Harnessing the Power of Your Subconscious

Today, our guest is Robb Zbierski, although I really want it to be Zbeerski because he and I are both craft beer fans, but it’s Robb Zbierski. And Robb is a bestselling author of the book Master Your Mind, which we will talk about today, in addition to other things. He is a speaker, a trainer, a coach, he can expand on that as well. He helps clients develop their professional skills and positive mindsets to help them discover their potential and maximize their results. Robb, did I get that right?

Yeah, I probably edited since then. But where to start with, that’s a great foundation.

All right. Well, I skipped the part of saying, Robb, welcome to The Unique CPA.

Well, thank you, Randy. Longtime listener, second time caller. Appreciate you having me. 

You are a second time guest, which is awesome. You and I were together last year sometime. And I’ve told you personally, but I’m going to tell it on recording now. I’ve gotten really good feedback on your episode. And when our producer tells me the top rated episodes we’ve done, you’re always listed in the top 10. So putting pressure on you — we need another good one here.

Oh, that’s fantastic. Now that was a, yeah, that was a fun one. And you know, selfishly speaking, I think that was probably impeccably timed with everything that was going on when we recorded that one. So I’m glad to hear that people got a lot out of it, and hopefully are implementing and using some of the stuff that we talked about. 

Yeah, but to go back. So here’s what I do, Randy, I help people achieve next level results through next level thinking. So that’s what I’m really helping people do is tap into the real power of their brain, the results-producing part of their brain. You know, you’ve heard work smarter, not harder. And that sounds awesome. And most people don’t know what that means. And I help people figure out what that means for themselves, therefore allowing them to achieve the next level of success.

Alright, and so we set this up like two months ago. So in the last two months, you could have sent me that new description of what you do, but that’s fine. We’ll let it go.

You know, I’ve been logging so many miles and so many ballrooms, my shoes on the carpet, that I yeah, I will go back and re record this. Sir, I’ll — maybe I’ll be another repeat offender, like have me back for a third time. And we’ll find out in a couple minutes.

Yeah, exactly. All right. Well, before we jump into, and we’re going to kind of summarize what we did last time, and then we’ll go into what we want to talk about this time. But before we do I have one question for you which entertains me and probably nobody else but so Robb with two B’s? What’s the deal with two B’s?

Oh, my God, that was maybe the stupidest question. I’m just kidding. There’s okay, so there’s a legit, I get this one all the time. So my first, my quick answer is, how many Robb’s you know with two B’s? And most people are like, none, and well now you know one, congratulations. Where it actually came from was in second grade. When I was in second grade, I moved to a new school. And there was another Rob in the class. And we were both the same height. We looked alike, we were both into sports. We both did the same thing—it wasn’t doppelganger, but it was close enough. And he went by—we just, we were always confused. And we were both at the end of the alphabet. His last name started with W, mine was Z. And so one day I just, I made the decision. I’m like, Alright, here’s the deal. I don’t like the way Rob looks. And I don’t want there to be three letters in my name. What am I 8? Totally. My self awareness was through the roof, apparently. Right? So I’m like, I’m going to be R-O-B-B, you be R-O-B. And he’s like, that sounds great. I don’t care. And it stuck.

You know, they sound exactly the same, though, right?

I know. It allows me to say well, how do you spell that? Just like it sounds.

Alright, well, I got that out of the way. And I told you, I’m laughing. I can’t help myself because I like the story. So I appreciate it. Alright, let’s go into what we want to talk, because last time we did talk. last time we were sitting doing this probably in May of 2020. Maybe it was June, we recorded, I think it was released in July. And obviously things were crazy, things still haven’t completely settled down. But things were crazy then. But CPAs, in general, were just insanely crazy because, you know, we didn’t know what was going on with tax season and it got extended again. It was nonstop and really, it has been nonstop. CPAs have settled in. I think they’ve done a really good job. They’ve been very busy over the last year and a half but they’ve done a good job. 

But last time we talked about staying with that positive attitude, focusing on your goals and I think maybe you’ll expand on this, but it was kind of like, get your brain trained for success is things we were talking about. This time I think we can go into discussion of, hey, we’re going into this third pandemic tax season at this point, we’re running pretty smooth. But still, CPA firms in general are probably understaffed. Everybody is, and CPA firms are understaffed. And so anything we can do to, I guess, help productivity, help things moving forward that any advice you can give. I think, Master Your Mind the book, and you can give us what the subtitle of that is. But Master Your Mind probably is a good way to go into that.

Absolutely. So yeah, the book is, so yeah, we did, we talked about, we talked a lot about concepts of being aware of how to stay positive and have the right perspective, attitude, all the stuff that gets a ton of lip service at most of the conferences that people used to go to, or now go to virtually right—goal setting, time management, all the stuff that I should be doing that, right. And so this call is a nice little follow up to that. And then, you know, shameless self promotion, we wrote a follow up book to do that, Train Your Brain for Success. It’s called Master Your Mind: Counterintuitive Strategies to Refocus and Re-energize your Runaway Brain. 

And where this came from is in our literally two plus decades of working with professionals. You know, we talked about that. I have the privilege of working with people in a lot of different industries. You know, I’ve worked with accountants, CPAs, engineers, car dealers, I do a lot of work in financial services and insurance, I work with dentists. One of my clients worked for a pharmaceutical company, and she’s in marketing. It doesn’t matter what you do. Our brains are just—they’re hardwired to focus on some things. We talked a lot about, a little bit about this on the last one: negativity, urgency and complacency are the things that our brains are hardwired to focus on. And they’ll take us, I’ll go so far as to say we’re kind of addicted to some of these things, you know, especially when we are pigeon holed into the ridiculousness of the last 18 to 24 months, right? We’re used to going out, we’re used to being out, we’re used to seeing friends, used to getting together. We’re used to actually not being stuck in our office or our cube or home. And so like, Okay, well, our brain’s going, we need something else to focus on. And it’s looking for, it needs its fix, right? It needs a fix of negativity, urgency and complacency. It shows up in different ways. It shows up in distraction, it shows up in spiraling, vortex of death, like woe is me, the hits keep coming. It shows up in, I’m really uncomfortable. Going to the office, I’m really uncomfortable going out. It’s just it’s, it’s weird, shows up in a lot of different ways. 

And so ultimately what it comes down to though is your brain, it just, your brain runs like a mile a minute, if not faster. And what we’ve found, is taking a proactive approach to slowing down your mindset, slowing down your thought process, slowing down what you do. And when you do that, it allows you to tap into this big, powerful results-producing part of your brain called your subconscious. And it’ll actually allow you to achieve the results you’re looking for way faster, with way less effort, just by slowing down. 

And that’s why we call it a counterintuitive approach. Because most people are like, well, if I want better results, I gotta do more. I gotta get more clients, I gotta get more returns done. I gotta, I gotta be fast. I gotta read faster. I gotta remember more, I got to do all this stuff. The reality is, if you do less, it declutters. And you tend to get better results. 

There’s a lot of examples we talked about, you’re like, What do you mean, slow down, I can’t slow down. And my couple favorite examples actually come from flying, and American football. If you think about it, a pilot has a goal to get from the departing airport to the arrival airport, right? There’s a whole conversation about a plane is off course 90% of the time, right? That whatever, we’re not gonna have that conversation. But what we are going to talk about is the most important thing that that pilot needs to do in order to achieve his goal of landing that plane is literally slow down the plane. Right, because of aerodynamics and airfoil and the way wings work. At a certain speed, air pressure kicks in and lifts the plane, right? When you’re below that speed, gravity takes over and the plane doesn’t fly, right? So if you think about it, if a pilot didn’t pay attention and actively slow down, he would fail miserably at his goal and you would read about it on the news. Like the planes coming down eventually, but it ain’t gonna be pretty. My other favorite example is from American football. And, you know, Randy, I can’t speak for you. It’s you know, as a lifetime Bears fan. 

Oh, boy.

Maybe that’s a whole nother episode. But if you think about American football, you know, the rules state that in order to snap the ball, everyone has to be standing still. Or you can’t be moving forward. For I think it’s like two seconds before the ball is snapped. If you’re moving, you know, false start, offsides, whatever, it’s a penalty. And you actually move backwards, you move away from the goal because you moved instead of standing still and slowing down. So I just, I think these two examples—they’re some of my favorites of understanding like yes, this is how you slow down and why in order to get the results, get the goals you’re looking for faster. And literally, in the case of football, you’re talking about with way less effort, you’re standing there, it doesn’t get much less effort.

So yeah, that’s kind of the gist of the book. And so but there’s a bunch of strategies and tactics and case studies of people who have really implemented this concept in a bunch of different ways. And so we actually, and I think this was the purpose of our call today is really, you know, what are some of those tips? What are some of those tools? What are some of the skills that people you know, CPAs, specifically, who, I’m not gonna say a new norm, but a new, they’ve established new comfort zones? And there is an upcoming tax season, and it’s about to get ridiculous. And you’re about to have that flurry of activity. Maybe with less players on the field. To use the analogy, right, you got whole employment staffing. And besides the team that’s, I don’t do HR, that’s a whole nother episode. But ultimately, I think a lot of us are tasked with doing more, being responsible for more. But we’re using our old skills. And we’re using our old approach.

Yep. So is there, I mean, you could tell me, is there five tips that we can expand on? Or is there, can we give somebody, everybody something that they can use, that they can implement immediately? Obviously, they’re not going to be an expert on this immediately. But is there some tips that they can, you know, listen to this in January and maybe help themselves for the next three months?

I’ve made fun of you for the wise spelled with two B’s question earlier. And then this might be the smartest question I’ve ever heard today. Yes, we’ve actually got, I do a program. And we’ve got a supplemental program that goes with the book. So if I can throw a shameless self promotion, another one out there. If you go to our website, freedompersonaldevelopment.com, and snag a copy of the book, this is a bonus that we offer, as you get a free audio version, that’s a much more in depth version of what I’m going to share with you now—10 tips for supercharging your productivity. So if you’re taking notes, grab a pen and paper, if you’re driving, do not grab a pen and paper. You may want to pull over though, because this is good stuff. 

Number one tip we always share with people is, get hyper clear on your goals. The thing that gets a lot of lip service oftentimes is having goals. And there’s a difference between goals and quotas. And there’s a difference between, we need to get this done and we want to get this done. And having clarity in your goals, like crystal clear image and picture for what that goal is that you want to achieve. When you do that, you actually tap into the power of that subconscious, there’s that big, powerful results-producing part of your brain. Because when you have a clear picture for what you want, it’ll actually start chasing it down with no extra effort. 

So we hear a lot of positively vague goals, like I want to get more clients, or I want to spend less time working, or I want to make more money, which sound great, but don’t actually mean anything. Right? $1 is, I want to, I want to make more money. Well, here’s $1, right, you know. I want to lose weight, well then go to the bathroom. Like, you know what I mean? They don’t, they work but they don’t work. So versus, you know, I want to be working with 150 clients in this range by this date, or I want to spend 70% of my time working with the top 80% clients, like that’s a clear goal, right. I want all of my returns done by at least x date, you know, get hyper clear on that. And your subconscious actually puts you in a situation where you have no choice but to achieve that. So that’s number one. 

Number two, and three actually are time management tips. We all have 168 hours, and some people get a ton done in 168. Some people can’t get squat done in that 168. But there’s a couple little tips you can do within those 168 there to help you maximize it. So number one is guard your green time. And green time comes from the seven step process that we teach our clients about how to—basically it’s a calendar approach. It’s a time management, I want to call it a solution. And then I’m not going to pretend like I got the silver bullet right, but it’s a tip and a skill and an approach that we teach our clients, that for most of them are finding 10 extra hours every week that they didn’t know they had. But it’s all about compartmentalizing what you’re working on and when you’re working on it, doing it proactively. Green time being when you are doing your money making efforts, right, the stuff that you do that directly puts money in your pocket, decide when you’re going to do that and then guard that, like really guard that. Because of your addictions to negativity, urgency and complacency, distractibility comes up and it’ll steal all your green time.

So turn your phone off, don’t look at your email, that kind of stuff or is there?

Yeah, that’s definitely part, those are great tactics for guarding your green time. Yeah, anything that could distract you, you know, eliminate it. And then also just be real purposeful and mindful. And just sometimes it’s going, I’m not available for that conversation right now. I’d love to help you. I can’t right now. You know, I know that you’re dying to complain about Nancy, but like I’m just not available to complain about Nancy right now. I got some stuff to do. So that’s number one. 

Number two is use the daily big six. And this is, can be easily confused with a to do list. And it’s not a to-do list. What it is, and there’s story after story, go on the interwebs. And go to the Googles. And type in Charles Schwab Ivy League, you’ll hear the whole story. Short version is, at the end of your day when you’re done cleaning your desk and getting ready to close up shop, get a note card, a three by five note card or a post it note, something really small. And write a list of the six most important things you want to accomplish the next day in the order of importance. When you show up, you work on the first thing, you know, not a lot of work on the second one until the first one is done. 

When the first one is done you cross it off, then you work on number two. Can’t work on number three till number two is done, so on and so forth. Anything that doesn’t get done either gets moved to the top of the next day’s list or just gets crossed off because it wasn’t important enough to accomplish. Reason being is most people I talk to, they have a to do list. And it’s usually like somewhere between 20 to three pages long. And I asked them, but how many things do you typically get done in a day? And they always come back to me and say usually like four to six. 

Well, if you know you’re capable of accomplishing four to six things a day, regardless of the size of your list, why not make them the four to six most important, impactful things, and then prioritize and focus on those. And that one is a big, I got one of my clients, she implemented that one approach and literally put $10,000 in income in her pocket in a week. Because she stopped being distracted. She knew exactly what she wanted to do, when she wanted to get it done. And it just so happened to net her—and not revenue. I’m talking income 10 grand. So that daily big six.

We call that net income in the economic sense.

Thank you. Everybody’s got different lingo, man. I’m talking 10,000 in net income.

All right. All right. I hope I just said that right. I haven’t done financial statements in a long time. We’ll see. 

Probably not something you want to admit right now.

I’m a tax guy, I’m not an accountant.

So we’ll hear the number four—use technology mindfully with barriers you enforce. You know, so this is really where one of the greatest pieces of technology that you can use mindfully and enforce barriers is your cell phone. You know, you can turn it off. And there’s probably somebody that I’m hoping there’s no one listening while they’re driving and they didn’t just like swerve off the road when I said yes, you can turn off your cell phone. I love the new update for my iPhone has this Focus. You just put Focus and it’s like, it’s training you what to do. I love it. Do Not Disturb is great. Change your voicemail. Hey, this is Robb. I’m currently on a podcast with Randy Crabtree, unavailable to return calls until after 12:30 CT. You know, do that out of office assistant on your email, all great. Setting reminders, using timers. You know, if you want to work in a focused manner, set a timer for 30 to 90 minutes. Use your phone, use an egg timer, I don’t care. But when you get that tick, tick, tick going, that forces you subconsciously to work in a more effective manner because you know you’ve got an end date. 

Which brings me to number five: compressed deadlines. We talked about setting that timer. I think it’s Parkinson’s Law that states that work will expand to fill the amount of time you have to complete it. And you’ve seen this? I know you’ve seen this because we both see it, we’re all human beings right? If you got two weeks to finish a project, guess how long it’s gonna take you to finish a project? Two weeks. You got two days to do that same project. It’s a miracle—it’s amazing how you finish it in two days.

Yeah. So I have an example that I point to a lot is, so I’m president of a nonprofit. And when I took over they had board meetings, always scheduled for an hour and a half. And they always took an hour and a half no matter what you had to talk about. So at this point, I’ve reduced them to an hour and we get everything done in an hour. I bet if I reduce it to a half hour, we get everything done in a half hour. So I completely agree to this.

Well, one of our favorite stories, we had a client years ago who ran—he was, this guy was one of the busiest guys we’d ever met. He ran a catering company, a really successful one. He had like four or five kids, think he had another full time job. He was also the pastor of a 300 member congregation—like this dude was, he had plenty going on. And so we’re Roger, my business partner was teaching this, you know, compressed deadlines lesson and he’s taking notes and the guy literally throws his pen down. He goes, I just found 10 hours. And we’re like, Oh, awesome. Like, can you tell me more? He goes, yeah, I got a catering company. We said, we know. He goes, yeah, I do about 10 orders a week. From the time an order comes in for us to make all the food, plate all the food, prep it and get ready to go, it’s usually about four hours, except sometimes it’s not. Sometimes an order comes in a little late, or they need a little early and we only have three hours to make the food, prep the food, get it ready to go. Except sometimes we don’t have three hours. Sometimes it’s an emergency and we only have two hours. And with those situations—four hours, three hours or two hours—where do you think they found out they were most effective? 

Two hours? 

No, it was three. 

Oh, really? Oh, it was a trick question.

I gave you a giant hint—I do ten orders a week. No, but this is a legit story. He goes, it was three hours, he goes at four hours, we are delivering top notch food and service and quality. At two hours, we’re admittedly cutting some corners. 

Yeah, that makes sense. 

We’re missing a tomato here, some Saran Wrap there. You know, nobody’s sneezing in the food. But there’s, we’re cutting corners. And we’re super stressed out. At three hours, we’ve found that every single scenario, we are delivering the same quality as a four hour order. But because we’ve got just that little bit more urgency, we’re having way more fun, and everybody’s more focused, right? And 10 orders a week. I’m just gonna tell people, they don’t have four hours anymore. They have three.

Right, so I could have done that math. And I didn’t. So we’re gonna edit that out now.

So that’s number five, is compress those deadlines. Number six is, this kind of goes back to our last episode, practice the positive. You know, choose positivity, upgrade your inputs, really pay better attention to what you read, what you watch, what you listen to, the questions you ask yourself, and the people you surround yourself with. We all have these addictions, our brains are, all of our, every single human being, our brains are addicted to some version of negativity, urgency and complacency. And I’m not saying this in a Debbie Downer way, I’m just helping raise your level of awareness for where the people you’re dealing, where their brains operate. 

Understanding also that your focus determines your reality. If you’re focused on positivity, your reality is going to be a more positive experience. If you’re focused on negativity and problems, you’re going to find more problems, and you’re gonna have some bumps in the road and a rough go of it. And then you’re gonna find other people that want to just complain. So I said, I’m not available to complain about Nancy right now. I think Tom is available to talk to our audience for a while. I got some stuff to do. But really take an active role in looking for the good, choosing to see the good and practicing positivity.

Yep, I think that’s great. I need to work with my wife on this one from one standpoint, and don’t get—If she hears this, don’t get mad at me. We can always edit this out. She, at fantasy football, that second game start, oh I’m gonna lose this week, and she can’t control it. But still it is. But she was right first week of the playoffs, she had the best team, first place, highest point, although she did lose this week. So we’ll control it. It makes the viewing experience a little bit less positive.

It adds a whole new dimension. I’m with you. But what’s funny, you know, what’s funny, too, though, is on the flip side of this. I don’t want to talk about me. But I would love to be able to make this stuff up. But I don’t want to, you know, I was looking at my year end numbers. You know, here we are nine days away from the end of the year. And looking at my numbers, I’m like, I hit a milestone in mine that I wanted to hit for the year. And I was just a tad bit shy of that. Which, you know, I’m not a super fan of, but while I’m looking at the numbers, my phone rings, and it’s somebody calling me going, Hey, I saw you speak last week, and I know you do coaching, can I hire you to be my coach? And I know how much I charge for coaching. I’ll be damned if that milestone didn’t just get blown out of the water. So you know, I’ve been focused on that in a positive manner. And I, when you focus on what you want, in a positive way, it’s amazing how it shows up for you. And then vice versa, as well. 

Number seven, get micro, get micro. Where this one comes from is, you don’t have to do 100 things 100 times better to get 100% better result. You find one thing, you get a little bit better at that. And that’s going to have a ripple effect on everything you do. We call it the winning edge theory. Since Arlington shut down, we can still talk about horse racing. But, you know, horses, it’s literally called win by a nose. And that first place horse wins a pretty pretty purse. Mm hmm. The second place horse, you know there’s a payoff. But it’s a fraction of what the first place horse won. And the first place horse is rarely, even if it’s winning by a length. That’s a second or a fraction of a second reaction. A fraction of a second leads to an exponentially greater payday. That horse wasn’t exponentially greater, it was a fraction of a second greater. 

So you take that approach and you don’t have to have this massive shift and upheaval and change to get a better result. Find one little thing, right if that’s starting your day with a better affirmation, if that’s, you know, having a better, more energetically designed goal, if that’s taking 30 minutes out of your day to just go rest, which I’ll come back to in a second, like that’s doing one thing a little bit better. And that’s going to have a positive impact on you. So get micro. 

Number eight, take time for renewal. I just said, Take, give yourself a break, your body needs, you got to recharge the battery man. There’s a reason we plug our phones in overnight. And for some of us during the day as well. Like that sucker drains and if it’s drained, you can’t be productive. So your body and your mind needs the same thing—you got to step away. We get help, get invested, get away. That’s the three gets with regards to making a mental and results breakthrough. So start with, just take time regularly for renewal, at least quarterly. A friend of mine in the dental world, he goes, if you’re not taking at least two weeks off every quarter, you’re working too hard. You’re gonna burn yourself out. And I gotta say, I don’t know that I think that’s too off in your world either. You guys, gals are nose to the grindstone, especially—it’s a marathon of sprints for you. And so you got it, you’ve just got to give yourself that gift and grace of taking time for renewal. 

Last two, I’m going to finish strong if that’s all right. Number nine, start and end your day intentionally. Start and end your day intentionally. I’ll tell you the two my two favorite ones are having really effective affirmations in the beginning of your day. And then practicing gratitude at the end of your day. I call it also known as doing a pre brief and a debrief. You know pre briefing yourself with, it’s going to be a great day. I’m a money magnet, I have zero emotional attachment to money. It’s time to make the donuts. That’s what I say to myself every day. 

Other people: something amazing is going to happen to me today. Just pre briefing, basically telling your brain this what’s going to happen. And at the end of your day, you do a debrief. Great. Where was I? Where was it a great day? Where was I a money magnet? Where did I have zero emotional attachment to money? Where did I make the donuts? Where, what am I grateful for from today? And just doing that intentionally knowing that when you do so it gives your brain a better picture for what it really wants. And it’s going to do everything it can to make that happen over and over and over again. Because as easy it is to be addicted to the bad stuff you can still create an addiction for good stuff as well.

Yep. So let me expand on that. So starting with intention. I mean, that is, like you said, positive affirmation. Is there other examples of that? Like, my day is almost always started with a workout. I don’t know but I’m not mentally getting myself prepped, but I feel like energized after I work out. So is that a form of intent? 

Absolutely. I would, I would say yes. It’s at the end of the day, I care what you do, and I don’t care what you do. Yeah.

But I can sit on the elliptical and think positive thoughts while I’m working out. I’ll be doing double duty then. 

Right. 

But I’m not slowing down, then I’m going faster.

That’s all right. Well, listen, it’s you know, alright, game within the game here. So instead of waking up and going, Oh, God, what’s going to happen to me today? That’s what we’re trying to get to. I don’t care what you do. If that’s a workout. If that’s an affirmation, if that’s a playlist on YouTube that fires you up. If that’s, you know, listen to Gary V, because you like F bombs. Like, that’s awesome. Go for it.

I have a friend who meditates every morning for a half hour and he swears by it and gets him ready for the day.

And I have a lot of friends that are like that. Absolutely. Can we talk in the morning. She goes no, I’m meditating. Great, I’m not gonna interrupt you. Like I want you on top of your game when we talk. So yeah, those are all great examples. Just anything that gets you in a, I’ll say, a positive state of mind at the risk of sounding repetitive. Again, I’m going to say what I said again, anything that’s going to help you get to the place where you’re going, alright, here’s what’s going on today, instead of, ugh, what’s going on today.

And then number 10. I always get, this one’s a fun one. Avoid multitasking. Yes, this one’s tough. Right? When you’re in that marathon of sprints, there’s, listen, there’s times when you don’t have, I’m gonna say you don’t have a choice. You always have a choice. But there are times when you just, you got to listen to a podcast while you’re driving. Right? There’s times when you’ve got to be hitting respond, reply to an email when you’re on hold. Right? Avoid it, because you’re never actually multitasking, you’re task switching. You’re never giving 100% to either of  those tasks and what I tell people is there’s no such thing as multitasking. There’s simply a willingness to suck at more than one thing at the same time. So that’s, it’s a PG 13 version of just never giving 100% in those situations. 

So those 10 tips, you know, those are those are some things that are proven in some of the work that we’ve done with our clients to help you slow down that runaway brain of yours, help you become more purposeful, help you get clear on what you want and tap into that results generating part of your brain.

I think that’s all awesome information. I think that’s stuff that people can implement. And I think that’ll help during tax season. Maybe give us an example of somebody you’ve done one on one coaching with that has implemented this and what that’s done for them.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So tons of examples in the book. I go back to my girl who utilizes that daily Big Six tip. She put an extra 10k in her pocket net income just by using this. It’s a strategy, but it’s also a tactic. It’s one of those like blended ones, you know, she and her team implemented that and within seven days, you know, it paid for itself. It was a very positive ROI. Right. 

You know, you go back to the idea of getting hyper clear on your goals and deadlines, compressing deadlines. I had a coaching client of mine years ago, we haven’t worked together. We’re really good friends, but he likes calling me up every now and again to brag. When he and I met, he was a financial adviser, he still is a financial advisor. But you talk about you know these specialist kinds of people who are trained to do a certain thing very well. 

And he showed up to our first coaching session with six crosslinked, leading activity lagging activity, Excel spreadsheets. And he was using this as his gauge for mapping out his week. You know, he talked about you know, this is kind of a, there’s a guard your green time, there’s the daily Big Six, there’s compressed deadlines, there’s get hyper clear in your goals, there’s avoid multitasking, there’s start small. Now all of them are kind of accomplished by my boy, Dane, or my guy, Dane, I should say. He’s a grown man. And he comes to me with these six linked, crosslinked, spreadsheets, Excel spreadsheets, with leading indicators, lagging indicators, you know, leading activities lagging result and all this stuff. And I’m like, Oh, my God, I told him, he goes, What do you think of all this, I go, damn it. I think you’ve engineered the bleep out of your entire life. And we had a good laugh about that. I said, I need you to do me a favor. Just put that all away and just trust, just trust me. 

And so we got to working together. And we got really clear on what was important to him and his goals, and his goals were to spend more time fishing with the kids. And so we just built a whole clear picture around, Okay, well, what do you need to produce to give you the amount of time that you want to be spending with your kids? And what do you need to prove to buy the new sexy boat that you want to go fishing, you know, and build upon in your backyard. He’d done a lot, he’d gotten to a very good level of success. But you know, he had done it very, very tasky, numbers oriented. 

And when we stepped away from that, and really got a clearer picture for what he wanted life to look like, income, time off. Philanthropy, running a team, vacation, time off is due—he’s regularly taking 12 weeks of vacation every year. And he’s making twice what he was making before we started working together. It’s funny because it was about—It was right after the first of the year when we were working together. We hadn’t talked for a couple weeks. Hey, how’s it going? How’ve you been? He goes man, this subconscious thing. I think I’ve got it figured out. Like what happened? He goes, I can’t get people to stop chasing me down to give me money. I go, is that problem? He goes, no, it’s not. I said, well, are you filling that out on your spreadsheets? He goes, I don’t even know what happened to those spreadsheets. 

We just moved him away from this whole busy, busy, busy, fill in the cell, put the right equation in, you know all that stuff. It was just. we got it a lot more tapping into, utilizing all the stuff I just shared with you, understanding how to literally master his mind. And he doubles his income, taking 12 weeks of vacation a year, has the boat, has the house, time with the kids, all this stuff that like the dream life, the ideal life he’s living in. So hopefully that’s a decent example.

Now I think that’s a nice putting it all together. Before we wrap up. I’m going to ask you about, you know how can people get a hold of you and all that. But before that, what is Robb Z, Robb with two B’s and a Z, doing or enjoy doing when he’s not coaching and telling people how to be more mindful?

Well, I love, see I think cocktail aficionado is the least substance abusing sounding way to put that. I still, beers for gears is still rocking and rolling at my second biggest season ever. This year. I do bicycle repairs and tuneups out of my garage and you have the option of compensating me in cocktails which is nice. So I love doing that, I love to ride, I do love riding my bike. I did not get out as much as I wanted to this year but that’s okay. So working on them. I love fishing. I’ll throw a line in the water. I had the opportunity to go deep sea fishing. We won’t get to the story. Short version is we had been working on an incentive trip that we’d earned two years ago. We went down to Venice, Louisiana end of the country, literally like road, road, road, road, road, road, water, and delta. Deep sea fishing yellowfin tuna—it was the day before they evacuated for Ida. If I can, if I can ride my bike to a fishing hole and have a cocktail. Oh, yeah. 

You got them all three tied together. 

And I love hanging out with my kids. Well, yeah. We should probably focus on the fishing and the biking. That sounds way healthier.

Well, I talk about craft beer a lot on this show and other things. So that’s one of mine. All right. Well, we should probably wrap up so if anybody wants to hear more about this or talk to you or reach out to you find out more about you, what’s the best way they can look you up?

Yep. So we’ll run through the, we’ll run through the gamut. Best email address is robbz@deliverfreedom.com. My company’s website is freedompersonaldevelopment.com. You can go to our book section, you can check out my book, you can check out our new book that Roger and I wrote, you can check out Roger’s book—Train Your Brain for Success and Master Your Mind. We put together some nice bonuses if you want to pick those up, we’ve got plenty of free training options available as well. 

So if you go to freedompersonaldevelopment.com/trainmybrain, you can actually get access to a program that companies pay us 1000s of dollars to travel around and share with their employees. So get that. I’m on LinkedIn as Robb Zbierski. I’m on Facebook. I’m on Twitter and Instagram, as @robbzspeaker. I live in Arlington Heights. Eventually I’ll get back to the Tuscan. Thursday nights, I’m a leader for my son’s Boy Scout troop over in St. Simons. Please don’t find me there. That’s family time. 

While I’m the communications merit badge counselor, like let’s just let’s go to the other ones. Yeah, that’s it. And I’d love to hear it—connect with me on social, shoot me a line, drop me a line. Let me know how I can help if you’re ready to. If you’re, if you feel like you’ve found the top, you found the ceiling or you’ve plateaued and you know there’s more for you and you know that you haven’t figured out how to get there on your own. That’s where I do a really good job of helping folks out. 

Perfect. Well, Rob, really appreciate you being on for a second time. You’re one of maybe three two-time guests at this point.

I want a jacket like they do on SNL if we get to five.

All right, well, I think I like that. I didn’t even think about that. We’re gonna—we’re gonna get The Unique CPA jackets out there. Maybe we won’t even wait till five, maybe we’ll do three.

We can skip two because I don’t want to be known as a two-timer for the record. I have bigger aspirations than that. 

Than a two timer alright. Alright, well again, thanks a lot. And I want to thank everybody for listening today. And thank you for joining us today.