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The Art of Selling Online Courses
The Art of Selling Online Courses is all about online courses.
The goal of this podcast is to share winning strategies and secret hacks from top performers in the online course industry. We are interviewing successful business owners, asking them questions on how they got to the point where they are right now, and checking how their ideas can help you improve your online course!
The Art of Selling Online Courses
Why You Know What to Do But Still Don't Do It
🔥 Work With Me - https://datadrivenmarketing.co/done-for-you
You know exactly what you should be doing to grow your online course business. You've listened to hundreds of podcast episodes, read all the blog posts, maybe even bought a few courses on marketing. You KNOW you should be sending email promotions every month. You KNOW you should be optimizing your sales pages. Yet somehow, you find yourself building just one more course instead.
Sound familiar?
In this episode, I sit down with Itamar Marani, a former Israeli special forces operative turned elite performance coach. Itamar has coached hundreds of six to nine-figure entrepreneurs to break through their mental barriers, and he's here to explain exactly why your brain sabotages your best business moves.
We dive deep into what Itamar calls "the war within" - the battle between the business owner in you who knows what needs to be done, and the hobbyist who keeps retreating to their comfort zone. Itamar breaks down the three "success killers" that are hardwired into our brains from 100,000 years of evolution: avoiding uncertainty, optimizing for approval, and seeking validation.
What makes this conversation different is that we don't just identify the problem - we walk through the exact process to overcome it. Itamar shares his framework for identifying your mental blocks, challenging false beliefs, and most importantly, understanding what emotional payoff you're getting from NOT doing what you know you should do.
We also discuss performance anchors - the people and habits in your life that drain your energy and keep you stuck. Itamar shares a powerful story about a client who went from $5-10k months to building a company with a nine-figure valuation, all because he had the courage to cut out a heavy performance anchor that was keeping him small.
If you've ever caught yourself saying "I know I should be doing this, but..." then this episode is going to hit home. Hard. Itamar doesn't do motivational fluff - this is practical, actionable advice forged in Israeli counterterrorism and refined through years of coaching high performers.
📖 Itamar's book "Elite Performance" is available on Amazon and at https://itamarmarani.com/book.
🔗 Check out Itamar's website: https://itamarmarani.com/
I wanted to do this, but then I started doing that. We're not wired to thrive. We're wired to survive. Our brain does not see reality for what it is. We fear that if we sell to people and one person doesn't like us, oh my god, we're gonna get ostracized by the tribe. We're gonna be alone by ourselves in the savannah and we're gonna die. There's a war within between different parts of you. There is a part of you that wants to be a business owner and is ambitious and knows I should do more upsells, cross cells, I should just build a funnel. And then there's that lesser part of you that's in their comfort zone, the force building. Even though you know this belief is not true and it's hard for you, why are you holding on to it?
SPEAKER_00:Hello and welcome to the Art of Selling Online Courses. We are here to share winning strategies and secret hack some top performers in the online course industry. My name is John Edward, and today's guest is Itamar Morani. Now Itamar is regarded as one of the top performants and mindset coaches in the world. He is a former Israeli special forces operative, the youngest federal agent and air marshal in Israel's history, a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Black Belt, who's competed at a world-class level, an a mentee of the Mossad's chief psychologist. He has tint coached hundreds of six to nine figure entrepreneurs, executives, traders, pro athletes to break through performance plateaus, eliminate mental drag, and operate at their highest level under pressure. His clients have exited companies for nine figures, raised hundreds of millions of dollars, and into top ten rankings in the world among other results. He has now distilled his wisdom into a fantastic book called Elite Performance, the Israeli Special Ops Mindset System to win the war within and achieve audacious goals. In this episode, we're gonna explore what it really takes to perform at an elite level, in business and life, from the mental side. Itmar's gonna share lessons for Israeli counter-terrorism, undercover operations, and competitive digits, and how he has translated those into practical tools for high-achieving entrepreneurs. He is known for cutting through motivational fluffs. I expect no rah-rah, no bullshit. I've worked with Itamar many times, one-on-one and a group setting, and we're good friends as well. And I'm really looking forward to this interview. Itamar, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Thank you for the warm intro. So, talk to us about pressure. Why and where is pressure a good thing versus a bad thing when it comes to our performance? Before why and when, let's talk about who.
SPEAKER_01:This is a really important thing that most people aren't aware of. So there's in the early 1900s, about like 120 years ago, when sales was just starting to become a thing, they figured out this concept called the accountability psychological safety matrix, where basically if sales team were held to low levels of accountability and also they didn't feel safe, like they would always get judged or people would yell at them, people just became apathetic. When you held into high levels of accountability, like guys, we need you to produce, but they also didn't feel safe, there was low psychological safety, that's when people got anxiety and they underperformed. And also when you just gave people low accountability but they felt safe, then they just weren't in the comfort zone. But they found that when you were able to master both, is both high levels of accountability and high levels of psychological safety, that's when people execute at their very best. And what's they discovered to be true for teams is also true internally. So with regards to pressure, the kind of people that I work with and what I think would be relevant to speak about is when people are already holding themselves to high levels of accountability. Like you yourself, you're a really driven individual, you're ambitious, and you hold yourself accountable to elite standards. So before the when is it good or in what way, it's also understanding that context, that there are different people. People that are not motivated intrinsically don't want to achieve a lot of goals. For example, sometimes you have these kind of employees, in order to get them to perform at their best, they do need a kick on the butt. They need more pressure. However, normally the kind of entrepreneurs that are very driven, that already want to get a lot out of themselves and achieve a lot, adding more pressure onto their plate usually actually hinders their performance. Now, the key thing is here, like what probably a lot of people are listening in and saying, ah, but I don't like how this sounds, is that we're not saying to take tasks off their plate or to achieve less. It's not about the external things that you do, it's about the pressure you feel in regards to those external things. And basically the whole you know mantra of pressure makes diamonds, so the more pressure the better simply isn't true. There is a bell curve where basically, again, like if there's no pressure, people need some. It helps boost their performance. It creates that excitement, something's interesting. However, when there becomes too much pressure, and usually you notice it when it starts people thinking, but what will this mean about me if this fails? Or what will we do if this doesn't work out? Then their performance starts to dip and they fall into this kind of anxiety or overwhelm quadrant. And that kind of pressure can be mitigated. And that's what I think is the bad pressure, so to speak, that doesn't help entrepreneurs or course creators or whoever it may be achieve what they really want to achieve.
SPEAKER_00:So how do people identify that? How do they figure out whether they are somebody who's got too much pressure or not enough? What's some of the kind of ways people can become self-aware about that? It's a great question.
SPEAKER_01:I think if you feel like you don't have enough pressure, you usually feel like days are a bit empty. You know, like you have a lot of free time on your hand, you're you know you're not pushing yourself, and you're just kind of, you know, coasting along. You feel too much pressure when you start getting the sense of anxiety or the overwhelm. And great ways to know that are are you dipping into coping mechanisms? So basically, if you're overeating because you're stressed, or you're drinking, or drugs, or for a lot of people it's just like diving into porn or sex just to get some kind of relief. Or, you know, just randomly running away from your problems by saying, I just want to look at YouTube a little bit, I want to relax, or I'm gonna go into Reddit or Twitter, or I'm gonna do these small ten dollar tasks in my business that don't actually move the needle, but they give me an illusion, a sense of control. These are things to soothe me emotionally. Or for a lot of the A-types out there, they're like, Let me go run a marathon, or let me do an Iron Man, or let me actually be a part of some charitable organization, something that I can just feel good about myself because I need an outlet for that. Usually, again, I'm not saying you shouldn't have great sex with your partner or have great meals every once in a while, but when you're doing that as a way to run away from an emotional state, and you know usually when you do that, that's when pressure is too much, and you need to learn how to modulate that. And again, I'm not saying diminish your goals, I'm saying learn how to modulate the pressure response.
SPEAKER_00:Here's what I see with the people in my audience, the kind of clients that we work with. So if you're if you're listening and this sounds familiar, this this may well be you. Is they're really, really good at specific things. So content creation and course creation. And so when they feel uncomfortable, they want to make more money, right? Everybody who comes to me, their goal is they want to double their revenue. That's their emotional comfort zone is to do more of those things, right? So they want to make more money. And I'm saying to them, and if you're listening to this podcast, you know this, right? You've heard me say it a hundred times that what they should be doing is every month they should be doing an email promotion and they should be working on their sales pages and their checkout pages and implementing order bumps and upsells, and it's like these same things I've talked about a hundred times in this podcast. And yet I see that lots of people aren't then doing it. And I'm pretty sure that a big part of the reason why is because they're like, oh, yeah, well, I started working on that, but that felt really uncomfortable. But then without realizing it, I I convinced myself that the right thing to do was that I needed another course. Like I I didn't I didn't think that I was doing the wrong thing. I thought I was doing the right thing because I kind of talked myself into it. Like, how can how does that fit into this whole pressure thing here?
SPEAKER_01:So I'd like to give your audience some tools. Is that all right? Yeah, please. So, first off, it's very challenging, like how you're saying I wanted to do this, but then I started doing that. When we just look at ourselves as I am just this person who sometimes does this, sometimes does that, it's more challenging to control. However, if we can split us apart and recognize there are different parts of us, there is a part of you that wants to be a business owner and is ambitious and knows I should do more upsells, cross sales, I should just build a funnel. And then there's that lesser part of you that's in their comfort zone with course building. That is the operator, not the business person. This is like this is the hobbyist, so to speak. Just to recognize there's gonna be always a business owner that I know what they should be doing, and there's gonna be the hobbyist. The hobbyist feels really, really safe. To recognize it's gonna be a battle inside. Like the reason we called the book the war within is there's a war within between different parts of you. Part of you that is logic and recognizes this is gonna be really successful and help us make more money, and the part of you that wants to feel safe. And that is a hobbyist. I can feel safe. I can always feel good about myself if I just do these courses. Now, to explain this comfort and all that, we basically called it in the book the three success killers. Now, I know it's super cliche, but we're just we're not wired to thrive. We're wired to survive. We evolved 100,000 years ago, and our brain does not see reality for what it is. It sees reality in a way that just helps us survive in the context of being in the savannah 100,000 years ago. So whenever we feel certain types of discomfort, we immediately jump to associating that with a life or death threat. So, for example, like something feels not good here. Oh, it must be wrong. I must turn it the other way and go back into being the hobbyist. Now, the three success killers that are kind of how we coined them again, just to make it easier for people to notice these things when they're starting to grip you is one, the first success killer is that you avoid uncertainty. Naturally, we do not like uncertainty. Like, yes, we like variety, but variety is something that is safe and just a little bit different. Uncertainty is something like, ooh, I don't know what this is. So again, 100,000 years ago, if I was walking from my hut to the watering hole and there was a rustle in the bushes that I didn't know what it was, that could be a predator. Very dangerous. I don't like uncertainty. Now I go to build an order bump and I don't know what to do here or what the next step will be, it can trigger the same feeling inside me, even though the consequences are completely different. And so that's why a lot of times people shy away. So that's the first one. The second success killer is optimizing for approval. And I think this is a big one with these course creators from what I've seen because I work with a couple of them. So again, we grew up in very small tribes, and being judged and perhaps getting kicked out of the tribe was a life or death sentence. Like resources are super scarce for mating partners, for food, for shelter, for everything. And a lot of times we fear that if we sell to people and one person doesn't like us, oh my God, we're gonna get ostracized by the tribe. We're gonna be alone by ourselves in the savannah and we're gonna die. We're not vocalizing it in that level of severity, but that's how it feels. And that's why, again, it causes that hobbyist all of a sudden jump up, that hobbyist part in you, and say, no, no, no, this doesn't feel right, this doesn't feel safe. Let's panic a little bit, let's turn around and do the thing that we know we shouldn't be doing because it just feels safe. So we stop focusing on the actual problem of making money and we start focusing on our emotion of feeling uncomfortable.
SPEAKER_00:So is this making sense so far how I'm explaining it? It totally is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I see this. I'm not convinced that everybody's self-awareness is going to be high enough to kind of notice these things, but maybe by us talking about them, it's gonna help people to be able to get that. So this is good. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So I'll challenge you with that, man. I think because of I do a lot of like speaking engagements. And usually people, once they hear about this, they're like, ah, that is the one that I recognize. I'm avoiding uncertainty. I'm just trying to like, I'm seeking approval, optimizing for approval. And the third one, which we didn't get into, is that you seek validation. And while optimizing for approval and seeking validation sounds familiar, they kind of are because they come from that tribal place of how will others perceive me. But the optimizing for approval is that I am just gonna ask my audience way too much for feedback instead of just doing. Every little step I'm just gonna do, but then wait, is this okay with you guys? Is everybody okay here? Like John, we we somebody responded negatively to the sales email. I know we got a thousand sales, but we had two negative responses, so maybe we should slow down. That's the optimizing for approval. The seeking validations is I'll only be ready to do this once. Basically, like your fear of inadequacy of not being good enough is keeping you from actually going for it at all. And again, it's another way we feel like it keeps ourselves safe because if we don't stick our head up, it's not gonna get chopped off in the small tribe that we evolved in. And it's another way we end up optimizing for our emotional state, not for our results. Now again, I will challenge you a little bit on this, man. I think that once people get awareness of what's going on, and again, there's a bell curve to everything, but there's gonna be a big portion of people that are like, ah, that's what's going on. I don't want to be like that. And now that I'm aware that this actually isn't a true problem, it's just something about how I perceive the situation. I can choose not to fall victim to that.
SPEAKER_00:I'll tell you a conversation I have with people regularly. It goes, I know I should be doing this, but that's like it's like so common. I know I should be working on my email marketing and my funnels, but now one of the buts is I don't know what to do. And that's that's kind of understandable. And like they can listen to the podcast and they can get a course or whatever and they can kind of learn what to do, and that's that would that would cover it. But it doesn't seem mostly to be enough because then they they might be listening to the podcast and still not doing it. And I'm like, oh you kind you kind of know what to do, didn't you? You know the first step you could take. Yeah, you could do something here, but the the more common one is but I've just got this this this one more course that once I make that, then, then I'll have enough. Then I'll be at a point where I could focus on the marketing and the funnels. That's what people keep convincing them of. What does that sound like? Where does that kind of fit into these?
SPEAKER_01:It sounds like you're seeking validation. You feel like you're not ready yet. Once you have that one course and it's gonna all like, you know, also you polished it and you super HD'd, and now the PDFs that go along with it are, you know, they're just right. Now it's okay for you to go ask for money from this. Okay. Because you're concerned, the part of you again, that hobbyist in you, is trying to trick you. It's trying to tell you that unless you have these in place, the marketplace is going to reject you. And if you get rejected, everything is going to fall apart.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. So let's say someone's identified that. Let's let's take that because that seems to be like a common theme with my audience. What's next? What's the next step someone should work through? First off, is accepting that's going to be there.
SPEAKER_01:And like this is the biggest counterintuitive thing that people expect to hear from me. But like, expect that that and part of you, that hobbyist part that wants to play safe, is always going to be there. It is just part of the reality. It's a part of our brain that evolved, like basically the more primal part of our brain, it is not going anywhere. It is your responsibility to manage it. To recognize, like I remember we back in the day talked about the chimp paradox. You made me think of. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:It's somewhere on the somewhere on the bookshelf behind me.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. It's it's the same concept. It's just it's a true concept to recognize that this is the lesser version of you. It is always going to be there. However, now that you're aware that it's there, you can say to yourself, I don't have to behave like that. That is just a part of me that I can control. I can be an adult. I can put this part of me in the backseat, and I can put whatever that version of me that I think highly of, the entrepreneur. I can also say, like, I'm going to be John right now. I'm going to, what would John do in this situation? I'm just going to do what John would do. And you can act on it. So that's the first thing. Just recognizing that that part is going to be a war within that you need to manage. Now, there are many tools in order to weaken that lesser part in you, that hobbyist, that voice to control it. And I think the way to do that, like to really weaken it, is to actually not address it first. I think that's actually where people get lost a lot of times. They're saying, okay, I know I'm a bit fearful, like how can I address my fears? And it's a very big question and it's a very ambiguous question. And you can just get lost solving random things that don't actually make a difference to your life, to your income, or whatever it may be. So the way I usually start people with, with clients or even in conferences, whatever it may be, is by actually looking at your future first. So we figure out what would be the most direct path for someone in your position to achieve your goals. So the way I kind of learned that is that in the agency when we were working undercover, we would start every day with tabletop drills. Basically, a way to kind of wake up your mind a little bit, get you into going, and also so you can build this bank of mental answers in your head. So when it's go time, you know what to do. And this day we were at a certain country, I can't say which one, we were working undercover and we were protecting an asset at the airport. And my boss said, Idomar, okay, here's a drill. We're standing over here, the asset is over here, and someone who is confirmed to be 100% a terrorist that you know is throwing a backpack with a bomb, and you're 100% certain this is a bomb in it on the asset. What do you do? And without thinking, I responded, I shoot the kill. Confirm terrorist, confirmed attack, shoot the kill. And my boss just kind of looked at me and he was like, Why would you do that? I was like, I'm like, yeah, probably I gave the wrong answer here.
SPEAKER_02:I was trying to explain.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I was, you know, I was like, I'm I'm the most qualified combat operative here on the ground. I confirmed terrorists. Bad guy, you kill bad guy. And he just kind of looked at me and he's like, Idomar, why are we here? And that's what I kind of bit by tongue. And he's like, are we here to kill terrorists or are we here to protect like Jews, Israelis, and assets abroad? And I was like, ah, we're here to protect the asset. He was like, Okay. So if somebody else's goal, not your, but somebody else's goal, was to protect the asset, what should they do? And it was super clear to me. I was like, oh, they should evacuate the asset, then try to throw away the bomb, and only then and if it's available, still pursue the terrorist. And he was like, great. So that's what you should be doing. And that officer of mine, he was probably the best officer I ever had in the agency. And it was a very valuable lesson that by detaching a thing, what should I do? But just asking, what should somebody else with a similar goal, what should they be doing? It bypasses all our biases, basically. Like I was just, you know, I was young, fighting was what I was very good at, is what I was trained at. And it was an automatic reflex of mine. And a lot of times, like with these course creator people, like you tell them what should you do? They're like, Oh, I know what I'm good at. I need it. My answer to everything is more courses, more features. It's like the it's that expression in English, I think, goes like to the person who only has a hammer, everything is a nail. It's like all they have is this hammer. But by detaching and saying, you know what? If somebody had this kind of business that I have right now and they wanted to make a lot more money, what would be the most impactful thing they could do? And there they can probably figure out it would be upsells, it would be downsells, it would be a certain launch, whatever it may be. But then it's getting that to a really, really clear level. Okay, what would be the one to three things they would do? This is where like your knowledge base would come into play. You'd be like, okay, they you should first do the upsell. Like, what would be the first for the majority of the people out there, what would be the first one to three things they should do?
SPEAKER_00:Just have an email promotion every month. That would make the biggest difference. Then they should work on their sales pages, and then they should work on optimizing their opt-in so their email list grows.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Okay, so let's do this. Let's just only focus on an email promotion every month. So just to keep it simple. So just doing that, if you're not doing it yet, that is your most direct path to success. It's something that the business owner part of you needs to be doing, but the hobbyist doesn't feel comfortable to do for a variety of reasons. Now, after and only after you have that clarity of what is the most impactful key action you can take, can you go on to the question of why is that part of me avoiding doing this, does not want to do it. And only then, this is the big thing, only once you've clarified, because we don't want to say why do you not want to make more money, but why do you not want to send the list these emails? You get hyper-specific, because then you can actually solve for the actual mental block that's holding you back instead of just a random, you know, limiting or negative belief that doesn't actually impact your life. So that's kind of the process. Like we would first do that, then go through those processes.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. So we've gone through, figured out like what is the emotional blockage. Is it the fear of uncertainty? Is it the validation? Is it the or need for validation rather? Is it the optimizing for approval? And then we all we've we've figured that out and we said, okay, it looks like it's this validation. I have to have this many courses, I have to have the courses to this level before it's okay to do more of this marketing. Then go through and identify what is it that someone else in my situation should be doing here. And you go back and you listen to some of my podcast episodes or you listen to what we just said, which is just send the email promotion.
SPEAKER_01:I just say let's put let's let's ask this for John. In your professional opinion, what is the benchmark that you could tell somebody that if you're doing less, is it is it that if you're doing less than one monthly promotion, you're avoiding the most impactful lever in your business?
SPEAKER_00:Yes, 100%.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, great. So this is that. If you're listening to this and you're doing less than one email promotion a month, that is probably a mental block.
SPEAKER_00:I think if you've only got one course, you might feel like it's not possible for you to do more a promotion every month. It's not true. There are different ways you can bundle it different ways. So whatever safe you're in, if you've got a course, this is the this is the thing you should be doing. Yep. Great. So that's where we are. Sorry, keep going. I interrupted a little bit. So then the next step is to figure out tell me again, what was the next step after that?
SPEAKER_01:So now we figured out what is the most direct path to getting you the results. Now it's about figuring out why aren't you doing it.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And again, it's it's interesting what you brought up that if you have only one course, it might not be just about blasting it in the same way. Because there are certain steps. What we want to do here is we don't want to be motivational speakers, you know, that it's just like, oh, you have this belief that this is harmful, just do it anyway, believe in yourself, yay you. It's about approaching this more like a scientist and saying, is the belief that this is a bad idea for some reason actually valid or not? Forget about limiting negative, is it valid or not? And what you want to do is stress test it. So for example, if someone has the belief that I can't do a promotion each month because it's just gonna, it's gonna be the exact same, it's gonna be repeating itself and the list is gonna get exhausted of it and it's not worthwhile, then again, there might be a place where there's an opportunity to challenge that. Is this a black and white that's absolutely true? Or is there some wiggle room here that you can send this out once a month if you also package it differently, if you just switch it around a little bit, if the messaging is different for every month. There's a different kind of promotion around uh Cyber Monday or summertime, whatever it might be. And it's about challenging that structure. Now, beyond that, like you saw this when you did the arena, there's a lot of other mechanisms you put in place, whether it's cutting away certain performance anchors that you just have in your environment, like you're saying I can't do a promotion each month because I'm just like spinning over my head with all these things in my life, all these things in my business that don't actually make a difference but are already there. So it's about creating a process proper audit of what are all the performance anchors that are holding you back and trimming where you can, and also just putting everything in place as far as the guardrails. Because I also I'll put it this way a lot of times when you help people figure out what they need to do to take action, they'll get super excited about like, okay, one promotion a month. Great, we can do that. I can see how much that's gonna make us money, how much money that's gonna make us. And they get excited, but then after about a minute, a voice in their head says, but what about this or that? Like, I can't do this because of if I do that, I won't have time for my kids or for my marriage or for fun in life, whatever it may be. And a lot of times you can just put in a simple guardrail in place that answers that. So if I'm concerned that I have let's say I am a course creator, I have a course, I know it's ready to promote. I'm concerned though that if I follow John's advice and I truly try to make this business like pro and make a lot of money off it, I won't have time for social events, for dinners with friends. So what if we just put in your calendar as a recurring event, two dinners out with friends a week? So you know it's always there. Would that give you peace of mind for that part of you? What if we also put in two fitness sessions a week with a personal trainer so that you know also your health isn't gonna fall apart? You're not gonna become this entrepreneur that you fear that as loses health, loses a social life. And you can put these little guardrails in your calendar that you know, like when the the kids play bowling and they have those bumpers at the end of the rail so the ball can't fall off, so to speak, and they're safe to go for it. You can put those in your life. And what that does, it gives you the mental permission to really just go for it. So if you can add those in as well, it's another thing in lowering and like lessening the power of that lesser level you, that hobbyist. Because whenever it tries to squeak up and say, hey, we can't do this because you're like, no, no, no, we're fine. We have the social dinners, we have the fitness time, and it's another way to weaken that internal enemy. And finally, it's about really figuring out what is the core of that belief. Because our beliefs basically are just a a link between how we see the world and how we think it relates to one of those success killers of uncertainty, optimizing for approval or seeking validation. Like at the end of the day, I believe that if I send one promotion a month, somehow it's going to be bad for me. And that's why I'm not doing it. It's about figuring out what exactly is the belief around that. And the more specific you can get, the more impactful it will be when you break it.
SPEAKER_00:Got it. Okay. Is there a a next step, an obvious next step someone should take after that? So this is interesting, an obvious next step.
SPEAKER_01:After like, let's say they've done all the steps, they've broken the belief and they recognize it's not true.
SPEAKER_00:They've got the guardrails in place. You know, maybe they've sent their first promotion. Is there like another thing to kind of keep themselves on on track after this? Or yeah, so I want to think promotions so bad, Itamar.
SPEAKER_01:I know, I know. So like I'll say this. What I've seen a lot of times is that people make progress because you know, also just accountability is motivation. So like if you have someone like, let's say, like you're they're in your coaching program for the courses, and they'll do really well also because it's an environment, and there's a there's demands from that environment where everybody sends a promotion each month, and they know this is what we do, and they'll do it for the bit. However, sometimes people regress. And this was something that I was not aware of at all when I started coaching people. Like we'd break everything down, we'd break the belief, be like, good, yeah, go do it. And they'd be like, Great, I'm doing it. And then three weeks later, they'd regress into old patterns. And it's a weird thing. Like, have you ever noticed that people stay in relationships that they know aren't good for them, whether it's business or romantic? They know they aren't good for them, but they still stay in them. Now, the reason that is because they're still getting something good out of staying in that relationship, even though it's bad for them. It could be like sex is good, I don't feel alone, I have somebody to also vent with, whatever it may be. By and large, this relationship is harmful for them. However, something about it is gives them a sense of familiarity or safety or comfort. So they stick with it. So a big part of it is then addressing that next layer. Like, even though you know this belief is not true and it's harmful for you, why are you holding on to it? What's the positive thing that you're potentially getting out of it? And it could be something as simple as I just like doing the hobby stuff of building more courses more than I like doing the email promotion. It could be something as basic as that. Like this is just easier for me. I'm more competent, I'm better at it. It could also be like, this makes me feel like people are always just sending me messages like emails, like, hey, this new course that you added completely for free was so helpful. Thank you so much. And I much prefer getting that than making a lot more money and also having one negative email a month about someone saying you're promoting this a lot. Like somehow that belief that you know isn't true now, you're getting something out of it. And unless you confront that head on and say, I am willing to let go of the benefit that that false belief gives me, you'll latch onto it.
SPEAKER_00:That part of you will keep latching onto it. Okay, so is that the exercise to go through and figure out well, what is it that is causing me to still want to do this other thing?
SPEAKER_01:And even though you know it's harmful for you, you know it's not good for you, like, why are you doing it? Why are you doing it? Yeah. And a simple way to do that is again to ask like you can pretend that you come out of your body, you're looking at yourself from above, and you can ask, what is Edamar getting out of this? Why is he doing that? How is this in some way helping him? And usually you can ask, why is it emotionally soothing for him? Because you know it doesn't help his bank account. But why is he wasting all this energy on this? What is getting out of this emotionally?
SPEAKER_00:Do you think that's something that you can do like as a desk exercise, or do you need to do it like as in the moment when you notice that you're doing something else instead of the thing that you're supposed to be doing? Or is it a bit of both? How does how can people do that? I think doing it in the moment is extremely, extremely challenging.
SPEAKER_01:It's it's basically something where if, let's put it this way, in the moment, you're probably already a little bit emotionally compromised. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So if you can do it in a place where you're actually calm and you're just going through this and evaluating what's going on? Okay, let me take a step back. I'm just listening to this podcast now. Maybe I'm in the car, working out on a walk, whatever it may be. What if I turn it off for the rest of the time, or if I go back home and I write down this, why am I not sending one email promotion a month? What part of me thinks that that's a bad idea and why? Let me challenge that. Super calm. Not actually doing it, not about to press the send button on a big promotion. And then ask also, okay, what am I getting emotionally out of not doing this thing that I know will make me a lot of money? What am I getting out of it? And if you could do that in a calm place, then you can sit back and be like, ah, that that's what's going on. Now, in the moment, there's other other mechanisms, so to speak, to make sure that you don't reverse back into that thinking when pressure gets higher. But you have to do that upfront work fr first. Even for me, where I'm pretty high level expert at this stuff, doing it in the moment is very challenging. So, like if this is not something that is your profession, assuming that you'll be able to do it on the spot without ever having done the work up front, it's It's gonna be a challenging challenging thing to do.
SPEAKER_00:So I'll tell you, listener, what uh what I do with this. So uh I'd gone to Reetamod's coaching program, the arena, and through that process, we'd done a lot of this work. I'd done a lot of this work for myself, like and figuring out okay, what are the places where I've got a certain belief that's getting in the way, what's the thing that I ideally should be doing, why am I not doing it? What's my blockage? What emotion am I after? What have you? And then we put together a spreadsheet in which I would have like down the side, or even I've got like a template for it, right? So down the side there was the week or the date, and then across the top, there's like three main areas that I was supposed to be working on. And then within each of those, there was like three sub-areas of like, okay, what is it I'm supposed to be doing on this thing this week? Did I and then each week I could judge, did I do that thing? And if not, I could then go, ah, fuck, I didn't do the thing again. Like, and then I could start to think through. I normally do this on the weekend, like Saturday or Sunday morning, kind of quite early, nobody else around. I'll sit down on the sofa, I'll fill out the spreadsheet, and I go, okay, did I actually do that thing that I was supposed to be doing this week? Or how well did I do it one to ten? And then within there as well is like a um a column that's around belief. Did how much did I fall into like that lower self versus the higher self? How much did I fall prey to any of these beliefs that I have that I know aren't correct? And how much should I kind of keep on track with it? And what staggers me is I can go through and do this and then at the end of the week go, oh, I did it again. Interesting. And it's like there's a dip, there'll be a different reason or a different like trigger or something like that that will cause it. But I kind of go through and do it again and again and again. And then at the end of the quarter, I'll go through and I'll like make a new list of like, okay, what is it I'm supposed to be doing now? Can I update this? Is this still correct? Sometimes what I find, I think this is quite interesting and could could definitely throw people off, is that what I put down as what I thought someone else in my position should be doing turned out to be wrong. Now, it was still right for me to track every week and try and do it every week and stay on track with it because I believed it was correct based on all the information I had. But then later on I'm like, oh, it wasn't correct. It's like, okay, well there's something wrong with the process. It's just that my information was incomplete. And now I've identified, okay, I need to tweak it in this way or that way or what have you. One thing I've noticed is once it starts actually working, the thing starts working and I'm getting results, then it's way easier to stay on track. And I think one of the things with email promotions that people could go wrong with is think, oh, I did it and it didn't make tons of money, therefore I'm going to give up on this. And I could totally understand that. That would be very disheartening. It's like if you're dieting and you're trying to follow everything, but you're not losing weight, you're like, what the hell's going on? But one of the things I've definitely seen with that is if you just keep doing it and keep trying to get better at it every month, then there is and you keep going back through the podcast episodes or the course or whatever about like how to do this thing, then you get better at it, and then eventually you start making a lot more money from it. And I've seen this really continually with people. So I think that's a place that someone could feel they were validated in stopping doing this because they okay, I tried it and it didn't work yet, therefore give up, go back to what I know kind of works, which is make more courses.
SPEAKER_01:I'll put it this way: resilience is a lot about expectations. People often ask, how do I build resilience? How do I get more resilience? What's something I can do every day to be more resilient? The biggest thing you do is to readjust your expectations. So if I have an expectation that I'm about to go on a run and it's gonna feel amazing and easy and it's just gonna be unicorns, as soon as it doesn't feel like unicorns and rainbows, a part of me is gonna be like, oh, maybe something's wrong here. Maybe we should stop. My foot isn't supposed to hurt like this. However, if I'm preparing for a marathon and I know that a part of me, like, dude, you're gonna have blisters, your toenails might bleed a little bit. This is part of the game. When they happen, it's still unpleasant, yes, but it doesn't cause me to freak out and panic. I'm like, oh, this is supposed to be here. And a lot of times resilience is just resetting the expectation. So when you hire an employee for a role, you don't expect that the first one is gonna work. You hope for it, you try to do everything that you can, but you come in with a healthy expectation. This might take three goes or four goes to get the right person in place. The same thing with the email promotion. If you can have the humble expectation of I'm just starting to do this, I might not make it perfect the first time, but this is still industry standard, the right thing to do that gets results. So I should have an expectation that it's gonna take me probably five months to nail in. When it doesn't go right the first month or the second month or the third month, that part of you, again, is this gonna be unpleasant? Yes. But that part of you won't freak out. Because you're not gonna think, oh, something might be wrong here. You're like, oh, this is just a part of the game, so to speak. I think that's a big part, is recalibrating that expectation.
SPEAKER_00:I had that yesterday. It was really interesting. I was in the gym and I saw there's a a monthly challenge or weekly challenge or something of who could do the longest wall sit. And uh I saw that the top one on there was like four and a half minutes, something like that. I was like, oh, I could beat that. And so I went and I did the wool sit for like five minutes. And it hurt like hell. And afterwards, my brain is just going like I was just like staggering around the gym trying to find somewhere to lie down out of the way because my legs were shaking so much. And this guy's like, Are you alright? And I was just like, Oh yeah, I just did the the wool sit challenge. And uh and that now my legs are shaking and everything's burning and it feels horrible. And he's like, Fuck yeah, I love that feeling. And I was just like, Oh, that's reset. I've just done well on this thing, but there's still a voice in my head that was going, like, fuck, don't do that again. You know, that was too unpleasant. Why did you do that? What have you? And then I could reset that voice as being like, Oh yeah, you're supposed to feel horrific pain after doing the thing for you know, long for longer than other people. It's like, oh, yeah, cool. This is I could just reframe that pain as like, yeah, that's how good. Yeah, you're supposed to feel that. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I I think all my big failures in life, and like uh I've shared things a previous time on a podcast, like the big one from the military, they were all because I didn't preemptively make peace with the hard that was gonna be a part of it. I didn't expect it, I didn't and accept it. It's a big thing. If you can expect and accept the hard part about doing hard things, like growing a business, it goes such a long way. Really, like if I could give my 18-year-old self some advice, I'd be able to just expect that things are gonna be hard and accept that this is a part of it. It's a feature, not a bug, so to speak. When it's hard, it doesn't mean you need to run the other way.
SPEAKER_00:Some things are just hard.
SPEAKER_01:And that's okay.
SPEAKER_00:If you want to listen to that previous episode, it was episode 80 from March 22nd, 2023. How to know if your mindset is off with ITMA Morani. So that's uh another really good episode with Itamar. Okay. Let me see where we got to. So people have now got an a way to figure out whether they might be the kind of person where pressure's causing an issue. What to figure out in terms of like which is the the success killer for them, the uncertainty, optimizing for approval or validation, how to identify what it is they should be doing, because I just told them it should be doing an email promotion. This is for the majority of people. Some people you're doing that, and then you've got another thing. But for a lot of people, I know this is what you should be doing every month doing an email promotion. Um, and then to figure out like what is it that is stopping, where are they kind of going wrong with that? What are their beliefs that are sending them off on the wrong track? And then how do we do that?
SPEAKER_01:Can I clear that up a little bit? Yeah, please. Yeah. So really from the get-go, just what is the most impactful action someone in your shoes could possibly be doing? Which in this case is probably more email promotions. Then let's go for the easy things first. Let's cut away any performance anchors in your environment. Things that drain you, that get in your way. First off, these could be small things, you know, like the light performance anchors, the WhatsApp group that you're a part in, the late night scrolling, all these things that as soon as someone tells you, yeah, you shouldn't be doing that, you're gonna be like, Yeah, that's yeah, I shouldn't be doing that. All right. These easy things. Then there's also the heavy performance anchors. These are usually people that you feel some kind of loyalty to, even though you guys are not aligned anymore in life. And it could be an employee that just that you know was with you since day zero, but now doesn't fit. It could be an old friend, it could be whatever. There's these people that really drain your energy. So you remove those from your environment. All of a sudden, energy goes up. You're able to do more. Now you also put in the guardrails in place. The answer is to, well, I can't send an email promotion once a month because of I'm afraid I'll lose touch with my friends, or I won't be able to like pursue my health goals anymore. So you put those guardrails in place. These are all tools to kind of weaken that lower level you and put it in its place. Then, and only then go into the beliefs of why do I think this is such a why does a part of me think this is such a bad idea? This is dangerous. And then once you break that, you also got to recognize, okay, like I recognize it's not true anymore. I know that logically, but what am I emotionally getting out of holding on to that? And am I willing to let that go? That's kind of where we are so far.
SPEAKER_00:Nice. Okay. With the performance anchors, have you got any kind of stories to bring that to life with like clients who've who've managed that or anything from yourself?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I can share it. I'll share one story about light performance anchors and one about heavy ones. So the light performance anchors, I had one client um we used uh a fake name in the book, so I don't remember what we called him in the book. But let's just call him Jeff for this sake. Yeah. He came to me, he already had a pretty successful actually uh SaaS business, and we figured out how to take it to the next level. We put this stuff in place and that stuff in place, and we're like, great. After the first coaching session, I was like, okay, you got your your most direct actions, you're just gonna do them, right? He's like, Yes. Be like, great. Then we hopped on a call the next week and like he had uh you know, like circles around his eyes, he was exhausted. And I was like, dude, what's going on? He's like, we we we said this is all you're gonna do, and we stripped away the other actions in your business. We just said you're gonna focus on this. Why are you so exhausted? He's like, Yeah, but you know, like I I wanted to like just like go into this elite performance thing and be serious about it. So I also like got myself a gut a gut health coach. I uh added a new like workout routine with a PT in the gym and all these other like things. And the re the weird thing was that he was super jacked and fit, like he had veins in his abs, like that level of fitness. Nobody has veins in their abs. Yeah, it was ridiculous. And though the funny part was like why this is so ridiculous is because he added these things on after things were already good, so it was so visible and so clear. And I was like, Jeff, you should you be doing this stuff? And he was like, No. It's like, all right, then let's focus. These are just performance anchors, you're just adding more things onto your plate that actually do not help your performance. Now, again, his example is very clear because he added these things on after he already had his key actions. Now, most people they already have this stuff in there. So just these random small things in their life that add up, you know, it's like a thousand open tabs on your computer, just slows everything down. The WhatsApp chats that you're a part of, the the sports stuff that you're not really interested, but you still follow, whatever it may be. So that's one example of the light performance anchors. A story about the heavy performance anchors, again, I'm gonna use uh a fake name here to protect the client identity, but this is someone that you've met as well. That when I originally met him, he was doing about five to ten K a month. And I honestly did not think that much of him. I knew him through jujitsu. Like I would see him on the mats, he would kind of show up late, you know, like leave right at the at the bell, and he didn't look like a committed person. And then one time he asked me if he could talk to me a little bit about marketing. Okay, so he was like, Hey, I think I see some things that you guys could be doing. Kind of out of just like politeness about being like, you know, like a black belt. I was like, okay, I'll let listen to him for a minute just to be polite. And then within about a minute, he blew me away at how knowledgeable he was. And I remember telling him, like, dude, like, why aren't you doing more with yourself? Like, you're clearly a master at this marketing stuff. And he kind of shared this big story about how when he was younger, he had a multimillion dollar company, and then he got swept up into young people's stuff, he got into drugs, and he got addicted, and there were a lot of challenges with that. And since then he's kind of been on this, he went to Narcotics Anonymous and he was able to get clean. But since then his life really, really tapered down. And when we talked about it, he was basically like saying, Narcotics Anonymous has been very, very helpful for me to get clean, but right now it feels like it's actually limiting me. It's telling me to be humble, to be small, to not think too much of myself. And I was like, okay, so do you feel an urge like you're gonna bounce back into drugs? Do you feel an impulse like that? And he was like, No, I haven't desired even to do anything for for years. I was like, okay, so is this something that's helpful for you in life, or is it actually detrimental for you in life? Is it a performance anchor? And he knew the answer, but it was so difficult because these people literally like helped him rise from the bottom. This community. And as a community, it's built about helping other people and loyalty and all that. So it was tremendously difficult for him. And why was also so brave for him when he actually decided to cut out that performance anchor. And we said, okay, so this is what you're gonna do. You have 30 days to reach out to the five people from this community that impacted you the most to explain to them that you're immensely grateful for their help, but now that it's time for you to move on. And he did that. And, you know, like you you've met him, his company now is at I think around 30, 40 million. They're at a nine-figure valuation, they might be exiting soon. It's like that would not have happened if you wouldn't have let go of that heavy performance anchor that was always keeping him stuck and keeping him rooted to that old identity of I am just an addict. It's like that was his focal point in life. Wow. Intense. Yep. Yep. That's like that's the power of performance anchors. And I think a lot of times it's interesting, people always tell me they we don't talk about this in business about performance anchors. They think it's uncomfortable. You know, it's not very DEI to talk about people or things as anchors that are holding you back, but it's just the truth. Like we all know that if you have a car, like a race car that you want to make like faster, you're gonna remove some of the dead weight. The reality is in life, we all have that as well. And you can do it in a very compassionate way with people and in a gracious way. And I found that one of the easiest frames people can have for this is instead of thinking, because everyone, nobody wants, not nobody, the vast majority of people don't want to be assholes. Right. And they don't want to look down at people and say, like, I am better than you, I don't need you in life. You're holding me back. However, if we can approach it from a perspective of humility, say, like, I am not Superman. I cannot take everybody on my back and go up the mountain that I want to go on, especially if you don't want to go there. Like if I'm trying to build a business and I know I need to sell people, but this person is always so judgmental of anybody trying to make money, like maybe I don't have that in me to build the business and also have them in my life at the same time. And coming in from that place of humility can actually be very freeing. Because it's not that I'm not judging that person for not wanting to make money, that's their stuff. I'm just saying that I can't achieve what I want to achieve if this is also here, and that's just my reality. And a lot of times it's very freeing from that perspective.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. All right. If you're listening to this and you're like, this is some fucking good shit. I want to learn some more about this, I want to actually go through this properly. Like I said at the beginning, Ich Mar has written the book, very tight book. He spent a lot of time on this. Many rewrites, many starting again, finding better support on how to write it better. Like he he worked at this fucking thing. And that is after he was already a proper expert in the whole area, the whole topic, coached many people to incredible success. And you can get this book at any reliable bookstore. You can get this online at Amazon. What's the title of the book, Itmar?
SPEAKER_01:Elite Performance, the Israeli special ops mindset system to win the war within and achieve audacious goals. And you can find it at Itamarmorani.com slash book or like John said on Amazon.
SPEAKER_00:The easiest place to find it. Would thoroughly recommend it. Absolutely fantastic. I've been working even though I've gone through the coaching twice and worked one on one with Itamar, I'm still going back through the book and being like, oh yeah, I've stopped doing that thing, or I forgot about this part of it. So totally would really recommend it. It's it's not fluffy, it is not overly wordy, everything is concise and clear and well told with lots of stories. Um, really, really recommend it. So go and go and check that out. Itmars you want to plug, please. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Please, uh, yeah. So actually, as part of the book promotion, like you said, it's been an irrational investment of time and effort. So we're actually doing something pretty irrational with the promotion of it. Okay. And as part of the book launch, what we're doing for this month is anybody who buys the book, and it's literally$1.99 on Amazon right now, it's as cheap as we could do it. You can enter into a raffle. And into the raffle as part of the book launch, we're giving away one spot for the arena performance accelerator, which is the program that John did, and also a one-on-one coaching package that is worth$50,000 to one person. This isn't, you know, like make-believe marketing money. These are coaching packages that people have paid for, dozens of people have paid for. And one person is gonna get that one-on-one coaching package as well. So if you go to itamarmorani.com slash book, you can find all the details about the raffle there. And you can join that. And also inside that area, there's also gonna be an Edomar AI tool for you that you can use, you can play with. And like John said, if any of these frameworks kind of landed, you can just use it and get all the coaching you want with the AI tool.
SPEAKER_00:Nice. Okay, so that's itamarmorani.com slash book. I t a m a r.com slash book. So go check it out. Fantastic. Itamar, thanks so much for coming on, man. Really, really appreciate it. I think a lot of people are gonna make a lot more money as a result of this episode. So thank you.