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Agency Forward explores the future of agencies as tech and AI drive down the cost of tactical deliverables. Topics include building competent teams, developing strategic offers, systemizing your business, and more.
New episodes delivered every Tuesday.
Unknown Speaker 0:00
Hey everyone. Today I'm joined by Ben Catley. Richardson, also known as the accountability Viking. Ben is the founder of get shit done and have more fun, and agency coaching business for founders who want to stop sacrificing their sanity. Not only does he have some great methods and systems to make this happen, but many of the ideas are led through studies in neuroscience. And so it moves these ideas out of theory and into proven application. In this episode, we discuss how to make tough decisions that create more free time, the importance of the five gates of learning ways to increase clarity to overcome overwhelm, and procrastination and more. Today's episode is brought to you by Zen pilot. There are lots of tools out there for agencies to manage projects, but any project issues aren't usually caused by the tool. They're from your own processes. Zen pilot helps agencies implement their project management tools while streamlining operations. So your team can move from chaos to clarity, you can see for yourself at Zen pilot.com/forward. And now Ben, the accountability Viking.
Unknown Speaker 1:09
It's easier than ever to start an agency, but it's only getting harder to stand out and keep it alive. Join me as we explore the strategies agencies are using today to secure a better tomorrow. This is agency forward.
Unknown Speaker 1:27
How can agency founders get more free time back in their lives?
Unknown Speaker 1:32
Do you want the easy answer, Chris? Or do you want the tough but more realistic answer? I will always go for the tough and more realistic answer because I'm a glutton for punishment. But but we can we can try the easy answer after.
Unknown Speaker 1:48
Yeah, we'll go back to that like the real answer. The tough answer is you just have to make the tough decisions, you have to sacrifice what is not getting you somewhere you have to get rid of all the stuff that's irrelevant, that's not actually helping. And you have to really,
Unknown Speaker 2:07
you have to make everything that you do essentially fight to the death. So you need to be able to look at all of your tasks, and know that every single one of them makes a completely valuable contribution to where you're trying to get to, if you see that you're doing something because other people do it. Or you're doing something because where you feel like you should, or because you've always done it. Those are usually the tasks, the commitments, the behaviors that are holding you back. And if you think that you can get rid of you know, 20% of the stuff that actually takes up your time, you are then going to have that to put into the stuff that can really move you forwards. Now the difficulty here is, obviously you've got to make those sacrifices, you got to make those tough choices. But in order to do that, you need a guiding principle or a priority, you need a way where every time you look at a task, or a commitment, or even a decision, you can already have in the back of your mind, a filter, a way of looking at it a way of turning it from a very difficult to kind of grapple with or maybe you know big picture conversation that you're having with yourself to just turn it into a yes or no, to turn it into a binary to turn it into something you can actually make a decision about instantly. And if you can have that priority, that single priority, that really drives forward, everything you do, two things are going to happen. First of all, you're going to make more progress, because you're actually going to be doubling down on the stuff that really takes you forward. And the second thing is if you make more progress, if you achieve more and get there faster, you will naturally feel better about taking time off. And so ultimately, it's not so much about creating time off, because you know, we can't create time, that's just way beyond our abilities. But what we can do is try and get the most important stuff done with our time so that we feel comfortable and no guilt about it actually deciding to take the downtime.
Unknown Speaker 4:20
Right. So I guess the real challenge then comes in how do you prioritize? How do you find that one thing? He's, you know, what is that big domino that you need to knock down? Yeah, and I think this is kind of circling back to the easy answer, the easy answer is get a job, because then somebody else will tell you what to do. Right. But we don't want to do that. That's not what we want to do. It's gonna go against everything that we're trying to achieve. And also, as I'm sure you'd agree, it's not the way that we actually achieve the unlocking of the life that we really want. You know, we want something bigger. We don't just want to be in employment. So if we're not going to go for that easy answer,
Unknown Speaker 4:58
you know, and to kind of look at what
Unknown Speaker 5:00
You were just saying finding that priority, we have to then figure out, okay, if we were employed, it would be easy, because someone would just tell us, they would give us that priority. So we almost have to take our head in two different directions, have the decision making process, go through the planning, the thinking the long term ideas, so that that person can have made all the decisions and leave you behind the guidance, the plan the priority. So in the moment, you're almost a different person, you're not making those decisions. And the only real way that you can find that priority is by kind of going back between those elements, I've never learned anything worthwhile, that I didn't fully commit to, when I was trying to find it out. So if you're going to find out a priority, you're never going to find it out in the room, behind closed doors, you've got to say, This feels like the right thing to do. This feels like a priority that I can really double down on, and then go out and do it. And if in a week's time you go, it's not working. You still no more than you did a week ago, you still got further towards where you want to be than you were a week ago. And that's the mindset you've really got to get in, I think is, you know, if you're trying to find the priority, you won't find it until you start running with something. It's like anything in business, isn't it? You just cannot learn until you're out there. And then you know, what's the mike tyson quote, you got to get basically punched in the face, you know, you've got to get your plan out there and then get punched in the face and adapt to it. And that's the only way really I think, yeah, we had a variant of that saying in the army, which was the enemy gets a vote. And so doesn't matter what plan you make, right? The enemy gets to throw their own thinking into this.
Unknown Speaker 6:49
So I don't know how much I want to get into all the different, like productivity tips and tricks, right? Like, I think the mindset is probably the more important thing. But something that I've been doing every week is just planning, or really, it's every month I pick out like what are the three big things I need to knock out knowing that I can't continuously make progress on one goal all the time. But I'll have two others that I can keep kind of fitting in. And then each week, it's like, okay, what is that one thing I need to do in order to advance my monthly goal?
Unknown Speaker 7:20
Is that getting to deprioritize? Or I guess, is that a structure that you would say is something agencies could start doing in order to get into being even more focused?
Unknown Speaker 7:32
Well, the immediate question to go through there is, having three things on the go is not a problem, right? Because this is where we can gonna get confused as well. We talk about competing priorities. And we often really mean competing tasks or commitments. That's not kind of what a priority sits as when you're trying to use this plan. The idea is that the priority is what you're trying to achieve what you're trying to get to, or ultimately, what's the blocker that stops you having what you want. And then obviously, the priority is to remove that blocker. So the first thing I'd be doing is saying, okay, Chris, you've got those three things you're looking for every month, but what are they serving? Like? Why those three things? Why did you choose those three things? And where did they take you?
Unknown Speaker 8:16
Right, and I guess they would all fall into, like the constraint of my business. And just three ways to kind of tackle it from the different angles that aren't necessarily competing, but are supporting each other.
Unknown Speaker 8:31
Although I don't think I've actually spent that much time thinking through that right.
Unknown Speaker 8:36
Now deliver a point, right, and a lot of it. So there's a book called essentialism.
Unknown Speaker 8:41
Yeah, forgive me. I can't remember the guy who wrote it really, really big McGowan. And one of them was a Yeah, most gifted book for a couple years in a row. Yeah. And the whole thing is brilliant, right. But one of the things I loved most was he had this conversation about I believe it was interviewing people, but you can use it obviously, in everything. And you you go, Okay, I'm going to rate these people on a scale. And then God, what we're going to do with the sevens and the eights, and how do we? And then he was like, actually, why are we even thinking about that? Why don't we just get rid of everybody below a nine, and then we only think about the nines and the 10s. And if there's only three people there? Well, that doesn't matter, because everybody else didn't come up to scratch. And ultimately, in that moment, you have then criteria that tells you who's worth thinking about who's worth really considering and who, you know, with all due respect to them isn't right for this thing. But you've got to have he would have had to have a way of building that criteria. What makes them right, what makes them an eight, and a NINE and a 10. What makes them a three. And if you can't do that to your tasks, I mean, let alone you know, let's not put numbers on people. But if you can't do that to your tasks, you aren't going to get you know, shiny object syndrome, which is that classic thing where you've been doing something how many times if you've done a project, it felt like the right project
Unknown Speaker 10:00
You're 75% of the way through, and then something comes up on your feed and LinkedIn or somebody sends an email about some new idea or AI comes out of left field. And you go, that's the new thing. And you leave how many 75% completed projects, you know, do you leave in your week. And two things there. First of all, like we said, you can't ever learn from anything unless it's completed and out there. So you never really learn from those 75% complete projects. And the second thing is, you don't make any progress towards what you were trying to get to. Because if you have in your head, this clearer idea of this project is going to take me there, but then you'd lost that you got 75% of the way through the project, something else pops up that's attracted you, you're whether you start, you know, on something that could also serve that project, sorry, serve that priority, you've got to start from scratch. So you're 75% of the way behind. So this whole, you know, task flitting shiny object syndrome, not completing things, it drags you back. And I've found that the number one way to get over that is literally this priority idea that if you have one simple single priority, it just makes everything else easier, because the decisions are already made up ahead in, you know, in terms of what is worth you're doing, what is not worth you doing what is relevant, what's not relevant. And so if you've got that priority to guide you, then you can put all of your energy into actually doing stuff and finishing stuff. And then assessing it, did it get me there? Did it progress me in the right way? Should I do this again? And if you can't ask that feedback question that kind of, you know, advanced knowledge question of what worked and what didn't you just, you just go around in circles? Right? What's nice about I think, figuring out those rules, and the criteria to be able to make that decision, like what is a nine on the scale, is that you remove a lot of that decision fatigue, right? Like, if something just doesn't align with your rules, you just wave it off. And like, you don't even have to think about it now. And so you can go spend your mental calories working on something that actually matters.
Unknown Speaker 12:08
huge benefit.
Unknown Speaker 12:11
Are you this is what drew me in good. Sorry, I was just gonna say this is what drew me into the whole idea, right was about two or three years ago, reading atomic habits and getting involved in David rocks, videos, and his book, the brain at work, you know, and all that stuff is is essentially like you say, it goes down to every time we think we use calories, we use energy. And I believe that the stat is that the brain is 2% of your body weight, but it uses 20% of the energy. So it's got a massively outsized demand for what you do. And you know, decisions, like you just said, you get that decision fatigue, it's one of the most intense energy demanding things you can do. So anything you can do to remove decisions from any equation from any action is always going to improve your progress, your ability to focus everything across the board.
Unknown Speaker 13:06
Right? So I guess we take a step. Now, earlier than just prioritization, we probably need to know what goals we're actually trying to like, are going to drive those priorities. What what are you doing in order to help people find out? What are their goals? What direction do we actually need to go with our business?
Unknown Speaker 13:26
Well, one of the things that people usually get stuck on is this idea of goals or obsessing about my goals, you know, this is where manifestation comes from, isn't it as well, you know, if I just want it enough, I'll get it. And you know, regardless of the stories of like Jim Carrey, you know, making things happen, and you know, we could go right off task, and talk about the reticular activation system and how you know, thinking about something means you see all that kind of stuff, fine, whatever. For me, what's really important is that if you have a goal, there's one thing you definitely also have, and that's a problem.
Unknown Speaker 14:02
And when you look at goals, usually I mean, me and you we've got different backgrounds, different career histories, different locations, different living conditions, but we probably have similar goals. And so knowing those goals doesn't really tell us anything, it doesn't tell us what to do next, it doesn't even tell us what to do first. So the most important thing when we look at goals is to realize that probably they're generic, they're nonspecific.
Unknown Speaker 14:30
But when you look at problems when you look at the thing that stops you getting your goal the blocker then you're into ripe territory because then you can say Well, the reason I haven't got this the reason I can't get there the reason I'm not achieving that goal is this that the other and as soon as you have that conversation with yourself, you know, you immediately know what to do next, what to do first what to remove, you know, why am I not fit? Well, because I don't go to the gym. Oh, well.
Unknown Speaker 15:00
That's the answer, right? Go to the gym. Why am I not feeling healthy? Because I don't sleep? Well, I drink lots of alcohol and I eat unhealthy food. Oh, wait, okay, now I know exactly what to do, but wanting to be fit and wanting to feel healthy, are completely generic and unhelpful kind of guides to where you're trying to get to. So for me, what I usually take people through is this sense of, there's actually a tool called the herringbone, which is nice enough for the Viking theme. But all it really is you can do it very simply, you just draw an arrow from left to right, the big head on the end, the big arrow head, put your goal on that side. And then what you do is you draw these little fish sort of rib bones that come back. And you're just saying, Well, why don't I have that? And why can't I do that? And what's stopping me making that happen? And why isn't that out of my way? And how do I remove that, and it just takes you back down all the way to where you are now. And then essentially, you've just planned out exactly how you get to that goal. Now, obviously, you still got to do the work. But like I say, the most important thing is if you know what you should be doing now, next. And first, you can get so much further than if you just have an idea about where you want to be in a year's time. And so are pending this idea of focusing on your goals to get what you want, and actually focusing on the problems that you have that mean, you haven't got those goals yet, is always going to, you know, help you move along. And that's how I start working with people to then draw out that priority. Because at a basic level, okay, I want to have a more successful business, right, let's spend some time talking about why your agency isn't as successful as it might be, okay? It's because I'm overworked, I'm stacked with work, I just don't have the time to strategize to think about where I want to be okay. So we can go in two directions, then we can then prioritize reducing the demand on you from work, maybe we'll try that maybe we'll try and systemize some of what you deliver. So it's parts of it are the same every time and you can reuse things, and then you've freed up time and headspace. Or on the other side, maybe we'll look at how you're using your time. Maybe we prioritize the best possible use of your time the most effective use of your time. And then we know that's a priority to work through. When you look at a task is this going to help me understand the most effective use of my time? And it's not an exact science? You know, it's this is why in a way, it works best on that one to one coaching level at first, because you want to, we all want to find the thing that right? That's the answer. That's the silver bullet, and then I run off. And you can do that. But what you often need is a friend or a trusted colleague or coach, to stand there and listen to you instead. Yeah, but you said you wanted that, that this is stopping you. And yet you keep doing the thing that, you know, creates that. So getting that second opinion, really, really helps. And ultimately, you're trying to get to something that makes like we said about makes decision making easy. So the actions don't have to be involved in decisions, you just separating those worlds. And then you just test it and see what works.
Unknown Speaker 18:17
Yeah, so I really liked this herringbone method. Because once you can start breaking everything down to like those individual pieces, everything is much more manageable. The something i i like using are tangible models. And so essentially, you create, like a math formula for whatever it is. So, for example, I had a team member, when I was running an agency who was he felt overwhelmed. And it was like to the point where he couldn't work. And so we jumped on a meeting. So okay, well, what is overwhelm? Right? It's a combination of high demands and a lack of clarity. So can we reduce your demands right now? Is there any projects we can hand off? Right? Is there anything you're not clear of let's organize, let's prioritize, right? Let's do all these things, you still feel overwhelmed. And like he left that meeting, literally saying in these 20 minutes, you got me back onto like, this was everything I needed. But it's like we couldn't do that if you hadn't identified the problem. It's like something as simple as feeling overwhelmed. And so I think just that model of being able to break it down, like this is genius to quickly advance on your role, right, rather than having this large, behemoth task. It's like, no, let's just tackle it. Right, like, bye, bye, bye.
Unknown Speaker 19:26
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, you know, how do Vikings eat bears, like everybody else, one bite at a time? You know, it's just that that iterative process. And I'd love to say I invented the herringbone, you know, obviously I didn't, but one thing I do feel like I've helped people to get to is because of course, the question then is, well, how small do you go? How far do you break this down? And so I started playing with this idea that basically you're looking for what I call a step, and I don't usually like acronyms and this cute stuff, but this seemed to work. It's like it's a simple task, with everything.
Unknown Speaker 20:00
in place, and if you can go that far down, were like that guy. Okay, I can walk out this meeting, and I've got a step that I can do that requires nothing. I've already got all this stuff together, I don't have to ask anybody for anything, I can just do it. That's the easiest route to getting over procrastination and you know, overwhelm. When we feel like we can take control, we have agency, that's also a massive, massive way to get over this overwhelm to get past this distraction that we have. It's like you said, it's clarity. You know, it's uncertainty. And we're living in a pretty incredibly uncertain time. And it's no surprise that procrastination and distraction is on the rise. Because not just are we surrounded with the digital items, you know, and obviously, if you're in an agency, you're kind of umbilically connected to these things, because that's your industry in your life, not just you know, what happens outside work. It's, you know, it's everything. So you're almost there telling yourself, I've got people who I've worked with? Well, I have to look at my phone the first time, I wake up in the morning at 630, because I'm trying to get ahead of and it's like, Yeah, but what is it doing to you? How much energy spending? Can we pass all that up in a more effective time when you're more intentional? And, you know, get everything else out of the way with first? And yeah, I think it's just that reduce the decision fatigue, reduce the demands, increase the agency and clarity. And immediately, people start to feel more able to get forward. And then it's a, like a golden circle, like a virtuous circle, you know, the more you get done, the more you feel like you can get done, and the better you feel. And so the more you can get done, it just goes on and on. Right? So let's get into burnout.
Unknown Speaker 21:50
And I'm very interested in your thoughts. Because I spent seven years active duty in the army. And at no point during that time, did I feel burnout, which, I mean, I was working 70 hour weeks, some of those weeks were in the field under duress, right? Like not seeing my family, not just, they were miserable. But I never felt burned. I never felt like I needed a break in order to be able to keep getting the job done. Then I moved into the agency world. And it's like, oh, now I feel like I could use a break right now.
Unknown Speaker 22:24
Way less stress, like when it comes in comparison, right?
Unknown Speaker 22:29
Just job wise. So what what is it about? I get like the passion that you bring into an occupation or something like that, that affects us? And what are some of those things I guess you should look for? To get around it?
Unknown Speaker 22:45
I think there's two ways to look at that, like the first way and I know you're gonna agree with me on this is this idea that when you're in the army, when you're in that structured environment, downtime isn't seen as downtime. So you know, that phrase, you know, never, never run, when you can walk, never walk, when you can sit, never sit when you can lie down. So ultimately, you're in a phase of activation, if you like, where, okay, I have a mission, I have a goal, I have something that I'm doing. That is important. But right now, the best thing that I can do, because I've got a five hour wait for a helicopter, I've got you know, we've got a five hour wait for the rest of the team to catch up with us, I'm then going to recharge myself. And so I think what you probably would agree with is that you recharge whenever possible in the army, whereas when you're in a working environment, you're hit with all of these expectations have we recharge overnight, we recharge when it's dark, we don't recharge at one o'clock in the afternoon, we don't recharge when we've got a deadline, we don't recharge, when we've got suddenly somebody's canceled a meeting, because we try and shove it in with, you know, if you're in the army, and you're on the front line, and your mission has stood down at the very last minute, and you've now got an entire 48 hours of time between your next posting you don't then go right, fantastic. We'll go off and we'll do this mission over here. You know, that's not how it works. So I think you probably agree with that. Yeah, that's pretty pretty spot on.
Unknown Speaker 24:21
And then on the other side, we're talking about a structured environment we're talking about much like, you know, I said, the easy question and easy answer, even at the beginning is just to get employed. Often we know actually, one of the reasons we don't like to be employed is because we don't get those clear, structured instructions on what to do. And that's why employment can be horrible. But in that structured environment, you were in, you knew that priority. You had that filter already applied to the decision making and also, you had been trained to have an inch of your life. Hadn't you been taken to that point where many of the actions that you took were reflex actions in
Unknown Speaker 25:00
formed by very deep training that were essentially natural actions that you took. So there was no decision making, there was no deliberating, it was act in the moment in response to a predetermined set of, you know, instructions, or a predetermined set of expectations. So you were operating in that world where there was huge amounts of uncertainty, but you've been given all the tools to tackle that uncertainty.
Unknown Speaker 25:25
Again, in the agency world, you know, a year ago, two years ago, it is now really, isn't it? Nobody could have expected that chat GPT would suddenly come out of nowhere, everybody was stuck into their social post writing and scheduling and stuff like that. What platform do you use? You know, what, what prompts do you use, you know, prompt meant something completely different, you know, two years ago, and then we all wake up during 2023. And not, not just part of the world has changed. But essentially, the whole of the industry has changed. And now you have people who who are hate using the word literally, but literally running businesses that are driven by AI writing content, putting content out there, and they basically just sort of tame the beast, you know, and say where to go. So you're in a very uncertain situation as well. And yet, you don't have the clear guidance, you've don't have the structured environment. And nobody's taught you how to respond in that environment, nobody's given you the drilling, nobody's given you the reflexes. And when you get down to it, and we can go into it in a minute, one of the key elements of downtime, is it is part of our human need, for what we actually go through in order to grow and learn and progress. But we deny it, because it feels like wasting time because we're guilty, all that kind of stuff. And so often burn out in an environment, like you've described in the agency world where you're under increasing demand to be on all the time, it's a worldwide market, you can be remote, everywhere. So you can have clients anywhere, which means that you can be contacted, and need to do anything at any time. And your, you know, tools are right there at your fingertips, you can be updating a website or altering a headline in bed, you know, one o'clock in the morning. And we can tell ourselves, we need to do this, like, we can tell ourselves that this is important. And then when we're actually coming to taking time off and relaxing, unlike when you're in the army, where you can actually put that as a really beneficial, productive, valuable part of your operating procedure. You see it as it's actually apart from your operating procedure. It's a luxury, it's an optional thing. I'll sleep when I'm dead, like Grant Cardone, you know, will always say, and it's nonsense, and it's detrimental. And you know, as you just said, it's causing burnout, it's causing people to get stuck.
Unknown Speaker 27:50
Right? So it's, how can we make recovery productive?
Unknown Speaker 27:58
So I think there's, there's a mindset shift, right? That has to be so basically, the way we learn, it used to be that we believed that you got better at playing the piano by repeatedly playing the piano by practicing it, we used to think that you got better at speaking a language by literally speaking to people by going out of your way to talk that language and think about that language, read that language. Or if you want to develop your business, you're gonna get better at it by delivering client work by overworking by 60 hour weeks by just working, working working, that's what's gonna get you better. Now, that's part of it, because obviously, you got to do the thing in order to get better of it in some way. But
Unknown Speaker 28:41
it doesn't actually help in the long run, because it doesn't actually, when we're doing it isn't actually when it takes place that we learned that we advanced that we bank, if you like that progress. So we've discovered we say we like I'm a neuroscientist neuroscience has discovered, and I'm very lucky to have a few very close friends who are neuroscientists, neuroscientists discovered that actually we learn most we embed most learning in our brain. When we're asleep. In exactly the same way, too, we build the most muscle, which is in asleep.
Unknown Speaker 29:19
But nobody tells you that. Nobody tells you that actually, if you sleep if you rest, if you take downtime, what that is doing is banking, all of that progress and hard work that you've made before. It's seen as weakness, it's seen as time off, whereas actually it's still time on so I think the mind shift is saying, okay, there are five gates, and they're called gates because you can't skip any of them. You have to go from one to five, you can't go from one to four. There are five gates of learning. You have to pass through all of them. And the last two are what we would typically see as relating to downtime.
Unknown Speaker 30:00
And if we can get that mindset shift to actually see that I'm not just not doing anything, I'm not just putting my feet up on my bum, what I'm doing is going through the next stage of this learning process progressing through the gate. And ultimately, burnout happens when you get stuck in the first three gates don't mind explaining them in a minute, but I didn't want to get too, you know, like driven into the detail. But the first three gates, we will see a very active based, and people get stuck in them. And then you never get through to the final two gates, which are very, in some ways, passive focused, but you can turn them active. And that's part of what I help people to do. Right. So I guess, going into the gates will probably give the answer to one of my next questions, which is, how do you remove the guilt from downtime, where I had a therapist who just told me to stop shooting all over myself, because every time I would sit down to try relaxing, you know, I would go through the process of like, I shouldn't be doing this, I should be doing this. And then I couldn't relax when I was wasting my time anyways, but my guess is, if you just prioritize these, you're kind of pass through these five gates, you can get rid of like, now you're doing something right? Yeah, you should be recovering. These are the steps you want to go into the five gates.
Unknown Speaker 31:23
Yeah, absolutely. Like, stop me, if I look like I'm giving cod psychology advice or anything like that, because I don't want to go, you know, into that area. I'm an enthusiast. I'm an evangelist, you know, I'm talking to these people who were studying this their whole lives. And actually, I was introduced to the five gates model by a guy called Dr. John B. Volador, who's a neuroscientist when he got his PhD when I was, well, before I was born. So he's been in the area for a long time. And his explanation of it, there are different terms depending on who you speak to. But the whole of, you know, the kind of studying of it puts him forward to propose five stages, five gates, the first of which is awareness. So gate, one is awareness. And as he says, You can't have any learning, you can't get anything done. You can't change anything without awareness. So in order to learn, we have to know what do we learn? Why are we learning it? What's missing? And obviously, in order to get shit done, we have to figure out what needs to get done. Why is it going to get done? What will it demand of me? So, awareness, if you think of it, like the big picture thinking, that's where we were talking about taking your goal, breaking it down into a problem understanding that priority, and then you've got, you know, that kind of way to move forward. The second stage is agitation. So gate to agitation is the trigger the motivation in physiological terms, and kind of inside your brain terms, it's the burst of adrenaline, that triggers you to then take action. The reason why you don't just sit there and do nothing, so we always need to be agitated or triggered to actually take action. And a lot of that depends on it can be a threat. I mean, that's where we come from, you know, is sort of evolution has designed us to respond to threats, way more extreme and severely than it has anything else. So we can respond to threats we can get going. And then that will move us down the line. So one of the ways you could do that is looking at loss aversion. So you want to get down the gym. Okay, so you've done your awareness, you've understood that you need to do this kind of thing at the gym for this kind of result. And you're going to have to go this amount of time. But what's that expression? I think it's in James clears book, atomic habits, the heaviest weight at the gym is the front door, you know, so to get through that front door, you're going to need a trigger, you're going to need a pump. And one of the things you could do is loss aversion. When you say okay, I'm going to spend 150 quid on a personal trainer, who is in the gym, do I have to get to the gym to get my money's worth, and I've already paid the money, I don't want to lose that money. Therefore, I'm prompted to get there. The only trouble was stick. So that's basically like the stick or the deadline advances. If you keep using sticks. You just get bruises. Okay, so you've got to mix it up. And again, atomic habits had a lot of stuff in this about what's called environment design, or what James clear calls environment design, which is like you want to go to the gym, then make it incredibly easy. Create the environment that gets you to the gym, when you come into the house. Don't sit down, put your gym clothes on.
Unknown Speaker 34:29
Partly that's because you get worked into the habit, but also, our brains are kind of simple. And so you get into that process where the trigger can be as simple as your subconscious going. What's the next natural thing? Well, I'm in my gym clothes. So the next natural thing is I go to the gym. So agitation is a funny one. There's lots of different areas for it, but it's essential. So you then get on to the stage which is attention to gate three attention. And this is where people really struggle. Probably two or three
Unknown Speaker 35:00
Three reasons. The first reason they struggle is because this is where we go back to what we talked about getting rid of irrelevant stuff, you've got to be able to focus, you've got to be able to take your attention in a particular direction, and sustain it for long enough to actually do something to get something to happen. So you need focus. And obviously, we know that people are struggling with focus right now. So that's where the priority comes in. So I always say to people always prioritize never priorities, because that's just the recipe for disaster. So if you have those three gates, you have awareness, you have agitation, and then you have attention. Those as we can see, if you ever got taught how to learn or how to get stuff done, you might have got taught along those lines, something that was useful in those lines. And that's probably where it ended. Because again, we see these as active. The next gate is called reward. And this is where the problem begins. Because and, you know, me and Dr. Mulder have talked about this. And he, you know, kind of talks about it in terms of we call it reward, but we call it reward. But it's because when we say the word reward mean, what do you immediately think of? What do I immediately think of we think of external factors that, you know, approve us accolades, awards, you know, money, attention. And ultimately, we can't control any of that. So whereas we can learn to control the first three, when we get to reward the natural feeling, anyway, the natural interpretation, we can't control it. So we end up waiting, we ended up thinking long term rewards that will keep me going. And this is where we mix up motivation, which has got us going with momentum, which keeps us going, the momentum is the only thing that can keep you going. And the best way to do that is to move in this gate to move from outcome goals, I win an award, somebody, you know, gives me a job, somebody pays me to do it to do a project. Rather than focus on those and reward those and see those as the outcome. We go to process goals. So we think about what can I control? You know, what can I turn up? And do? How many people can I reach out to and have a conversation with every day? How many events? Can I take my agency to? To display what we do? How many tough decisions can I make every week to move us forwards? And then what can I do that isn't reliant on drink? Or food? or money? What can I do to reward myself and the maddest thing about this is that our brain will respond to something as simple as tally charts, Tally marking, you know, going through that, or just a fist bump, or just a Yeah, in the mirror, you know? And these things, I'm not gonna lie, feel silly, because we're never taught them and they kind of feel silly. But what you've got a choice, you know, do you be silly and get stuff done? Or do you stay embarrassed and get stuck? Right, that piece, right? There was a huge struggle for me where I felt like I always if I did something good, like, I got to a point place where I needed to be, I needed to have some sort of reward. Like, I literally spend time deliberating over what is this reward? Because I feel like I'm not going to actually advance myself. And one of my coaches just said, like, can't you just congratulate yourself and just like, sit there for a minute and be like, Good work, and then move on? Because like, that's really what I want to do move to the next thing.
Unknown Speaker 38:32
Yeah, that was just a huge shift. And now we can sit there for a minute, and just be like, Hey, you did it. Good job. Next thing, let's go.
Unknown Speaker 38:39
But let's, and it can be as simple as thinking about your wins in the week, just writing them down. Yeah, it's just recognition of your efforts. And ultimately, that's going to generate satisfaction. And so to go right back, you know, what we're talking about? I know, we've talked a lot, but to go right back to what you're talking about, how do we feel less guilty? Well, yeah, first, you get the priority, the priority is going to help you get more done. The next thing you do is you get that satisfaction. So you end the week, in some way on a high, you plan it, you celebrate it, you get that progress, you recognize it, no matter how small it might be in the bigger picture, you you kind of give that that reward to yourself that yeah, that fist pump, because we are creatures of ritual. And if you've ever worked in an office that then went out on a Friday afternoon for you know, post work drinks or anything like that, how easy was it to shut down from the week because of those Friday drinks and then to enjoy the weekend. I mean, maybe you had a hangover the next day, but it really felt like the week ended and the weekend begun. And so that's what we need at this stage. And that's why the rewards gate is so important and why was having control over it. It's so important, because if you don't finish it, like you said, if you don't have that sense of completion and satisfaction
Unknown Speaker 40:00
You're just spinning your heels in those other gates. And you can't ever get further forward right at the start of this year, I bought a calendar that has all of the days on this like two page sheet, and I'll put it score just one through 10. Like how did the day go, and then inside on the monthly, like version, for each day, I just write down the wins. Like for the button, you know, it's July 16, As of recording this. So I've got six and a half months of just wins in this book. And it's really hard to look back on your year and be like, I wasted my time when you can see even these little things just stacking
Unknown Speaker 40:39
it into the last gate to Alright, I want to make sure we don't miss that one. Yeah. So I just want to add very quickly, there's a book called The Confident mind by Dr. Nate Zinser who used to teach at West Point. And he's also worked with top sports people. And one of the things he says is that high performance, people don't think about their losses. They don't think about the things they did wrong. So if you have an NHL player, practicing, you know, he doesn't think about the times he missed the puck, or you know, didn't get there, what he thinks of the one or two times when everything went right, and then tries to repeat them. And so that's the mindset, like you said, that's what we want to get into. So if you get that satisfaction, you've had the priority, which means you can drive yourself forwards, you've had that focus on process goals, which means you can then reward yourself and feel satisfied. Then we go through, then we're ready to go through to gate five, which is process. So by that I mean processing. So it's the endpoint, its sleep, its rest its recovery. There's I'm gonna I'm throwing books out here all over the time. But there's a book called Why We sleep by Dr. Matt Walker, which is terrifying. Absolutely. You got it there. Yeah, had it repaired.
Unknown Speaker 41:55
And it's terrifying because it's so brilliant because it just undercuts everything we know about sleep or being taught about sleep. And it's this gate, this final stage. If you do everything right, and then you don't sleep, you've still mess things up, you've still wasted all that time, we need the rewards to tell us we did something that was worth repeating. But we need the processing, we need the recovery, the sleep, to make the repeating of it easier and easier and less and less energy demanding. And so if you never go through those full five gates, you just never get that you never met that progress that, you know, you never reach the top of the hill, it's Sisyphean, you know, you're always pushing the boulder up the hill, and then it rolls back down again, just to start all over again. And the other that the drawing to a close is like this is a cycle. So the awareness stage is so important to get your head above what's going on. But you can't ever get back there. If you're stuck in the agitation, or the attention phase, you can't get back to that big picture awareness until you've gone through the next gates, the reward and the process. But as soon as you've done that, and so getting into Friday, and then having the weekend is perfect for that, because then you begin Monday with right back in awareness that might only take five minutes, because you might already have it all detailed. But I'm back in awareness, I can take the bigger picture. Have I gone in the right direction? Yes, have I not course. Correct, right, and back into agitation and attention again. And when I discovered well discovered when I was when I was introduced to that model, that was when I was like, Oh my God, you know, I've been looking for something like this my entire life. Because it just tells you everything about what's wrong about the way we're taught to learn and grow and you know, make things happen. And yet at the same time, it can be so simple to make it work. And all you've got to do is get into that that rhythm and that ritual, I say.
Unknown Speaker 43:51
So
Unknown Speaker 43:53
if we're looking at just like a standard week,
Unknown Speaker 43:57
I guess most people in the corporate world right are going to fall into the five work days, two weekends. Do you recommend more of a psych a sprint through those five days? Get your stuff in so that you can just focus on completely shut down for those two days? Or is it more of a? No, let's let's do this every day, let's let's find ways to incorporate that recovery. So that we can even if you do have to work on the weekend, right? It's not going to take such a huge hit on you. Because you're continuously just reef recharging your engine.
Unknown Speaker 44:33
I think it's important to kind of say, you know, first of all, yeah, I'm not a neuroscientist I'm basing my work on, you know, the information that I get from friends and I've checked it out with them, and we've gone backwards and forwards. And so it's all sort of weaponized, if you like from knowledge. And ultimately what you realize when you do that kind of thing is that that means that like you were saying, the enemy gets a vote, the world gets a vote. So there's no answer.
Unknown Speaker 45:00
that can be this is how you apply this system, you just do this, you just do this. Now, if you're in an employed situation, yes, there might be a good structure because there's already a nine to five structure. In many cases, obviously, that's changing now. But one of the things that I experienced way back my first job, so I used to be a video games journalist on a magazine. And we would have a routine, where every month you're working towards that deadline. Now, the last week of the month, certainly the last three or four days of the month, when you were working towards the copy deadline, was always crushed was always tight, we were always in late. But what we did, as soon as the magazine was sent, we were then out celebrating, we were ready to you know, and then we came back in, and it was a slower start. So on that way, there was a big, kind of monthly long cycle that we could get used to. Whereas when we're self employed, one of the reasons that you know, I've no doubt many of your listeners started their agencies or took over their agencies, because they don't want to just do a nine to five regular life. They want flexibility, if they want to take Wednesday afternoon off, they do they want to work a bit late on Saturday, they do. And it's about first of all, accountability, you know, where I come in accountability on making those decisions? Do you know what you're trading off? Do you know why you're doing it? So you obviously got that priority in mind. The other side of it is just saying, You've got to be aware of where you're at. So I had a speaking engagement, I ran a workshop a few weeks ago. First one I'd done in a while. And it was new content. And so it was all brand new. And then the next day, I tried to get some work done in the morning and got some reflex action, some routine actions done in the morning. But by about 10 or 11 o'clock, I was like, if I carry on like this, I'm going to be wiped, I am in the end of that heavy attention phase, I've just done something I need to reward myself, I need to celebrate it. Because at the moment, I'm hung up, I'm not moving forward. So I did that I went to the cinema for the afternoon just had a little bit of time out really, you know, thought about the winds, thought about what went well with the workshop. And then I had, you know, a really restful afternoon, into the evening, got up in the morning, the next day, wow, I'm raring to go. So it can happen on as short as time period is sort of 48 hours or probably even 24 hours, or as long a period as a month or however long you want to go. And probably many different ways inside of that. Because we're not talking about just one big cycle, we're talking about, you know, multi cycles going on at the same time. The key is just to listen to yourself and say, okay, yeah, I need I need to rest right now. But I'm feeling like I can't, okay, that probably means because I'm stuck at this reward phase, I need to go through that gate, I need to recognize where I've actually got to. There was a study in an airport a few years ago, where they went through the airport lounge and interviewed about a few 1000 people about them going on holiday. And they had some crazy number, you know, 6070 plus percent of people had fear of switching off, they were afraid of switching off. And I've spoken to agency owners who have taken obviously their laptops on holiday, I've got people telling me that their partners are like if that phone rings one more time, it's going in the sea, you know, they're out in Barbados or Tenerife, or somewhere beautiful, and they're still working. Why is that partly because they can't let go. And they probably can't let go. Because they haven't found that division, because they haven't gone through the gates. And partly, it might also be that they're not confident that when they come back, you know, things are going to be durable, capable, that something's gonna go wrong when they're away. And so you've got to kind of be aware of like, what do I need right now? Is it some more action to put in place like a proper handover or whatever? Do I need to build up trust with somebody? Is that something? Is that my big picture awareness that I need to build that trust and go through this phase? Or is it just, I'm stuck in a gate, and I need to go through what that gate needs so that I can get to the other side?
Unknown Speaker 49:12
So I've got one critical question for you that I will probably never ask another guest.
Unknown Speaker 49:19
What is that one lesson that you wish agency founders pulled from the Vikings. So one of the things we think about when we think about vikings is violence, pillaging, you know, invasion. But actually,
Unknown Speaker 49:34
the key thing, the key thing about the Vikings were they were masters of navigation.
Unknown Speaker 49:40
They built their boats in an entirely unique way. And actually anybody who knows boats, I don't know them very well, but they know this. Anybody who knows boats will tell you that the Viking design was so sophisticated because whereas other boats of the same time, created a lot of friction and we're very heavy and loaded.
Unknown Speaker 50:00
out in the water when they were traveling, Viking boats set up much higher in the water. And they split their wood in such a way that it trapped air between the water and the boat. And it reduced the friction massively. So they could travel incredible speeds. And they could also maneuver up through streams and rivers that other boats couldn't get to. And so they had this kind of technology awareness. But that was really driven by their desire to navigate into unknown territory, their desire to go and explore the world, there were very few, certainly at the time, there are very few races or, you know, tribes, collections of the time, that spread themselves so widely, with so much interest in what actually was happening and borrowed so widely from what was going on around them as the Vikings. And I think ultimately, if you're gonna take anything from it, it's that sense of navigation, in order to navigate even from Denmark and Finland and Sweden and Norway, even to navigate from there to the English islands, they have to go through fatal sometimes conditions, definitely conditions. So they had to know what they were doing, they had to have a clear path that they were following. They had to be really clued in to everything that was going on around them. And they had to have that single priority, that guiding force that enabled them to tack with the wind to move the boat in the right way to prepare themselves what was coming. And it was all because they knew exactly what they were trying to achieve. And maybe if I can get a bonus second one is that they knew how to have fun. You know, they really knew how to have fun, they knew how to celebrate and enjoy their victories. And, you know, that's certainly something to take out of their book as well. Awesome. All right. This is a great conversation. I got two more questions for you. That I do ask every guest with first being what book do you recommend every agency owner should read?
Unknown Speaker 52:03
Ah, so I mean, the I've thrown out so many there. I think probably it has to be to back up everything I've said and show you that. You know, I know. I know. It sounds like any deal that you've got to get more rest. But to back it all up. It has to be why we sleep by Dr. Matt Walker because if you get through there and you're not terrified and you're not immediately changing your sleeping routine, then I don't know there's no hope for you. What he says is practical. And you know information just dense about the benefits of it. And if you need it, excuse me if you need any reason to not feel guilty about taking downtime, it's all in that book. Awesome. Last question. Where can people learn more about you?
Unknown Speaker 52:47
Best Places LinkedIn so I am the accountability Viking on LinkedIn if you just do LinkedIn and then you know the forward slash accountability Viking you can find me there. You can also I think if you just put accountability Viking into Google, I'm coming up with some of my speaking dates and my Instagram maybe and stuff like that. So LinkedIn is the best place to find me if you want to see my in progress website which is always in progress because it's not a priority right now. It's get shit done dot fun. Thank you for joining Ben, this was a
Unknown Speaker 53:22
you're the only Viking who's been on the show. So
Unknown Speaker 53:30
that's the show everyone. You can leave a rating and review or you can do something that benefits you. Click the link in the show notes to subscribe to agency forward on substack. You'll get weekly content, resources and links from around the internet to help you drive your agency forward.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai