna have to be comfortable with. He definitely felt— although I had one other individual that said to the contrary, but for the most part, he and many others indicated YouTube, because that's where people go with the intent to watch a video. Video on social platforms like Instagram or Twitter or Facebook are good, but people don't go into Facebook to watch videos. They go into YouTube, however, or maybe even IGTV, because that's designed to be more of a long-form video play. But they go to YouTube with the express intent of watching a video. So if you can put together some longer-form video content that is engaging and compelling, tells the story, brand authenticity, that's ultimately where you'd like to get people to go. And even at Social Media Examiner, he indicated they made this shift a couple years ago, and it's really paying off because most people are going to YouTube and doing what he was hoping they would do and watching that content to 50%, to 60%, to 70% completion, whereas they were getting nowhere near near those numbers when they were sharing that video content through Facebook. Getting started, which is a difficult thing for most people, he presented 3 things that can get you started. And this is kind of the strategy that I'm taking, and I would encourage you all to think about this as well. First off is experiment and get comfortable with short-form video. And by short-form video, what he's referring to are things like stories on Facebook and Instagram or Snapchat or just little videos that you can take. They don't last forever, they expire in 24 hours. You do the video, it doesn't take a lot of time. If you don't like it, you delete it. But posting it, getting comfortable with producing that yourself and watching other people do it, and pay attention to what everybody else is doing— short form is going to get you comfortable with the concept of talking to your phone, pressing the play button, holding it in front of you, not feeling like you're being, you know, I'm all this and look how cool I am, but really it's getting outside of that fear of feeling like everybody's going to think that you're an egomaniac because you're talking to your phone and getting into the mindset of you have some helpful information that you want to share and there's an audience out there that really needs to hear it. The next step in that evolution is experimenting not just with the short form But getting into entertainment-based content. And this is where TikTok— and there was only one session on TikTok this year. I suspect if it's around, it's going to be more, but that session was packed to the gills, spilling out into the hallway. But TikTok is taking the social media platforms by storm. It's the most downloaded app. It's predicted to be in excess of Facebook here very shortly. Just making sure that you understand, I've been— I have an account. I'm not posting on it yet, but I've been following, seeing what people are doing. You've got lip-syncing, you've got other sorts of things that are going on, you've got different stories, but there's other people that are actually sharing information. And in a prior webinar, I had Ben Pankin from Social Assurance on, and we talked a little bit about some of those things as well. But certainly TikTok is one to pay attention to, even if you don't want to be an active publisher. Be familiar with the platform, what's going on, what people are doing there. It was reinforced again within the session. The last thing, once you get comfortable with those short stories, entertainment-based content, then you can move yourself into more of the longer-form video where you now start— can actually produce content that ends up out on YouTube or Instagram TV, because now you've got a little bit more comfort level in speaking in front of the camera. You understand how to entertain as well as educate, and now you can incorporate that into a video strategy where you can incorporate some of the, you know, video editing capabilities that you might be seeing with some of the other producers that are out there. So that's really kind of the evolutionary process. So I just saw a question come in and I'm going to quickly do a quick check. So, gotcha. All right. That was just simply a thank you for sharing this information thus far. You are quite welcome. So I keep the little control panel hidden while I'm actually doing my little chitchat. So when I see the question mark come up, I want to make sure that I pay attention to that. So So Stelzner's kickoff was great. Got even more notes, but certainly it was a, it was a really good session that gave us a lot of things to think about as the conference kicked off. But if I go back to Sunday, I wanna chat a little bit more about my session that I sat in on with Cliff Ravenscroft. And if I go and actually pull up his picture here, so this is Cliff, and he started the presentation by pretending to tear up $300 because he told the story about how he had a difficult mindset in increasing his rates and being able to be comfortable charging people $300 an hour for what he knows and the value that he brings to his clients and actually intentionally told somebody to, you know, just go over here and you can get the same information for free, and basically was throwing $300 away. So that's him holding $300 worth of $100 bills, and then he ripped everything up. Of course, it was fake. He didn't rip up real $300. But when he did it, everybody in the audience was kind of shocked by the fact that that he started off with that. But in, in his presentation, he just talks about sometimes, oftentimes, we have these limiting beliefs that we impose upon ourselves that prohibit us from achieving our goals. Whether we say to ourselves, and we're all familiar with the whole concept of imposter syndrome, but I'm not good enough, people wouldn't hire me for this, there's other people that are smarter than I am. And shared some ideas around kind of getting around that and being free of those limiting beliefs. And so, there were 4 little items that he shared related to breaking free of these limiting beliefs that I thought were pretty good. First is you have to become aware of the limiting belief itself. So, as you sit down and you say, well, what are the goals that I want to achieve and what are all the reasons why I'm not achieving them. That's a good place to start. And chances are you're going to have an excuse for all of those. And the excuse is exactly the reason why you're being limited. And you need to go back and take a look at those excuses and say, you know what, write them out. What's the excuse that is there? And, and, and so that's the first step in the process. Of trying to figure out why you're not meeting your goals or getting kind of the success that you would like to achieve. Then you need to spend a little bit of time, what he refers to as discovering the source of those excuses. And there's a few ways, or a few, I guess, a few areas where we're getting some of those things. So he mentions things like verbal programming because Maybe somebody told you, you got to work hard, you got to put in your time, you got to do this, nobody's going to pay you for that. You've got modeling expectations where you actually, maybe you saw your parents working really, really hard, working 2 jobs, working in jobs that they didn't like, or you see other people doing this and you just think, well, that's what needs to be done. And, you know, you can't jump right to— and I think that was one of the things that he gave as an example is, you know, My father, there's no way that he could have charged $300 an hour for what he did. He was a very humble man. And so when he was encouraged by someone that he should increase his rates, that was one of the things that held him back is, well, my father was a really smart guy and he couldn't do that. So it makes him think, makes me think that I can do it. There could be specific incidents that took place when, when you were young, or there may even be sources of negativity where people that you're hanging around, whether it's intentional or unintentional, will reinforce some of those things or maybe hold you back because they're jealous. Or maybe you're watching things like, you know, movies and TV shows that reinforce that, you know, all of this either isn't possible or how you achieve a goal really isn't really the way that it happens. The next part, which isn't probably as easy as he made it sound, is Disassociating yourself from all of those things and kind of saying, you know, it doesn't matter what I learned when I was young. It doesn't matter what I see on television. It doesn't matter what my friends and family are saying about me wanting to quit my job. I got a little bit of that, I'll have to admit, when I made the decision after 15 years as a community banker that I wanted to step away from banking. The next logical position for me was going to be the CEO of the bank that I was working at. Unless I really screwed things up, but I had a really nice logical career path. But that wasn't what I wanted to do. That wasn't what I felt my purpose on this earth was. And so some of this, it was nice to hear a little bit of reinforcement, but now when I'm at the business and I'm taking myself to the next level and I go back to, um, I mentioned earlier with Pat Flynn and hearing him speak in 2018. I was sitting in this session thinking, well, what are the reasons that I have that I haven't moved forward with the business plan that I put together when I heard Pat speak in 2018? And really questioning some of those things, because at every stage in your life, you're going to have different areas, different times, different moments when you need to break out of what you're doing and achieve something greater. And so anyway, some good introspective conversation I was having on my end just to determine what it was that, that, that I needed to do. And yeah, so I guess those are kind of the 4 main things. Let's see, so disassociation— I'm kind of looking at my notes on the other screen, so I apologize on that. But the next The 4th item on that was conditioning an empowering alternate belief. And, you know, really kind of saying— and this is where he kind of got in, he played off with the $300 quite a bit when he told the story— but conditioning that, repeating it, writing it down, documenting that, putting it in front of you, whether it's through a vision board or saying it to yourself when you wake up. And making sure that that actually ends up happening. He told the story of wanting to own a Volkswagen Beetle, would love to own a Beetle, but not really much of a car guy. Somebody that he coached recognized that that was something that he wanted, sent him a little tin diecast replica of a Volkswagen Beetle that was on his desk that he looked at every day while he was working. And within 2 months, he actually owned a Volkswagen Beetle that is in his driveway now that he drives on a regular basis. And it was kind of like you put it in front, you put it in the universe, you put it out there, and you are going to have a whole lot likelier chance of being able to achieve it. So, some of the other steps that he shared as part of achieving this goal. So, the first really part of it was breaking out of this mindset that's limiting you, that's holding you back. The next thing that he talked about, and I believe that there were 7 or 8, it looks like maybe 10 actually. So, I'll just rattle these off and then I'll kind of come back to each of them. So, a way to achieve any goal is first define what it is that you want. And so, again, this was the whole example of the Volkswagen Beetle that he wanted to have. Next is define why you want it. There needs to be some sort of a purpose. You have to then believe that it's actually possible, that you can do that, you can achieve that, you can leave the bank and start your own business and be successful. Decide right now, not, well, in another— and this is probably one of the ones that I have a hardest time on because there's so many things going on that I have a difficult time of focus— but decide right now that you're going to achieve this goal and it has to happen. Write it down. I want to go back to that one because this plays off of some of the ways that note-taking is being done in my world. Ensure that your goals are in a place where you see them on a regular basis. Telling others about your goal— and keep in mind, you will get some negativity, you'll get some questioning, but it also creates a sense of accountability because if you tell the right people, they're going to be there to encourage and move you towards that goal and be a cheerleader and a support system. Taking massive action was the 8th item that he had talked about. Having some evaluation of your results to determine what you're doing, if it's working or not. And then if it's, if it's not working, or even if it is, don't be afraid of changing your approach, moving things up, shifting in a different direction. And a couple of things that he said around that, and this is one of the reasons why I think I like Social Media Marketing World so much, and particularly one of the reasons why I was excited to go to the meetup and meet Pat in person. And then as an added bonus, I got to meet Chris. Is find individuals that have already done this and achieved their goals, and then figure out how you can connect with them, seek their advice, read what they're posting. Consume all the content that they're sharing, because their chance— chances are they're making the same errors that you likely make if you try to do this on your own. When I made the decision to leave the bank, there were a number of people that I trusted that were outside of my community because it was a pretty sensitive thing in a small little community with me being at the bank. But there were people outside of my hometown that I trusted and had done something similar just to get some feedback of what are the things that I should be thinking of, what are the questions that you should have, how did you, how did you pick an attorney, how did you pick an accountant, those sorts of things. So pretty important elements there. So those are the 10. I'm gonna just see, I got another question that's come up, and let's just kind of go. Great way of viewing this— purpose-driven. Absolutely. So having a purpose into why you're doing what you're doing. You know, some of you may know a little bit of the purpose around why I decided to leave the bank. I'll give you the abbreviated version, but, you know, one of the reasons why I decided to step away while I was in banking, a really good friend of mine's daughter ended up getting diagnosed with stage 4 neuroblastoma cancer while we were in banking. He and I met at the graduate school of banking. And I had been doing web development on the side for a number of years. And back then, there were no sites like CaringBridge, although that platform has since come and gone now, unfortunately. But there was really no easy way— blogging wasn't a thing— for someone to share information online. So I took the initiative to build a website for the family, and we actually shared Christy's story through the web, which was intentionally designed to just be for friends and family, and that took on a viral nature. And she battled the disease for 4 years, and when she passed, we achieved a million visits to the site. When we launched her fundraising for her Christy Thomas Fund for her charity, we ended up getting our first donation from Germany within literally 20 seconds of launching the donation site. And I saw firsthand how the internet and technology really brought people together and felt at that moment in time I really needed to do that and to figure out ways, whether it was for businesses or individuals, but how can I leverage this technology to make it possible for people to connect with each other even before the days of social networking sites took place. This is in 2003, '04, '05, somewhere around in there. So, so that really was my purpose, and that's what drove me and got me to leave the bank and to decide that I wanted to go be part of this thing called the internet and help others connect and build their brand. So having some sort of a purpose like that, some sort of a passion, is certainly important. So, but if we go back to the 10-step process in the time that we've got remaining, I'm just going to give you a little bit more detail around each of the 10 items so that you have a little bit more perspective. So, the first one was you have to know what it is that you want, what you are looking for. He wanted to be able to spend more time at home. He generates and he shared some of his numbers. A good deal amount on a monthly basis. He does not— this is one of the things that he, he wanted to work Tuesday, Wednesdays, Thursdays. He did not want to work Mondays and Fridays. I'm gonna work 3 days a week and I'm gonna take the other 4 off. And that was his goal. That was what he wanted to do. That's how he wanted to build his business. He suggests writing down a what-do-I-want list. And we've all done these, you know, what do I want, what do I not want, whether you call it a T chart or whatever, but focus on the what do I want list. And he suggested don't stop until you get 50. And they can be giant, audacious, big. I want a jet, I want to own a helicopter, I want to get my pilot's license, I want to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. All these different things that you want. And then once you get that, boil it down, go to the top 10, boil that down to get to the top 3. And then once all of that is said and done, You're going to have, hopefully, and it worked for him, you're going to have one item that's going to be the number one thing that you want, and that is going to be your driving purpose. And as I think back to Christy's story, or I think back to this business plan that I hatched when I heard Pat speak, my number one objective in all of that is really to help people figure out how they can connect through digital. And to be able— now that might be a little bit too specific, and that might not necessarily even be the right answer, but helping other people and educating is really what I ultimately want to do. Because I feel if I do that the right way— it's why since 2009 we've been doing— I've been doing— Jeff and I for a number of years have been doing these weekly webinar shows, and, and it's about sharing information that I know that I'm hoping somebody out there, either on the live side or hearing it after the fact and catching the recording, will get some sort of a nugget that will help them in their job, in their life. And by doing that, that is going to get me the other things that I want of being able to work where I want, work when I want, spend more time with my wife and my dogs, enjoy my bicycles, those sorts of things. Defining why you want it, and this goes back to the comment earlier about having that purpose. Why is it that it's there? You've got to have a purpose that's going to fuel you to get— fuel you, and say that 3 times fast, everybody. Ready? Fuel you. Fuel. So, it's got to be something that's going to fuel you to get out of bed and to get excited and a big enough why so that the how comes to mind and you know that that's what's going to get you from point A to point B. Having that belief that it's possible. I've seen this quote a number of different times, but it's always one that is used in this context. Henry Ford, I believe, was the one that said it originally, but whether you believe you can or you can't, either way you're correct. And if you think about that as it relates to identifying your goal, putting yourself in the proper mindset to ensure that what you want to do, You've got to have a full belief, and you're probably going to be one of the only ones that's going to believe it initially, especially if it's one that's way outside of the box. Decide right now that you're going to do it, and you basically squish any of the other options. And again, I go back to the last time I made one of these big decisions, determining And getting the confidence to walk into the CEO's office and to sit down face-to-face and have the typical small talk. Hey, how's your weekend? Great. Everything's good. Cool. Oh, by the way, I'm offering my resignation. When there was no dissatisfaction on my part, I wasn't upset about anything. There was no reason why I felt like I needed to leave. It was just basically, this is something that I need to do. And it was something that just had to happen. And, uh, and getting that decision, once that I've, I've decided I'm gonna do this, that was one of the hardest parts. But once that decision was done, the rest of it actually became a lot easier. So deciding right now. Um, the 5th one I mentioned that I wanted to come back to, and this is writing it down. And I know I have talked about The Rocketbook a number of times. It was part of my, I think it's for all of my like wishlist Christmas sessions that I've done. It's always there. But the Rocketbook notebook is the best of both worlds in my opinion. He quoted a study and said people are 42% more likely to get anything that they want in life by writing it down. And he mentioned some of the physiological elements of that dealing with the creativity and the tactile nature and how you're using different hemispheres of your brain and crossing the neurons between the corpus callosum So don't mean to turn this into a physiology course, but there's a certain chemical and physiological component to writing things down versus verbalizing them or even typing them on a keyboard. And a number of the notes that I took while I was at Social Media Marketing World were done on my Rocketbook, or I took notes on a laptop and then came back because I can actually type faster than I can handwrite and But then, coming back to the Rocketbook and jotting some of the key ideas and observations down. So, the big things that I got out of the session were actually written down and put into writing. The nice part about that is I have the benefit through Rocketbook to be able to write that down, so I gain the physiological benefits. But Rocketbook then gives me the ability to scan that, store it in Evernote, tag it, archive it, so that I know I can always get to it. But writing that down has solidified that in my brain and made it more likely that those things are actually going to happen. So if you're not using a Rocketbook yet, I would strongly encourage you to pick one up because they are awesome. Love them to death. Place your goals where you can see them. I will have to admit, my wife is a very big vision person and she's always talking about goals. And when she was an active sales representative back when we originally met, she would have sticky notes and other sorts of things on the mirrors in the bathrooms and other sorts of areas where she would walk and see those goals and objectives. This is the whole VW Beetle example where someone sent that to him. He put it on his desk every day. He would, you know, see it sitting there, reinforce that the VW Beetle was something that was in his future. And 2 months later, lo and behold, he found one on eBay and ended up buying it. So I've done this on occasion when the itch comes along to get a new bicycle. I'll find little pictures of different bikes that I want or other sorts of things and just making sure that they're there where you're paying attention and, you know, peppering them around your work area if it's appropriate, just so that they're within the line of sight. Telling others about your goals. Now, depending on the impact of your goal, I mean, if you're thinking about leaving your job, you probably are not going to want to tell your coworkers, because that might be something relatively confidential that you don't want sneaking around the office. But having a trusted source or some folks that you can share this with— another one of the initiatives that I created several years ago was called Pedaling with a Purpose, and it's— the whole concept around that was Picking an event that is cycling-related that might push you outside of your comfort zone. So my first Pedaling with a Purpose event was a 100-mile mountain bike race, and I did it with the intent of raising money, having people sponsor me to raise money for neuroblastoma, because I was raising money to help support Kristi's battle against cancer. And so I created a website, I sent emails out to all of my friends and coworkers encouraging them to me raise money. I was going to ride my mountain bike for 100 miles, which I'd never even thought of. I'd ridden centuries on my road bike, but spending, you know, 10+ hours on a trail on a mountain bike is a little bit on the verge of crazy. Although most people nowadays, there's a lot of endurance-based. But back when this was like the only 100-mile mountain bike race in the state of Michigan, I made the commitment that I was going to race this. I was going to get in shape for it. I was going to raise money and I was going to finish And because I told people, I had people that would contact me and they'd send me email, hey, how's training going? How's your fundraising going? I was able to finish the race and I was able to raise close to, I think it was $17,000 in my very first Pedaling with a Purpose event, just due to me telling the story, painting a picture, doing this for Christy. This was before GoFundMe and crowdsourcing sites were out there. So, it would probably be a little bit more difficult to do today, but that was the direct result of telling other people about my goal and making sure that they knew that this was something that I was committed to and I needed their help to make sure that I trained and was devoted and didn't get out there and hurt myself. And a lot built up to that and I was able to achieve it. Take a massive action. What's the one thing that you can do right now that would move you closer to that goal. Pedaling with a Purpose certainly had a massive action with making the commitment and shelling out the $125 entry fee and registering for that, for that event. And so, you know, the massive action to commit yourself to that, evaluate your results and determine what's working and what's not. So you are going to fail He mentioned in his presentation he failed a number of times. I failed a number of times doing things that you, you know, but you got to learn from those failures. What did you focus on? What things went right, if anything? But why did you fail? And making sure that you take action and do something a little different next time. And then modifying that approach and changing things and making sure that you're comfortable. Because if this is something that's really important to you, it's going to be harder for you to give up. And if you keep doing the same thing over and over again, it's going to make that seem like more of a reality, like you really should. But being comfortable with changing your approach, modifying what it is that you're doing. The last little nugget, and he did have a bit of a ministry background as well, served as a pastor actually for a number of years. before doing this. But the other thing, you can boil all of this down into one word, and everybody was very curious on what that one word is. But he said, ask. And the whole concept of ask and you shall receive. If you ask for help, if you ask for support, most people will try to do a lot of this shift and goal achievement by themselves. And I can tell you the decision to leave the bank and to start a digital practice, the decision to sign up for a 100-mile mountain bike race, the decision to do pretty much anything big in my life— there are people that I definitely had to ask, not just for assistance but permission. And so asking and getting others involved is certainly an important component to all of that. So many other sessions that I sat in on that talked specifically about video strategies, tools, what sorts of equipment you should have, different apps and sites and software that you should be using. Those were all really, really good, and certainly from a tactical perspective, giving me the, you know, new things that are out there. Those are all really great, but I, I really enjoy the sessions that lead up into Social Media Marketing World. The next one that I'm not going to talk about today, but I sat in on another one about developing an influential personal brand, and that played off of a lot of what Cliff talked about in achieving your goals. And then I believe the third one that I sat in on was all about building a podcast starting from scratch. What are the things that you need to have in place and the power of a podcast and being able to have your voice? So some of what's on my radar screen is ways to leverage Free Webinar Wednesdays, for example, and potentially making that a component or an element as part of a podcast, or even setting up another podcast that's a little bit more banking-specific and even more narrow on the things that I love and, and what I enjoy, my teachings at the various banking schools around the country and those sorts of things. But a lot of Sunday was really about just what do I need as Eric to be able to take myself to the next level, which is ultimately going to take our business to the next level and at the end of the day help our customers get to their next level. So, so yeah, hopefully that— I don't know if it's inspired you to go out and buy your ticket for Social Media Marketing World next year in San Diego. I mentioned at the beginning Ellie and I already have ours and We're planning on returning and coming back. I did tell one local community banker about it last year and was very surprised and pleasantly surprised to see both of them out. But you know, really there's no other community bank representation at this event, and I really think there should be because that's the market and industry that I'm the most passionate about. It's also one where I feel there's some really good stories and. Some good influence and some good results that are being created. And, and having some of the knowledge from Social Media Marketing World to be able to take back to the institution, I think, is certainly something that could be very advantageous to the bank as well as whoever brings that back for their career. So that concludes my Social Media Marketing World ramblings. I appreciate you for sitting in on today's session and listening. Hopefully you were able to get some good notes on some of the observations I had from Cliff. If you'd like to learn more about Cliff, I would certainly encourage you to go out to cliffravenscraft.com. You can get all sorts of info about him. He's got a podcast, he's got some downloadable info, he's got some good blog posts, he's got some video. It's going to give you a better sense of who he is and his story. I didn't mention it when I started off, but he was a very, very large individual, made the commitment, and this is one of his, I am going to exercise 6 days a week, every week for the rest of my life. I am going to not eat sugar anymore for the rest of my life. And so, some of these big audacious goals He basically drew a line in the sand and said, this is what's gonna happen, and he has lived by those. He's lost well over 100 pounds, so he definitely puts his money where his mouth is and is living what he preaches every single day. So it was, it was a cool inspirational event and probably a really great way for me to kick off the conference this year. So hope you enjoyed today's show. We are in the process of getting other presenters live up to resume our conversation on WSI's Digital Minds book series. As you may recall, we are now in our 3rd release of the Digital Minds book, and I just got notice from Cheryl, our marketing director in Toronto, that it has been officially released on amazon.ca. So it is available in Canada, and we are going to be releasing it here, I believe, within the next couple of weeks. It'll be available on amazon.com. So you will already have an opportunity to download the Kindle to actually get the book. And I've got a number of people that have reached out to me and have told that as soon as I get books, we're gonna go ahead and get some copies out. So if, if you are interested in getting a copy of the book, be sure to keep an eye on Amazon, and I'll be making a formal announcement when it's available here at Free Webinar Wednesday. So with that being said, enjoy the remainder of your week. I will look forward to seeing you online here at freewebinarwednesdays.com. Thanks for joining me today, and go out and conquer. Talk to you later, everybody. Bye-bye.
