Code Climbing Requirement

I'm Alex Charfen, and this is The Momentum Podcast made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers, and creators of all kinds. Those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny. We define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop, and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority, the few who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future, and instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters. Clearly the most important people in the world because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution, and we always will be.

Code climbing requirement. Today I want to share with you one of the fastest accelerator pedals that you can use to get up the billionaire code, and yesterday we shared builder, so I want to take a break from the levels and share with you this massive shortcut to getting into higher and higher levels of the billionaire code, but I want to tell you why I'm sharing this now because at every level above builder, when you get to 300 to a million, at every level above builder, an increasingly higher percentage of your success is going to be dependent on your ability to surround yourself with and lead a team of people who are helping achieve your goals.

And I want you to understand something. It doesn't matter how you plan on running your business. It doesn't matter where you plan on going. Entrepreneurs have to go through building a team in order to get there. It's either going to be a small team or a big team or a team of contractors or a team of employees, but you're going to have to have some type of a team because if you're listening to my podcast, here's what I know about you, and I challenge you to deny it: Your goals, your aspirations, that vision that you have in the back of your mind of who you are and who you will become, the type of change you will make is far greater than anything you could achieve solely and totally on your own.

So as entrepreneurs, we have to give in to the fact that more and more of what we're capable of becomes dependent on our ability to be a transformational leader, on our ability to be present and aware, on our ability to be seen by our team as someone who they trust, as someone who they trust not just to lead them in a company, but to lead them in their lives because that's what really ends up happening with people who work with you. And if you can command their trust and you can earn their trust and you can show them that you trust them, they will trust you, and you will build a business that's formidable.

But here's the biggest accelerator and a requirement for this to work: You have to start taking better care of yourself. And I know this sounds cliche, but self care is one of the fastest shortcuts to success that there is for an entrepreneur, and I want to tell you that my highest level, mastermind, where people pay me tens of thousands of dollars to be in a group coaching experience with me, I start here. I start at self care. I start at things like hydration and breathing, meditation and eating the right foods and moving in the right way to keep yourself out of fight or flight, to keep your body connected and aware of because here's what I know: It's the fastest accelerator for my clients to be able to build a team, step into transformational leadership, and show up in a way that people will trust them.

And the question I ask entrepreneurs all the time is, "Who's the most important person in your business?" And about one out of 10 give me the right answer. Entrepreneurs say things like the customer or my team member or the next person to buy or the person who we haven't talked to yet. No. The most important person in your business is you, and if you haven't ever thought that before, I want to let you off the hook.

I was probably 27 when I heard this the first time. I was out to lunch with a entrepreneur that has sold his business for about a quarter billion dollars, so he had made about a $100 million of it, and he was kind of sharing some life lessons, and he offhandedly said, "The most important person in any business is the entrepreneur." And I said, "Really?" And he said, "Of course. Without the entrepreneur, none of it ever happens. The entrepreneur is the person that has to see it before it's there. They're the person that has to tell everybody what it's going to be there. They're the person that has to make it happen by building the team, by bringing the people together. If the entrepreneur isn't there, then none of it happened, so of course they're the most important person in the business."

And he looked at me funny because he knew I ran a huge team, and up until that point it never dawned on me I was important, and I know that sounds crazy because the rest of the world looks at entrepreneurs, and they think we're just out to gain status and make a ton of money, and there's a part of us that is, but the fact is I never thought of myself as being important enough to take care of because I thought as an entrepreneur, what you did was you killed yourself, and you put it out there, and you left it on the mat, and you did what you had to do, and you sacrificed.

But what I didn't realize is that by not taking care of myself, I was putting myself in a place where I wasn't a great leader a lot of the time. I didn't eat regularly, so my blood sugar would go down. When I was younger, I didn't understand hydration. I learned hydration because when I would get dehydrated, I started realizing how bad my decision making was, my behavior was. I finally tied it to water. That's why I coach this stuff because when we as entrepreneurs take care of ourselves, here's what happens: By taking care of yourself, you inherently lower the pressure and noise in your life, and lowering the pressure and noise in your life is the fastest shortcut to momentum.

See, here's why I say this. When you lower the noise in your life, you will inherently ... It's just physics. It's math. When you drop operational drag, when you lower the noise in your life, when you get rid of things that you don't need, when you start taking care of yourself and all of those things lower the noise, what happens is you get into momentum.

There's two ways to get into momentum. You can either kickstart an engine and push the engine to its limits and carrying a ton of weight, or you can drop as much weight as you can and drop all the operational drag you possibly can, and you will get into a higher level of momentum right now.

And part of taking care of yourself is actively taking care of yourself. That means pre-booking appointments and making sure that if you see a chiropractor or masseuse or whatever it is you do to take care of yourself, that you're doing it regularly. Just pre-book the appointments. Prepay if you can. Start eating right because if you're going to go up this billionaire code, I want you to know something. From this level on, you have to show up as someone who is consistent and someone who is present, and I want you to understand, I have not always been that person in my career. In fact, I've been anything but.

I've been the CEO that didn't take care of himself, didn't go to the chiropractor, didn't get massages, didn't eat right, stayed up way too late, got up way too early, didn't spend time with anyone other than just run running my business, isolated, worked over, worked weekends, never got any time off, and as a result, I showed up in a way that it challenged my ability to run my business, and I now know that that damaged my ability to build a business that I wanted to run, and I don't want you to do the same thing. I want you to learn from the massive mistakes I've made because when you build a business without taking care of yourself, you make different decisions than when you're present and aware and you can see the future.

When people like us, here's what happens. We are evolutionary hunters, and when everything in the moment, everything around us gets tactically overwhelming, when there's too much pressure and noise, we kick into fight or flight, and here's the factual consequences of fight or flight. This is not theory. This is real. This is scientific research. This is the result of when we go into fight or flight, what happens is we narrow the options we see in the world because if we're going to actually fight or flight, we have to make decisions quicker, so we see less options. We also see a shorter time horizon. Rather than thinking about a week from now or two weeks from now or three weeks from now. You go into fight or flight, you're thinking about right now.

And so when things in the moment get tactically harder for us, when we get tactically overwhelmed, when there's too much going on, when we're not taking care of ourselves, when we're not lowering pressure and noise by going to the chiropractor so that we actually have more gas in the tank, when we're not lowering pressure and noise by going and getting rolfing or seeing an EMDR therapist so that we have more gas in the tank, when we're pushing ourselves to the limit, that is when people like us fall apart, and that's when people like us have a really hard time getting anything done, and we make short-sighted decisions.

When we are in fight or flight mode, we don't make the right types of decisions. We don't see the right time horizon. We don't see the possibilities that we do when we lower pressure and noise in our lives, and I have a warning for you. If you're the person who's sitting there thinking, "Well, he doesn't know me because this is how I've always done it, and this is how I always will do it, and I've always stayed up late and gotten up early and went out and partied and ate whatever I wanted," and all of those things. Well, I have news for you. The day all of it catches up to you at once is devastating. If you start making habitual changes now, not only will you see momentum in the moment right now, it may save you from ever having to go there.

You know, I have the privilege of coaching some of the most intense millennial entrepreneurs on the planet right now who run multimillion dollar businesses, and I am blown away at their acceptance of this principle of taking care of yourself first because I wouldn't have done it in my 20s. I don't think. I mean, I didn't have someone like me in my 20s, and I didn't have a group like the group that I coach where there's a lot of people who talk to each other and share how much self care changes things, but I'm blown away that they're willing to do it, and I can tell you some of my clients are running some of the fastest if not the fastest growing companies in the country today. Just watch.

And they're doing it in part because the way I coach is you take care of yourself first and you get the stuff scheduled first, and we start immediately talking about what are the people, the places and things in your life that you don't need anymore? Where's the frustration coming from? What are the things that bother you? What are the things that aren't working for you? Because this is binary. It's on/off. The people, places and things in your life are either giving you momentum or they are taking it away, so what are you going to get rid of because every time you make the decision to cut yourself off from anything that takes away your momentum, you invite more into your life, and if you know you're meant for more, and you know you could be doing more, and you have that overwhelming feeling that there's more opportunity than you're taking advantage of, I want you to understand something. From any level of the billionaire code, self care is an accelerator to success that has no other rival.

There's nothing else I do with an entrepreneur that increases the level of success enough. Let me explain why because I want you to understand factually how I see this, what I've observed, and so that you don't just think I'm blowing smoke because I know that self care is a bridge to successor. Self care is a shortcut to success has almost become cliché, and then there's a lot of people out there who talk about self care, but you look at them and you think, "Really? I mean, I don't know if that's the person who demonstrates self care."

And here's how I know that if you're taking care of yourself, if you're doing the right things, everything in your life will accelerate and get better. I'm just going to take one keystone habit that I coach. Momentum Masterclass is an entire course of just keystone habits for entrepreneurs. The habits that help everything in your life improve and don't cause you pressure and noise anywhere. What are the keystone habits? What are the things that when you add them, everything in your life gets easier?

Like when you simplify your wardrobe, everything in your life will get easier. It's just simple. It's easier. It's a keystone habit for me. It's one of the things that I've always done. I've simplified my wardrobe over and over again. It makes my life less noisy. A keystone habit for you? Hydration. Let me show you how this keystone habit changes everything.

When you are hydrated, you are more mind body connected. You are actually more physically present and aware. Your blood is thinner. Your heart doesn't have to beat as much. You're calmer. Your body actually feels like it's in a calmer state. That will make you more creative. That will make you more present. That will make you more aware. That will help you make better decisions. So, just from hydrating, you will start systematically making better decisions.

Here's how I know that. When people are dehydrated, they make increasingly worse decisions. Study after study have shown that dehydration will cause you to act, in some cases if you're dehydrated enough, like your buzzed, like you're drunk. Those days that you've made decisions at work where you look back and think, "Man, why did I do that?" Or when you were overly reactive at someone and you later think, "I wish I hadn't done that."

First, I want you to know I've been there. We all have. Don't think that any of us are perfect. It's when you do those things, when you have that overreaction, when you have those blow ups, we always feel like we're the only ones, but I want you to know you're not, and every one of my clients has had those moments.

But when you hydrate and you're more present and you're more aware, you have far fewer of them, and they are nowhere near as bad, and so when you start taking care of yourself and you start putting in habits like hydration and meditation and creating a morning routine and eating a whole foods diet and really taking legitimate, aggressive care of yourself, you will see your entire business transform because when you take care of yourself, you will be more aware of where you're uncomfortable in the business, and when you're more aware of where you're uncomfortable in the business, you can use that discomfort to drive you to fix and correct the deficits in the business because your level of discomfort in the business is the canary in the coal mine for exactly where the business needs attention, and the more you lower the pressure and noise in your life, the more you take care of yourself, the more you value yourself, the more you make it so that you are present and aware, you will be able to see that path more clearly.

And as an entrepreneur, when we lower the pressure and noise in our lives, when we are willing to take care of ourselves, we are finally willing to start admitting what help we need and start asking for exactly what it is, and everything in our lives completely shifts and changes because when we finally get to the place where we can ask for the help we need, when we finally can communicate what that is to a team, when we take care of ourselves enough that we are seen as a transformational leader by the people around us, and when people ask me, "How do I become a transformational leader?" I want you to think about everyone you ever would think is a transformational leader, and they probably have two qualities. They are present and aware.

They're not frenetic. They're not panicked. They're not overwhelmed. They are present and aware, and when they speak, they speak from a place of presence and awareness that lets the people around them know they should be in a position of leadership, and the fastest way you get there, the fastest accelerator up the billionaire code and what I tell every one of my clients is an absolute code client climbing requirement and requirement of working with me is that you take radical good care of yourself.

If you're an entrepreneur and you're not quite at the level where you can get into our high level coaching masterminds, I want you to know we can still help you. We have a course about exactly this. How do you lower the pressure and noise in your life and get clear on exactly who you want to serve, build a plan forward so that you can achieve it, and get into momentum right now. It's called Momentum Masterclass, and it's a lot of the same platform that I coach my high end clients with, and it's self care, forward planning, understanding exactly where you should be focused, and knowing who you want to serve as an entrepreneur with a high level of clarity.

Go to MomentumMasterclass.com. MomentumMasterclass.com. Check out the short video, and I'll see you in the private Facebook group that comes with the course.