How Fear Holds Us Back From Being Better Audio Entrepreneurs

This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 61

the six figure home studio podcast, the number one resource for running a profitable home recording studio. Now your hosts, Brian Hood and Chris Graham. Welcome back to another

episode of the six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood and I'm here with my cohost Chris Graham. Hey Chris. How you doing buddy? Buddy? Stop. Whatever that is. If somebody, if there's this one, someone's first time listening to our podcast, I'm a real man. I'm going to put audio in business here. Widow. Let's do this. How many Ms Dot Chris Cream business principles. Oh my gosh. So you can do what you're passionate about. There's at least one person out there that played this for the first time. They heard your voice and immediately hits will never listen to us again. He'll be back. He'll be back. Okay? Okay. Okay. What's new with you, Chris? Graham.

Okay. Let me nerd out with you real quick. So I got something new for myself this week than I'm so pumped about. We've talked about Parkinson's law on the podcast in the past. It's this idea that however much time you have to complete a task is how much time it will take you. If you have to finish editing drums and five hours, you will. If you have to finish editing drums in an hour, you will. You'll figure it out. And so I struggle with this a lot and Amazon just came out with another Lexa wall clock.

I saw your instagram video, which is linked to Chris Graham's. Instagram is inside of our show notes@thesixfigurehomestudio.com slash 61.

Indeed made them follows y'all. Chris Underscore Graham, like the cracker g r a h a m. anyways, so I got Alexa at the office and I can be like, Alexa, set a timer for 20 minutes, which I do every morning. He used to do it on my phone because first thing I do want to get to the studio is I read a self help book that will fire me up. Uh, I just finished reading the one thing that you recommended maybe five or six weeks ago. Yep. Rocked my face off. But this clock shows like a countdown timer when you tell it to. Unbelievable.

Yeah, I saw the video. It looks pretty cool. I also have an Alexa spy. I call them spies because I also have an Alexa spine, my kitchen and the only thing I use it for is it listen to music and I will set a timer for my coffee in the morning for four minutes because that's how long he told me to stop my coffee and my

aeropress press don't over extract. You really don't. So catching you guys up. Brian and I love two things. Helping you guys run a business so that you can do what you love for a living and roasting our own coffee beans.

Those are our two passions in life. Coffee and studios.

So we use Arrow presses and we use this little like attachment called

I stir the whole time. That one you just said, the little attachment that Prizmo a. that's the game changer. B, that's the gear. Slow alert because that is gear. We are a coffee

gear sledding. Yeah.

And See, that's the most coffee nerdy thing you could possibly ever mentioned is a

third party attachment skier coffee creation thing called an aeropress. So continue on. For those of you that are annoyed, let me just real quick, the game that Brian and I both play is, can I make the best cup of coffee I've ever had every morning and we have all these gadgets that are all relatively inexpensive. I did the math. I spend $12 a month on coffee, but I roast my own beans. I grinded by hand. You have all sorts of Arrow, pressy, Doo hickies and scales and stuff. You know, all of this stuff is fun and let's bring it back home for you guys on the podcast. It's amazing because if somebody comes over and you make them the best cup of coffee they've ever had in your life, a client, they're going to come back like they'll never forget the best cup of coffee they've ever had. And newsflash, coffee in our world, at least in our country is atrociously bad.

Yes. It's so true. America is so far behind the game when it comes to coffee.

Oh, it's so bad. It's so easy to make someone the Best Cup of coffee they've ever had with not a whole lot of investment in equipment or time.

Okay, so coffee. Sled aside, I don't even know where we were talking about before that. Let's move this back to the actual topic of this podcast because we're going to talk about something that's going to help your business today and the topic of today's episode, Chris, is drum roll fear. Oh, that's such a lame episode, Chris.

Fear. Yeah. Well, here's the thing. Our goal with this podcast is that every episode he would listen to it and be like, oh, got it. I moved a notch forward in my career. I'm a little bit closer to where I want to be. I'm a little bit closer to being consistent with my business and I'm going to be confessing so many things to you guys today about my own fear and how fear really is the big issue. It's not that you don't have enough customers. It's not that your systems aren't good enough. It's not that you're not marketing well. Ultimately it was pretty good chance that all of that comes back to fear that you have.

Yes, so think about, and I'm going to try to relate this to those of you who have clients in the studio thinking about that time that you had a client that was an absolute annoyance to you because they needed to do the take 30 different times, especially vocalists 30 different times and they're still not happy with it. Chances are that was their fear getting in the way of getting something out into the world and so it is a massive issue when you come across that from the outside looking in because you're like, hey dude, 40 takes ago. That was great. This 41st take, it's not any better and you're not gonna. Get any better. As a matter of fact, you're getting worse because you're getting more and more pissed off as you go. And so to bring that back to us, we don't spot this in our own lives. Most of the time. We constantly make excuses of not doing something. We postpone things, we delay things. We just never get things done in our lives. And this is a huge detriment to our business because there are so many things that you have to do in your business if you want to be successful, there's so many things that would help push your business forward and help you gain success faster, but you let that fear stop you from doing certain things.

Huge. So let's just come right out of the blocks here with my fierce. I love podcasting. It's fun. It's not scary to me. You know what's terrifying? Making youtube videos scares the crap out of me. Also, sending emails scares the crap out of me like mass email newsletter type things.

And just to give people context here with the newsletter thing, Chris and I have mailing lists with tens of thousands of people on it. Yep. And so when you send an email and press enter to send, you're sending this email out to tens of thousands of people. Imagine that you're seeing an email to an arena full of people. That's intimidating. So. Okay. So go back to what you're talking about Chris.

Yeah. So for years and years and years, one of the best ways that I have gotten customers is I crack the code with Youtube Marketing and probably most of you, your first encounter with me was probably actually a youtube ad. They probably wasn't this podcast. You might not even recognize on the same annoying guy that would show up every time that you were looking for certain types of tutorial videos. And that was really effective for me. But ironically I have only two videos on my youtube channel and I only made one of them. The other is my head mix engineer and the issue there is I'm a wimp and I don't want to make youtube videos because I'm afraid that people will comment on them and say nasty things about me. And so that is a problem because there's such a big opportunity for me to talk about some of the things we talk about on this podcast on youtube. There's such a big opportunity for me to talk about the mindset behind why it's so dang hard to make music in a recording studio. And there's plenty of opportunity for me to talk about mastering, so. So by the time this episode has dropped, I will have started my 2019 new year's resolution, which is to drop a youtube video every single week.

Ooh, that is a bold statement, my friend.

Yeah, it is. So I'm going to do it and if I don't, I would like to get lots of negative reviews on this podcast on itunes.

So with you on that shit, dude.

Yeah. So this might feel pitchy pitchy, not like a singer, but pitchy like I'm trying to sell you guys something. I'm not. We're talking about fear today and facing your fear and looking in the eye because it's through doing that that you grow.

And I want to stop here just real quick to kind of make sure you're all on the same page here. Chris has been talking about launching his youtube channel for like the last six months. He's been seriously talking about the last six months. He's shown me all these little great gadgets. He got to make it as simple as possible for him to shoot you two videos. And I have not seen him launch a single video in six months and there was only one reason why that hasn't happened. It's not because he doesn't know about mastering, it's not because he doesn't have ideas about what sort of videos

to make. It's not because he doesn't have the equipment. It's not because he doesn't know how to edit the videos. It's not because of any of these things is because of one thing. And that one thing is the fear of putting himself out there because frankly it's terrifying. Yup. You got me a 100 percent true and I'm the same. Like I didn't want this podcast for like three years because it was terrifying. And until I had a crush my little social crutch over here, Chris Graham to launch the podcast with me. And so like fear will stop you from doing a lot of things. This podcast would have been out three years sooner had I not had that fear of putting something out in the world. Thank God though, because now it's better. I'd rather have 60 episodes with Chris Graham than 250 episodes with just Brian Hoods.

Buddy, I love you man, but back to your youtube thing here. This is about you, Chris, not me. Yeah, and we're going to bring this back and help you guys apply this in your own life, but for me, my business has taken big leaps forward in direct correlation to when I've taken big steps forward to address my fear to say, you know what, you're an idiot that you have had 30,000 people. This is a couple of years ago, signup on your website for free mastery sample over the past decade and that you don't email any of them ever. Let me pause again here. Chris had amassed a mailing list of 30,000 people and this is actually when I had met Chris my first time on this mastermind call. Chris was talking about the first ever email he sent out to this mailing list. 30,000 people on your mailing list and you had never sent them an email and this was all trace back to fear.

And the reason I'm pointing this out is because Chris had no problem spending money on ads for Youtube and getting all these funnels dialed in, but he had been completely neglecting a free source of work for his studio of just out of fear. So logically he knew and I'm just using this example because it's easy for me and you can call me out a thousand percent if you want on my own fear stuff. But like logically you knew that the mailing list was a great source of marketing for your mastering studio, but you never took advantage of it. Yeah. And it was because of that fear holding you back. And that's really the topic of this episode is why that is what sort of fear holding you back from doing right this second and how can you get over it? Continue on your story. Yeah. So the email was so intense.

I confess this in my mastermind group. I had a community guys. Many of them you guys probably know is a bunch of podcasters and bloggers and like Bjork Limited Dixon. See Joe Gilder was coming around, Lid Shaw, Matt Boudreaux, like just all these different heavy hitting podcasting, blogging, youtube guys just for you guys. That's audio issues.com. That's recording studio rockstars podcast. That's working class audio podcast that's home stereo corner.com. Crystalyn with mixed online in shepherd with all his mastering stuff, production device that UK and so all these people that are just great, amazing people and I, I kind of stepped out and looked my fear in the eye for a minute. It was like, hey guys, I have an email list. 30,000 people. I never emailed them and be Oregon in particular. Just fricking laid into me and

encouraged. Imagine how mean he was to you.

It was great. Well, he helped me a lot, get better at that and so I started sending emails. I made tens of thousands of dollars just from that. And so the youtube thing, like let's bring this back to the youtube thing. Writing an email used to take me like six, seven, eight hours. It was ridiculous. Like 500 words is so stupid. So many fear issues like that

because what if somebody thinks I spam them and

with youtube it's the same of just being afraid of trolls commenting on videos and stuff and for me as far as moving forward, that's the thing I'm the most afraid of, so I'm going to look in the eye and I'm going to try to do good in this world and make content that will help people and help you guys through making these youtube videos. So check it out. It's Chris Graham mastering search for that. On Youtube you can subscribe or whatever you want to do. I'm going to be talking about mindset about why it's so hard to make music in the studio. Why there's this fear. You know exactly what we're talking about here, about the psychology, about mastering, about mixed polishing. You know why it's so hard to do that last 10 percent of a mix. So the big thing for me is I feel like 2018 was an amazing year for me because I was convicted about something called stewardship and stewardship I think is a really important topic as we talk about the topic of fear. Stewardship is doing the best that you can with what you've got. And it's this idea of like if you've been given much, much is expected of you. The whole like Spiderman thing, you know, with great power comes great responsibility. That's uncle. What's his name?

I don't know those spiderman. That shows my extent of my knowledge.

Spiderman's uncle, like his uncle tells Peter Parker, I forget his name. You guys are screaming it in your cars right now. You know, his uncle tells them this and it's this idea that you need to lean in and you need to use what you got. Uncle Ben. Uncle Ben. Yes. Good old uncle pen. So this idea for me of like, I feel like I could help a lot of people by making youtube videos and talking about trying to demystify, mastering and demystify. Ultimately, what makes mastering so complicated and so scary is this fear thing. It's a mindset issue. It's a psychology thing, so I'm gonna try to rip that apart and I'm going to be dropping videos each week, so let's bring this home. Let's say you are trying to do music production full time. You're trying to be an audio engineer full time. Brian, what would you say are the most common ways that fear enter the equation and keep people from achieving their potential?

So the most common things that I see for people that fear holds them back from number one is building relationships, and I see this all across the board. I have, between the home studio, startup course and profitable producer course. I see over a thousand people that have taken the steps towards progress. They know exactly what they need to do. They know exactly how they need to do it and then they never do it because of the fear and this wholesome back in a number of ways, but it comes down to this is a relationship business and if they can't get over that fear, if they're going to struggle to succeed in this business. So I see it getting the way of relationships actually going out and new relationships.

I see it getting in the way of putting a website out and this is a really common one. People just tweak the website all day long and they never actually launched. They never make it live and so it's this endless like, I'm going to make this font a little smaller and I'm gonna. Make this fun a little bit bigger and now I need to do the Rubato Sans Font instead of the Open Sans Font because this is a little more modern font and I need to do my logo and no, I don't like that logo. So I'm gonna now get this logo created and then I'm going to put, what should my headline be? I don't know now what about my bio. Should I write it in third person or first person? Should I use a photo of me in the studio or front of me out in the field?

It's all this bullshit that doesn't really matter and they obsess over it and this is really across the board, not just websites and then they never launch it, never launched their website or they never get their logo created or they never create a business card. They never send that email because they don't have that perfect subject line. So there's so many places this applies to home studio owners that it's going to affect every single person listening to this podcast and one way or another it affects Chris Graham. It affects me. It affects everyone I know in some way, shape or form. So at somebody that has to be addressed. Yeah, so let me get nerdy here for just a minute. Why? Why are we like this? Why do we get tripped up by our fear and instead of building something awesome and doing awesome things and putting awesome art out in the world, why did we get tripped up by this fear?

Why is it this something that everyone struggles with, so there's a lot of reasons for that, but I think one of them that we need to point out is for a really long time, human beings lived in very small communities, but a hundred and 50, so you would find a bunch of cave men and women and children and there'd be about 150 and the tribe and then you go 40 miles away and there'd be another 150. There weren't cities up until very, very recently as far as human history goes. Now the thing that I keep in mind is that for generation after generation after generation, human beings adapted to this sort of society and in a hundred and 50 people, if you put yourself out there and you did something stupid, you took a risk. There wasn't a whole lot of reward for that, and the drawback might be that you were ostracized from your caveman community, which meant that you had died.

I was gonna say that's a death sentence back then. Total death sentence. We are programmed to fear rejection disproportionately to how we should in a modern society. Man. I'm pep talking myself here, so this idea that, oh, what if someone doesn't like it? It doesn't matter. You won't get kicked out of the tribe and be eaten by a saber tooth tiger. It's not the way things are anymore, but there's a piece of our brain that's very much still a caveman and that piece of our brain says, don't offend, don't offend, don't take a risk. Don't put yourself out there because you'll get destroyed and if the chief doesn't like you or if the chief's wife or the chief's daughter or the chief's son or whatever, then you're out and if you're out, you're dead and your best opportunity to survive is going to be to walk to a new tribe and start from scratch to be the lowest person on the totem pole, literally the totem pole and have to deal with that.

That's not reality. Not Anymore. That is a remnant leftover from our previous life. Yeah, so you look at people that are really doing great work, you know, case in point, Bob Dylan at that's just used him. Bob Dylan put some weird music out there and he says like this, a sings oddly and a lot of people hate Bob Dylan know, but millions and millions and millions of people love Bob Dylan. That's the nature of the society that we live in. You can have a million people hate you. Nickelback cigarette example. Yeah, there are the butt of a joke. Yep. Most people hate nickelback, but it doesn't matter because probably at least a million people are obsessed with them and will spend money on anything that's got nickelbacks logo on it. Fun fact, Chad Kroeger, the singer for nickelback and founder of nickelback pronounce cruder sorry Bro. Net worth of $60, million dollars so it can be profitable and we hate it sometimes, but that's really, that's kind of the point of this is that it doesn't really matter whether it not everyone loves you, but the feeling inside of us is that everyone has to love us.

Yeah, and that's the thing that keeps Chris Graham from launching his youtube channel. That's the thing that keeps me from launching this six figure homes video podcast. That's the thing that keeps Chris Graham from sending an email out to tens of thousands of people is that fear that it won't appeal to everyone and so that he can't send it to anyone. This is helpful for me. This is something I struggle with mightily and you just hit the nail on the head that the fear is that anything less than 100 percent of people will love you. That's crazy. That's super crazy and I struggle with that mightily and so man, I hope for you guys that are listening that you're tracking with us that probably the reason your business isn't as big as you want it to be, the reason you haven't been able to go full time or the reason that you don't have as many clients as you used to, it probably has something to do with some fear that you have about doing something that not a hundred percent of people would like.

I failed to mention this, but I tell people all the time, one of the number one things you can do in your business as followup, followup, followup, followup, yeah. Every single conversation you ever had with anyone forever in your entire life should always have a followup attached to it at some point, even if it's a band that rejected you, follow up a year from now, even if it's a band that you just finished their IEP, follow up a year from now, no matter what, every single conversation you need to have a follow up, but what will happen is that people will not follow up because of a fear and that fear is this feeling that they are annoying people when they follow up and that couldn't be further from the truth, and so this is just one of many ways that people let fear get in the way of pushing their business forward and I think that's just something that had been mentioned.

This is a good time to mention it as well. Well, and just to kind of pat you on the back, they're like, I have followed up much more since we began doing this podcast case and point. I've been following up pretty well. Not probably as good as I could, but as we were prepping for this episode, I landed project from one of the big three labels in the world. Won't tell you who just yet. Congrats. Yeah, I mean it was awesome. Like, oh cool. I followed up with a contact for this band and I landed a project from one of the biggest labels in the world. Sweet. Awesome. One other thing that I see fear doing is not necessarily getting in the way of you doing something. It's a fear that makes you self sabotage. Well, I got a great example, so I used to be in a community of people that we were all in our twenties and there was a guy in the community, I want to say what his name was [inaudible].

This is pretty embarrassing for him, but he had a crush on a girl in the community and he had his own issues, but he wanted to ask her out. He knew he needed to ask her out, but he was so nervous about what the result of that would be and this girl was pretty far out of his league, so he did something really weird. He shaved his head and his eyebrows and then he asked her out. I asked them about. I was like, why'd you do that? And he was self aware enough to tell me the truth, and he said, well, I knew if I did that, there's no chance. She would say, yes, that's crazy. That's such a good example of this. It's like an extreme example, but we've all done this in some way, shape or form. We didn't want to fail on our own accord so we self sabotaged so that it's our decision to fail.

We made it so that we failed. We didn't let failure happen to us. We created that failure and that's really obviously a dangerous thing. Well, I see this with people that are just learning sales, you know, they'll talk to someone and be like trying to make their first sale or their third sale or something like that, and they'll say something along the lines of, well, you know, I know you know, you probably have a budget and it's probably too much and that's the case was a big deal. You may disqualify themselves. Yes. They disqualified themselves at the onset instead of leaning in and you know, being okay with a no. So men case and point. Best Story. Best I ever did this in my life. I had a crush on a girl in a. let's see here. Two thousand five. So you're after I graduate college and I wanted to ask her out really bad.

Just the year I graduated high school. Oh, that's amazing. So I decided in my heart I was okay with a no. I was going to lean all the way in this idea of leaning in is the opposite of fear. It's leaning in and with anticipation of I'm going to do this, I'm gonna. Give it my best instead of self sabotage, which I was notorious for when asking girls out before and I convinced her to meet with me and I leaned all the way in. Literally had no fear. Kissed her on the cheek. Just kidding. It was so crazy because she was like, you know, well we can meet, but like the answer's no. I was like, okay, whatever. Like it's still meet. I'm just want to tell you why I wanted to ask you out. When you say lean in, you didn't mean physically leaned in.

You mean, like figuratively? Metaphorically leaned in. Got It. So I went in guns blazing, gave her my pitch, asked her out, and I'll never forget this at the end I was like, okay, well that was it. What do you think? Which was me leaning in of like, I'm going to ask for a yes or a no, and I'll never forget it. She said, well, I'm scared, but I'm feeling it. And I was like, oh my gosh. But it was because I had no fear that I got a yes. And now she's the mother of my children and my wife. It was our 12 year anniversary this past Sunday. So thanks. I also want to mention something and it brings up a point when it comes to sales. This is not a sale episode. This is a fear episode. But Chris did something interesting there. He wanted a yes or a no.

Some people are okay. This is why I like follow ups. Some people are okay with a non answer. They'll put themselves out there, they'll face their fears, they'll pitch themselves or they'll send a price or something and then they are too scared to ever follow up because that would be a yes or a no. And they're too scared to get that yes or a no. But let me just say a no decision is always a no. No answer is by default a no. So if you never get a decision from someone, if you never get a reply from somebody, if you never get an answer from someone, a definitive answer. If they're on the fence, that is by default a no. So if you are okay with constantly getting rejected, never follow up, but if you ever want to win deals or wives will just say wife, single, lighter, when wife, then you need to make sure you're getting a yes no from someone and not being okay with a non answer.

I love that. And I tell you what, man, I struggled with this like crazy in middle school and in high school I started to get a little bit better at it in college and I'm a lot better at it now than I used to be. But there's so much room for growth there and I don't think I'll ever be at a spot where there is no opportunity to grow in this. This is an exciting topic. It's an exciting topic because I know that there are people listening right now that are like, gosh, I feel like he's poking me in the chest with his finger. Uh, this is uncomfortable. They're just cringing. Will listen. This whole episode that just looks like they're taking a big old dump or just smelling a big old dump. Just, Oh, this is me. I want to hear that. Oh, this is gonna make me face reality.

Speaking of reality, so I've talked about this book and the podcast before. I had a guy reach out on my instagram just this week. He mentioned that he heard about this book on the podcast and read it, which made me so proud to vote called integrity by Dr Henry Cloud and Dr Henry Cloud. This book is fire and it is a really hard read, not because the words are big, but he drops the so many truth bombs that it's very uncomfortable. Were there any in there about getting over your fears? Oh yeah. The biggest quote, and I've shared this quote on the podcast before, but it's worth sharing on every podcast. He said, integrity is having the courage to eat reality for breakfast without getting sick. Again, I'll say that integrity is having the courage to eat reality for breakfast without getting sick, and I think what most of us do, the way fear manifests for most of us is rather than face our fear, we deny reality.

We pretend that the situation is something different than it is, and I've seen this again and again and again in relationships where there was one guy that used to be really, really close with. It's almost like a son to me and he had issues with lying. He was a very dishonest guy and I would call him on this pretty regularly and he would. I didn't learn this until much later, but the issue wasn't just that he lied, that he lied to himself about the lies to convince himself he wasn't dishonest. I heard something recently go through premarital counseling right now because I want a healthy marriage. And, uh, one of the things they talked about is how fear can cloud who you really are fear on your child, who you really are. And what happens in what's very common and what it sounds like this guy had done is he had let fear cover who he really was.

And so he had to lie because the lie had become who he was instead of who he truly was. And I've seen this across to people. Example would be like someone who is a really great person and amazing person at heart, but the fear in their life causes them to be someone that they're really not investor, a terrible person that every one of us know someone like this, someone who is really at the core, a great person, but they let a fear driven life dictate who they are and that person is not really who they are except they left. You're the way. Ultimately it changes who they are at the core superintends stuff, so for I'm sure many people listening that are trying to build a career and audio. They might have the skills, they might have the network, they might even have the financing that might have a really good job, but the only thing holding them back is fear.

Fear, and it's that fear of, you know, we kind of hint at the fact that Brian and I think Jesus is cool on the buck at sometimes, but we hinted that without trying to be preachy here, but there's a really great phrase in the Bible. Sorry if that's offensive. Anybody, and this is not the point of the podcast here, don't be sorry about that. I'm sorry, but there's this phrase, fear of man and Jesus talks all the time about how this is an issue that really messes people up. It's not like, oh, you're promiscuous, or, oh, you've got alcohol issues. All you have fear of man issues and this fear of man, whew, boy, man, that is like a super intense, like one of the most wicked things that can go in and change your heart and make you make decisions that contradict who you are. And you know, for me, I definitely struggle with fear. Men. I definitely struggle with like five make this thing or if I say this or I'd make this video, some people might not like it and they're going to post comments in Youtube and then other people will see those comments and then they will agree with them and it will snowball downhill and everyone will know that I'm a fraud and they'll make fun of me for my crooked teeth. Kind of like how you just apologized. If anyone was offended by you talking about the Bible.

See, there it is. Fear of man. Well, let's talk about some things. We're not experts in this like we both have fears in our lives that hold us back no matter what, but I have seen some things that have tended to work when it comes to getting over fears and I think is worth mentioning and Chris, you're welcome to put it into your tips and tricks here as well, but some practical

advice to help you overcome your fears. And the number one thing that I have seen that helps people get past their fears is accountability. Chris Graham just talked about how he's going to have 2019 be the year of Youtube for him. One video a week. He just announced it this entire podcast, thousands of listeners, and now he is going to be held accountable by thousands of people. If I were a betting man, I would say that he would, if not perfectly, get that done. You get pretty close to his goal there and if you have people that are holding you accountable, that is one of the best ways to get over a fear of something is to announce what you're going to do and to have people that will actively hold you accountable for what you say you're going to do.

I love that. Well, and the component that's really effective there too is our pride, which is another one of these issues that can really mess people up because I've gone out and said, I'm going to make a video every week. My pride won't let me fail too egotistical for like, oh, I put that thing out there and I said I was gonna do this thing and I didn't. So this accountability thing, there's two components to that. One is telling people your goals, telling people in your intense, but to making those goals solid, not just like, oh, own will be successful in music. That's a stupid goal. What does that even mean? Doesn't mean anything. Yeah, I use the word that stupid. Really the phrase that super, that really kind of rarely, but this is one of those things that you won't be successful if it's this own, do this thing and want to be good at this thing.

You have to make it objective. There's two ways something could be. It could be subjective, which means at probably this, it's probably that. It's hard to actually say what success is. The word better is subjective. Yes, totally subjective or objective, which is rooted in the word object as in real, as in hard and so objective would be like, my goal is I want to make $10,000 this year. My goal is I want to break six figures this year. It's those objective goals. They become really useful with accountability because there's a polarity there. It's yes or no. Did you do the thing yes or no, not will a troll and things go in the wound, you know, the, you know, didn't expect to have objectivity with accountability. That's the winning combination.

That's the winning combination. That's what we do in our accountability accelerator bootcamps. We do a few of these a year and this is where we put everyone on an eight week bootcamp where you have to do shit. You literally have to turn in proof of work that we check every single week or you get kicked out of the program and you lose money. That's how it works and so it's like this brutally difficult program, but our strike out, our dropout rate is surprisingly low because people are a part of a team. They have accountability in their lives, so it's really, really a powerful way of doing this, but I want to talk about something you mentioned when it comes to objective goals and talking about a goal being, I want to make $10,000 a year. I want to make 100,000 dollars this year. That is not a good goal in my opinion, because you don't necessarily have control over that.

You don't have any control over exactly how much money you make. That's what we call a lagging indicator lag. A lagging indicator. Your income is a lagging indicator. A leading indicator is maybe how many lunches you have per week with people in your network or maybe how many people you reach out to on facebook or instagram per week or maybe how many cold emails you send out or maybe how many people you follow up with a week. Those are the leading indicators. If I follow up with 100 people this month, 25 of those people will get back to me with interest of some sort and five of those will book a project with me for a total of $10,000. I can't control the back end of that equation, but what I can control is that I can follow up with 100 people every single month for the next year and if that is my goal, that's one that I control is a leading indicator goal.

So with you on Youtube, your goal, your. It's like saying I want my goal in 2019 is to have a million youtube views. You don't have control over that. What you do have control over is the fact that you're going to put out 52 videos in 2019 one a week. That's a goal that you have full 100 percent control over. No matter how many views it gets, no matter what gets in the way. You can control that and that's why I liked those types of goals. The ones that you are the one in control, not things that are outside of your control, not the lagging indicators, the views of the lagging indicators, the things that come after you do the leading indicators, which is putting the videos out in the world. I got way nerdy, but that's a really important part.

There was a moment there, you were talking and I sort of forgot that I was podcasting and felt like I was just listening to a podcast and I was like, Oh God, I need this in my life, so yeah, no, totally. That was amazing, dude. So I do this every once in a while I hit the rewind button, like, go listen to that last 30 seconds again. That was really, really your 45 seconds again, that was super, super good and if you're going to take home something from this podcast episode that can help you immediately. I think that advice that you just dropped, Brian, is probably yet

two minutes, 15 seconds actually, but who's counting? You know, it's amazing, man. I love this. I want to say one more thing as far as practical advice that I like to leave people with and that is using fear to overcome fear. Fear is a big thing. We're talking an entire episode about how fear gets in the way, but you can actually use fear to your advantage and that is because people will work 10 times harder to not lose something than they will to gain something. And what I mean is Chris Graham will work 10 times harder to not lose a thousand dollars. Then he would to earn a thousand dollars extra and so I'm going to call you out right now. Chris, you say you're going to put out a youtube video every week for 2019. There is a website called [inaudible] dot com. S T I C K, k, it'll be in the show notes, James, I'll find it, and this is a website where you set a goal.

It could be to lose weight, it can be to stop smoking. It could be to follow up with 100 people a month. It could be to put one youtube video out per week in 2019 and so you set a goal. Then you set a coach so you invite someone to hold you accountable so you have the coach in there. That would be me in this situation. It would be in the situation and then you set a deliverable so it may a photo of your weight on a scale. It might be photo of your credit card statement showing that you didn't purchase any cigarettes. I don't know what it would be in that case, but in your case, Chris Graham, yours would be a link to a live youtube video every single week and that goes to your coach and then your coach either approves or denies or says nothing was sent to me this week and so now you're going to get a certain amount of money drawn out of your bank account every single week and it's going to go to either a charity which I don't support and here's why.

You'll just give up because your money's going to charity and you'll just like, you know what? I'm not going to do it. The money's going to charity or it can go to an anti charity. Something you hate, something you don't support. And that's what I would say here. You can put money towards anti-gun are pro gun things. You can put money towards political activist campaigns and what you don't support. Any hot button issue that you would ever think about. And so you can lose money to something you don't support every single week that you don't put a youtube video. So that is my challenge to you, Chris Graham is using fear to overcome fear in the situation by signing up to stick.com, committing to a certain amount of youtube videos in 2019, setting me as your coach and putting a amount of money each week that would hurt at least 50 bucks that will hurt.

It will sting if you lose it that week. Putting it in my to do list you have and that went better than I expected, but this is something that I used a couple of years back to lose like 15 pounds and I had someone that I was sending my roommate that I was sending photos of my weight to and I would have to do all sorts of crazy shit sometimes to lose weight because I had to lose one point five pounds per week and if I didn't hit that weight by my deadline, I lost 25 bucks to some political activist campaign that didn't support.

Okay. That's amazing. This is really good stuff. I think there's my sigh. I'm like emotionally exhausted now from contemplating how much pressure is going to be honored and drop these videos, but yeah, that whole loss aversion thing is fascinating that people will do anything to not lose, but they won't work that hard again. So yeah. I'm gonna have to go to stick.com and figured out what charity, what anti charity I didn't want to send money to. Right. Can it be to charities because I'd love to put the Republicans and the Democrats.

You can just pick one. It doesn't matter. I don't think you're gonna do two. It'd be hilarious. Gosh, that's intense. Yeah. I would say anyone listening right now, you have someone in your life that can hold you accountable. You can set some sort of objective, not subjective, some sort of objective goal in your life, and you can sign up to [inaudible] dot com and help overcome that fear by having a set deliverable every single week or at least every single month that your coach or your sponsor, whoever it is, is approving this stuff that's unbiased and holding you accountable that they can have the guts to hit that button and make you pay that 50 bucks every single week that you don't do it because I'll tell you right now, Chris, if you sign up for it, I will gladly charge your credit card every damn week that you don't put youtube video. You

will know you will. Oh Man. Okay. Well, let me lean into some more fear here. One of my favorite things in the world is talking to people about this sort of stuff. Podcasting is great, but I love meeting one on one with somebody and talking to them about their fears and not from a spot of like, hey, I don't struggle with this stuff, so I'm gonna help you in that struggle with this stuff, but from a spot of hate. I used to struggle with this a little bit more than I do now. Maybe I can help you struggle with this a little bit less. So one of the other things I'm gonna be doing in 2019 is I am going to be opening up just a few spots for coaching. I've mentioned this on our six figure studio community on facebook. Basically what this is, if you go to Chris Grand Master Dot Com slash coaching and there's a link in the show notes below and you are looking for a mentor, a coach, somebody to help you work through this stuff.

Whether that's finding your niche, whether that's figuring out how to actually get off your butt and market your business. Whether that's how to build your systems out, all the stuff we talked about on the podcast or just to hold you accountable. Like I just said, accountability is one of the biggest parts of this. Yeah, so it's a one on one thing. I'm only gonna open up a few spots. It's going to be on the expensive side, but probably like a one hour phone call once a month and there's some variability depending on your situation, but if you're interested in that, go to Chris [inaudible] Dot com slash coaching. There's an application. I'm only going to take a couple people on this, but definitely something I've been thinking about this a lot. I love doing this sort of thing and it's something where if I can carve out the time each week to do it, it's something that I would love to do to build relationships with people and help them grow and mature.

So if that's you, if that's something you're interested in, please check that out. Chris. Grant Mastering Dot com slash coaching. You can apply and you know, we can look and see if I can help you get to the next level. So yeah, check that out. Let me know what you guys think. I'm terrified about doing this and putting myself out and yet another way, but yeah, so I guess that is where I'm coming from it, this idea of I think it's really tempting to want to put yourself out there as a guru who knows everything to be like, I'm awesome and I'm incredible at all of these things. I don't know what struggle with anything and in my experience, people that say that are just completely full of crap. Yep. And they're not relatable. No one relates to that. Yeah. They're not relatable, so that's the sort of coaching I'd want to do is to be meeting with people and talk to them about, oh yeah, this is something I struggle with.

Oh my gosh, I was so afraid. The first time I did my first paid marketing campaign, or Oh, I was so afraid the first time I told a client, oh, I don't do that anymore. I only do this one service now. So figuring out how to navigate niching down, figuring out how to navigate growing your business. These are all hard things and while a podcast is amazing on some level what this podcast is for, we talked about it in the past. It's an advice buffet, and so it's on you to choose the advice that applies to you the best that it possibly can. What coaching is for is curating that advice for your particular situation, for your particular gifting, for where you're at in life and for where you are at on earth. So if that's you, if you need some help picking out what to eat on this advice before that is this podcast, I would love to be your coach.

Check it out, Chris Graham, mastering.com/coaching and I 100 percent endorse Chris' Graham's coaching because the man knows what he's talking about. He knows what he does. He is able to see this from the perspective of someone who has been there, done that, who has hit all the same roadblocks, all the same hurdles that you're probably going through now and has found ways to overcome all of these issues. So highly recommend. Go to Chris Geere, mastering.com/coaching apply, and I would say only if you're serious about growing your business. Otherwise, if you're just piddling around, if you're the kind of person that is not taking this seriously, I wouldn't waste his time. Well, thank you Brian. I appreciate that man. Part of my kind of push and doing this. I'm also going to lean forward here and tell you guys a secret. You guys probably remember a couple episodes back. We interviewed Graham Cochran. That was episode number 46. Yeah, so on episode 46 we had Graham Cochran on the show and that was probably one of the best episodes we've ever had. Graham blew my mind. Graham is a youtube superstar. He's got like a half a million subscribers all home studio owners