Episode 72: January Book Club Sneak Peek: Atomic Habits

Episode 72: January Book Club Sneak Peek: Atomic Habits

Brandon Schoen:
Success is a result of your daily habits. And James talked about this a lot in the book. If you can just get 1% better each day, you'll end up with results that are 37 times better after 12 months,. You don't have to make big changes in order to have big changes happening in your life. Small changes that become habits are not only easier to start, but they often have an even bigger impact in the long run. That's just because you're not seeing results right away. It doesn't mean your work isn't paying off.

Brandon Condrey:
So in order to make a new habit, you need to know why you need to make the change. If you don't recognize why a new habit is important, you'll never have the initiative to get started and making one good small decision is enough to change the entire trajectory of your day, your life and your business. Don't be fooled into thinking that only the biggest decisions are worthy of your attention.

Announcer:
Grow your cleaning business, make more money, have more time. This is the Profit Cleaners podcast with your host Brandon Condrey and Brandon Schoen.

Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Profit Cleaners. You are in the place to be learning from the top 1% of cleaning business owners from around the world to Uplevel your game,

take it to the next level and win. I'm your host, Brandon Shane. And I'm joined by my cohost Brandon Condrey Brandon Condrey in the house. That's right. The Brandon's to bring you some fresh content today. And in fact guys, very exciting episode today because we're actually launching the very first episode of the Profit Cleaners book club, free to the world free for you guys right now,

we're doing the very first one with you guys as promised. And we have a very exciting show. We're going to be covering atomic habits by James clear. And the whole concept of the book guys is an easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones. And let's dive into it. Brandon, why should we be talking about habits? What's the whole point of being successful with habits?

Is that really a thing? Yeah. So I don't know when I think of the word habits, I think of something bad, like smoking or biting your fingernails or something. Maybe that was just my upbringing with my family. But the way that he's phrasing it is that a habit is anything that you're going to do. Eventually it's going to be something that you do automatically,

like you just do it unconsciously. And so there was a part of the book where he said that 40 to 50% of your daily activities happen without you even thinking about it. You just are going through the motions. You're not really doing it. Like, have you ever driven somewhere to work or your kid's school? And you've forgotten how you got there.

If you don't remember the actual route you took, that's all muscle memory type stuff. The point of the book, I think is to be way more intentional about stuff and drive you dictate what habits you want to have. So he gives you loads of examples in here, but there were some examples off the bat. Like if you wanted a daily meditation routine or a daily exercise routine,

what steps do you take to implement that? But make it stick, not just try it. Cause this is the classic new year's resolution. You show up at your regular gym that you're a member at and there's 800 people in there. And then they're all gone a week later. Those are people that have the inability to make that habit stick. And that's a lot of people's.

That's why he wrote this book. So the whole thing is a bunch of actionable items through here that you can take to make good habits, stick, create new habits, but also there's things in here to help you break bad habits. If that's what you're after. Yeah, Absolutely. Guys, just to recap on this episode, guys, we're going to go through the high level stuff in this book,

like summary overview. We're going to go through key takeaways. We're going to go through some notable quotes and we're also going to go through some discussion questions. The whole point of this guys is not just to go through a business book and personal development type stuff, but it's also to apply it for a service business or specifically your cleaning business, because that's how we're thinking of it.

You want to see how you guys enjoy this. If you get a lot of value out of this, awesome. We'd also love to hear your feedback on what you liked, what you didn't like, how we can make these better. So that's why we're putting this first one out free. I mean, in the future, if you want to jump on these book club calls,

go ahead and head over to our Patrion group and subscribe. It's 20 bucks a month. It's ridiculously cheap for the kind of value that could change your whole game, your whole business game, your whole mindset to win. Basically you value what you pay for guys. So we had to put some price on it. So you guys would actually take action on it.

But I think the point today, guys, we're just going to recap that we talk about a lot of this stuff on our podcasts in general, which I thought was really cool. Just going through this book. So we'll recap some more of that. Going back to habits, a lot of people are like, how do I become successful? It's like success is a result of your daily habits.

And I think James talks about this a lot in the book. It's really the effects of small habits compounding over time, Brandon, you're a numbers guy. You love compound interest right in the finance world. And that's what this is. He talked about at the beginning of the book. If you can just get 1% better each day, you'll end up with results that are 37 times better after 12 months.

So we're not talking like monumental shifts. We're not talking like you got to go out tomorrow and raise a million dollars and score a home, run and blow up a huge business. We're talking about get like small little micro changes every single day that add up into this huge monumental shift and where you're going. Yeah. So that's a good takeaway I think is that this is not the get rich quick scheme book.

It's not that type of thing. They gave a bunch of examples of like what you would expect to. I took two Spanish lessons. I'm not fluent in Spanish. These aren't things that happen every day. But if you practiced 1% more Spanish tomorrow than you did yesterday, over the course of a year, you'd be 37 times better at Spanish. That's the idea.

So there's another part in the book where he talks about you just got to put in your reps, like success is putting in the reps. You got to do these things consistently. And that's why he wants you to build the habit. You need to find a way to relate whatever habit is that you're trying to build or try and reverse engineer the end result.

And then there's gotta be some habits to kind of get you there as well. Yeah. And he kind of talked about the beginning of the book. He was talking about the UK cycling team or somewhere over in Europe, they just were horrible. They never won any metals. They were never doing good in any competitions. And it was this concept of the 1% changes.

Like they were constantly tweaking stuff. They were constantly testing out different types of bikes and gear and different types of food or things that would make the athletes better. They even painted the walls of the vans so that they could see dust. They would eliminate dust from getting in the gears and things that would wear out the parts faster. So if you just think about that for your cleaning business for a second,

that's what we're always talking about. Guys is creating little efficiencies in your business. Always tweaking things, always making things better, small improvements all the time, whether it's in your systems and your cleaning, whether it's in your marketing, whether it's in your customer service, it's little changes, guys. This doesn't have to be monumental, huge shifts, but it's those little shifts and those constant progress and that constant consistency over time,

that ends up taking you from another concept. We've talked about like the rocket ship that if it's just pointed a little bit, a couple of degrees over it, it ends up in a completely other part of the atmosphere. That's why these little tiny shifts are so important, even though it doesn't seem like it's big, the little stuff really, really does matter.

So let's dig in a little bit deeper. So there were two chapters at the beginning and they laid out what the groundwork was going to be at the end of the book. So one of them was there three levels at which behavior change can occur, right? The first level, which is outcomes. So these are like goals and results. The second level was process like you're going to change the process itself.

So habits and systems that you need in between and the third one was identity. And that's like your belief system and your worldview outcomes are about what you get processes are about what you do and identity is what you believe. The biggest takeaway for me on this one was if you're having trouble doing something the way to do it is like, okay, if you just identify as what you're trying to be,

I identify as a cleaning company owner and the business makes seven figures, eight figures, whatever it is, I'm an eight figure cleaning business owner. What would I do in that situation? So if you're faced with some choice, whatever it may be, I want to go to sleep. I'm lazy. I don't want to go to work today. Well,

what would an eight figure business owner do instead of going to sleep or doing those things? Well, in that case, I'd probably be doing X, Y, Z, and that helps you move towards something. That was one of the biggest takeaways for me was if you just identify as the thing that you want to be, I identify as a healthy person,

a healthy person would be at the gym or not be eating this that I thought was really interesting. If you envision the results you want in the future, instead of thinking just about the, how you're going to get there or the why sometimes, which is important of course, but how do you see yourself? How do you perceive yourself? And when you start viewing yourself in the who,

right, who is way more important and you start saying, well, who am I? And who do I want to be? And if I am that successful business owner, six, seven, figure eight, figure, whatever your goal is, what would I choose to do? And like you said, Brandon, if it was back related to health or something,

it would be like, well, yeah, I'm not going to eat the donut. I'm going to eat the salad. But if you're a cleaning business owner, I'm going to get up and do the thing on my list today. That's going to move me forward. The critical tasks in my business today. Even if it's super small, even if it's picking up the phone or if it's setting up something or setting up a meeting or talking to a customer,

maybe it's uncomfortable, but it's a small thing. And you're like, Hey, it doesn't matter. I don't want to do it. It does matter. And it's the little tiny things like that in your business that do matter. That stack up day after day after day. So just know we had here in our main notes, as we expect progress to be linear and fast.

But in reality, the results of our efforts are often delayed. So it's not until months or even years later that we realized the true value of the previous work we have done. So this results in the valley of disappointment where people feel discouraged after putting in weeks or months, or even years of hard work without experience any results. But yeah, like it's like if you're not associating,

who are you becoming? That's really the most important part. And that was a big takeaway for me too, is envisioning yourself as that person, like as opposed to the negative self-talk of I'll never make it, or like, that's why negative self-talk is so damaging is because your subconscious hears it and they're like, it doesn't know the difference. So it just starts perceiving everything as like,

well, I'll never be successful instead. Imagine yourself as that successful person, who do you want to be? What kind of business who would be running that kind of business to become that person and envision, well, what would I be doing today? If I was that and I would be taken action, I would be talking to people. I would be doing things that are uncomfortable because that's what successful people do.

They do the hard stuff right. Consistently. Right? The other thing that he mentioned, and he comes back to this over and over and over again, the whole book is built around these things. So it's the four laws of behavior change. So to change any behavior, you need to make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy and make it satisfying.

And then every single chapter through the book is split into specific action items that you can take to. Here's some things that you can do to make a habit obvious. Some of those examples were called it an implementation intention. We've talked about that too, but it's like a smart goal. It's gotta be specific, measurable, attainable, reasonable, timely. So this thing is like,

whatever the habit is at this time in this location, if it was a cleaning company business, what habit would you need to do? But not just say like, yep, I'm going to do that. You need to write it down and put it somewhere where you can see it. That says like, okay, when I get into the office in the morning,

the first thing I'm going to do at eight o'clock is I'm going to call back five estimates last week that didn't reply to me, make sure that they know that I'm following up with them or whatever the task is. That's going to be most important for you in your business. I'm going to order the supplies that we need to make sure that we keep going and that you get in the habit of doing those things every day.

And then the idea is the more times that you repeat it, the more the reps you put in, you don't have to think about it that much. You just get in in the morning. And then your brain's like, yo, we're here. We have to call the five estimates from yesterday and make sure that they know that we're talking to them.

Yeah, absolutely. Or he was just talking about designing your environment, making the cues of good habits, obvious and visible. If you needed to call back those estimates, but you're always forgetting to do it. We'll make it more obvious. Leave the estimate book or note on your desk in the morning. So that's the first thing you see and you're like,

oh, I got call back. Those estimates, make your environment conducive to the action you need to take. So it reminds you, so it's almost automatic. This could relate to all sorts of parts of your life. If you make it easy, you make it obvious and you make it even fun in some ways, then it's easier to do the hard stuff and then you can move forward a lot easier.

So I liked that a lot. That's one of the things you said, you touched him on the environment thing. He did talk about designing an environment to make things obviously invisible, but there was another part further down where we talked about priming your environment. So make it so that it's ready to go. This is one thing that I do Friday afternoons with the last thing I do before I leave the office,

I tidy up my desk so that when I come in on Monday, it's the cluttered. And so that's me priming it for just jumping into whatever I need to do. And then I've also done things, right? Something that's really important on a sticky note and then stick it in the middle of my computer monitor so that when I sit down at my desk right now,

my habit that I need to break is opening social media and checking the news. So instead of doing that, the idea is the sticky note would be like, Hey, don't forget, you got to pay this bill today. You should do that first. And so that would be a way of making it obvious. There's a sticky note right in my face,

but also priming it so that my desk was clean and good to go. You have to try and think about the things that you're avoiding that you need to do that would move the needle forward and then applying the priming aspect to it, but making it obvious and easy, removing the friction. Yeah. On the first law of making it obvious on the things you need to do when he talks also about the habit stacking,

which is increasing the likelihood that you'll stick with the habit by stacking your new behavior on top of an old one. And then this process can be repeated to chain numerous habits together, each one acting as a cue for the next. And I thought that was really cool too. After current habit, I will insert new habit and you stack those habits and you just make it easier for yourself.

Again, it just makes it more obvious. It makes it more easy. It makes it more fun to move forward with whatever you're trying to achieve. And then just jumping back to what we were talking about. A lot of times we focus on results. You know, we talk about results and goals and we'll get more into goals here in a sec.

Instead of going back to the who focus on who is that person you want to become. And when you focus on the who, there's this feedback loop of like who your identity is and the habits that surround that and what that would be. But the habits help you become what you want to be. And the habits change your belief about yourself. So if you change your belief about yourself,

if you actually believe you're a successful cleaning business owner, your habits will start to reinforce that you will start to do things because you perceive yourself differently, right? Yeah. This is like a Fake it till you make it to The extreme. Exactly. Let's say you're in really, really good shape. You don't have to psych yourself up to go to the gym every day.

You probably just go to the gym every day. Cause you're like, I'm really strong. You almost do it without thinking about it. Right? So, but that's because you believe you're a healthy fit person. So if you believe you're a successful cleaning business owner and you start perceiving yourself differently, you will start taking different actions that align with that belief.

Again, that's one of the most powerful things I got out of this book is not just looking at results, but look at the person like the, who that you're trying to become and focus on becoming that person instead of just the results. Right? Yeah. Habit stacking was an interesting one too. So the examples he gave in, there were things that you're doing unconsciously.

He talked about two specific examples. He was trying to do 10 pushups a day. So his thing was anytime he closed his laptop to go to lunch, he would do 10 pushups right away in his office. Like before he walked out the door and he had another example, he seems to be very fitness oriented. I gathered that from his examples, but there was another one which he wanted to do.

So I'm going to do burpees every time he took out his phone check, social media, he would have to do a couple of burpees before he could look at his phone. So the habit stacking was the habit was, I took out my phone, but before I'm looking at it, I S I remember I'm going to do three burpees before I get to look at my social media.

So that was a way to stacking one on top of the other. But it's also another part of the book where you're talking about attaching one that you're doing that has a good feeling was like attaching a habit that you want to do to one that you enjoy doing will make it more likely to happen. Yeah, absolutely. And you talked about behaviors followed by satisfying consequences,

tend to be repeated. And versus those that have undesirable consequences tend to not be repeated. Well, here's another way to think about it too. Like a lot of times people think, well, if I have this habit, it means I'm restricted. And I have to only do it this one way, but it's another way to reframe that as habits don't restrict freedom,

they actually create it by creating the structure. And we did a whole, another podcast episode about this too. You're creating that structure in your life. Creating that environment is so key to your success because then it reinforces that positive feeling. You get on the back end of it. And again, just creating more freedom. It feels good. It could be limiting,

but it actually creates a lot more freedom than you think. It's like, it frees up a lot of mental bandwidth that I was using to think about the thing that I didn't want to do instead of just getting into the routine to do it. You create the environments. Within that podcast episode, we talked about me setting up a meditation timer and blocking out all these social media things,

using an app. And then by the time you came out of the meditation session that your brain's already like, oh yeah. When we do these things in this order, it's like work time afterwards. So the work itself is satisfying because you feel good that you did things. But what I've been doing is as soon as I finished that deep focus session,

I go to the climbing gym for a little while. That's my lunch break. So that's a way to reinforce it by doing something good. And even on a more micro level, I use the Pomodoro method during the day. So I'll sprint for 45 minutes, take a break on that break. We have a dartboard in the office and I will go throw darts for a few minutes.

I find her it's really fun. It's like a quick practice thing. That is also a way to reinforce it, but you're trying to get into this reward loop. And so what you want to do is your brain's going to start associating off. I do the thing that I need to do. If I build this habit, then I get to do this other thing that I like.

And so that could be as simple as you did the five minutes of work or the 10 minutes of work. Well then like you get a jelly bean. This is of loves dogs, like old school psychology, where you're trying to associate one thing with a different thing. You want your brain build this habit. It's going to associated with the jelly bean.

And over time, it'll just get more and more automatic in green. Yeah. And the word now talking about the second law, which is making it attractive, what Brandon was just talking about, his temptation bundling is I guess, was what he calls it. But you pair an action that you want to do with an action. You need to do another example of that is join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior in this case,

guys, congratulations, you're already here. You're listening to the Profit Cleaners podcast right now, creating a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior to succeed and to win in your business. And that's why it's so important to join masterminds and groups of people that are going to bring you up that are going to challenge you that are smarter than you. And when you do that,

it is attractive. And you're creating that ritual of something that you enjoy immediately before a difficult habit or right after something. So you can get it done easier, right? Yup. Totally. So guys, we're going to skip around a lot because we're not going in order. We're not here to read the book to you. So we'll skip around a lot.

We have a much more organized write up on it for you. That'll be in the Patrion group and we'll give you the first one here too. We're going to bounce around. Don't worry about it. It's all in there. I think one of the important things about this book is that a lot of these concepts I had seen before in a different book,

in a different podcast, in a show, whatever. But the resource of this book is that everything about it is bundled into one little place. And more importantly, there's specific lists of this is what you do to get that. And we're going to give you that list. He calls it a cheat sheet, but it's free on his website, but we'll just link you to it.

That is literally under the third law. Here's the four things to do under make it easy. Here's the five things to do. So work bouncing around on there, but I promise it's more organized than the duck. Yeah. This is our first go at it guys. Just trying to relate this back to cleaning business and take the high level nuggets and stuff you can get out of it.

But like, it really did shift my mindset in a lot of different things. Like a lot of business podcasts or entrepreneur books and self personal development stuff. You hear a lot of people talk about goals, obviously this time of year, more than anything, but shifted for me to give you direction, but systems actually give you progress. And a lot of times we're talking about how do I get different results,

but like actually achieving a goal. It's only momentary. If you hit a certain goal in your cleaning business, that's great. But then like what's after that. So instead it's more about solving at a systems level, fixing the inputs and then the outputs fit kind of fix themselves. CEOs think differently as a small business owner, you have to stop thinking like one,

we're launching the Profit Cleaners book club to help transform the mindsets of cleaning business owners every week together, we'll read some of the most important business and mindset books so that you can become the leader. Your business needs learn more about the Profit Cleaners book club today, by going to Profit Cleaners dot com slash book club that's Profit Cleaners dot com slash book club.

What I took away from that part of it was goals help you win the game, but actually systems help you. So you can keep playing in the game. And we talk a lot about systems guys all the time and our cleaning business. And I think that's a really, really key takeaway is it's easy to revert to old habits if you're just focusing on goals.

But if you're focusing on your systems, that's going to help you get way more progress. It's going to be way more attractive to keep going and keep playing in the game. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, will you talk about systems, but that's an important point that you're changing an entire process, which is there's another part in here that we talked about.

If you change the inputs, the outputs will change accordingly as well. That's the same thing. So the system is the input. So if you change the system, the end result is going to shift. I mean, I do like setting goals and things, but maybe the goal should be to alter the system. So it performs better instead of just XYZ thing.

So there's lots of different ways to approach it, but this is a good high level. Look at a lot of psychology involved in the way that he wrote it, which I thought was interesting. Like he gave so many cool examples on so many different psychologists and a lot of science and stuff in there, which I know you love Brandon. And I thought it was fascinating if you think about it,

guys, business is so highly related to sport. If you think about how people in sports are like Olympians, they actually use a large amount of their brain. A lot of people only use the five for 10% of their brain capacity, Olympians and athletes. And even as entrepreneurs, you have to be able to use and access a lot more of your brain and think more creatively and think at these higher levels.

And so that's why we talk about this kind of stuff and hone in on what you should be focusing on to really get you to that next level. So that's why some of this stuff might seem, why does this even matter? But it matters so much because it's your mental game. And a lot of this is just mental. And if you can get the mental part,

right, all the rest of it flows and all the rest of it it'll happen if you're focused on the right stuff. So yeah, some really good stuff. I've got the difference between a good day and a bad day is often a few productive and healthy choices made at decisive moments. Yeah. His decisive moments thing was interesting. You hit a point in the day where you're going to decide to do X or Y and whatever that decision is,

it's going to change how the entire path of the rest of the day goes. This follows another swallow. The frog thing that we've talked about in the past twos, if you do the hard thing first, that decisive moment means that everything else will just flow easier for you through the day. Whereas the reverse of that is avoiding the hard thing and spending it on menial tasks.

He touches on this too. He calls that motion versus action. One of these examples that gives was like, I've got conversations going with four potential clients. Things are going really good. That's not really what you're supposed to be doing. The action is really to be closing clients. And if they're not going to close, then you move on to the next one.

That's like, he also mentioned in the frame of mind of analysis paralysis, if you're thinking too much about stuff, if you're making spreadsheets, I've got all these numbers going. I figured it out. Everything's looking good. But in reality, you haven't really taken the first step to doing anything. Those, I think motion versus action was really important. So the difference between running in place really fast,

like I got my 10,000 steps in versus actually running around the block, doing a 5k. Those things are important to make that distinction. And so those decisive moments are the ones that will lead you to talking a lot about it or actually doing things on it. Yeah. I love that part of it because I feel like that is such a huge struggle,

even for myself at different points in my life. And still sometimes now it's easy to get in that trap of like, I'm just going to analyze this and I'm going to continue to look at it and I'm going to learn some more and I'm going to read a book over here and that's more passive. That's the motion versus the action. And the action.

You've heard to say this on the podcast before guys, the action cures, everything. When you take the action, everything else gets better. You're like, wow, that wasn't as hard as I thought. Or yeah. Instead of just talking about, I'm going to close these clients, you actually did it. And you're like, I overcame this hard thing.

And now you've built this confidence to do the next thing. And it snowballs. So it's like each decision you make is like a fork in the road. And these choices stack up throughout the day and ultimately lead to very, very different outcomes. And then the other point on that is maximum motivation occurs when facing a challenge of just manageable difficulty. I think that's huge.

Anyone listening to this, you've probably done this too, whether you're just starting your cleaning business and you're trying to analyze, how am I going to do it and what am I going to charge? And all these questions that you could sit there and analyze forever. Or you could go out there and start doing it and just get in the game and just start focusing on action.

Actions is going to get you results. And you might start getting maybe not the right results, but you'll figure it out pretty quickly. And you'll, you'll change your actions. So you start getting the right results because either way, you're going to get results. When you start taking action and that's going to cure so many things, not just getting them results,

but it's going to cure your anxiety. It's going to cure your stress levels when you're feeling stressed out and anxious and all these feelings it's because you know that you got something to do, but you're not doing it. And once you start doing it, you're like, oh, I feel so much better. That's so much easier. You feel lazy. You can get into a rut sometimes like when you get sick or something and you're like,

oh, it's nice to sleep in. But like, no, you gotta be aware of that and catch yourself and realize as soon as you can get back in action, like the faster you can get back in the game and start getting those results again. But yeah. Action is key. I thought that was really huge. It was in that same chapter,

but one of the things he said was when you're trying to build a habit, you should be asking how many times do I have to repeat it? And not how long before it works, you'll often ask, like how long is it take before my cleaning business will be successful? Well, instead is like, what's the underlying habit that's going to make it successful.

How many times did you do an estimate? Did you get better at it? How many customers did you talk to before you get to the success part? It's really hard from that point of view to be like, it's going to be 90 days and you're good. This is more like, Nope, try and reframe it as how many times do I have to do this thing before?

I feel like I've completed some tasks to move on. That reminds me in the book he was talking about like classroom. I don't know if it was a university or what, but this professor gave an assignment to his classroom this semester and it was quality over quantity. Right? I think he said half the class, he was going to grade them on quantity.

So that every week they had to turn in, or it was like every day they had to turn in a hundred photos. And if they did, it turned into a hundred photos, photography, photos, they got an a, if they turned to 90, they got to be, if they turned an 80, they got to see versus the other half of the class,

they had to, it was quality the whole semester. They had to turn in one photo and it had the most perfect photo. And then the end result was the people that were constantly taken action. The people that were constantly taking photos actually had way better photos because they were in the game all the time. They were like coming up, innovating new,

cool shot. They had so much that they were just taking so much action that they actually got better results than the person that was just focusing on doing one thing really, really well, like analysis paralysis, trying to get it all. Perfect. That's the thing, guys. Don't try to be perfect and try to do your business. Perfect. Just be taking so much action.

That it's quantity of action that you're going to get more results. You're gonna get more progress because you're just taking so much action. You're not trying to be perfect and Learn more from the results from taking all that action. So in the beginning we took any customer, do whatever, and then you slowly hone it in. And now we've got a really good idea of what our ideal customer is.

And we want to focus on those who want bi-weekly customers for cleaning and they have a 2,500 square foot house. So the analogy, what you just said with the photos would be like, yeah, I can get as much money with one giant 12,000 square foot house as I could with five regular customers. So that's obviously we're five regular customers, right? Well,

maybe not because that person's very picky and they're the ones that complain all the time and you need handhold and things like that. So there are the way to do that in the cleaning company is like, just get out there, man, put people through the pipeline and you'll learn stuff. The pipeline will be tweaked. The more people you go through the website,

the more feedback you'll get on it, the easier you'll be able to tweak it. There's lots of different ways. But the overall arching theme is that with habit building, it's getting in the reps. It's how many times can you do it? You got to keep doing it so that you get better. You get better at language by practicing it. You get better at darts by throwing more darts.

So you get better at climbing by climbing more in the gym. That's like a really simplistic way to give you what's in the book, but that's what he hones in on over and over and over again. Yeah. And just to give you guys another little side tangent story of this, when I was 20 years old, I lived in Spain for a whole year.

I didn't know anybody out there. I literally threw myself into the furnace of just craziness of just totally other language. I didn't even speak that well, but I went all in and I would have never learned Spanish if I didn't do that. And that this is a perfect example. People try to learn a language for years and years and years and develop that habit.

And they never do. But when you put yourself in that environment where you're forced to do it, or you just go all in, like with your cleaning business, you just like, I don't know. I'm just going to throw myself out there. I'm going to get out there every day. I'm going to do it. I'm going to force myself to be uncomfortable.

I mean, that's exactly how I learned Spanish was I was just like, I couldn't even do anything else because everywhere I looked, that's the only thing they spoke. The only thing I could do is force me to do it. If you're wanting to have success and your cleaning business, throw yourself out there and as much as possible, as much quantity of as possible and take so much action.

It's hard not to be getting results. It's hard not to be creating those new skillsets and those new things that are going to get you those results that you're wanting to get it. That was really cool too. Another thing, man, I think people just struggle with is just mindset stuff. I thought this was really cool in the book where he talked about reframing.

A lot of times, people it's as simple as reframing how you say stuff. Now you talk to yourself instead of getting up in the morning and saying, Aw, man, I got to go to the office today. And I got to call those people, reframe it. I get to go in the office today. I get to co build my business.

I, it sounds like so simple when you swish it around in your brain and you make it attractive, like we're talking to make it attractive, make it easy, make it fun and satisfying. That's a whole different ball game that you're playing in. When you're doing that. Sometimes I've had to struggle with public speaking, even like a lot of people struggle with that.

Even when we were doing estimates early in the day, I would like tense up a little bit when like choke on my words a little bit. What the heck, man, I'm not normally nervous talking to people, but sometimes I would be instead take that feeling of like, oh, I'm so nervous. I got to talk. I'm not good at sales.

I don't know how I'm going to talk to these customers know, reframe it and be like, I'm going to take this energy and say, I'm so excited. I get to talk to this person about my business. I get to grow my business. I get to tell them about what we do and how we're providing jobs for people and how we're growing and helping the community.

Just reframing. It can be so powerful. Right? Yeah. In the book, he talked about a guy in a wheelchair and someone had asked the guy, do you feel bad about being confined in a wheelchair? You said, no. He's like, this wheelchair gives me freedom. He's like, if I didn't have the wheelchair, I'd be confined to my house.

That's a way to reframe it. I'm way better than I was without the chair. So the same thing, like, no, I'm not nervous. I'm getting an adrenaline rush. That's making me more prepared to be able to handle. Whatever's going to come in this thing. And I totally get to be excited about telling someone what I'm doing and why we're passionate about running this cleaning business.

We talk about mindset on the podcast a lot, but it's good to know that there are other people that are hitting on it. I mean, this is not just something that we made up. This is a psychological phenomenon that you should be aware of and tweak it to your advantage. Yeah, absolutely. So thought it was interesting that it was talking about going back to just showing up,

you got to practice. A lot of people are always planning. This goes back to emotion, part of it, but it's instead of just planning all the time, get in there and the game and then practice. Instead of asking how long ask how many to create a new habit, you got to practice to make it easy. I think we're pushing 40 minutes here.

So I think you guys have gotten the nuggets out of it for a cleaning business that we want you to get. Hopefully, because this is a book club, you bought the book and read it. And we picked out some things to help you frame it as a cleaning business type of thing. But you should be thinking of any book like that, of how to do it.

And so we're going to keep the book club going. What I think we've got, that's really working for it is this document that you'll get with every book that'll be in Patriot in the future, but we'll give you that this one is you get a summary of the books, some key takeaways, some quotes, and then you get some action items at the bottom.

We do have some action items for you for this particular book. We'll tell them to you now. I don't know if we hit on all the key takeaways, but let's just do those. And then we'll do the action items. The key takeaways are you don't have to make big changes in order to have big changes happen in your life. Small changes that become habits are not only easier to start,

but they often have an even bigger impact in the long run. So long story short guys, it's just because you're not seeing results right away. It doesn't mean your work isn't paying off. It feels as an entrepreneur. Sometimes you put in the work you put in the work sometimes for years and years and years, and you're still feeling like, man,

it's just not paying off, but it's going back in and retooling and doing those little changes. So you can start seeing those bigger impacts and just being consistent, keeping in the game. And then the other part of that is if you want to make changes in your life and in your business, you need to change how you are identifying yourself. So if you want to be a successful business owner,

you have to start making decisions of a successful business owner. How do you perceive yourself? I started thinking of that, started thinking of yourself as a successful business owner, your actions will start aligning with that. Brandon, you want to cover this? The last part of that, which is how to talk to yourself and about yourself will dictate your future success.

So in order to make a new habit, you need to know why you need to make the change. So if you don't recognize why a new habit is important, you'll never have the initiative to get started. And if you want to make faster progress, you can stack new habits. On top of each other. We talked about that. Making one good small decision is enough to change the entire trajectory of your day,

your life and your business. So don't be fooled into thinking that only the biggest decisions are worthy of your attention. That's right. One of the past podcasts we talked about guys, Brandon would say like I came into the office and you're like, this is what I'm doing to win the day. It's like my little list of things I'm doing the wind the day,

those little things, those little wins matter. If you're not able to celebrate the little wins, it's going to be really hard as an entrepreneur because you gotta be able to celebrate the little wins every single day in order to hit those home runs and see the bigger ones. So don't just focus on the big stuff. Focus on practicing, getting in the game every day and making those little wins happen.

And that's really it. Guys, if you can just focus on consistently an action everyday on a few things and you get those done and you execute on moving your business forward. That's it? I mean, that is really it. And then you can go enjoy the rest of your life. You don't have to do a thousand things every day and do one huge thing every day and hit a home run,

just hit those base hits, get up the next day, hit some more base hits, keep winning. And that builds momentum that builds confidence. And then you'd be surprised how far you'd go with that. Let's hit them with a few notable quotes on the way out here. So we got every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.

No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity? What's another one, Brandon, Those are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress. Yeah, that was a really good one. The one right before that was, you do not rise to the level of your goals.

You fall to the level of your systems. So I love that because of the guys, we talk about systems so much, whether it's your cleaning systems, other systems in your business, but like goals are great focus on your systems and everything else gets easier. That's what we're trying to tell you here. Even just the system of I'm going to get up everyday and accomplish three to five things.

That's a system focused on that system and you will be above and beyond further in progress than a lot of your competitors. Next quote, all big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single tiny decision. But as that decision is repeated a habit sprouts and grows stronger roots and trench themselves and branches grow Pride. You have in a particular aspect of your identity,

the more motivated you will be to maintain the habits associated with it. The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when he habit becomes part of your identity. So again, guys, back to who you are, who do you want to become focused on that person? And that intrinsic motivation happens without you even knowing how it's happening. It's just focused on who you want to become and who that business owner is.

Do you want to be? That's all there. It's one thing to say, I'm the type of person who wants this. It's something very different to say, I'm the type of person who is this. Think about that. I'm the type of person who is this. A lot of times, it's just believing in yourself and that shifts your whole mind.

Cool. I don't know if we went through those discussion questions already. I think we Hit all those kind of along the way. Let's just give them the action Items. Yeah. So some action items, guys, you hit the first one, Brandon. So pinpoint three habits. You would like to cultivate in your personal life and write down why incorporating these habits is important to your success.

If it's written down, it'll help you achieve that. But this is also just trying to spell out which habits are going to make it important to you. Absolutely pinpoint three habits, write them down, why they incorporating those habits is important to your success. I love that. The next one is rather than setting a goal to create new habits, develop systems and your daily life that integrate the new habits in a way that ensures your progress.

So again, guys systems developed a systems systems will set you free focus on those systems, The process with your business. So what are three new habits your business can benefit from? And what are the systems you can create to ensure that these small habits take root in the, For you, it might be what are the systems you can create to ensure these small habits take root?

Like maybe it's set up a phone system, maybe it's set up a CRM software so you can better check and serve your customers and make things more automated. That's something we didn't touch too much on, but like he was talking a lot about using technology and systems and technology to automate things in your business and make it really fun and attractive, you know?

So definitely be using technology to be using online marketing, be using all this stuff at our fingertips guys that even had a a hundred years ago, he didn't have this stuff. We have so many cool tools and resources at our fingertips. It's just focusing on the right ones, obviously. So definitely model what we're doing and tell us what works. If you got something better.

And then the last one is, are you identifying as the person you want to be review how your business is currently communicating with its audience? Can you make any small changes that increase its confidence? So for example, is your business wanting to be something or declaring it as something? Right? So when I heard this, I was like, yeah. Instead of being like,

I need five more customers right now, I need five more cleaning business customers to fill my schedule. Well, how about telling people, declaring it? Your customer would be like, we're the best cleaning business in town. And we have a waiting list. I don't even know if we can take, you know, like just like declare what you want to be declared,

what you envisioned that would be more successful. That would be more in demand. It will happen. Like the results will happen is that perception you put out there and that picture you paint. It's powerful. So anyways guys, I think we could go on for hours and hours about this book. It's an amazing book. What I thought was so cool just to finish on the story,

James clear, the author of this book talked about kind of like Brandon, like how he was talking about on a recent podcast, how he sections himself off in the office. And he like, has this software that like, doesn't let him go on certain websites or social media when he's trying to be productive in his work. Well, the author James clear did this exact same thing.

When he wrote this book, he literally said it took him years and years. And he was like, I was trying to write this book for years when he finally got it published. It was like a New York times bestseller. It sold millions of copies, but he was like, literally it took me years and years to get to this point where I finally just told my team,

he had a bad habit of getting distracted and procrastinating. Right. So he made it really difficult to have that bad habit. So what he did was he gave his team, his social media passwords and all his logins for his like stuff that distracted them. And at the end of the week, they would give it back to him on the weekend, but he did this.

And I think he finished the book in a matter of days because he was so focused and he had no distractions and it was doing something that made it hard and made that habit hard to do, to like get distracted procrastinate. But ultimately that was the result that helped him publish this book. So I thought, how cool is that, that he's talking about this in the book and that's exactly what he did to finish the book.

And then this book was like a major success. And so maybe for you think about that, like what is it in your business that you might need to cut off or you might need to eliminate in your environment, whether it's a person or a thing or something that's distracting you so that you can get to that next level and win and make the result happen.

So maybe it's taking something out, maybe it's adding something in, but yeah, guys, I encourage you guys to pick up the book atomic habits by James clear, it's actually in your mastermind to Brandon, right? You guys are going through it. Yeah. We talked about this in firecracker. That was also very good. And this was in context of our goal setting thing,

but yeah, it was a really good book. I did like it. I think we'll come back to it in the future many, many times just for personally using in business use. So that was the first episode of the Profit Cleaners book club. The rest of them will be on Patrion on the future. And we'll put you out on Facebook, what the next book is soon,

but to really get the benefit of it, you've got to get on Patrion. Yeah. And so on Patrion guys, how it'll be probably a little different in the future is we'll be in there with you guys. You guys can be asking questions, it'll be a little bit more of a group asking questions and working through different concepts and what that might mean to you.

And we kind of break it down a little bit more as a community. So I think that'll be really cool. It'll be a little bit more involved. I mean, I think investing in your knowledge, investing in your mindset, investing in this kind of stuff is critical to your success. So there's that phrase you've probably heard readers are leaders. And we talked about few podcast episodes that go like the top CEOs in the world read 52 books a year.

Well, that's how they achieve that success is because it advances their thinking so much that they're able to accomplish amazing tasks that you can accomplish too. But you got to change your mindset. You got to upgrade your minds, upgrade your thoughts. And a lot of times it's just picking up a book, it's getting a new perspective, hanging around people like in these masterminds and these book clubs or wherever it's at,

where you can grow to that next level. And a lot of times it's just quick little mental shifts that can make all the difference. So yeah. I want to wrap it up today. I learned a lot, Brandon. I thought it was an awesome book. I'm glad we went through it. Yeah. I liked it a lot. No regrets,

man. It was great. Yeah. So I'm looking forward to the next one. We don't know what the next one is yet guys, but beyond the lookout, if you guys do want to join the book club, go over to Profit Cleaners dot com forward slash book club. And you can sign up on Patrion and jump in the group. We'll be doing these calls every month.

We'll be giving you guys like Brandon said the notes and be a little bit more interactive in the group. There it'll be live and you guys will be in there with us. But again, this was just a little teaser to throw out there. Kind of get an initial test in the waters here and see how it goes. But we'd love your feedback.

We'd love if you guys would like us to do it differently or add more to it or do it in a better way, let us know. Hello at Profit Cleaners dot com. And if you guys are, should we tell them how to pay the fee? Brandon share the podcast. Yes. Tell your friends if you know someone who could benefit from it,

please tell them about us. Otherwise, if you yourself are getting some value out of it, please leave us a review. Wherever you consume your podcasts, that is the best way to help us by Absolutely absolutely guys. Well, I think we covered a lot today. Go back through your guys. Go download this podcast. We're going to give you guys out the notes free.

So you can go to the Profit Cleaners dot com website and get this first episode in the show notes. And we'll put the notes in there. We'll put the book in there. So take a look at it. Guys, invest in yourself, invest in knowledge, double down on knowledge, sharpen the ax. And we're looking forward to seeing you guys next time on this next call on the next podcast.

So until next time, keep it clean. Keep it clean. Thanks for joining us today. To get more info, including show notes, updates, trainings, and super cool free stuff. Head over to Profit Cleaners dot com and remember keep it clean.

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Thanks for joining us today. To get more info, including show notes, updates, trainings, and super cool free stuff. Head over to Profitcleaners.com and remember keep it clean.