Train Your Brain

Increasing Self-Confidence, Creating a Positive Self Image and Understanding Your Business - Determines Business Success.

The First Step to Business Building

Hello Again! It’s Jim DuBois with WindowWashingWealth.com. Today we are going to Train Your Brain. It really is the first area of success for any business. And not just in the beginning, but throughout your entire window cleaning career. Understand, the school never taught us how to train the brain for optimal living. But, it's never too late to train your brain to be strong, happy and successful. But it first starts with the dream stealers who surround us in life…

Do not let the dream stealers steal your dream for why you entered this business in the first place. Prepare yourself. Let your excitement for the possibilities brew. Turn yourself on, build your passion so that nothing will stop you, and this will cement your thinking so you can go through brick walls to attain your goals. Know what you want and go after it. Training your mind is probably more important than the techniques of marketing we talk about in the Business Builder section. I didn’t think so until after I attended a couple of conferences.

I routinely sit at what is called breakfast round tables at window cleaning conferences with new window cleaners who had heard about Window Washing Wealth and were trying to get started. I found that 90% of their problems were their beliefs that they couldn’t succeed. It doesn’t matter where these beliefs came from. The bottom line was their beliefs prohibited them from becoming successful.

Throughout history, the biggest enemy of success for an individual has always been themselves.

Your biggest roadblock to financial success will be you.

You will beat yourself up in a number of different ways, but the biggest one will be lack of self-confidence. If you are already defeated in your head before you start, failure is inevitable. If you are already defeated in your head after you start, failure is inevitable So the first important rule of success is to create self-confidence.

It is normal for everybody to have self-doubts. However, for most people, they have been born completely out of proportion. In my business experience, I would estimate that over 90% of the population has been brainwashed from birth into thinking they are inferior, with parents, friends, and relatives, and co-workers holding them back. I worked through the same problems. Ever since I was a kid, I felt that I could do great things, but there was so much brainwashing going on telling me I couldn’t, or it’s too hard, or only special people get those things, that self-doubts began to creep in. These self-doubts had to be dispersed if I was going to be a success at entrepreneurialism.

If you are going to have any success at all to succeed in the window cleaning business, you cannot have a loser complex - “Born to Lose”. This self-image may become true – if you believe it. But only if you believe it. Positive thinking, take charge attitude, and knowing that so many people, just like you have made it will propel you into the 20% and some of you into the 5% and even 1% elite that I talk about.

Positive thinking certainly isn’t anything new; there have been 100’s of books written about it. But what I’m talking about is a real winning attitude. This is best illustrated in the following examples.

When I first became successful at the window cleaning business, people would out of curiosity, ask me about my business. The most common thing I heard was, “Didn’t the thought of failing worry you? Didn’t you worry about all the money you saved… your house… everything?”

To these people, I would simply say, “Failing never even entered my mind. I wasn’t going to fail.” This reaction as I have learned is common among winners. I see it more and more in interviews with other successful entrepreneurs. One of the first times I saw it was with an interview with boxer Mike Tyson. A reporter asked him, “Since you are so boastful, don’t you worry about what’s going to happen if you lose?” Tyson replied, “I’m not going to lose. It doesn’t even enter my mind. I just don’t think like that.”

This attitude of course, does not make one immune from failures. But to a loser, a failure is the end to it all. To a winner, it is simply an error in the trial and error learning process. It is an error to be corrected. It is another obstacle to overcome. It’s not the end. To be a successful entrepreneur, you have to think about success, but know how to handle failure.

I’ll give you a personal business example. My company has engineered 19 commercial storefront acquisitions. Most all have gone just as planned – successfully. But one, not so well. Break-even at best, maybe even lost out into negative territory. Yet, we are still paying the guy we bought out, every month. Am I giving up and throwing in the towel? Am I a failure? Absolutely not! There were areas of this particular buyout that I look back on now and see as red flags. To me being a winner, it’s simply an error in the trial and error process. Something I learned from to only become better.

A loser is always looking for an excuse to fail. And they always have an excuse when they do. It’s always somebody else’s fault, not theirs. But there are always going to be obstacles. If you fail, you didn’t handle the obstacle properly. There are no valid excuses. It’s your fault if you don’t succeed.

Here are the three most common excuses for losing and why you must not accept them if you really want to win.

Excuse 1.

Another breed of people do BIG things. This other breed is often referred to as ‘THEY”. THEY do this. THEY do that. THEY have this. Only THEY get those things. Who are “THEY”?

First of all, “THEY” do not exist. Most people think that inventions, technology, and creativity in general come from some great master planner’s brain and there are only a select few every generation. That’s not the way things happen. What really happens is that inventions and technology are almost always the result of trial and error, or even pure accident. The start of it all is people actually doing something and discovering how to do it better in the process.

Excuse 2.

Big things are only done by people who get high grades in school or by those who score high on IQ tests. I will dispel this myth for you right now. I know for a fact that a person’s determination plays a very large part. I think the old proverbs are almost always true – “You can do anything you want to do, if you want to do it badly enough.”

Perhaps that’s why few of the real geniuses throughout history did well in school. Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, for instance, both flunked out of school and were considered ignorant. Successful entrepreneurs usually do not do well in school, in fact many of them drop out at an early age. For example:

• Thomas Edison was considered inept at math and a poor reader.
• Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken dropped out of school at age 14.
• Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy’s, did not complete high school.
• Richard Branson, a billionaire entrepreneur dropped out of school at age 16.
• Steve Wozniak, the genius behind the first Apple computers, failed college.

…and the list goes on.

Now, here’s the point of all this. If you are worried that you cannot do big things because you didn’t get good grades in school, forget it. This old proverb is also often true, “A” students make the grades, “B” students make the friends, “C” students make the money. But don’t be misled by my critique of education. It’s important to keep up with the latest technology, so you don’t plunge in and reinvent the wheel. That’s a waste of time and money.

Excuse 3.

The establishment intimidates me. They are too powerful to compete with. Established entities that you must either compete with or deal with, such as government institutions, taxes, and other competing window cleaning companies, may look larger than life to a “common” person. Some things will go through your mind like, “People coming out of big, prestigious universities are too competent to compete with”. Or, “This window cleaning company across town has been here for 20 years. There’s no way I’ll succeed with them here.”

Believe me, all this is an illusion. It’s just a mirage created by what I call ‘false magnifiers’. When I started my first window cleaning company, there were two major window cleaning companies in my area. And they did not like me. I was considered a threat. Even though I was a skinny 19 year old kid. I was flattered nonetheless! They did everything in their power to see me fail. That’s a whole ‘nother article. Yet, I still carved out my piece of the pie with revenues into the six figures within a couple years. Intimidated? No way! I knew what I wanted and was not going to stop until I ‘made it’, which brings me to the next topic of discussion.

Be Persistent

Lack of persistence is the key reason that most people never even get to first base with a successful window cleaning business. Very simply put, most people are stopped to easily especially when the going gets tough.

There is a barrier to success you have to be aware of so you can plan to overcome it. Most people don’t want you to be successful until you’ve “paid your dues”. But even then, even though friends and family may ‘say’ good luck and hope you become successful at your new venture, they don’t want you to become more successful than them. I’m telling you, this is how it really is. Think about it. In fact, deep inside they want you to fail, so they can continue to be better than you. It is crazy but it is true. They are all watching and hoping YOU FAIL. They don’t want you to have a better life than them unless it’s your mom and dad.

There’s a natural resistance to anything new, and this includes somebody that wants to become successful. All odds are that people will be against you. People who do not consider themselves successful will not want to see you become successful because you provide competition for them. It’s called the ‘competition of life’. The net result is there are very few people who want to see you become successful. Add to this, obstacles like Murphy’s Law – which states that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. And lack of money and experience, and all the rest of the obstacles there are to success, and you have the basic elements of the success barrier.

What most people don’t know is that it is very rare for somebody to get through the success barrier on the first try. Ninety-nine percent of the people who were successful in any field of endeavor were failures at some point before they became successful. Failing is part of success. There is usually one main ingredient that separates the successful from the unsuccessful – persistence. The success barrier, like any brick wall, it must be hit many times before it cracks and finally crumbles.

That’s the key. You have to keep hitting it over and over again. You have to pick yourself back up, failure after failure, and ram that wall again. The good news is the barrier can’t take the pounding. It can only take on so much, then it crumbles. When it starts to go, it goes quickly. Hence my elusion, if you want it bad enough, and you should, you will go through a brick wall to get it. Nothing will stop you.

I was already a persistent person, but the following statement certainly did give me a lift and served as a constant reminder to me through all my trials. You may have heard it. Here it is:

Condition Yourself. To be a successful window cleaning entrepreneur, you need to do a lot of thinking. Thinking is nothing more than mental work. But it is rigorous work. You can measure radical changes in body chemistry and stress when one is engaged in problem solving and creativity. In doing certain difficult creative work, I sometimes break out in sweats. Creativity is often blood-sweating work.

Another example of persistence and conditioning yourself is that in writing an advertising promotion like a flyer, or website, or designing an EDDM campaign, a heavyweight will not be satisfied until that promotion is perfect. If it takes six months, the heavyweight stays with it. On the other hand, the lightweight will work on the same ad for a few hours, or maybe a couple of days, and if it doesn’t turn out to be superior, he or she publishes it anyways. I just finished writing a landing page to my site WindowWashingWealth.com. It took me two months to get it right. It had to be perfect or it wasn’t going public. After 3 years of trial and error, I finally created a commercial storefront B2B sales compensation plan that worked. I cracked the code, paying the salesperson enough to perform, while greatly limiting my turnover. Just stay persistent and your goals and targets will be reached.

Writing the Window Washing Wealth Licensing program and developing the system, took an overwhelming amount of mental work and time, and I can assure you many times it approached unbearable agony. So when people say, “Well, you are successful because you are a genius. Look, you wrote this course. It takes a genius to do something like this. You can just whip something like this out, but we can’t.” I can understand the stories about how people like Edison wanted to strangle people who said things like that. I can certainly sympathize with their position on mental work. Edison once said, “If people only knew how hard I worked, they wouldn’t think I was so smart.” And that would describe me. I just don’t know how to quit!

And therein lies the secret. You just grind it out, with hour after hour of mental work and physical work where it applies. It means working while everybody else is partying. It means working in the morning when everyone else is sleeping from partying the night before. It means getting the project done and not watching TV. Success and fortune are not made in the euphoria, intoxication, and glitter of festivities. Fortune and success are ground out morsel by morsel and inch by inch. Fortunes are made in the black of night or the bleak dawn when you have to reach into your soul for your last ounce of fortitude and effort to press on. And if you do it right, the work to get there is only temporary. Success will be knocking at your door saying, “You Did It!»

But first, Train Your Brain.