(transcripts from the Training & Coaching Lifestyle Podcast)
JSE: Welcome to the show, I am your host JSE and this is the training and coaching lifestyle podcast. My guest today is my friend AJ. Roberts, he is, well, he is a champion power-lifter, and if I said that incorrectly because I know there’s different techniques and the competitions. I’ll have you clarify it AJ. You do a lot of business marketing in the coaching and training industry as well, you travel all over the world, and because of that you also have the most unique accent of any of my guests thus far. So, welcome to the show, and what did I miss?
AJ: Yeah, thanks for having me John, like you said, I am a champion power-lifter, I am a world record, actually two time world record holder, and the ultimate record. So that’s the most weight I ever lifted. And, while I was doing that I was very obviously very involved in building several businesses, in fitness niche, and branched out into helping other businesses and growing from there. I got my hands into lot of different things, in essence like really I just live my life with the purpose of doing everything to the best of my ability and kind of raising my game on a daily basis. It seems to serve me well, regardless of what I do. So hopefully we can show a little bit of that, with the listeners today and show them how they can implement that in their business in order to kind of move up to that next level.
JSE: Perfect. Ok, so, here is the deal you guys. We are going to borrow, that’s such a better word than steal from Jim Collins, the author of “Good to Great”, which is a fantastic book and we are recommending that you pick that up when you get a chance. So, we are going to talk about how to go from good to great as a coach, and it doesn’t matter if you are a fitness coach, wellness coach, personal development coach, there are some unique traits and skills and strategies to go from good to great, and so, with that, AJ what do you think is the the leading reason why trainers or coaches are only good and not great?
AJ: I would honestly say the base thing I’ve seen is when people are trying to figure it out themselves. And it just baffles me in today’s age when there’s other people out there, you know, things from books to podcasts, to programs, to coaching programs, to master minds. There’s so many ways that you can leverage other people’s experience to excel your results, and unfortunately so many people go at it alone, and it seems like they sit there every day trying to figure out what to do next, and spinning the wheels scared to invest in themselves with a coach, or a mentor, or enter the program to move them forward and I am not sure if they are scared of actually having success or whether they don’t trust themselves enough to take action on what is going to be shared with them. For me, the biggest limiting factor for any coach out there who is working with anyone else. It’s the fact that they are not willing to invest and maybe they don’t get the results for their clients and it is based on their experiences, and they are still trying to figure out the best way to move someone, with them in their journey, and it all comes down to getting those results, and in investing people and learn from others who are already very successful and it shortcuts that and you’re able to get results quicker for your clients, you are able to move forward quicker, and of course then you can leverage all that on the marketing, and leverage that to bring new customers, to train your staff members and move your staff members forward, if you have those. So, that to me I would say is the biggest thing.This fear of investing in coach and taking the leap of faith, and kind of learning from someone else. I live by the rule of you get the product to five people you are hanging around with, and sometimes those five people, it doesn’t have to be the friends you’ve made, they can be people you invested with them. It makes a big difference.
JSE: You know, what you’ve just said is how I live my life, so right on brother! So, yes you guys, you are basically the sum average of people you spend the majority the time with. There are people saying different rules, it’s five or seven, whatever, just keep it at five, simple enough. The fact is that those five people will influence you far more than anyone else. Think about it… if like you are a parent and your kid’s hanging around with some punk and you are like, “well there is one of the five, right?’, and that kid can be a horrible influence on your child, and so, why do we forget about that as adults, or we don’t think it’s as important. It’s kind of like “well, they are being molded as a child so we really wanna have him around good kids that come from good families”, and that’s good, that’s important, but it is almost like we reach a certain point in the adulthood where we don’t pay as much attention as we should. I was just thinking about something as you were talking about investing in coaching, there is something that I noticed. You and I attended a few different industry events together with a lot of heavy hitters, there is a lot of trainers and coaches that are probably earning anywhere from $30,000 to $100,000, $150,000 a year, and that’s two to three times the American average for household income. I think it’s 45,000, or something like that. They are investing in some of the programs and products and services for their betterment as well. The people who are at 25- 40,000, who have the most room to grow invest the least. And it doesn’t have to be a lot of money always, but they invest the least time, or they think they already have the answers, they don’t think it’s worth it, or whatever, and what I’ve noticed it’s, you know, in certain circles that you and I have been in, probably with 15 to 20 people, and these guys are making anywhere from $200,000 to probably $5,000,000 a year, something like that. Their discussions are how many tens or hundreds of dollars they’ve spent this year, or over their lifetime in coaching and in education. Have you noticed that as well?
AJ: Oh yeah, absolutely, they are always looking for the next person to kind of move them in that journey. When they are looking to make 6 figures, they invest in coach that will get them to 6 figures. Once they are there, they are looking for another coach who will get them move to 7 figures, and once they get to 7 figures, it’s “ok, how do I get to a multiple 7 figures”, and then, we start looking “ok, how do we get to a hundred million and, from there, how do we go from that to kind of to pretty much to whatever the amount of money we choose to make, and what’s fascinating about that is, my belief is that those who are at the bottom, who are kind of moving along the journey, the thing is as if it is almost like they have that mindset that they have to move along in certain pace, and for them it’s like “when I make this much money then I’ll invest in this coach”, and what’s funny is that they don’t realize that could completely leap from that just by finding the money to invest, and when I say finding the money, you know, there are ways you can borrow, the banks are great with the credit cards and loans and things like that. I think it’s an interesting thing, because when you realize that the more you invest, the more you learn. It puts you around the people who’ve already done what we wanna do, and that’s the key. It’s being around the people who’ve really done what you are doing, I always draw things back to sports with my background, and I look at the four minute mile, you know, and until it was broken no one thought it was possible, but once it was broken, then quickly more people broke it. Now if you don’t want a four minute mile you are not considered successful. So what happens is your reality change, you know, a reality is just what we have created and what’s been put on us by others around us, and that’s why our friends and the people we surround with are so important because they shape up our reality and beliefs. When you move into a different group that have different beliefs it is easy to see what you need to do to get to that level, and so I think that, you know, the scariest thing for those people is, it’s not the reality to them. Someone who’s making $20-30,000 a year can not process making a $100,000 a month. To them, it is completely something that their reality is not used to, it is completely foreign concept, the skepticism, the disbelief, and it is all very real, but it is only real to them. When you get around the group of people who make $100,000 a month and look at what they are doing you start saying “wait a minute , it is not that difficult”. That was the breakthrough for me a few years back, I am very privileged to work with guy named max silver and he has the group called “Maverick 1000”, and it’s a group of people who literally to qualify to be in this group you have to make 7 figures a year. So when you get around the people like that, everyone in that group makes 7 figures a year, in their business. Now, that doesn’t mean they keep 7 figures, right, so you have different people, you have people who are operating on 10% margin, 15% profit margin, and at the other end of the spectrum there are people operating at 80% profit margin. You look at the business models and you start to see patterns, and the patterns emerge. Success always leaves clues, and that is why is so important to surround yourself by those who’ve already done what you wanna do, because it leaves clues, and it makes it so much easier for you to do. So if you find a fitness coach, or a wellness coach, or another MMA instructor who is very successful already, and you look what are they doing, it is easy to model that success. And I think that’s the biggest thing. Because the reality that we know is just what surrounds us, and until we step outside that, it is very difficult to have that faith, in order to move us forward. So hopefully with what you are doing with the podcast and with what other people are doing to spread the message it will start to break that down, but I really do believe it’s like the income you make is really only based on what you know. It is not based on what truly you could make, or what you’re necessarily worth. You may be worth more, but it is what you know in terms of how to position, how to place, how to structure. You know, sometime if we are doing one-on-one coaching, or training, or a mentorship. It is difficult to grow to a high number, income wise, because we are limited by our time. Once we start to see ways to warp our time in terms of leverage, when we see how we can leverage then we can change it, so it all comes down to just following those clues that have been left and following the model that someone else has already done in the industry. That’s why I think it’s important to find people and seek people who are already very successful. If your goal is to own, you are currently working for someone else, and your goal is to own your own business, you go and find someone who owns his own business and find out how they did it. How did they take that leap of faith from moving from? Being employed by someone else to owning their own business and then, beyond that, if your goal is to own multiple locations, you find someone who owns multiple locations. How did you hire, how did you manage, how did you get out of being the day to day?
JSE: You know, I agree 100% to what you are saying and I want to add two points here. One is that every event that I have ever been to, that is about business, ends up being about personal development and the mindset of making money, as much as it is about the specific strategy. And it is not necessarily about motivation cause we are plenty motivated but it’s how we change our perspective, and the part of it is that in our society, in our culture, probably even more so in last several years, there is this divide between those who have and have not, or the perception of those who have or have not, or this class division, or those are the two percent, that’s the one percent, it’s all, honestly, foolish. And it’s a waste of time and energy. If you are segregating yourself, you are alienating yourself. If you have hatred or disdain for people who have more than you, and if you think that wealthy people are assholes, then you would do anything at a subconscious level to become wealthy because then you’d have to admit that you are also an asshole, right? So you have to change your perspective, but you can’t say “hey, this person is a total jackass and then aspire to be that person or what they have, it doesn’t work that way. So when people say “oh, but that’s the rich person doing this or that”, or “well that’s for the wealthy”. Why are you filled with hatred and disdain in this and that? I mean, some of the wealthiest friends I have are some of the nicest, the most giving, most helpful, I met jackasses that are poor and some got wealthy and, if you are poor then wealthy, or middle class then wealthy, and if you are a jerk, you probably are going to be a jerk with the more opportunity to be a jerk.
But if you are cool then you are going to continue to be cool. And that’s just the way it is, but you can not have the perspective of thinking, you know here’s the thing, T. Harv. Eker who wrote, he was in my movie the compass, and he wrote a book “Secrets of the Millionaire Mind”, and he told me, I remember having a meeting with him in San Diego, not too far from where you at, and he said “people have to learn to love and embrace what is that they want”. To love and embrace what you want, and that can be a person, an idea, a philosophy, an income level, whatever it is, but if you are filled with this disdain, in like this “oh, but that’s them”, “maybe for wealthy people they can do this and that”, now think why are you acting that way? Why don’t’ you, people say “I just want to help people”. Ok, if you have $20,000,000 and you give each person a dollar you can help 20 million people, but if you only have $50,000, heck if you give everyone 2 dollars, I mean, you helped far fewer for far less. So it doesn’t , it’s not the way it works, it’s a mindset, but I don’t believe it’s the motivation because I think that people are plenty motivated, they are just motivated to do the wrong things which move them into wrong directions. I mean, I’m gonna say this and I’m gonna turn it over to you, I believe it’s Tony Robbins who said this, I don’t recall but here it is “you can’t major in minor things”, meaning that you can’t expend all your energy on frivolous, trivial, meaningless, empty, shortsighted things, it’s just the matter of changing your perspective on what you will focus on. I’ll give you this quick example…. at the point I am at in m career now I won’t do any business venture at all, I won’t even entertain it, if it is not fun, if it is not digital, if it is not scalable, if it can’t be, at least at part, be outsourced, and if it doesn’t help a lot of people.
And if it doesn’t provide income on ongoing annuity basis… I won’t do it. And that’s not being weird or anything, to me that’s being smart because now I get to help the most people and have the most freedom with the most opportunity for the lowest amount of income for the highest profit margin.
To me, it’s a good plan, and you say what AJ?
AJ: I would go back, I think you are right about the whole motivation thing because I honestly used to have this thought process like, and I blame Zig Zigler for my, my original quote on success was “to make more money or to be more successful you just work harder”. And I blame Zig just because one of his salesbook said, you know, “if you want to double your sales, work double your hours and make more money”, so the harder I work the harder I worth. So I had this belief as a coach almost that if someone wasn’t doing well it is solely because they were lazy, you know, because they weren’t doing anything, they were literally twirling their thumbs, and as I progressed, you kind of start to release the ego a little bit and and start to really look into human behavior, what you notice is that there are those who are lazy that are not successful, who claim that they wanna be successful, and that goes into whole different mindset there, but the majority of the people, and probably those that are listening to the show. It’s not that they are (not) lazy, it’s not that they are not trying to learn, what it is that it’s almost as if they are just looking in the wrong direction, and they focus like you said on the wrong things, so even though they are hustling day to day what they are doing, they are basically spinning the wheels because they are not hustling in the right direction doing the right things, so whatever they are doing it is not moving them forward and I think that’s where being around others who achieved what you wanna achieve, or finding a mentor who can basically point you to the right direction, it’s literally like if you look over your left shoulder and someone comes along and just turns you to the right and all of a sudden you go “wow, I didn’t notice this over here”. And that’s the key, like you said, being focused in the right areas and what’s interesting to me is, as you start to go on with this journey and you start to redefine what the wealth is, and you start to redefine what happiness is, most of the time you go into this personal development, and always seeking within, and if you look at the most successful people in the world they always end up going, like Richard Branson and people at that level, most of they go into, they’re still business oriented, they are still launching business but their focus is on giving back, like in making the bigger change, and I think that, you know, what interesting is, to get to that point where you can do that if you really want to make an impact on world, whether be as a massage therapist or as a personal trainer or health and wellness coach, or as a life coach, your mission is, I believe, to change as many lives as possible, and it all starts by being able to. Generate your income so you can grow and you can spread your message at the greater speed and across a broader spectrum. I think that is what it all comes down to, and so, when we move back to what’s important, you have to be a master of your craft and you have to seek out, and if you are amazing in what you do and you have results, and you just don’t know how to leverage that and move yourself up, then you go and find yourself a business coach or someone who’s done what you wanna do, and remember, the thing is, a lot of people think that they have to find someone in their industry and that’s where they struggle, but the rules of business are pretty much the same across the board and someone who has the deep understanding of that marketing or, you know, if you want to be in the public eye or you wanna get on TV and stuff like that, there are people who can help you, they don’t necessarily have to be in the same industry as you, but if you wanna master your craft and you don’t yet have that results, go find someone who is amazing at what you do, go study under them, learn from them, invest in them, become great at what you do so you can move to the next level ‘how do I get the message out there”. And I think that those are the thing that the people, just like you’ve said, it is not that they are not motivated, it is not that they don’t want it, it’s just looking in the wrong direction, and they are not around the people that can point them into right direction and it’s what really is, it’s just being pointed into the right direction, that’s what’s so powerful, and I think you have a very similar thought process. You can do whatever you want to do. There is no limit to what you can do, and that is the greatest realization ever that the only thing that leads you is you. If you can go early on way, drop the ego and realize that you don’t actually have much control when it comes to this, and basically release that need of being right all the time. It opens you up for the experiences and learning processes that you were closed off to before because you turned that over to someone else, you turned it over to those around you invest with, or surround yourself with and you will follow their advise without this need to prove them wrong or to prove that you are right, and that’s the huge thing, you just let go and trust in the process and you will have ups and downs, that’s a part of life. I always go back to sports, as I said, look at any championship team that wins, they don’t have undefeated season, you know, they have wins and losses, and the goal is to have more wins than losses and eventually be a champion. But you gonna have ups and downs, that’s the part of entrepreneur journey, the key is to manage your state and be confident and have faith throughout, regardless of the tide. And I think if the people can get to that point, success is inevitable, it will all come around quicker the more they are willing to give up, let go and trust the others.
JSE: You just said, go get out with the tide, you heard the phrase, you know, “a rising tides lifts all boats, also stronger income, stronger economy I should say, can help everyone”, I believe it’s Warren Buffett who said “the ebbing tide exposes who is swimming naked” (Laughter), so basically when the economy turns, still it is debatable how strong the economy is now, it depends on who you ask, it will expose who is barely getting by because they are gonna be scrambling and trying to cover their midsection. I wanna offer an additional perspective for the listeners and that is, I think it is always important to do an honest self-assessment, and when I didn’t do that when I was younger, I faulted, and now that I am older and hopefully wiser I am going through constant and ongoing self-assessment, so, for all the listeners here is your self-assessment, and you have to be honest no matter how much it hurts and even if I piss you off, you gotta be honest, ok? So, here it goes.
So, look back on the last year…… it doesn’t have to be a calendar year it can just be 365 days from now, and if you just kind of scan that history, do you have much more money in a savings account? Do you have an investment that you didn’t have before? It could be stocks, bonds, gold, SEP, IRA, money market account, real estate, commercial or residential rental property, or whatever it is. Do you have something of that you didn’t have before? Are you now leveraging your time toward not trading dollars for hours? Because if that’s still all you are doing you are not getting ahead. And the people who are doing that are getting farther ahead. Are you working more hours with really nothing more to show for it? Do you feel that it is an endless conveyor, but getting you nowhere, like the treadmill of life? Do you feel that your positioning in the industry is exactly where it was, or pretty darn close to where it was a year ago? Are you closer to your ultimate goal of living your ideal lifestyle? And if you are not on any of these things, if it’s not happening, you have to be honest and you have to change what you are doing. And, when I say this to people I can just see their facial features change, you know, and believe me, when I say this thing I am not saying that I am hitting all those marks, ok? I am not creating any false illusion here. What I say is that I learn that through constant and ongoing assessment and reassessment for myself and my businesses, and all my different interests, I am able to constantly assess where I am at, am I making the right progress. I’m gonna do a quick breakdown, and I want your opinion on this AJ, so, you guys, because I have such a diverse interests in different aspects of our industry people say “how do you manage it, how you keep on the top of it, what do you do?” So, I have an annual goal list, and the goal list is, I break it down into, I live in a few different locations, so I break it down to each location, so I manage each of those things well. What I wanna do, with that from financial investment perspective and also aesthetically so I have a nice environment. I do it from a financial perspective, did I increase my income, did I invest in different things, what is my investment portfolio look like, and by the way, some of you who are just starting like “your investment portfolio?
You know, IRA, Sep accounts, money markets, real estate investments? I am just trying to get my personal training clients or whatever”, you have to think about your end goal now. And if you are not doing it you are going by it backwards, you actually don’t go from where you are to where you wanna be, you figured where you wanna be and walk backwards and figure out the path to get there. That’s the distinction. So, in this annual list I will also break it down to each division of my company, what are the major goals I want done. Do I need any maintenance repairs at any facility or something like that , what’s the budget for that, I have to figure out the timeline for that, I give myself a rough time on some of the stuff and not on others. I break down personal goals, family goals, travel goals…. different things I want to experience physically too. Last year I wanted to compete at the Jiu Jitsu World Championship so I put that down and did it. This year I want do a Mauy Thai kickboxing fight, so I will put that down and approximate time when I wanna do it. And I know how I can assess my physical and mental energy, because it is very difficult to train for something like that and also launch something big in your business at the same time. It’s about energy allocation and preservation… that’s really important. So, you only have so much energy, there is only so much pieces right, so where you gonna put them in one time to where you can do the best job possible without losing your mind and getting hurt, but also achieving the most benefit in the most goals. So I break down every aspect of my life like that, then I have a daily “to do” list, which is, so the annual is the macro, and today and ‘to do” list is the micro, you know, we do macro and micro cycles, right? So, this is the micro, is the ‘to do” list. Then I also have another list that shows every revenue stream. Now, if you are just doing one on one coaching you have only one revenue stream, which is another thing, we need to focus on increasing your number of revenue streams and diversifying that, so I will have a list of each revenue stream. And then once a week I’ll go through it and say, what have I done to improve this revenue stream, what have I done to improve this revenue stream, and so on. The revenue stream list, the daily “to do” list and the annual list, and they all go towards the super macro which is “how do I want to live my ideal average day for the rest of my life?”, and everything moves me in that direction. So there was a lot on information there but I just want, the people often ask me how do I do it, and how do I manage it. That is how I do it, and if I didn’t have these lists , if I didn’t check those things off, if I didn’t create deadlines, if I didn’t make progress everyday it absolutely wouldn’t happen and you would be talking to someone else, or listening to someone else. What do you say?
AJ: I do something very similar. The one thing that I learned to do is a little bit, and I am sure it is exactly the same for you, I kind of do the same thing, I have met massive goals, and I want to set audacious goals and I tell people that the reason I do that is because not many people do this, there’s less competition, others find the bigger the goal the less the competition, and I break them down very similar to you and they end up in the daily task list. The one thing I really like to do, I am very conscious of numbers , so whether it’s my business, whether it is my physical health, I always look at the numbers and I let the numbers guide me in terms of, when we are looking at the financial numbers, you know, when we are looking what’s working and what is not working, and you dive in, and ok, this is the area we are going to focus on, and we sort of do the same thing with my body, I look at the numbers at the gym, weights lifted, repetitions, energy level, I am looking at the body weight, body fat percentages, things like that, and I let the numbers decide how did my diet go, how much training do I need to do, do I need to increase volume, decrease volume. In terms of spiritual health I am looking at, in terms of happiness, how happy I am in general , how do I manage my state, do I lose my temper, like if someone cuts me off when I am driving, am I able to smile and say that they probably didn’t see me, or am I going to lose my temper, and you know, if I lose my temper , why do I lose my temper, and so on, always letting the numbers and letting that dictate the flow a little bit, but other than that, very similar to what you broke down there, I think that everyone needs to do that and I think that the more focused you can be, you don’t have to know necessarily how exactly you gonna do it, and that’s the kind of beauty, kind of figuring out as you go, but if you have a plan, at least have a something to follow, it’s gonna shortcut that journey, it’s like you took off and you wanted to drive across the country and you don’t have GPS or map, you’ll get across the country eventually, you’ll figure it out, you’ll stop and ask people, and you will get there, but if you had GPS you would get there a lot quicker, you know. And that’s kind of the same thing, and I think you summed it up really well.
JSE: You said something really important and I know you talked about Yanik Silver. He actually contributed to my last book called “Collaboration Economy”, a brilliant guy, very good friend, very smart. He is the kind of person that coaches the coaches what to do, really, I mean, he is at that point, I mean, he is a heavy hitter, and very smart and willing to help. I am sure that he would agree with this too that is, you mentioned that you have to know your numbers, there was a time when I was growing rapidly with the different things I was doing, and I didn’t monitor the numbers, cause everything was kind of gravy it kept rolling and it was all good, and it’s like great, but when you don’t know your numbers you don’t know your margins, you don’t know, if it is profitable, how profitable, are you investing too much money, what is your ROI, your return on investment for things like, well, this was before Facebook advertising that I am talking about, this was long time ago.How much are you spending on, it was a long time ago so it was a newspaper ad, but now it would be pay-per-click or Facebook ads, or something on LinkedIn, or SEO campaign, or building a web site, what’s the return, what are the numbers, how many visitors am I getting, what is my conversion rate, on the conversion rate, what is the lifetime value of the customer, what is the logical progression of their purchases, how long will they retain the customer, what is the ideal number of blog posts that I need to put up per week or per month to where it manages my time the best, and I have the return on the investment and it’s more likely that these people will become thrilled, ongoing and referring customers. So what are these numbers? The more I analyze it and pay attention, and also the more I study and understand the people who are more successful than me, they all do this at the higher level with the greater degree of accuracy, it is undeniable.
AJ: No doubt. I think it is more about the awareness, the more aware you are the more you can push your energy into right direction, and that is the key we talked about the whole show, it’s about moving forward in the right direction and the more aware you are, the more you have to go off of, the better the focus the direction can be.
JSE: Agreed, I know that you have an appointment to get to, and I appreciate your time, and I know that we can go on and on about this, but, I am glad that our philosophies are pretty congruent, that’s nice to know, because, you said success leaves clues and also people who are successful tend to do very similar things even if they have different niches, so the fundamentals of what makes them successful, are, it’s almost like an universal law, I mean there are variants of course but it is pretty predictable as to how and why people become successful in our industry, and I am including that in all the training and coaching industry, especially with leveraging on-line and technology , and let me say this, I am gonna have my final thought here and I’m gonna let you give yours. If you are struggling, challenged and you are thinking ‘”I deserve more men, I wanna get ahead, I wanna make it to that next level, I wanna make a bigger impact, I wanna share my message with the world, and I feel like I am on a treadmill and I’ve been doing this for five years and I am really not better off than I was five years ago, I wanted to move but I couldn’t afford to, I wanted to have X number of dollars at savings but I have half as much, I wanted to surround myself with like-minded people but I am not going to the right events or hanging out in the right pools”, you know, and so, you have to make the change and if you are not willing to do it and stretch and grow, and sometimes it is a little painful and uncomfortable, you know, that’s just the way it is, and you gonna pass it and you gonna realize that these people who are at the point you wanna get at, or get to, are fun, kind and helpful, the only thing I would say is to never say “can I pick your brain?”, because that’s an extraction and it physically and audibly sounds horrible, so don’t say “can I pick your brain?” to someone who can help you, you can say “thank you for what you do. I learned a lot from you. Is there anything I can do for you? how can I learn more about what you do?”. Something to that effect, but picking someone’s brain is basically an extraction and it is a one way movement and you are not offering anything in reciprocity, and over time that can be a burn out. What do you say?
AJ: I never said “hey I need you to promote me, or do you have any advice?”, I always just talk to them about the things I know that they are interested in, that are relevant to them, I wanna know how they grew their business and I am looking at ways I can help them, and that’s how I really connected with most people, it’s “how can I help you? what is that you got going on?” Maybe I can offer my advice, or maybe I can connect you with someone, maybe I can help. I found that it served me very well, and those who I know to do the same thing, it serves them very well, and those who take the opposite approach , and I understand sometimes the mindset of those people are in, because they are struggling, I believe they are in kind of, almost in desperation, then looking for that secret, cause they feel like there is something they don’t know, but when you operate from that place, a place of taking rather than giving, it doesn’t create a very good relationship, and the person typically wants to get away from you as fast as possible because you are draining them of their energy, and so, actually when you approach with the giving hand first, and you know, Gary Vaynerchuk’s new book “Jab jab right hook” has a great example of the ways to do that, but also, what’s that one book, to give you one?
JSE: The Go Giver?
AJ: Yeah, The go giver, that’s another great book, and if you operate from that place and you come to people in that mindset you’ll be amazed the difference it makes, then you really are able to connect with anyone in this way , and to create a relationship that is lasting and you’ll be surprised how well it serves you.
JSE: Agreed. And yeah, I actually read anything that Gary Vaynerchuk does, because he’s been an incredibly influential coach and mentor to me, so anything he does I’m at least gonna review it at the minimum. So, hey, I want the people to be able to get in touch with you so give us your contact info.
AJ: My website is ajroberts.com and you go there you can actually get a free book I did with Yanick and Brian Tracy “Cool change agents”, and so you can grab that, and my contact information is there, and I also have a podcast as well if you are in the fitness industry and you are interested in that, it is called thefitpreneurs.com , it’s the more of the marketing side of stuff, and me and my friends love to do that, and we just go through and helpful ways to grow your business, and lastly Facebook, I am very active on that, and it’s just facebook.com/ajroberts.
JSE: You gotta keep it simple when you can brother. All right now, thank you so much, thank you all, so it’s ajroberts.com , there is a lot of great information there, AJ is one of the good guys, he is here to help and incredibly knowledgeable, and he has some cool skill sets to help you out, so, thank you all for listening, thank you AJ…. and we’ll catch you on the next show. Thank you.
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