The Truth About Damage of Lying to Yourself

This is the Momentum Podcast.

Hey, this is Alex and I cannot remember the last time that I did this for one of my podcasts. I'm actually in the car with my daughter Reagan. Say hi, Reagan.

Reagan: Hey.

Alex Charfen: I just picked her up from theater and the whole way here I was like, oh, I've got this podcast in my head. I really want to record it. And then I waited until I didn't have enough time. Picked up Reagan, asked her permission, so now I'm going to record this here in the car. So if you hear the glorious noises of my car that has been prepped to go really fast, I hope you enjoy them. And if you're somebody who doesn't enjoy a lot of car noises, then I apologize for that. But if you're a car person, you're probably going to really enjoy it.

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.

Here's what the podcast is about or here's what, here's why I just felt so inspired to record this. [Cadey 00:02:00] and I talked to a friend of ours probably about three months ago. I don't have permission to share her story, so I'm just going to leave her anonymous for now. And we were talking to her about three months ago and she had a lot of stuff going on, some major changes in her life and actually lost her husband. And they ran a business together and she wanted to be able to kind of pick up the pieces and start running the business again and not necessarily pick up the pieces, but she wanted to fulfill the deem that the two of them had. And so we made the recommendation to her and really had a conversation with her about joining one of our programs.

And there's really two parts of this podcast. One is what I told her, but the second one is the fact that she joined our program. I've actually talked to coaches and consultants and speakers who have told me they don't let their friends join their programs and that's actually come up more than once. A bunch of times I've had people tell me that. And I always stop them and I ask why. And he usually it's answers like, well, my friends are a pain in the neck or they get into the program, then they want extra help or it's I don't like to mix business with friendship or business with pleasure. And any time somebody tells me that, I'm always like, you know what, here's all I hear. You don't trust your product. You don't trust your product, you don't trust your team, you don't trust your delivery because when a friend of mine has a problem and I think that one of what we do can help them and I think that what we do as a team can help them, I'm not casually recommending it, I'm doing everything I can to involve us in helping them out of where they are.

And so for this friend, I knew that that our program was ideal. She was going through a big decision making process, putting together the plan for where her business is going to go now. Serious, massive changes in her life that she had to adjust to. And there's really, there's no other program out there that does that as well as ours. I mean, I can say that with conviction, I can say that with a hundred percent belief that there is no other program out there that does it as well as ours. I know because I look for them. I want to know what our competition is. I want to know who else is helping people with getting clarity, building a strategic plan, building a company intentionally with an infrastructure so that they don't feel like they're doing it all themselves. And there's just nobody else out there. So one, the point I wanted to make was if you won't recommend your products to your friends, if you won't sell your products to your family, if you won't let the people that you care about the most into your business world, you've got a problem in your business world. You have an incongruency in your business world that you should go cure and you should think about and figure out what that is because that is a warning sign that something is not right in how you're doing business.

But that's not really the point of this podcast even though I spent the first three minutes talking about it. The point of this podcast is what she said. So she reached out to us and she said, "it's taken me a couple months to get back to, I'm digging into the content, I'm absolutely loving it." And she said, "but the thing that is hitting me the hardest is the concept of look left." She's like, "look left. Oh, I wish that I had heard this years ago. We weren't looking left."

And let me explain to you what this concept means so that you understand what she means by looking left. In our program, the basis of our programs and the basis of our coaching and the basis of how we look at business is a nine level framework called the billionaire code. And if you look at the billionaire code from left to right, it's nine levels of the very early stages of business all the way to a hundred million dollars. And in each of those nine levels is a size of business and the state of business that you may be in. And so what happens is the first time somebody sees the billionaire code and they look at it, they say, Oh, I'm in level four. And they immediately look to the right and say, where am I going next? What do I have to do next to grow? What do I need to do next? And we want people to do that. We actually want people to orient to where they are and then look at and anticipate what they're going to need next. But here's the coaching we give everyone when they come into our program, look at the billionaire code and if you want to grow your business as fast as you possibly can, look left.

And here's what we mean by that. Look left and make sure you've done everything on the way to where you are. Look left and make certain that you have laid the foundation for your business, that you have gone through each step, that you have the building blocks from which you're going to build the business that you really want to have, the business that you're going to be proud of, the business you're going to go change lives with. Look left and build first the foundation.

And she was saying, this is the message she left me today and left Cadey and I today. She actually left us a voicemail for the two of us and said, "I'm realizing by going through this that I have been and that we were," she and her husband who passed away, were living a little bigger than their actual results and were maybe talking a little bigger than their actual results and were making people think that they had more than their actual results. And this advice to look left she said, "it hit me that I need to build the foundation. I actually need to lay the building blocks."

And here's why I feel like this is so important for anyone to listen to. And by the way, at the end of this podcast I'll give you a link so you can go download a copy of the billionaire code so you can see exactly what I'm talking about. But this is why I think this is such an important message is that in business, especially today, I think there is an epidemic, I used to use the words epidemic and pandemic all the time before the coronavirus, now I need to change my vocabulary. I think there's an overwhelming amount. Those have now become trigger words for people. But I think there's an overwhelming amount, a far too high of the percentage of entrepreneurs that are living in the impression of where they are that are sharing the impression of what they're actually doing, but not just reality, hey, this is where I am. I think there's a lot of people who are showing up in a way that shows like they've got it all figured out. I think there's a lot of people that are showing up in a way where the way they show up kind of gives everyone the impression that they have much greater results than they really have.

And here's why this is such a massive, massive issue for anyone who's doing this. Now let me tell you where this comes from and how I know it's such a massive issue. This is very personal for me. I've been that person before. I think every entrepreneur has gone through a period of time in their business and in their life where the results that they're getting are not the results that they want to share with people. And so as a result, we share the veneer, we share what we want people to think of. We share what we want people to believe about us and we don't really share what's happening. And here's the tragedy that happens when we do this as entrepreneurs. When we don't let people know where we're really coming from, they can't give us the help that we really need. They can't actually connect with us at the level where we are and so as a result, we don't get a lot of support, we don't get a lot of help.

And you know what happens? That creates this self-deprecating spiral of I don't have the results I want so I'm going to tell people that I'm doing better than I am, but I'm not going to get the help that I need so I'm not going to get the results that I want. But I'm going to tell people that I'm doing better than I am, that I don't get the help that I need, that I don't get the results that I want. And we stay in this death spiral for entrepreneurs. That may sound dramatic, but you know what? For entrepreneurs, for us, when things aren't going our way, when we're not in momentum, when we're not growing like we want to, making the effect that we want to, and it's happening over and over again and we're in this place where we are consciously creating massive incongruency by telling people we are doing more than we're actually doing. And then knowing the results we have, it really is a death spiral. And that may sound dramatic, but it feels like we are dying. It feels like we are falling apart. It feels horrible to be an entrepreneur in that situation.

I know because I've been there. And you know what? By my actions and my lack of transparency, my lack of congruency, my lack of ability to just tell people what was really going on for me, I stayed there far longer than I should have. This might be a place that, as entrepreneurs, we visit every once in a while, and then we should quickly figure out where we are and then go back and tell people with congruency and transparency and honesty what's really happening for us. And here's the interesting thing. As soon as I started doing that, as soon as I started just coming clean with my friends and the people around me, as soon as I started telling people what was really happening, as soon as I started telling people what results I really had, everything in my life and my business got easier.

And that's the key as an entrepreneur is how do you make your business and life flow. How do you make your business and life show up there so that you show up in a way that when you're in your business, when you're living your life, you're in a place where you feel happy and congruent and secure and grounded? And man, one of the first ways to do that is to look left and build that foundation, but even more importantly, tell people you're doing it. Be real with people about where you actually are, speak with concurrency, with transparency, with honesty about what struggles you're actually having because here's what I believe about our lives and who we are as human beings. We are energy and there is so much research now, I've become an incredibly spiritual person.

The older I get, the more spiritual I become, the more I believe in the energy around us, the more I believe in karma, the more I believe that how we treat each other truly matters. And it's because there's so much data around this. We affect each other with our energy. We affect each other with how we show up. So if you're showing up to a room or an event or to get coaching or to get help or to a men's group or a woman's group or an entrepreneurs group or any those things and you're showing up with the energy of incongruency, with the energy of a lack of transparency, with the energy of telling people things that aren't really going on, if you're lying, if you're in the energetic of lying, you're going to have a hard time connecting with people. You're going to have a hard time extracting the value out of the experience that you're in. You're going to have a hard time actually being seen for where you are and getting the help you need because here's what I know about the entrepreneurs I hang out with.

It doesn't matter where they are, it doesn't matter what event they're at, it doesn't matter what they're doing, if another entrepreneur says, man I'm really struggling and here's what I need help, I don't know any entrepreneur that I hang out with that doesn't stop and say, well tell me what's going on and how can I help you and maybe I've learned a lesson that I can share with you. And what I realized and what anyone who has been living in a place where there's a lack of transparency and a lack of concurrency, a lack of really telling people what's going on, what I realized almost immediately was as soon as I started telling people what was really happening, the synchronicity and the coincidences and the just so happens to know exactly what I need that happened to me were overwhelming. Why? Because I shifted my energy. I energetically changed how I was showing up in the room and as a result, and not just in a room, in relationships and conversations, and as a result, the people around me could very quickly see where I needed help, what I needed to understand, to know to need to get to where I wanted to be, and I stopped that spiral of not getting the results I want and not getting the help I want because I'm not telling people what's really going on.

And here's what's interesting. People love to help, people love to be part of your story, to be part of your success, to be part of me moving forward. When you allow them in with the energetic of honesty, with the energetic of transparency, they will do whatever they can to help you. I know because it's happened to me over and over again.

And so a few lessons here for me. One is if you can't sell your friends and family your product, go figure out what the heck is wrong with your product because you have a congruency issue. And then the second one is if you ever are in a place where you find that you're not congruent, that you're not real, that you're not telling people with integrity what's really happening, that is the place to immediately address and work. It's time to get some EMDR, do some meditation, do some walking, really get clear on what's going on for you so that you can shift that energetic.

I always used to hear this phrase when I was younger. If you change the way you're looking at things, the things you're looking at will change. And here's what I now understand at 47 years old after having done decades of trauma work and spiritual work and working on myself and understanding that the universe and the world around me is that when you change yourself and the way you're looking at the things you're looking at and when you shift yourself and the perspective with which you're looking at things, they absolutely change because we're energetically affecting our environment. And so when it comes to being an entrepreneur, make sure you can sell your friends and family, show up with transparency and integrity, and then go download the billionaire code and figure out exactly where you are. And then look left, build that foundation so that the business you build is the business you actually want.

And if you're ready to download that framework now, go to billionairecode.com. There's actually three things you can get. A full copy of the billionaire code matrix. It's nine levels that we absolutely pull up every time we're on a coaching call, our members use it, we have discussions around it. That framework in and of itself will give you an entirely new impression of your business. You'll also get a copy of the billionaire code decoded, which is our ebook explaining each of the nine levels, what you should be doing in each of them, and what you should be anticipating to come next. And if you're interested and would like to know a little bit about our programs, you can sign up for a quick call with a member of my team and we'll talk to you about the coaching memberships where we partner with entrepreneurs like you and help them grow and scale their businesses. And we would love to be able to talk to you about doing the same. So go to billionairecode.com. And thanks for listening on this rare in the car recorded podcast. If you want to add anything, Reagan?

Reagan: Nope.

Alex Charfen: My poor 13 year old daughter is sitting here listening to all this, but sometimes I say poor Reagan, she has to listen to this stuff all the time or poor [Kennedy 00:00:16:35], and then I hear one of them coaching either someone we know or a friend or a teacher or someone around them and I'm like, it's sinking in. So I'm glad you were here with me too, Reagan and I'll see you on the next episode. billionairecode.com, go get your copy.