Are You Investing in Yourself?

Top Secrets of Marketing & Sales

Investing in yourself isn’t always easy. It is a matter of finding the time to make these investments in ourselves and to say, “okay, if I can’t go to a cabin for a week, what can I do? When can I do this?”

David: Hi, and welcome back. In today’s episode, co host Jay McFarlane and I will be discussing investing in yourself. Welcome back, Jay.

Jay: Hey David. It’s so good to be here. I feel like lately we’ve been going after things that I really struggle with. We talked about controlling your internal monologue. Now we’re talking about investing in yourself.

It’s really easy for me to invest in other people. That is very easy. But taking time to invest in myself… when I need something, I will go and find it and I’ll learn how to do it. But being proactive about it. I’m reactive, just about in every way.

David: Interesting. So when you think in terms of investing in yourself, you mean investing what? Time, money?

Jay: All of it. you know, investing in myself when it comes to just taking time to learn new things, or I think investing in yourself can be just reading on a regular basis, or instead of watching social media, be listening to productive podcasts, or, taking a walk, those kind of things.

We talked in the last podcast, controlling your internal monologue. Those are all things that require proactivity and honestly, I don’t know if it’s pride or stubbornness or whatever else. I’m like, oh, I’m good. You know, I’m good.

David: That’s interesting because we are actually on completely opposite ends of the spectrum on this one normally we’re agreeing with each other not that we’re disagreeing here, but I am at totally the other end of the spectrum.

I’m constantly reading stuff. I’m constantly investing in programs and audios and videos and courses. I can’t tell you, and I’d be embarrassed if I could tell you, how much I spend on that type of thing. Just because, I don’t know if that is like a FOMO element of mine, where I’m afraid I’m going to miss something, but I’m conscious of it to the point where I recognize that you don’t want to invest in everything, right?

There’s looking at investments that are designed to help you with right where you are now. If you need help getting over a particular challenge, that’s where I find the investments most worthwhile.

And then there are investments that sort of just in case learning. I’m learning this skill just in case. I’m going to learn how to do whatever, something related to social media that may or may not help. Or that sounds like the catchy thing of the day.

Because when you’re online, you will hear all kinds of people talking about all kinds of different things that are the solution to your problem.

And one person is going to tell you that it’s Instagram. And another person is going to tell you that it’s Facebook ads. And somebody else is going to tell you that it’s organic. And somebody else is going to tell you that it’s something completely different than those things.

Everybody’s got a solution. And it reminds me of the old adage that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right?

So depending on who you’re listening to, who you’re paying attention to, you may end up investing in things that are not actually designed to get you from where you are now to where you want to be.

Jay: Yeah. And I guess I have to clarify a little bit of what I’ve said. If it’s something I need or want, I’m a dog with a bone. For me it’s the difference of, do I learn how to do exactly what I want, or do I go to college and learn all of these broad subject matters, and then focus.

I think both are important, and I’m never the broad subject matter guy, right? I mean, Over the course of my lifetime, I’ve learned how to make video games and released over 100 apps. I got into talk radio. I started several businesses. I have training courses. So, I certainly invest in myself, but unlike you, you’re kind of like, this is the world that you live in.

I only do it on very specific things and I only do it when I feel like this is something that will help me or my business or my family immediately.

David: Yeah, well, I think that’s a great way to approach it, because otherwise you can go down a lot of different rabbit holes, and you can end up following other people’s priorities, as we talked about in a previous podcast.

So, when I think about the idea of investing, it’s What are we investing? Is it our time? And in a lot of cases, it’s definitely going to involve time. Is it money? And in some cases it can involve money and it can involve quite a bit of money depending on what you’re investing in.

I know I’ve done online courses that have cost a lot of money and some of them have been really worth it, and some of them have been kind of worth it, and some of them… they just weren’t worth it for me at all.

It doesn’t mean the product was bad It may just mean that it wasn’t suited to my personality or whatever.

But I think as business owners or as salespeople, we consistently have to take the time, take the energy, take the money in some cases and invest in ourselves to be able to say, if I’m at a particular point and I need to get to a different point, a higher point, a better point, I want to be able to provide more and better for my family, as you mentioned, then what’s it going to take to get there?

Because in a lot of cases, what we know now has gotten us to the point where we are. So if we want to get further, we can either just try to keep doing more of what we already know, pedal faster, essentially, pedal the bike faster to get farther, or we can say, “well, what can I do to shift gears?”

And a lot of times that involves looking at the things that we don’t know and correcting that and saying, “well, if I fix this one problem, then I’m going to be able to go a lot farther and a lot faster.”

Jay: Yeah, so often, when we do these podcasts, we end up with self awareness as being such an important element here, right?

If you are going to invest in yourself, well, are you aware enough internally to know what you need, right? Where you stand? And you kind of mentioned this, I think what happens is, every once in a while I’ll get on this thread of self improvement or things like that, and I want somebody else to tell me what I need.

And I want them to just give me the secret sauce, right? And so that’s what I’m looking for. It’s like a get rich program, but for self improvement or for task management or goal setting, right? I want the quick and easy. And I think so often investing in yourself is not quick, nor is it easy.

David: Right. Particularly if you end up investing in the wrong things. And I think, to some extent, It’s really important to identify the areas where we’re stuck. To say, “okay, this is the specific problem that I’m trying to overcome.”

So with our clients, we work with primarily business owners and sales people who are at a certain level of sales and profitability in their business, and they’re looking to get to another level.

And they recognize that there are things that they are not doing, and they’re not quite sure what those things are. And so when we have conversations with people like that, and we’re able to identify those areas and say, “okay, is that something we can help you with?”

And if it is, we’ll tell them that. And if it’s something we can’t help with, we’ll tell them that as well. When we do that, It’s better for everyone. Because at that point, they either have a solution or they have to keep searching for a different solution. And we’re totally fine with either of those things.

We’re not looking to try to be the end all solution to everything. But because there are so many options, it’s important to be able to have conversations to find out exactly where the people are stuck so that we can determine If or how we can help them.

And that goes for myself, that goes for anybody who is offering you any sort of investment in yourself. You want to make sure that it lines up, not with what they want you to do, but with what you want to do, with what your objectives are, what your outcomes are.

And a lot of times in the conversations that I’ve had with people, I’ll ] talk to people who will say, well, I don’t like doing cold calls. And there are some programs where it’s like, well, you have to do cold calls.

And it’s like, well, that’s not going to be helpful to me if I don’t like doing cold calls, right? Or social media. ” I hate doing social media.”

Well, if you hate doing social media, you definitely don’t want to sign up for a course that requires you to do social media. And so in our work with our clients, one of the things that we’ve looked at is to say, “okay, let’s look at what you actually enjoy doing, what you’re naturally great at doing.”

And can we create a curriculum for you that is based around your strengths and your areas of interest, so that you’ll be a lot more inclined to do it?

In an earlier conversation, I’m not sure if it was this podcast or I think it was the previous podcast, you were talking about sort of the difference between school learning and business learning, right?

And in school, we’re forced to take subjects that might not resonate with us. Whereas once we get out, and once we get to call our own shots, we can focus on the activities and the skills that we want to develop, to get us to our next desired benchmarks and our next goals.

Jay: Yeah, I think it’s so important what you talked about, and that is, if you are going to use somebody to help, If they don’t take the time to get to know you and where you’re at and your strengths and your weaknesses, then, I’m not saying it’s not going to be helpful because I think anything that causes you to reflect and look at your own systems and kind of do an inventory, I think there is value to those things.

But I think we also fall into the trap of looking at somebody who’s successful and assuming we can do exactly what they do the way that they do it.

Like, I looked at Elon Musk and Bill Gates, and I look at the schedule they run, and how Bill Gates, once a year, locks himself in his cabin away from his family, with just all of his books, and he just reads and reads and reads and reads, and I’m like, I need to tell my wife I’m going up in the mountains for a week, and I’m gonna do this thing, right?

They’ve found ways to make it work for them and to invest in themselves. if you’re living by comparison and not really finding out about yourself, that’s a difficult road.

David: It is absolutely difficult. Yeah. And not everybody’s going to be able to do that. Not everybody can afford to take a week or two weeks or a month by themselves or even have a cabin. Right?

So, there are all those elements. I know for myself, what I find helpful is I’m able to take in a lot of information while I’m on the treadmill in the morning. I’ve got a Sony speaker and I just crank it up so that I can hear it over the noise of the treadmill and so I can take in information while I’m exercising.

So that’s kind of a twofer. And I’ve got a little digital recorder so that when I hear something that I need to remember, I’ll record it.

So I’ve got endless recordings of myself panting and recording messages to myself about things that need to take place. But it is a matter of finding the time to make these investments in ourselves and to say, “okay, if I can’t go to a cabin for a week, what can I do? When can I do this??

For me, again, early morning is great because it’s a quiet time. I’m able to focus on it. And it also gets my brain in gear for the day.

I’m not thinking about other stuff. Like if I watch TV? I don’t. I haven’t done that in years. But if I were to watch TV at the beginning of the day, it doesn’t matter what it is. If it’s entertainment, then that’s in my brain. If it’s news, that’s the worst, right? Definitely never want to do that at the beginning of the day.

So I find that when I’m listening to something that’s helpful to the business, in the morning, it allows me to get myself into gear a lot more quickly.

Jay: Yeah, I love it. Great discussion, David. How do people find out more?

David: You can go to TopSecrets.com/call, schedule a call with myself or my team, or just check out the video on that page and see if what we’re talking about makes sense for you. If it does, schedule a call. We’d be happy to have the conversation. If not, that’s fine too. We have lots of resources available on our website. Feel free to have at it.

Jay: All right, David. Always a pleasure.

David: Thank you, Jay.

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