First published 8 November 2021 on Your Best Year Starts Here with Nigel Risner.
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Nigel had promised at the end of the last episode that he'd come back to self-talk, so I held him to it. He started with one of his own. Whenever I ask if he wants to do the intro, his head tells him he'll forget the title or the episode number. So he never does it.
That's the start of an exercise he runs with senior leaders. Write down your negative self-talk, then write down how it plays out. His example is pricing. You think they won't pay £100, so you say £85, they say okay, and you've just knocked fifteen quid off yourself. Then comes the group bit. You share your positive self-talk and the others tell you what they see for you. Quite often they'd have said you should be charging £115.
I brought in what I call legends in Done Beats Perfect. They go deeper than stories, because they're everything installed in you since you were born, right down to how many bedrooms your house had. Put two newborn babies in front of you and you can't tell me which one will be successful in 30 years. Show me their parents or their school and you start judging. And if a belief wouldn't stand up in court beyond reasonable doubt, why let it decide what you do next?
Then Nigel tried his trainer's red bus test on me. Are there any red buses in London tonight? Of course there are, I said. Based on what, Neil? Apparently that argument used to run for half an hour. I pushed it further and said every fact is really just a widely held opinion, then went off about buying Formula 1 and changing the rules so I could win. Jeff Bezos could pull it off, to be fair.
We finished on Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, which turns out to be Nigel's favourite book. And he left the business owners with this one. There are no difficult clients, they're just different.
The bits worth keeping
- Write down your negative self-talk, then write down how it actually shows up in your life.
- Ask the people closest to you what they see in you. Don't ask them for negative feedback.
- Find one person who's done the thing people like you supposedly don't do. Then you can be the second.
- If you don't like where you are, move. You're not a tree.
Okay, well, is there one person that did? 'Cause if there's one person that did, guess what, I can be the second person.
Neil Martin
For all our business clients who are listening right now, there are no difficult clients, they're just different.
Nigel Risner
