If you’ve experienced success then failure, you can lose your self-confidence and wonder if you can ever make it work again. However, if you knew that every endeavour has only a 50/50 chance of success and that YOU bring the magic, 1% can really make a difference. But as always there’s a twist in the tale…
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Clicks And Leads is a “tongue in cheek” digital marketing Vzine by entrepreneur, author, podcaster, speaker, Nicola Cairncross.
Mentioned in the Vzine
- Be Everywhere Online – 30 Day Challenge
- Write Club Podcast
- Michael Neill – Creating The Impossible
- James Schramko podcast – How To Transform Your Extraordinary Mind With Vishen Lakhiani
- Code of the Extraordinary Mind by Vishen Lakhiani
- 6 Phase Guided Meditation by Vishen Lakhiani
- The Money Gym
- Own It! The Podcast featured on Radio Public
On the blogs
Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders: Chris Barrow
Vzine 061 | How To Be More Efficient
Vzine 060 | Marketing Versus Sales
Own It! 174 | Tom Evans – How To Own Time
Own It! 173 | Being Unbusy
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Hi everyone, it’s Nicola here and it’s a bit of a gray old day in Stoupa. Yes, shock horror, we do get gray days here too. Not so often nowadays.
Yeah, just wanted to update you with what’s going on, the 30-day challenge for “Be Everywhere Online” has started. We got about 70-odd people in there. And everybody’s getting very animated and excited. They’re on day two now, so basically I chunked the whole thing down into tiny steps every day. And hopefully, that’s making people able to move through it.
It’s interesting how that works isn’t it? I think my brain just naturally chunks things down so it’s interesting how some people need a bit of help with that. But I’m happy to give it, and it’s great fun to watch everybody moving through it.
You may have noticed, I am wearing not black today. I’ve had a delivery of not black clothes, how exciting is that? And I think there’s a few more to come yet. I’ve even got some colors. This is denim obviously. I’ve got jeans on as well. Don’t die of shock. And it’s really nice, it makes me feel a bit more normal.
While it was good to not care about what I wore for a while, and while it was good just to throw anything on as long as it was black, I’m starting to get a little bit more interested in clothes again now. So that’s making me feel good.
What’s not making me feel good this week is the Sahara sand, from Africa. Apparently every five years, they get a wind that comes straight off the Sahara, and it brings a lot of sand over. And it’s very very fine, and I woke up a couple o’ nights ago and I thought I had my friend Stella’s lurgy. She came back from England with a coughing lurgy so I trotted off down the chemist yesterday afternoon and bought a bottle of cough mixture cause there’s nothing I hate worse than being woken up at night by coughing you can’t stop. And it turns out I’m not sick at all. I was expecting to get sicker and I didn’t.
I’ve just figured out that perhaps its the sand that’s bugging me. So I’m a little bit chesty today. I used to get asthma but I haven’t had it for years and years and years. A little bit chesty today but I feel fine in myself so fingers crossed. You know, I haven’t been sick for so long, I was really not looking forward to it. So I’m very happy to have a reprieve.
What else is news? We did our Write Club recording last week, we got seven episodes done. We did six, but one didn’t record, can you imagine the pain of that? A one-hour podcast episode and you have to go back and do it all again. Luckily, we were able to do it although some of the jokes got left out, and some of the others didn’t sound quite as good second time round. But we pressed through and we’re very pleased that we’ve achieved it. So we’re set now for the next six or seven podcast episodes.
Let’s get on with the show shall we?
So this week I want to talk about the magic of you. It sounds a little bit whimsical that title doesn’t it? But it’s following a rather large realization I had earlier in the week. You need a bit of backstory really.
Basically what I’ve been doing is I’ve been following “Creating the Impossible” by Michael Neill and I’m on day 40. And it’s really nice because it’s set out like a 90-day challenge, with tiny little steps every single day and what you have to do at the beginning is you have to “take five”, he calls it “taking five”.
Actually, it’s just clearing your mind and getting calm, and banishing all other thoughts. And it’s a bit like a unguided meditation really, you just sit and you concentrate on your breathing for five minutes, and I really quite enjoy doing it. So much so, that occasionally, I did 10 minutes. And then, I was doing 10 minutes regularly everyday before I started today’s task. And then I thought some days I was thinking that wasn’t good enough. I didn’t achieve it well enough, so let’s do another 10 minutes. So, some days I’ve actually done 20 minutes.
So then you go off your little tasks. And you have a little moment of reflection at the end where you think about what has happened. You know, how did you show up to your task. And I got to 36, and he’s talking about 51%. And it was interesting conversation it was just saying, let me just read what it said.
“Achieving results isn’t completely down to us even though we may believe it is. That belief tends to act as a deterrent to our own best efforts. If I believe success is completely up or down to me, I’ll either become a control freak, a stressed out over-achiever or both. If I believe it’s nothing to do with me, I’ll probably do the minimum necessary to keep my job and my head above water, feeling lucky when things do go my way, and disconnected from the people around me and the tasks at hand. But if you think about it, you’ve got 50% likelihood of success, it doesn’t guarantee you anything.”
And what he’s saying is, that in every endeavor, there’s a 50-50 chance of success. And the 1% is you bringing your magic. And I sort of read that and I thought: okay that’s interesting. That’s really great. Because it means that it’s not relying on luck.
But it is, and it’s saying that you are special, and you are bringing something special to the table. But it’s saying that it is really a gamble, whether you succeed or not. And it’s a tiny, tiny odds.
And I mulled it over for a few more days, and then I was listening to James Schramko, and he did an interview with Vishen Lakhiani from Mind Valley. And Vishen was really interesting, I mean I’ve read his book “The Code of the Extraordinary Mind” and really enjoyed it. And I was listening to it, and he was offering a new meditation, it’s called a six-phase meditation and I liked the sound of it a lot.
It starts off, you think about what you’re grateful for, that’s one of my favorite things. Anyway, I went off and downloaded Vishen’s 10 minute meditation, it’s a guided one where he talks you through it but I thought that’ll be easier to do than the one where I just concentrate on clearing, concentrating on my breathing.
And as I was doing my sort of second or third version of Vishen’s meditation. This whole thing about the 51% came back to me. And I thought, well that explains The Money Gym, and why it took me so long to recover from that.
Because I had my first success with a company called The Money Gym. I wrote a book. I wrote it as emails first, and I attracted a lot of people to the website, and I started attracting coaching clients. And I was doing all the things that I’d been told to do. And I was doing them persistently, and it had a magical result. But I always thought that that was external to me.
And when it went tits up, as it did, in the global recession, and the meltdown of the credit crunch. And I found a lot of people coming into The Money Gym to learn how to do property investment, and they couldn’t do that anymore because they couldn’t get mortgages, and the whole thing fell apart really.
I blamed myself. I took 100% responsibility, and I blamed myself for missing something that I thought I should’ve seen. And when you think about this 51– Oh, right so and then it took me ages to get back on my feet because I totally lost all my confidence. And when you put this 51% concept together with the concept that we’re only ever 1% away from failing, then you start to get a glimmer of what did I bring to the table with The Money Gym that made it work? And it was me.
And someone else might’a done The Money Gym but they would’a done it in the totally different way. And they might not have succeeded or they might’ve succeeded better, who knows. But when you start to think about yourself as the magic 1%, if every endeavor’s only got a 50-50 chance of succeeding, and you are the 1% that brings the magic, then it just gets a whole lot more interesting doesn’t it?
Because then you realize, that you’ve got to show up.
If you’re the 1% that makes the difference, if you’re the magic that’s gonna make the difference between something failing and succeeding, you have to show up, because if you don’t show up, the 1% just won’t be there.
So I’m starting to feel quite good about bringing the magic. I want you to know that you’re the 1% that’ll make a difference in the endeavor. If you don’t turn up and take the action, do the work, then that isn’t, it’s not gonna succeed, whatever it is you’re trying to do, because you are the magic.
Bit esoteric this week, and I’m not absolutely 100% convinced that I’ve explained it as clearly as I would’ve liked to. But I’m gonna carry on mulling it over and if I have anymore insights I’ll let you know in one of these Vzines.
Hope you enjoyed the thought, go and check out “Creating the Impossible” by Michael Neill – it’s fantastic. Go and download Vishen Lakhiani’s Mind Valley Quest app. It’s got the six-phase meditation on it, which is absolutely brilliant. So if you find meditating quite hard, it’s astonishing how much better it makes you feel about everything. So I’m really enjoying that. It’s like meditational Prozac So there you go.
That, and wearing clothes that are not black, and meditating, and having a lovely time all round, has maken me feel quite good this week. I hope that helps, and I’d love to hear your comments. Underneath as always on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn or the blog.
Okay so what’s on the blog and the podcast this week. Last week we were talking on “Own It!” the podcast to Tom Evans, who is a successful author. He’s also a guy who knows all about creativity and works with people who want to become more creative. And then he started doing meditations as well, and releasing those into the wild. He’s now one of the biggest creators of meditations on an app, whose name escapes me. But he’s had nearly a million downloads on one of his meditations, isn’t that astonishing? And you just don’t know what’s gonna happen when you let yourself out into the wild.
And that reminds me just instantly that “Own It!” was actually featured as one of the independent podcasts to watch on RadioPublic last week. We had this massive spike in downloads, and we couldn’t understand where they’d come from, and then I got an email from RadioPublic saying that we’d been featured, and it was really very exciting, cause we went from something like 300 downloads on one episode, to three and a half thousand downloads on one episode, and the magic continued for most of the next week.
And in fact I think we’re still in the “Indies to Watch” chart. Now did you know about RadioPublic? It’s really easy to put a podcast on there. I think you can actually record your podcast straight into RadioPublic. Or you can set up your podcast on Audioboom for just $10 a month, and syndicate it onto iTunes and RadioPublic, and Stitcher and all those other places. Unbelievably good value, Audioboom, and really exciting on RadioPublic, because if you don’t have any ads in your podcast, they will pay you per listen, per the time listened. So you can actually get paid, according to how many people listen to your podcast for how long. How exciting is that?
Yeah, and on the VZine last week, I was talking about how to become more efficient with your workload, and how why batching’s so important and why getting into your flow is so important, and trying to do the same kind of activities on the same days.
So I’m gonna leave you there. And thanks very much for being here every week, I’ve had some lovely comments on various locations on last week’s VZine. So let me know what you think of this one. Whether you think it’s the whole 1% thing is of interest. And let me know if you’re meditating and if so, how it’s going for you. Is it making you feel better? Is it making any difference? Is it giving you creative insights? That’s the exciting thing that it’s supposed to do. Speak to you later, bye.
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