How to invest in yourself to reach your potential

Ryan: Hello and welcome back to the passive income project Terry today, we’re talking about investing. But we’re not talking about stocks or anything like that. We’re talking about something that has an even greater return, probably the best return that exists

Terry: investing in yourself. Everyone says it that way.

Hey, go and invest in yourself. And we said it in the first season, but no one really tells us how to do that. They just say, go and invest in yourself. Yeah. And look, it’s good advice because there is no better return than the money that you invest in yourself. Your human capital is the most valuable thing you have in the more productive you can make that the better off you’re going to be over time.

The problem is we just don’t have much guidance. I don’t think anyway, it’s really just, you kind of left to your own devices and. What’s great is that we’ve got more opportunity than ever before to invest in ourselves. Like as business has been continually done online that has opened up a world and a universe of opportunities to invest in yourself, which is amazing.

And I think COVID only accelerated that, right? Like more and more businesses are online. Like we’re now doing business with people in America. And the UK, we’ve got members in those two countries and it’s purely because people are really open to doing business and sort of investing themselves in a whole bunch of different ways anyway, with anyone anyway.

Ryan: Great. Like I love the fact that it’s broken down old institutions that you had to be close to. You had to move to a city to learn about, you know, I think about studying for myself. I moved to Jalong. Originally to do my bachelor of commerce. So I love that. Now you can go learn about very specific things, add superpowers to your utility about that.

We talked about last episode without having to worry about all of the fluff, and you can go to people that have substance, which is

Terry: great. Well, I think it comes a lot of anxiety as well. Now, like we had a lot of people reach out to us after the last episode, didn’t we, and sort of ask questions and sort of sack conversations around it.

Still obviously excited by the idea and uncovering that and understanding what impact it could have. But then the next step, like, okay, what do I do with this information? Where do I start? That’s really what we want to cover today because I see sort of two types of people right now. We’ve got this abundance of choice things.

You can spend your money on to improve yourself in all these different areas. Opportunities if you like, but I think it’s paralyzing for some people and they just kind of go, there’s so much choice. I don’t want to do, I can’t do anything. This is what happens to me. When I open up Netflix, my wife says, find something for us to watch.

And I’m like, Oh,

this is what’s happening right now in this space. Right. There’s so much choice. So many opportunities. Some people get paralyzed by that. But then I see on the other side of the coin, Some people that just jump in Willy nilly and they waste tens of thousands of dollars on opportunities that really don’t align with what their signature strengths are with what their gifts are.

So they don’t get really a good return on their investment. They pay for a lot of support, a lot of cheerleading at times, and maybe they pay for someone’s approval, but it doesn’t necessarily help pretty mean by that they pay for approval. Well, I think in some of these communities, you almost get what you’re not getting in other areas of your life.

So you gotta be really careful that you don’t find yourself in one of these communities and feeling like you’re getting value, but actually all it’s doing is propping up your ego. You gotta be results focused. There’s a third category though. I think that’s people that really seem to have a real Knouse for getting the most value from their dollar in terms of investing in themselves.

They’re using money in a really smart way to. Improve their skills get better results and have a higher impact, which as we know, that’s all tied back to your compensation, whatever your contribution is, it creates your compensation. So making sure that using money in this way, super important for me. So

Ryan: what are we walking away with at the end of this episode?

Terry: Well, I think what we want to do is when I talk through what not to do first, and it’s really important because I think we misunderstand progress and where progress comes from personally and professionally. So understanding that we’re going to sort of say, well, this is what not to do. This is what will not help you progress.

And this is what will, it’s going to be a bit of a framework to think into around how do you critically analyze an opportunity that’s in front of you? And there’s some specific questions that we ask to help think about. Is this the right thing? Is this the right time? Should we be doing this right now for us?

You need a filter. Yeah, exactly. So it’s a filter as we work through that, we’ll give you context for these questions and we’ll also give you the toll at the end,

Ryan: so nice. He used to cover him and want to get to that tool at the end. So you said we’re going to start at what not to do through that.

Terry: When we think about investing in ourselves, like what’s the purpose of it, what’s it supposed to do for us?

It’s supposed to help us progress personally and professionally in some way. So it’s makes sense to actually understand where progress comes from, what it results from. And I know for me, when I was younger, I think I misunderstood progress. I thought it was the result of adding things to my life. Adding new knowledge, adding new contacts, adding new connections, adding new qualifications, all of these things.

But what I’ve learned over time is progress is usually more the result of subtraction, removing the things that are in the way of you getting forward. It’s like, we’ve got one foot on the accelerator, another one on the brake. And we just keep trying to push harder on the accelerator instead of realizing that we need to take our foot off.

Right? Yeah.

Ryan: So you’re doing donuts. 

Terry: So when you think about investing in yourself, I think the first thing to do is to think about how use your time, your talent, your money, to remove the obstacles that are in your way. It is absolutely worth giving you knowledge and skills and all those kind of things, but you really want to know what is impeding or will impede your progress, regardless of what, you know, So I think really what this is about is just reducing clutter in your life, making your life work better, making things a lot easier for yourself, basically, because if you don’t have the bandwidth to pay attention to any thing that you’re learning and you’re distracted by all these other ideas, all these other things that are on your mind, it’s very hard to get value from whatever you’re investing in.

So the first thing for me is how do I make my life work better? Because I can’t be present to any lesson. Otherwise, right. I might be physically present in a lesson, but psychically I’m going to be somewhere else. So I think the first thing for me is creating space. That’s what I mean. 

Ryan: and there’s two sides to this isn’t there because, you know, you mentioned there about being there physically. So that’s about time. Like literally being able to physically be available for it and not having those other tasks and commitments during the day. And then there’s also your bandwidth, which is the amount of decisions that you need to be making, which adds to your cognitive load.

So being present in the mind, as well as the body, it’s creating space for both those things, isn’t it?

Terry: Yeah. It’s just really hard for you to take anything on. There’s a molecular biologist code, John Medina. And he wrote a book called brain rules. And one of the things he said in that book was a stress.

Brian doesn’t learn. It’s one of the rules. And so when you think about investing in yourself, you’re investing in yourself to learn. So you’ve got to make sure that you’re not stressed while you’re learning, right? So whatever’s creating stress in your life. It’s about subtracting all of that. That’s really what we’re talking about.

So for me, it’s a lot of lower order tasks, a lot of things that sort of sack your time and energy, like to small decisions, you have to make all the time. So to add up and they sort of soak up all your willpower. And by the time it comes to things that are really important, the things you actually want, you don’t have it.

So it’s about managing all that stuff first and then getting on top of the things that are even deeper that are kind of holding you back. Yeah.

Ryan: So when you’re talking about those small things, my mind always goes to tech billionaires, your Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, your Steve jobs at Apple. These guys that they wear the same clothes every day.

And they call out the fact that they don’t want that to be a decision that they need to make each day. 

Terry: They don’t want to major in the minors and for them. Choosing what to eat for breakfast, choosing what to wear. These are all decisions that really don’t have to be made the principles worth. Noting.

Really just make sure that you’ve got the time and the space to think about the decisions that matter and do whatever you can to reduce the clutter in your life. And you can do this a couple of ways, right. But I think we kind of wait for these moments where those decisions are not there for us instead of actually proactively making that happen.

And that’s the difference. So we’ve got to find out and figure out strategies to make that space, create those windows for ourselves. So that the really big things we do have the time and space for them.

Ryan: Yeah, but we need to do it more consistently than naturally. 

Terry: Yeah. It’s about getting out of the making of living and styling and creating the space where you can start to think about making a life that doesn’t happen by accident.

You got to be really deliberate about that and you gotta be aggressive about that because the world’s just gonna keep coming at ya. Yeah. So if you don’t do it, it’s not going to happen. So I think it’s worth for us just discussing. Well, how do we create these windows? For me, I think there’s two ways you can automate a lot of lower order tasks using technology, and that’s really cheap and sometimes even free.

Uh it’s and it’s so worthwhile just to take a little bit of time to get some of those tasks off your plate, right? If you use technology in a really smart way, can just make your life so much easier. The example that sort of Springs to mind for me is my wife and I brought a robot vacuum and that thing just goes around and it just cleans by itself.

And we pretty much just leave it on when we’re out, but also we’ve outsourced the decision as well because we just program it to happen at certain times in the day. So I think what’s really important to know is like the task needs to be taken off your plate, but sometimes the decision needs to be taken off your plate as well.

Right. Because the decisions, what SaaS is sappy willpower. Anything you can automate that takes the decision and the task off your plate is a very good investment. The next step is an outsourcing to people. I know that you do a little bit of this. Can you talk us through how you think about outsourcing your thinking around meals?

Okay. Yeah, so

Ryan: I use hello fresh, which is a meal delivery service. Uh, it doesn’t. Come prepared. So you still got to make it, but for us, we hate the decision of choosing what’s for dinner. So we tend to look at each other at about five 30, six o’clock at night and go, what do you want? And everyone knows how that goes.

Terry: Nah, just don’t

Ryan: want to do it. It’s a bad conversation, but Brett doesn’t mind preparing dinner. And I don’t mind cleaning up after a while. We don’t mind those jobs. It’s kind of a finishing to the day, but we hate the decision. And we don’t mind the task. So for us, it was about delegating that decision so that we can free ourselves up from that.

Yeah.

Terry: And Hey, it’s not much more expensive than going out and getting your own food is

Ryan: probably 10, 15, 20% extra.

Terry: What you’re paying for is not having to deal with that sort of conversation, that interaction at the end of the day, you’re not having to deal with thinking about it as the day wears on. Was she doing it?

Was I doing, as Maurice wants to be the was at hers? What are we

Ryan: doing? Yeah. You never think about dinner. Yeah. Which I don’t. I get to six o’clock and I’m like, Oh, I should think about it. And what it does is it probably frees up 20, 30 minutes a day in terms of thinking about that as well as going to the supermarket and preparing dinner.

So that means an extra 20, 30 minutes of work for me. And I know that that time’s better spent creating value in some way.

Terry: [00:11:01] What’s better work too. Isn’t it? Because if at the edge of it consciousness, you’ve got this kind of task that’s sitting there going arm. I got up, I was going to push that aside.

That’s still weighing on your mind. So maybe you’re in a meeting with one of my members and it’s sitting there at the edge of your conscious, you’re not as present. When we talking about automating and delegating, what we’re doing is saying, how do we make your time more productive? And yes, it’s also, if you can actually free up more time, but it’s also worth it if you’re just creating more presence.

So I think that’s sort of the first point. I would recommend the book that we talked about last time in the last episode. Have a look at the book who not how Dan Sullivan, the other thing I would do is make it a list of all the decisions you have to make every day. And then just put them into two categories.

Is this helping me add value, doing the thing that I do? Or is it not, or is it just a thing that I have to do to keep the lights on? And then how can I use automation or delegation? To either free up time and or space to do those things. And you might not have heaps of money to do it, but if you’ve got a little bit of time, you can find some really smart ways using technology that are not necessarily costly at all.

So for me, it’s just sharpening the ax base.

Ryan: [00:12:02] Yeah. Nice. I like it. So we’ve talked about automation and delegation. So automation is about using technology delegation about other people. How else do we reduce clutter?

Terry: [00:12:11] I think the other way is to think about just getting out of your own way, just identifying those ideas about yourself, that don’t help you, the constructs, the behaviors, the patterns that work against what you want.

I think your time and your money spent on improving yourself in these areas is so valuable, right? Because this is where your foot’s really, really on the brake. Oh yeah. It’s a handbrake. Yeah. So for me, spending time, knowing yourself, getting to know yourself, understanding who you are, where your ideas about yourself come from, and then just looking at those areas of your life, where you feel really disempowered.

These are huge unlocks for me. This is why I love personal finance, because it’s such an unlock. For me. I think most people are like working harder, stressing, just trying to just outwork their worries. Right. But if they just mastered this part of their life, all those worries go Hawaii. And then they start thinking very clearly about what’s this big changes get made.

Right? Like the things that some of our members are able to do once I actually sort of go hang on, we’ve got this. So it was really these areas that you’re disempowered in. And it’s probably where you’re less aware of yourself to whether you’ve got these kind of self-sabotaging behaviors. And they do crossovers, particularly when it comes to personal finance.

But when I think about awareness, like I hate to quote Gary V but he’s right. I think  self-awareness is a superpower. Just knowing what your strengths are, knowing where you create your biggest impact and you make your highest contribution and knowing the things you’re not good at really can help you stop wasting time.

Because remember times that number one asset, Tom’s the most precious thing. So if we’re not using our time productively, it’s very hard for us to get more income, basically.

Ryan: [00:13:43] And you’ve got to start by understanding yourself before you can really find out where you can have your biggest impact. Like you need to understand yourself first, before you can understand how to serve

Terry: [00:13:54] others.

You do. Definitely. Yeah, just recently I was listening to Tim Ferriss podcast, having listened to it for awhile, but he had Jim lower on there and I’m not sure I’m pronouncing his name. Right. But, um, he wrote several really good books and he made this sort of point in that podcast where he sort of said power broker in your life is the voice that no one hears.

And how will you revisit the tone and the content of that private voice is what determines the quality of your life. It’s the master storyteller and the stories we tell ourselves are our reality. I think it’s a really important point, right? Like that internal voice is having such an impact. And if you don’t know where it comes from, You can’t separate that voice from who you really are and understand it.

It’s just, or hard for you to get ahead because I love the point that Stephen Covey made in his book, the seven habits of highly effective people. He said, you can get really busy, caught up in the activity, trap, climbing the ladder of success. Most people find that that ladder is leaning against the wrong role.

And the difference between knowing that that lead is against the right wall and it’s on the wrong wall. That’s self-awareness yeah, yeah,

Ryan: [00:14:54] yeah. I like it. The tone and content of your private voice, like the way you’re speaking to yourself and the story that you’re telling yourself, governs how you say the world.

And usually those ideas have served you before. But now they’re actually inhibiting you in this next step, right? It’s always like you need to upgrade that thinking to be able to achieve that next. You talked

Terry: [00:15:17] about those ideas we have of ourselves. We basically add these ideas. They come onto us from other people in the world as we go up or authority figures, tell us who we are, tell us how we should be.

We get socialized. And that helps us get along in the world. But it doesn’t necessarily reflect who we are. So I feel like you’ve got this kind of period in your life where you’re gaining other people’s ideas and you’re kind of collecting them and you’re sort of mirroring all that back to the world.

But actually once you get beyond a certain point, you really get to understand yourself. It’s actually about taking away the stuff that’s not you. So you can figure out what is. Thinking about two people that are super skilled and one of them is really self-aware and knows what they’re good at and knows where they’re going to have the highest contribution the other one is trying to do and be everything all the time, trying to compete with everyone.

Doesn’t understand what they’re doing. And they’re sabotaging the team’s success. Who do you want to work with the self-aware? So I think starting there as a key, just to sum it up, we talked about de-cluttering or moving obstacles to progress. If you do those two things. You start to think about how you can create space and you invest time and money to get out of your own way in these areas of your life, where you’re holding yourself back, or you’re disempowered.

Now you’re ready to put the foot on the accelerator and push harder. And how do we do that? I think if you’ve done what we just said, and you’ve really learnt yourself and you know yourself, you’re going to know what your gifts are. And we talked about it in the last episode you give. So your goldmine and your wealth is going to be dependent on how well you mine.

It. And so it’s just really important that you know, what that super power is for you and know where and how the world wants it from you. And this is where I think you need to spend your time now figuring out how to find that fit. Here’s my super power who wanted from me and how do they want it? That is the quest for me around.

How do you invest in yourself to accelerate your growth and your potential?

Ryan: [00:16:56] Almost a little bit counterintuitive, because we’re always taught to work in our weaknesses. We’re taught to think where are the gaps and fill the gaps. And it’s not that we don’t want to squash our weaknesses, but ultimately what you’re saying is highlight the strengths and make sure there’s a base level there, or you seek support for those other areas.

Terry: [00:17:13] Isn’t it be focusing your time to be most productive and you can’t be most productive if you are playing yourself out of position all the time. You’re the goalkeeper, who’s trying to kick goals. It just doesn’t work. So Peter Drucker’s someone that I really look up to. It was a very well-regarded management thinker and he always said it can’t build on weakness.

So your job is to find where you’re going to do your best work and put yourself there. The most successful people have somehow figured that out. I do best and that’s all I do. And I work with other people to help me do all the other things. I don’t have to be good at everything. If you want to have a business and not just be self-employed doing something really small.

It’s impossible. So we just had to make the choice. Are we going to be self-employed? Are we going to be building a business? If you’re going to be building a business, you have to let go of the idea that you’ve got to know everything like a Elon Musk. Doesn’t know how aeronautical engineer, X users, not in bolt B to tighten up and make sure that all the pressure and the cabins are rot.

He doesn’t know that stuff. That’s a great example. A lot of it, you just can’t do it. So. I guess, yeah, you’ve got to let go of that. You’ve gotta be humble enough to sort of let those things happen and realize that you doing your thing is the best thing you could be doing, doing more of that. Yep. Melanie Perkins of Canva, I think is a great Australian example, right?

Yeah. She was a graphic design teacher in Perth, and now she runs a multi-billion dollar tech company, Derek, and she knows how to code look I’m she might know a little bit, but she’s not a character. She’s not a programmer. And she wasn’t necessarily the business person, either. What she was is a culture builder.

What she was, was good at bringing people together and building teams. And that’s what she did a visionary, a visionary. Exactly. So she’s got two partners, one of them handles more logistics and the other one was from Google and was an elite and a gun programmer.

Ryan: [00:18:58] And he came in late didn’t he? Because that was somebody that they needed a part of their team to be able to make that happen, but it wasn’t there.

So they didn’t go out and learn how to code and how to do software engineering. Did they, they found him right

Terry: [00:19:11] now that we’re contracting with people. I think, I think that we’re kind of using people to just cobbled together kind of prototypes. They had the idea. And when they went to Silicon Valley to sell it, basically all the VCs said, love the idea, but unless you have a technical, co-founder not in.

And I think eventually one of those people actually broken the relationship between them. So I said, you guys need to talk to this person and if you can get that person, I mean, and that sort of went from there. So what’s interesting is. She’s always done what she does really well. And she said, you always had these dreams of kind of building this workplace.

He just wanted to work at the kind of work place she dreamed of. And that’s always been the thing. It just happens to be that the vehicle is graphic design and democratizing that through technology for everybody. She doesn’t have all the skills for that. She does what she does really well. So it’s just super important at this point that you’re saying, all right.

Now, I’ve got to double down on my strengths. I’ve got to find them. So yes, if I’ve done some work on myself and I’ve gotten out of my own way, I should have some self-awareness of who I am. And I should have some self-awareness of where I create my highest contribution. This is now the point where you’re kind of going.

I need to match up what I do really well with what the world wants. So you’re going from internal to external now. And sort of shifting that focus outside of you and saying, who wants what I have and how do they want it? And

Ryan: [00:20:22] when you say what the world, once it’s either solving a problem for somebody in some way, you know, if you’re a business owner, who are you serving, how you’re solving their problem, but it might also mean in the workplace, right?

So maybe you’re in a job right now and your strengths. And not lined up with how you can make the biggest contribution for that organization. So sometimes it’s about identifying that and being able to relay that to the manager or the leader or whoever that might be. So you can actually become more valuable to that company and earn more of what you,

Terry: [00:20:50] and there’s always opportunities to express more.

What you good at in any role, you just have to think about. How to do it differently and how to work with other people to do it. So even example, when I used to work in sport, it was my job. I was going to create a new recovery system for the team we’re working for. And usually the way it used to work was we’d just kind of make it up on the day.

We’d write it up on the whiteboard and athletes would come in and just tick it off. They just comply. I’d just be like, yep. Done that, done that, done that, done my recovery. They never learned anything about themselves. They didn’t learn about how they recovered best. They didn’t learn about different modalities.

None of those things happen. They just follow the rules, the mindless, I said, I’m going to take this on. And I’m going to build a system that teaches people how they best recover. So I started went out and did a lot of learning, sort of looked at different ways of creating freedom within a framework for people.

I liked the idea of systems as well, just because I think you can compound your results with systems. I sort of came across this idea from, um, Bulletproof coffee, Dave Asprey. He had this infographic where he basically, it was like a one pager and it showed you how to eat and all the different types of meals you can have.

And gave you sort of a guide of how to eat and sort of live in this way. That’s what I want to do for this recovery thing. So I kind of came up with this shitty sort of first draft. And I went up to the admin. I found the graphic designers that worked for the team I was working for at the time. And I said, Hey, can you guys help me with this?

And they’re like, what do you mean no one’s ever coming to ask us anything from the football department. Nobody ever talks to us from there. And then I sold them the vision. I’m like, here’s what happens. Our athletes. I come in, they do, they set it and learn anything. It’s not really helping them, but this is really going to help them.

And this will be an asset that stays in the organization for a long period of time, if we do it right. But I need your skills to help me do it. I need you to help me make it look awesome. Cause then what I’m going to do is I’m going to blow it up on coal fleet and I’m going to put it up on the wall so that anyone, whenever they come in here, They’ve got this freedom within a framework and they can start to learn what works for them.

And it’s just designer. And I kind of collaborated for the next couple of weeks around making it work. He created this really cool infographic for me, like Dave Asprey’s and it made it so easy. And it just meant that from that point forward, the athletes were in charge of their recovery and they actually did it way better because it was their choice.

So I think the key point with that story is that end result was way better for me focusing on what I do best and then getting help from others to make it work. And I can tell you that in two parallel universes with me doing it that way, having the idea, getting help in making a better thing versus me doing it all myself.

The end result, very different. I would just have that crappy Canva prototype people will kind of look at and go. I’m not quite sure what you’re trying to achieve here versus this Epic thing. That’s still there. What’s interesting is I did less work for a better result this way. I would have done 10 X times the work the other way.

And I would have been sitting there going, why isn’t the one giving me the credit? Why is no one acknowledging the effort I’ve put into this?

Ryan: [00:23:31] So how do we go about getting better results?

Terry: [00:23:34] Well, I think for me, you just have to accumulate a lot of experiences that start to show you where you do the best.

And then, like I said, have the humility to look outside yourself and find people that can help you. The main thing I think is that you’ve got to try a lot of stuff to sort of have those experiences where you go, man, I killed it doing that. That was awesome. That works so well. And if you can really just observe yourself, you could probably look back through your life and see a few of those examples.

Like the story I just told. Around getting the help with the graphic designer. You probably have a few of those that can really inform your approach. And you can say I’m best when I do this. And once you see those patterns, you just start to narrow in and say, I’m just doing more of this. That works the best because we don’t waste time.

So you have to make a study of yourself. Going back to what I said before about Drucker. He said, you can’t build on your weakness. He wrote a book called on managing yourself. It’s more of a pamphlet than a book. I would highly recommend that you read this book because the ideas in this book will help you figure out where you can have your highest contribution.

One of the practices he talks about is documenting the decisions you make and actually the results. And then continually looking at the gap so that you can start to say, well, I make really good decisions in these areas. This is where I’d send to do quite well. And these other areas, maybe I’m not so good at.

And then just looking at where your time spent as well. This is some really practical advice in that book, and you can read it in honestly, probably an hour. And if you act on that book and do what he says, then you can get some really good advice. The other thing I would do is just ask other people that are very experienced with you have spent a lot of time with you and say, when am I at my best?

If you want a little bit more context for this exercise, check out Adam Grant’s podcast. Work-life, there’s an episode there on strengths. We’ll put it in the show notes. I think it’s really well done where he kind of talks about working on your strengths versus mitigating for your weaknesses. It’s quite well done.

All right.

Ryan: [00:25:20] So we’ve talked about what gets in the way and how do we reduce clutter and create that space and getting out of bound way. And then we’ve talked about what to focus on building our strengths and seeking out collaboration opportunities to fill your voids. How do we then I guess, filter these endless opportunities that we have in terms of own education investing in ourself and how do we know it’s the right time as well?

Terry: [00:25:44] I sorta think about it in two ways. We’re getting paid for results. Right. And if we’re getting paid for results are results of the consequences of the skill we’ve applied to something. And so I’m going to make the assumption that you have the qualifications already. So because qualifications give you access a seat at the table.

If you like, if you need access, then you’ve got to go and get qualifications, but assume that that’s all done. And now you’re just trying to figure out how to get better results to improve yourself as an asset. If you’re in an industry or a profession or a career that requires qualifications. You going to go, I need to get those and that’s fine, but just, don’t be one of those people that keep accumulating qualifications on the assumption that it’s going to get you better results.

Because if you’re accumulating qualifications, you’ll be being taught. When you’re accumulating skills, you’ll be coached. You’ll be mentored and skills is what’s going to get you better results and better results is what’s going to get you a high contribution. A high contribution is what’s going to improve your compensation.

So for me, I think it’s going to be following really what your interests are right now in alignment with those strengths of yours, those gifts that you’ve got really helping you get to the next day. So things that you’re stuck on. So I think it’s got to solve one problem for you right now. It can’t be something that’s theoretical that you’re like, Oh, it’d be just great to have that.

Knowledge, no, it’s got to solve a problem for you right now, because you’re going to be permitted to the learning. You won’t be interested in it. And there’s a big difference between those two things right now. I’m not saying you can’t just go and learn things cause you like to learn them. But I think when it comes to investing in yourself, you’ve got to be a little bit strategic and you’ve got to be a little bit targeted around how you use your time, attention and your money.

Ryan: [00:27:10] Gaining commitment. That’s often hard. Like I think about the courses that we’ve done, one of the most crucial components, and I don’t want this to come across the wrong way is actually paying for it. And sometimes paying more for it means that you have a greater commitment to it. It’s very easy to take something that’s free.

And you don’t appreciate the value of it and you never actually fulfill its potential. But when you know that you’ve traded your time, your talent, your money, yeah. For it, you have this consistency bias with yourself and a commitment to actually fulfilling that, that you actually get the result. You know, there’s a transformation on the other side of having that thing, equipping yourself with those skills.

But if you’re not committed to it and you haven’t created that commitment for yourself, you won’t get that transformation. You won’t find those skills. So you do need to find ways to build on that commitment too.

Terry: [00:27:59] If you find yourself sort of hesitating, and you’re not sure it’s probably a sign or a signal from yourself, it’s probably a sign or a signal from yourself that either.

Or you don’t think you’re worthy, you don’t believe in yourself enough. So listen to that. And if you’re hesitating and then sort of question it and say, well, is that my voice? Or is that somebody else’s? Cause if you do really want it and you do think it is an opportunity it’s going to help you, then you should make the decision.

Ryan: [00:28:22] How would that be disguised? What narratives, what stories, what ideas, what statements would we make to ourselves that shadow that idea of I’m not worthy?

Terry: [00:28:31] It’s just a typical one. So I’m just too busy is one. I’m not sure it’s the right time. Here’s another one and the other one is, Oh, it’s just not that big a priority right now.

And if you’ve been exploring something and you really been, I guess, obsessing over it, and you’re kind of continually gathering knowledge and you’re sort of stuck in that cycle. It is probably something that you want. You just can’t let yourself have it. So I’d just be asking myself the question, why can’t I let myself have it?

What is it about the stories I’m telling myself maybe I’m comparing or I’m worried about being judged or I don’t think I am where I should be. I don’t want to be seen to be needing help. I think these are all big ones, particularly for men. That last

Ryan: [00:29:05] one I don’t want to be seen as needing help. This is an ego thing either.

This is a cultural conditioning. We are bred to compete. Yeah, and money is just one of those status things that we don’t want to pop the hood on. So I think that’s valuable. You said before, there’s endless opportunities out there. And often we have that question Mark of. How do we trust someone before we trust ourselves to be able to do that?

How

Terry: [00:29:27] do we filter it? I think there’s a few questions that we came up with with that I think it worth just quickly going through, and don’t worry about writing these down because we’ve actually credited so fully to do this. There’s a form that you can actually fill out. So if you want to use this as a tool, you can just have this link and pretty much just run through this filter.

Anytime you come across a development opportunity and it will help you. I guess check your thinking a little bit.

Ryan: [00:29:48] There’s another automation just to speed things

Terry: [00:29:50] up. Exactly. It’ll kind of coach you through the decision basically. So I think the first thing is obviously what’s the opportunity. And when I say the opportunity, I mean, is this a course?

Is it coaching? Is it a mentor? Like what is the development opportunity that you think is going to help you right now? Just quickly state that the next one is, how did you come across it? I think this is important because how you came across, something really does matter. Is it something that just popped into your feed and you just kind of had a really compelling message or is it something that you’ve kind of been thinking about for a long period of time, a journey that you’ve been on?

And then the next one is, what do you believe this is going to do for you? What do you think doing this, or, or pursuing this opportunity is going to do for you in this quickly? Just write down two or three things, getting coaching from this course or whatever, or this mentor is going to help me do X, Y, and Z.

And then the next one I think is really important. Do you think that’s going to give you the greatest sense of progress right now? Is this solving a problem or is this just something that you’re like, Oh, this seems to be cool. And we always talk about making it a project. So when people come to us and they work through the mentor sheet, we’ll like, make this a project in your life right now, there’s this, but then just think more broadly about this era of your life.

We’re just going to help you master it. And is that what you’re focusing on right now? Because if it is then perfect, but if it’s not. Then maybe not. You’ve really got to be in that part, sort of wanting to Polish that area. The next one is how confident are you that this opportunity, the one that’s in front of you is going to help you achieve this and is giving it a rating of one to five, five being super confident, one being not very confident and then justify your answer after that.

Why you will five, why you were four and that’ll help you pull out, I guess. The unconscious reasoning that you’ve been doing. And when you’ve been thinking about this opportunity, so once you’ve done that and you’ve explained why you’re a fog or why you’re a four, then you’re going to think about the opportunity cost of choosing this thing that’s in front of you.

And basically what that means is like, what else could you be doing with your time, your talent, your money. How else could you be spending it and using it productively and easiest, the most productive thing to do with it right now, depending on what your goals are, where you’re trying to progress in your life.

I think that’s really important. Just jotting down a couple of other things you could do. The money is the resource. And what tends to happen with money is that money narrows our focus. And we kind of just get. So to shuttle down this one line of thinking, and it’s either like these whole nothing instead of going this, that, that that’ll, that always

Ryan: [00:32:08] force yourself to think in terms of

Terry: [00:32:10] trade-offs.

And so you think of those trade offs, you bring them sort of the conscious level of awareness. And then you look at it in the cold light of day, and you say, do I still believe that this opportunity is the highest value out of all those? And it might be that you kind of come up with a list and then you say of that list of alternatives.

This is the best. And then you just compare those two and you say, which of these two is the best. And you go from there. So that’s the opportunity cost. And then the next one is after you’ve done that analysis and you’ve looked at that opportunity cost. Do you still believe it’s the most important thing for you to do?

And if you do, now you ask yourself the question, are you interested in it or are you committed? Because if you’re not committed, then you shouldn’t do it. It’s not going to work for you. You’re going to waste your time. You’re going to waste the other person’s time. You’re going to waste all your resources.

And so that’s a really hard question to ask yourself, are you committed? And it’s something that we pretty much asked that at the stop for the people that work with us, don’t we, we sort of say, how motivated are you to achieve this? What’s driving you because if it’s not enough, then you won’t do the work you won’t actually do.

What’s required. Yeah.

Ryan: [00:33:06] And that’s ultimately surfacing. What is the negative feedback in your environment and your loss right now? Isn’t it easiest a real pain point. Is this getting in the way of you becoming that next version of yourself, surfacing those ideas, writing them down in some form. And looking at it and saying, alright, does this break commitment or is this just something that I’m thinking about right now?

And I think if you

Terry: [00:33:27] want, I don’t know whether you’re interested or committed, then ask yourself what is the ultimate cost of inaction. And am I prepared to pay that price? Because if you are, then you’re probably not committed.

Ryan: [00:33:36] When you think about that in terms of money paying and money podcast, what are some common ones you’re saying in terms of the cost of not getting that part, right.

Are you

Terry: [00:33:45] prepared to pay the price of always worrying about money? Are you prepared to pay the price of having to work for people you don’t want to work for? Are you prepared to pay the price of stress and strain on relationships? I prepared to pay the price of having to rely on others. I prepared to pay the price of feeling guilty about that.

I prepared to pay the price of keeping your life smaller and not actually achieving those things that you really like. Yeah. And they’re

Ryan: [00:34:09] they’re high level. And when you do this, it’s probably going to be more granular. It’s thinking about your family or thinking about your day to day, but I think that’s good to surface some of those ideas just to know where that might lead to.

All right. So that’s a series of questions,

Terry: [00:34:23] isn’t it? It is. Yeah. So if you want that as a tool, all you need to do is just have a look in the show notes and analyze any of your sort of development opportunities that are coming up. And I think you could even probably save this to your home screen if you’re on a mobile and I’m always have it there as a bit of an app, when you.

Yeah,

Ryan: [00:34:38] absolutely. So let’s just give a bit of context. So we’re talking about investing in yourself here, because we know that investing in yourself will create the biggest return of anything you invest your time and money into. And that there’s endless opportunities that exist out there. We live in a day and age where you can access the best thinking in specific fields.

And we want to be able to filter, which of those are going to service most. And we needed a self-reflect first. Then we need to look at those opportunities and filter those out. So this tool is about filtering those opportunities. Once you’ve done that, self-reflection to then determine is that the right time and actually breed your own commitment as well.

So once you work through that, what we’d actually highly recommend for you right now is. Actually thinking about what that next investment is, surface few of those things do some self-reflection look at your life and think about where could you get the most exhilaration, say the most progress in your life and start pulling some of those opportunities to the surface and use this tool, you know, in the next week or two, be able to filter it through, just get a repetition in.

You might not even find the right opportunity, but just go through the process of asking those questions. Because as soon as you can embed those questions into your psyche, you will start to automatically assess those opportunities before you even have to go to that more conscious layer of putting it through the tool.

So start thinking about what that next investment is. Yep. If

Terry: [00:36:01] you can do it in the next three days, the likelihood that you’ll use this framework or these questions in the future increases dramatically. If you wait a week, that’s a lot less likely you’ll ever use these questions again. If you wait two weeks, you probably never know.

Good. And that wraps us up. Does it? It does, mate. Hopefully we got some value in there for you love to know what you thought about. Don’t forget to

Ryan: [00:36:21] write, review the podcast as well.

Terry: [00:36:23] Yeah. Keep going. Those writings love those last couple that came through. And just quickly before we go. Coming up, we’re going to be working, um, a little bit more on some property side of things.

So we actually got into one of Australia’s best mortgage brokers, property advisors, and started to talk through the property decision if you like. Yeah. So that’s, what’s coming out pretty excited about that one. And we’ll be doing a little bit of a series off the back of that, thinking through how to use property, to create wealth in a couple of different, pretty cool little known ways,

Ryan: [00:36:47] correct?

Yeah, absolutely. And also, how do we live with debt? And make it work for us, right. Improve that relationship with debt to live with debt. Yeah. Nice. Thank you guys. And we’ll see the next one.

Terry: [00:37:01] Hi. If you’ve listened this far, you are a rare breed. See, most people won’t do the work to change their money story, but not you.

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