Why Your Results Don’t Match Your Work Ethic

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I have never felt this good. I shouldn't say never, but I haven't felt this good since like 2017, 2016, which is a freaking decade ago almost. It's nuts.

Okay, this is so true. It's been super fun to watch all of your progress because For years, Chris, you have been working really, really hard. Like really hard. So what on earth changed? That's what we're gonna talk about today.

Well, it started with a setback, right? So if you guys remember, less than a year ago, I tore my bicep and my shoulder and had to have surgery to repair both. And that was kind of the first moment where Matt Zanes, I don't wanna say came into my life, uh, you know, he's been in my life as a friend for a long time, but stepped in and said, hey, let me handle your rehab. And while we're doing this, there's a lot of stuff that we need to correct. If he, he said you're at this crossroads, you're in your upper 40s, right? And you're either gonna start having some not so good posture and you're gonna start kind of limping a little bit from your activity levels. You're gonna start having these little ailments and problems, or you're gonna take the other route in this crossroads and you're gonna look better and feel better and move better and be more mobile than you ever have. And this is kind of that point of no return, right? So for context, I'm 48. And I know, I know, thank you everybody, I look 38. Just kidding. So obviously I chose the, you know, what was behind door of mobility and door of feeling good and looking good. And so I went all in with him and I feel like I've gotta kind of paint the picture when I say going all in with an expert. He is the physical therapist and trainer for Team USA Olympics. He is also the physical therapist and trainer for the Navy SEALs. Both on the East Coast and West Coast. Obviously they have more than just him, but he is one of the key ones. And so when I say expert, I mean like expert. And, and full transparency, even though it's a friend, you pay your friends for their services. That's right. That's, you don't always have to, but it's, if it's going to be a long-term engagement, you do. And I'm only sharing this because I want people to understand what investing in expert looks like. It's $600 a session when I work out with him or when we do my PT. Now they're long extended sessions, but nonetheless, $600 a session. Now, why do I share this? I have never felt this good since I can remember, or at least since like 2016, 10 years ago. I've never looked this good, finally again. And best of all, I've never moved this well. We are correcting all of the weird habits and movements and correcting all of the compensating factors that I've been using slowly, and they've been piling up in the wrong direction. Even though, and this is the point of the episode, even though I had been working really hard, you see, I never missed a day of exercise. I never missed a day in the gym. I never missed a day working out really hard, or at least going on a couple of walks with you and getting lots of activity. I wasn't slacking.

Mm-hmm.

I was putting in hard work, but I was just kind of doing it on my own without an expert looking at me and saying, okay, move this way. Here's what's happening. Okay, stand this way. Look what's happening. Okay. Eat this way or show me what you're eating. Here's what's happening. Mm-hmm. And there actually was, here's the great irony. When I keep referring back to like 2016, 2017 was the last time I felt and looked this good. You know, I was mid-30s at that time, or upper 30s, I guess. I was working out with an absolute expert back then.

Mm-hmm.

Abe Maynard. Remember Abe? I love him.

Mm-hmm.

Absolutely love him. And I missed him. And look what happens. Even though I'm trained to do the hard work, even though I don't miss days, without the expert, you go downhill in a lot of different ways. And so having this expert back in my life is why I can sit here and say at 48, I've never felt better and I've never been more optimistic.

So I love that we're talking about this in terms of physicality because I, I think that, you know, physical fitness and your body runs so parallel to your business. Mm-hmm. So the effort, I, I love talking about it in the physical sense because That's obviously where my story started. If you didn't— if you guys didn't know, I started as a fitness competitor and then a personal trainer. And so I for years had been working out and had been eating what I thought was fairly nutritious from what I learned in magazines. And so I was applying the information that I was seeing, or what I thought, like literally what I was perceiving as correct. And no matter how hard I worked, which was a lot, you guys, so many hours. Chris, I remember sometimes we'd be be at the gym for like 2 hours, 2 and a half hours, and I was not getting the results that I wanted and that I was seeing that these people were saying in these magazines and getting their types of bodies. And it wasn't until I went and really learned from somebody who knew how to dial in nutrition and look at, okay, when are you eating, what are you eating, how much are you eating, are we tracking it? Because also what doesn't get tracked will not move. And so even though you could be working really hard, even though you think you're doing what you should be doing, if you don't have somebody to help you dial it in, and if you don't track it and like really map it and follow it, then you are not going to get the results that you want.

Yeah, I would say this, this is the mic drop moment that we're kind of hoping that you get ready for this. You cannot applaud yourself for working harder than anyone else if you're working harder in the wrong direction. Because it is your responsibility to make sure you're going in the right direction. Imagine you're running a marathon, right? 26.2 miles. You've trained for it, you've worked harder than everybody else for it, and you don't bother to look at the route. You just run in the wrong direction. You're running faster than everybody, you're running harder than everybody, but you're running in the wrong direction. Whose fault is that? It's yours. No, no one's gonna look and say, gosh, you didn't train for it. No one's gonna look and say, geez, you weren't running hard. Mm-hmm. But the end result is the same or worse. When you work really, really hard in your business or in any other area of life, but you don't have the expertise and you go the quote unquote wrong direction, now you just worked harder at going the wrong freaking way and you ended up further away than if you weren't even working that hard. So is this, are we proponents for, well, gosh, you might as well just cut back on your hard work? No. We're saying it's time to get better results. For your hard work anywhere in life. Now, typically we talk about business on this podcast, but this is life, this is relationships, this is friendships, and this is definitely your business. Stop working so hard, banging your head against the wall only to get the same results as last year or worse. And if I'm really being truthful, a lot of people we're talking to out there are working really hard right now and they're getting a little bit less results than they did the year before, the year before that. Now, this is a trend. It's not that they're not working hard. Some people I know are working harder and they're getting less results. When times change, when headwinds come, you need an expert navigator in your boat to point you in the right direction and navigate those winds and those waves like nobody else can.

I'm thinking of so many examples right now, you guys. If you have not found a million examples yet throughout your life as you're scanning what we're talking about, and where you could potentially be wasting a lot of time and energy. That's what we're trying to keep you from. And, you know, Chris mentioned relationships. This would literally be like me trying to guess what I should do to be a better wife with Chris, and I can't— it'd be like me trying to figure it out and trying to figure it out, and him still not— me still not feeling like we're connected and we're still a little off, but I never ask him. Like, I never actually go to the source and say, hey, is there something that I could be doing better? Is there, is there a way that I could be supporting you more? What is it that you're going through and how could I help you, you know, go through this journey with you or whatever that is? And so you guys are constantly guessing, just like I was guessing with those magazines and trying to fill in the details of what these people were doing, you know, in the interim and not just looking at a diet and thinking this one page of diet is what they do day in and day out. Like, there's so many nuances to things that you have to know. This also reminds me of when we first started my fitness membership. So I had an online membership. It ended up having thousands and thousands of women every single month. But in the beginning of that, I would look at other people online, and there were only a few who had anything similar to this at the time. And I remember looking and thinking like, oh my God, how do they get these hundreds of thousands of people on their challenges. And I thought it was just from social media. I was convinced that I was doing a terrible job on social media. So I started showing up more on social media. I was doing lives on social media, and I would be so hard on myself for not getting these hundreds of thousands of people into my challenges that I would start to run in order to have them become a member in the fitness membership. And then all of a sudden, one day, When we actually decided to go to an expert who was running these challenges to get people in their fitness membership, we learned that they were running ads, spending a ton of money doing so. It's like, oh my God, I wish I would have known this like a year prior so that I wouldn't have beat myself up and absolutely exhausted myself in the wrong direction. And you guys weren't even— they weren't even remotely doing what I was doing. They had like a completely insider scoop to this marketing concept that I had no clue around. And that's what's happening right now. There is, there are things going on that you have no clue about in the direction that you want to run, whether it is getting your health in order. And there's massive hacks out there like peptides and nutritionists and people like Matt Zannes that you're not tapping into, that you don't understand. And you're comparing yourself to these people who are using all of these things that you aren't necessarily knowing about or getting access to, and you are feeling behind in comparing yourself.

Guessing and assuming is not a business plan, and guessing and assuming is sure as hell not a life plan. You've got two avenues and only two avenues. You can hire expertise to save yourself all the time, money, and wrong effort, you know, or, you know, effort in the wrong direction, or you can buckle down and aggressively and intentionally learn it. And we've seen examples of both of this. Here's a really good example of like hiring expertise, and then Lori's going to give you an example of buckling down and learning it like, like our friend Jack Abdeeb has. So if you guys know anything about investing, there's something called the rule of 72s. And all this means is the rate at which your money that you invest will compound is you're able to figure it out by dividing your annual return, right? How much are you making as a percentage on your money? You divide your annual return into 72, and that tells you how many years it takes for your money to double without adding another penny. So for example, if you were getting a 10% return on your money because you had an expert managing your money, then 10% divided into 72 means every 7.2 years your money would double without adding another penny. So if you had $50,000 saved, in 7 years it'd turn into $100,000. 7 years after that, it would turn into $200,000. And 7 years after that, it would turn into $400,000. So $50,000 turns into $400,000 in 21 years in that example, investing. This is about if you were earning only 5% because you went in and you started your own Vanguard account and you're just doing this on your own. Now you're working just as hard. You cut back so you could find extra money to invest. You're doing the right thing by quote unquote saving and investing. Except by making 5% on your money because you never got expertise. Now your money only doubles every 14 years. Let that sink in. Your money can double every 7 years if you work with an expert, or it can double every 14 years if you're out there dinking and dunking and screwing on your— screwing around on yourself, getting only half the return. So when you put it that way, everybody would say, well, hell yeah, I'm gonna go get the expert. I'm gonna hire the expert, give 'em a little bit of that money in order to give me the better return. But if you don't have the money to hire an expert, then your only other choice is to stop screwing around, set aside intentional learning hours like you're getting your ass back in school, except you're also the teacher, and diving into the books, diving into AI, and diving into every free resource out there to teach yourself what's working right now.

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Her account is growing on Instagram.

Yes. And so that right now is kind of crazy. People are not really growing on social media right now. Like, it is challenging. And the people who are super committed are growing for sure, but the people who are not going all in and really learning and becoming experts in the arena are not going to grow. So the thing about Jen is, has she gotten help before? Yes, I know that she has absolutely like learned and taken some courses and learned from different people, but majority of her success has come because of self-study. And so I've been voice noting back and forth with her being like, okay, so what's changed for you? Like what all of a sudden has been getting these results? And she's like, well, I've been going all in for 2 years, like really trying to learn this. And especially the last 6 months, she's like, I'm making this like my number one thing because I believe that, you know, there's not a whole lot that eyeballs cannot solve. And that has been what Chris and I have always felt is, you know, if we took one of your programs right now and poured a million people into, sent a million eyeballs to your website, most likely you'd make some decent money because it's, it's, it's usually not the program that's the problem. It's the lack of top of funnel. It's the lack of people looking at your program or your product. And so with Jen, she's really, really focused on, uh, learning. Like, she is studying so insanely hard right now what is working. And so you either need to 100% go all in on all of these different teachings and becoming the expert yourself, or you really need to find somebody who can help you.

Yep. Those are the only two choices. And by the way, if you have a business that is earning under $500,000 right now and you wanna learn how to get over that, we have assembled experts exactly what we're talking about from every single business discipline that you could ever want to hire, except you get to use them for free as long as you're within the program. It's called the Mentor Collective Mastermind. It's become one of the biggest hits ever out there. I think it's one of our favorite programs we've ever, ever put there. Well, most effective, that's for sure. And people are loving it cuz you have unlimited access to all of the experts that we hired in there and put on salary on your behalf. Now we're not enrolling right now. We always do it in very small tranches so we can make sure that we're always having the right ratio of experts to members, but it's a first come, first serve. On the waitlist in terms of you getting an opportunity to be in there. And that's the best part about a program like this. There's a waitlist. You know, it's good. It's like the line outside of a club. So I, if I were you, if this resonates with you to hire an expert, I would go to the community where you don't have to hire the experts, but you could ask the experts just by being in the community as much as you want. Go to loriharder.com/mentor and put yourself on that waitlist right now. Get to the front of the line. LoriHarder.com/waitlist.

All right, you guys, we are so grateful for you. Chris and I are actually rolling into our Elite Level Mastermind this week. We're so excited. Um, and if you want to follow what that looks like, you can go on to our Instagram and see us on stories because I'm sure we'll be doing a lot of fun BTS. But that is where we're going to be all week, and I know that we'll have a lot to report next week for sure on our He Said, She Said from that.

All right, guys, love and appreciate you. Good luck.

Bye, everyone.