You have to get your head on straight if you’re looking to achieve success and build wealth.

If you give a box of the best tools to someone and they don’t know how to use them, can’t get their act together, can’t discipline themselves to learn how to use them, can’t motivate themselves to do what’s necessary, then the tools go to waste.

Dan shows you how to:

Tune in to this special episode…and get the results you want starting TODAY.

Russell Brunson: Welcome back to the Magnetic Marketing podcast. This week, we were going through a whole bunch of old Dan Kennedy courses, and there's a course called sales mastery unleash. And there's a really cool 40 minute presentation of Dan's talking specifically on mindset. And so we want to bring that to you for this week's episode. If you are enjoying these episodes again, please let other people know about the Magnetic Marketing podcast and that way we can get more subscribers and keep bringing you more amazing stuff from Dan for free. With that said, let's listen to this week's episode.

Dave Dee: Hey, Dave Dee here from GKIC and I've got with me Dan Kennedy, but we're not going to be talking about marketing today, Dan. We're actually going to be talking about mindset. And this is a topic I've really wanted to get in deep with you about, and I know a lot of our members do so. Thank you so much for spending some time with this today.

Okay. So let's get right into it here. I think a lot of people falsely believe that you don't think a lot about mindset, that goal setting and all that stuff isn't important to you, that you only care about the hard skills such as copywriting and marketing and things of that nature is that true? Let's get that squared away right from the very beginning.

Dan Kennedy: Well, no, and I'm not sure you can separate really one from the other. And if you frame it as hard skills and soft skills, that's like overly simplistic, right? And so to me really, they're all skills. So self-management, my management, time management, self improvement, personal development. These involve hard skills just as does copywriting or marketing strategy, design or selling.

Dave Dee: So how important has this been the personal development aspect of what you do, the mindset, the goal setting the time, how important has that been to your personal success?

Dan Kennedy: Well a lot over 40 years and people who do not know that about me are either deliberately taking a position that fits their own bias, or they don't know much about me. You know, they really haven't studied me period. Because there's a rich wealth of material out there by me. That in part, and in a few cases in whole, you would put in the mindset category. I did a lot of work with the Maxwell Malts materials for a number of years. Psycho Cybernetics is one of the all time best selling self-help self improvement books in the history of publishing. My best accounts, including all foreign additions and all privately published additions and so forth. The book has sold over 60 million copies. And so I did a update of the book coauthored with the late Dr. Maltz called the New Psycho-Cybernetics. I did a audio version of that with Nightingale-Conant.

If you look at the whole wealth segment of my work, the No B.B Wealth Attraction book, the wealth seminars and products that are at the GKIC store. They, if you try, if you want to pigeonhole them, or you want to try and categorize their content, you would probably put about half of it into the mindset category and half of it into strategy and tactics category. So it not that it's... If somebody paid attention, they would see that I'm a personal development, self improvement, a mindset practitioner and advocate and at times teacher.

Look, if you give a box of the very best tools to somebody who does not know how to use them, that's pretty futile. If you give a box of the best tools to somebody who knows how to use them, but cannot get their act together, cannot get themselves organized, cannot discipline themselves, cannot motivate themselves, cannot get performance from themselves, then that's pretty futile. If you give a box of the very best tools to somebody who knows how to use them, but he won't use them, then that's pretty futile. So the idea that it's all about the tools is a very, very false idea.

Dave Dee: You mentioned Dr. Maxwell Maltz, but who else have been your major influence when it comes to the mental side of success? The personal development side of success?

Dan Kennedy: Well, if you go dead and you go historical, there's a long list. If you go more contemporary, my observing, borrowing, extracting and assembling is still fairly eclectic. So I have read, read studied the metaphysical almost woo, woo side of all this, discarding much, but finding some valid, so contemporary names, you would have Maryanne Williamson-

Dave Dee: I think people would be shocked by that, by the way.

Dan Kennedy: There's the religious category of this, where there's overlap. Somewhat historical, the Norman Vincent Peale, Robert Schuller side of things. Today you might put Rick Warren in there. You might put Joel Osteen in there. Historical, you put Reverend Ike in there. You have the sports psychology folks. You have the business psychology folks. You have the whole performance slash implementation category of this, where you would find, for example, our own and my longtime friend Lee Milteer. Again, if you've got a pigeonhole or that's kind of where you'd put her. And she does a great job in that category. Dennis Waitley belongs in that category.

So there's those folks. You have the, I would call it the strategy category. So there's goal setting in there. There's the management by objectives guys in there. So this thing breaks apart into a bunch of subsets and a bunch of disciplines. And then very contemporary, when you read biographies and autobiographies. And even how to books that are written by hugely successful people. So if you read Trump's Art of the Deal, or there's a book, I just finished it and it is significant enough. It's going to get two or three more fores, and I'll probably start recommending it aggressively soon. It's called The Education of a Value Investor, but it's less a book about investing and actually more about the life journey of this major fund manager, huge success.

And if you read these books and you don't notice, you don't see the mindset elements, the self-management elements, you're just not paying attention. I've been particularly interested in them and I looking for them. So I for example, am not actually going to go make real estate deals. So the technical stuff in a Trump book, or even more so in a George Ross book is actually of less interest to me than how these people think about what they do, about how they do it, about the world around them and about themselves.

So no different, I think than an athlete for example, has a copywriter for example if you use that, that's a performance, that's you got to achieve a certain mental state. You've got to achieve a certain physical state. You've got to achieve focus and concentration. You have to have organized thinking. You have to have some stamina, because if you can only concentrate or sit in a chair for 15 minutes at a time, and then you got to go do something else, you're not going to make a living as a writer. So you have to be able to tap both your conscious and subconscious resources. There's some fairly esoteric elements to it. I write copy while I sleep, you give an assignment to the subconscious and let it do the work. And so there's some fairly esoteric stuff to it.

A big category of mindset loops to stuff I deal with and teach, which is your intellectual and emotional relationship with money. And so, regardless of what it is you do, salesman, manager, executive, CEO, negotiator, copywriter, whatever it is that you do, there's a personal peak performance element to it that that has an attitudinal compartment. It has a belief system compartment. It has a performance compartment, and it has a mechanical or technical compartment and pretty much anyone without the other is severely handicapped.

Dave Dee: Got it. Wow. Great answer. Do you actually set goals?

Dan Kennedy: Yeah. Macro and micro. So virtually every day is scripted. So I mean, you can argue, you call it what you want, goal setting, planning, you know, whatever. But, so today is predominantly a phone day all day from 07:00. Let's see, I started at 7:20 this morning and I'll end at 4:40, a little earlier than usual because I'm in an early race and I have to get to the track, but there's a, besides the lunch break, there has been today, 1:20 minute gap and 1:30 minute gap. So for that gap, there were if you want to use the term goals. There was a finishing of two pages of a newsletter for which there was 15 minutes allocated. There was successfully resolving something with one of the people who manages investments for me, which was allocated 10 minutes.

So there's like five things that got done in those time gaps that were pre-planned and were goals for the day. That in part, I can judge the success of the day by how many of them got done and how many didn't get done and whether or not they got done in the allocated amount of time to get them done. So that's like a micro example, right? Not quite as micro, but I mean, I don't like do a consulting day with a client without some sense of the four or five things I'd like to have as outcomes by the end of that day. I don't just like show up.

On a more macro, I mean, so if you... Money, not only doesn't it grow on trees, but it doesn't sort of show up by itself. It at least has to be invited. And just like if you invite somebody over for dinner, it's better if you tell them exactly what day you'd like him to come and what time you'd like them to come and whether or not you want them to bring a bottle of wine. And so the quality of the results we get is sort of related to the quality of instructions we issue. That's a form of goal setting. I mean, I'm managing not just income, but net worth charitable contributions, a range of financial benchmarks for the year, for the quarter, for the month, for the week, for the day. And know whether I'm ahead or behind.

If not day by day, certainly week by week, which then allows you to adjust before it's too late. For personal stuff, absolutely. I mean, to the point of fault. So I do very little for which, I can't like go for a drive. This is completely foreign to now 40 plus years of conditioning. I can enjoy a drive, but I got to be like going somewhere and for a reason. I mean, it doesn't matter... It does or it doesn't, but it's not an economic issue what my statistics are, as a harness racing driver. Nobody's going to tell me I can't do it if my statistics are less than X, Y, and Z. So it only matters to me, and so people will say, why are you don't obsess about that just go and have a good time. Well, I don't really know how to do that.

So there's goals for the year, there's goals for each horse, there's goals for the night, there's goals for the month. And I'm really only competing essentially with me.

So I think that there are behaviors of highly successful people that have skilled roots, they have philosophical roots, they have conditioned habit of thought and action roots, they have attitudinal roots. And I don't think that you really can create and sustain certain successful behaviors without a proper mindset attached to them, nor do I believe by any stretch that you can have exactly the right mindset and that's it. And somehow Lamborghinis will magically your under your pillow. So that school of mindset thought, I put in the bullshit category.

Dave Dee: Got it. So I just want to one more thing on goal setting and then I got a question which follows perfectly. So are you writing these goals down? Are you reviewing them? Are you following a particular procedure? Do you write them in the affirmative? How do you do at the beginning of the year for like your yearly goals? Exactly what are you doing?

Dan Kennedy: All of that and more.

So some of this stuff is up on as part of a storyboard. Some of it is in written form. Some of it is set, but is tracked. So if you had my business checkbook, you would see that deposits are by and large done once a week, because I'm not at a big hurry to get money in the bank necessarily it doesn't have to get in there. So generally speaking, they're done once a week and there's a tracking page in that checkbook of on schedule, behind schedule, ahead of schedule, towards revenue for the month, quarter, year, diversion from those deposits to wealth account activities. On schedule, behind or ahead, for the year diversion from those deposits, from those revenues and deposits to the giving account activities, charities, et cetera, ahead behind a pace for the year, racing stats or goals are in writing. Personal stuff weight, health stuff, that kind of stuff.

I'm forced to plan at least a year's calendar, a good hunk of it. Block 12, 14, 16 months in advance. A lot of it is at least four to six months in advance. So there's a lot that gets locked down well in advance, leaving less and less and less flexibility, sort of mandating good planning. I mean, if I'm going to take four, three day vacations in a year, I pretty much have had to plan that 18 months ahead. And so yeah there's a lot of it that is in writing in one place form or shape or another. Then I think think the non-written part is in, so it loops back to what we want to put quotation marks around his mindset. I mean, it is really about how your orientation towards everything you do.

So most people do most of what they do pretty thoughtlessly. They jump in and do. So for example, most people take uncontrolled incoming calls. Okay. So I don't. So with very rare exception, the only time I'm on a phone is if I have made a proactive call or I have had an appointment, and now I'm getting on a call with somebody at an appointed time, therefore I have mentally prepared. So I may not have done it in writing, but I have mentally prepared for what the outcomes of this call are supposed to be. And I'm very rarely having a call without their supposed to be outcomes because why have it. I happen to like my own company, so I don't like need to get on the phone just to be on the phone.

So most people are not goal oriented if you want to use that terminology. We could are not thoughtful, are not purposed in almost everything that they do, whereas really successful people very much are. And so I've observed that I've seen it reflected in all sorts of philosophies. The Bible tells you to be thoughtful and purposed, Buddha tells you to be thoughtful and purposed, Trump's book tells you to be thoughtful and purpose, the best literature on negotiation tells you to be thoughtful and purpose. So it's obvious to me really, that that's important. And so I made it important. So really, even though that's not in writing, it's a very goal driven approach that for me is automatic. I mean, I don't really have to tell myself to do it and I don't need a notebook with pre-done boxes in it to do it that ended long, long, long, long, long ago. I just I sort of automatically do it.

Dave Dee: Got it. Yeah. Wow. That's that's great. I mean, we could talk really having a whole interview just about goal setting. One final thing on this things you keep mentioning, which I think is mentioned, which is missing from a lot of goal setting programs, is you keep talking about tracking as part of this as part of your system. Really tracking it, not just writing it down, reading it, visualizing, but actually tracking what you're doing to get the results to see if you're on track or not. I mean, I think that's really, really important that people get. You mentioned that you script your days. Do you have a daily success ritual other than scripting your day? And do you script it the night before? First of all, do you script your day the night before? Then second, is there anything else you have as part of your daily success ritual?

Dan Kennedy: Well, most are scripted long before the night before or at least the majority of the day is. I don't have that kind of flexibility. And nor by the way, do I want it? The rituals, well the first one that most people don't master is like getting their ass out of bed. So I mean, I'm pretty good at that. Most people actually use the snooze alarm, which is absolutely the dumbest invention ever. So you have an alarm clock and then it's equipped with something so that you don't have to honor the alarm that you set on the alarm clock. It's an mystery to me. Then yeah, in a sense there's ritualistic performance of different functions. There's not one. So it's not like I'm going in the bathroom and saying my 12 affirmations while looking in the mirror, not by the way there's anything wrong with that. But no, it is more ritualistic regimens depending upon the activity.

So for a writing day, there is a ritualistic regimen. For a selling day, there's a ritualistic regimen. For going and giving a speaking performance, yes, there's a ritualistic regimen. And this is supported by the way you manage your associations, your support circles, whether you do masterminding or not, whether you have coaches and advisors or not, what kind of teams you have together to assist with X, Y, or Z, all of that. And one of the best things somebody can do for themselves to improve their performance is to step up in the quality of the people that they're around. And to be more selective about that. So the one regimen, I guess, if you want to make it that that is universal it laps over everything, is very rule driven, rigid control of access to me. And certainly most people do not practice this. And therefore they are mystified by their own lack of performance, their own lack of productivity. And they are equally mystified by somebody who is extremely productive and performs at a very high level.

Dave Dee: I've got so many questions for you here. We can make this a really long interview, but we can't. So what are your thoughts on the visualization? Do you do it, do you believe in it?

Dan Kennedy: Yep. So Maltz's theory of the mind is one explanation. Again, it's very important to understand I do not believe in it in the manifestation arena. So the idea that you visualize something clearly enough and often enough, and with sufficient lust or desire, and that's all you got to do, and somehow it materializes. You have cancer and you visualize the cancer going away while you continue the same diet and smoking and behavior that no. So I don't believe in it like that. I'm not a white light aura guy. But most high performance athletes, they've trained themselves with visualization, with synthetic experience in place of, and along with real experience.

And most sports psychologists and coaches, they may not use the word visualization. They may use terminology like simulation or synthetic experience, but it's fundamentally the same thing. So the use of visualization, so that the act itself is dejavu is a very powerful thing. The use of affirmation, I don't do it formally anymore in the sense of a 10 written on a four by six card. But the internal affirmative dialogue, and you will hear Trump make affirmative statements in much the same that I do in context, even in public. So in coaching, I say things automatically like, well, that's why I get the big bucks. The teaching I do is affirmative. So what I describe having a very intellectually and emotionally healthy relationship with money, I am affirming that. And I am affirming the specific things that make up that.

In talking about selling, I will often say to somebody, I can get a check out of a rock and I can, if I have to. I don't have to do that much anymore, but I can do it. So visualization, affirmation, the use of affirmative language internally and externally, clarity. See clarity is about who you are and what you are and what it is you're out to accomplish and who you want in and who you want out. All of that. It ties to these things and it is an evolutionary process. And so most people are well served by, at least for some period of time, being in a formalized environment where this is worked on.

For some people that's therapy. For some people that's 101 coaching. For a lot of people that's being in a coaching and mastermind group that is about this. For some, although it's much more difficult to make it work, it's about an ad hoc group of three or four people who get to get to work on these things. And you'd have to go back 30 years, but 30 years ago, I did all those things and participated in programmed approaches to this that now are now our conditioned core competencies.

Dave Dee: But Dan, one last question for you. And recently we were together and you gave a great analogy and it kind of ties in perfectly what we were just talking about by joining a group that can help you out. And your analogy was when it came to working out, someone can buy a piece of equipment, and can you give that analogy again? Do you remember what I'm talking about?

Dan Kennedy: Well, so way back Weight Watchers, which was created by a woman largely inspired by Psycho Cybernetics, what they quickly discovered in Weight Watchers is that losing weight in isolation, sticking to a diet in isolation is extremely difficult. And so Weight Watchers almost from the beginning used reinforcement by group meetings and a weight loss buddy, which also by the way was a referral mechanism, but that doesn't negate its its validity. And so almost everybody in Weight Watchers for many years, went to meetings and had a weight loss buddy. And it's for the large part, it's why Weight Watchers was, is continues to be, has the highest rate of efficacy of any program.

And so if you think about fitness, yeah, you can work out at home and you don't really even need equipment. You need some soup cans and a rope. But most people don't stick to that. All home fit this equipment is made with the handles pointing up so the laundry doesn't fall off on the floor. The most effect... So if you get somebody to regularly go to the gym, then they have a higher likelihood of effectiveness. If you get them to go with a buddy, they have an even higher likelihood of effectiveness. And the programs like Iron Tribe, where they are in group by far have the highest degree of effectiveness. And it's about friendly and competitive accountability, which happens in any good coaching group and in any good business group.

So it happens in Titanium, the group for info marketers that I administer. It happens in Peak. So it is about accountability. It is about competitiveness. It is about recognition. It is about being with people who actually appreciate what you're trying to achieve and what you're going through to achieve it. So all of those factors are reinforcing. And when you consider everything that somebody encounters on a day to day basis, that is the opposite of that. That is a influence that will pull them away from what they're trying to achieve. Then it makes the reinforcement all the more important.

Dave Dee: Beautiful, beautiful. Dan, loved this call. We're going to do another one at some point where we can, I didn't even touch upon all the questions I had for you, but thank you so much for spending your time with us and sharing your knowledge in this very, very important area, which I think a lot of people overlook. So thank you so much.

Russell Brunson: Thank you for listening to the Magnetic Marketing podcast with Dan Kennedy. If you love hearing me on these lost Dan Kennedy talks and speech and calls, then please let someone else know about this podcast. That's how you can help it to grow. And the more it grows, the more free Dan Kennedy we can bring to you.

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